Career Profile of Frédéric Porcherot, Interim CFO

What is your professional background?

Frédéric Porcherot, Interim CFO: I graduated from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon with a generalist engineering degree, which is not the most conventional route into a CFO role. I began my career in management and organisational consulting for six years. This allowed me to broaden my engineering background and make the transition into my current role as a corporate finance executive. During those years as a consultant at Deloitte & Touche, I worked with banking and financial institution clients, developing two areas of expertise: one in organisational design and operations, and the other in management control and certain financial aspects.

I then moved into industry, and in particular the pharmaceutical sector, where I successively held two positions as Head and then Director of Management Control at Solvay Pharma and then AstraZeneca.

I subsequently moved into CFO roles, still within industry, in the specialised retail sector, where I have been operating for around ten years. I have held 3 finance leadership positions:

• within the Fnac Group (PPR), specifically in what was known as the Fnac Children's Division, comprising two separate companies — Fnac Junior and Eveil & Jeux — which were subsequently merged into a single entity, Fnac Eveil & Jeux;
• at Reebok, at the time of the merger with Adidas, where I held both the COO and CFO roles for France simultaneously;
• and more recently, at GAME France, a subsidiary of the GAME Group, the European leader in video game retail.

This gives me approximately twenty years of experience to date.

What have been your main areas of responsibility?

• I was tasked with setting up the management control function for one of my clients when I was a consultant, and with identifying and training their future management controller;
• I have been responsible on several occasions for implementing SAP information management systems, on projects of varying scale, including one international project covering 3 countries and all SAP modules, encompassing every function within a pharmaceutical group;
• At Reebok, I held two directorships simultaneously — CFO and COO. It was a dual role in which I greatly enjoyed broadening my scope to cover purchasing (direct stock procurement), customer service, and sales administration. This dual hat was fascinating because the combination of the two roles made me more effective in each: I could be a better CFO by having direct access to operational data to steer the business, while also being highly relevant in Operations by staying closely aligned with the Group's defined strategy and precisely targeting the objectives we had committed to;
• I have also been involved in several mergers and organisational integrations, again at varying levels depending on the case, from preparation through to execution: AstraZeneca (which at the time became the world's third-largest pharmaceutical company), Fnac Junior – Eveil & Jeux, and Adidas-Reebok. These are fascinating projects both from a human and technical standpoint, where you must address — in a concentrated period of time — every issue of strategy, organisation, processes, and structure that a company normally faces over much longer cycles;
• Finally, one of my other key responsibilities to date was working on the turnaround and rescue of Fnac Junior: a single objective — prove the concept was viable or close the business. We ultimately succeeded, and quite spectacularly at that, though we came very close to closure…

This gives me approximately twenty years of experience to date.

What are you most proud of in your professional career?

Without false modesty, there is more than one source of pride for me, as I have always thrown myself fully into every project. But undeniably, one stands above the rest — and it was also the result of a team effort. When I joined Fnac Junior and Eveil & Jeux, I had two very clear objectives on my brief, one of which was to work on the turnaround of Fnac Junior as quickly as possible, or to have to close the business. As mentioned above, we ultimately succeeded, but it was a long and arduous journey. At one point, when the decision to close the brand had almost been made, we took the initiative of convincing Serge Weinberg, the then head of PPR, to grant us an additional six-month window. We made Fnac Junior profitable, with a clear business model and a new development programme, thereby avoiding liquidation. Today, it appears that Fnac/PPR managed to generate sufficient value from it, as it was sold a few months ago as part of PPR's refocusing on other projects.

What are your areas of expertise?

I am a corporate finance executive who has not spent his career in a single sector: I started out in consulting for the banking and financial sector, then had two experiences in the pharmaceutical industry, and have now been operating for 10 years in specialised retail, with the advantage of mastering its various dimensions — across different channels (stores, e-commerce), B2C, B2B, pure distribution, and also the brand owner/equipment supplier side.

Within my areas of expertise, I like to present myself under several headings. I have developed strong organisational skills since the early days of my consulting career, which have run through all my subsequent experiences. I operate as a finance executive who works to develop and maximise business performance across all its dimensions: financial, economic and budgetary, certainly, but also in terms of ways of working, structures, processes, and tools — with the objective of improving, streamlining, and better systematising the organisation as a whole.

More broadly, I contribute to performance improvement — financial, operational, and organisational.

For me, numbers are not an end in themselves, but rather my raw material for steering the business. Drawing on financial and operational data, I enjoy taking a 360-degree view of the business to identify levers for improvement or growth. I position myself at the service of other functions and of Management, providing each with support, advice, and insight for steering their activity. I rely on genuine expertise in data analysis and interpretation to identify trends, errors, or successes, and to correct or build on them accordingly. This is the management control skill set deployed across the entire organisation — whereas it is too often confined to budgetary control alone.

What is your current situation?

My current situation is straightforward: I am looking for a new role. I had to leave my last position as CFO following organisational changes. After the departure of our France CEO, the Southern Europe CEO — who was also responsible for the Spanish subsidiary — decided to manage the French subsidiary himself with his Spanish leadership team. As a result, the entire French subsidiary management committee, of which I was a member, left the company.

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