Interview de Hervé Hélias, cité de la réussite 2014

I believe there's perhaps a slightly false perception that a large group would be something that takes few risks, that would be somewhat immobile and not move much, in contrast with startups which would be very entrepreneurial and ready to risk everything. And I think this opposition is somewhat false. First, when we look at the large groups we have today, they are very powerful, they are global leaders. These are groups that at some point were small companies. I often take the example of Publicis: before being a global advertising agency, it was a collection of small agencies, so they too went through that development phase.

If I take our own case, today we are 14,000 people present in 72 countries, but we started in the 1940s as a startup and we went through all these phases of development, particularly these phases of international development where some of our colleagues left with their backpacks to set up a subsidiary, an office. So all these large groups showed an entrepreneurial spirit and audacity that is very important.

So I think we shouldn't oppose them. The difference actually lies more in the way audacity is exercised. A startup founder is ready to risk everything, quit their job, invest their personal funds. We wouldn't see a company director ready to commit all of the company's capital. The responsibility, the environment are different. So there is audacity in both, but it's exercised differently.

Yes, because on one hand, part of our job is to help these innovators. We are in contact with all these companies that are creating, and especially not necessarily at the moment of creation, but in this second phase when the initial seed funding has been done, when it's about developing your market, being able to expand internationally, simply dealing with financing issues.

Today you have many business creators for whom building a business plan, financing it, meeting bankers, mobilizing skills like ours — and we ourselves need to work on our own innovation. I was giving this example during the conference: I think that in 10 years, our professions will be profoundly transformed. In 10 years, when an entrepreneur goes to a restaurant, they'll take out their smartphone, put it on a machine, it will record the payment, account for the expense, generate the expense report, and also feed into their cash flow forecast — all with a single click.

So we too have a transformation of our professions, and in fact, this contact with young companies, these young startups, is also to see and understand how our professions will evolve. There is a real cooperation between large and small companies, not to extract value as I heard someone say — we don't want to extract value from startups, that's not our purpose. We want to understand through startups how our professions will evolve and manage our own innovation.

First, the spirit of initiative, we don't only manage it externally — we also manage it with our teams. We have young teams: 85% of our staff are under 30, so we have people who are very close to these young startups, who take initiatives every day in contact with clients on the ground. And the whole role of leaders at Mazars is to be able — and it's difficult, it's difficult to break with the day-to-day — to set aside time for innovation, and for us that's essentially innovation in terms of new services.

And then we have this development with startups. We have two particular programs: first, we incubate startups. We recently incubated a startup in crowdfunding because, in our financial transaction professions, we think these are the platforms that will gain ground in the future. And we're also very present in open innovation institutes where we both provide advice to young startups and are also able to identify those that could extend our own innovations.

Thank you.