Interview with Lucie Klarsfeld

"Hello Lucie, can you introduce yourself and your company?

My name is Lucie Klarsfeld, I'm 35 and have two children. I joined Hystra in 2009 and have been a partner since 2018. When I joined Hystra, the company had just been created. There were three of us in the back room of an art gallery. Now there are around twenty of us, with a few associates in Africa. We're a hybrid strategy or "inclusive business" consultancy. We started out working with major groups such as Engie, Total, Danone and others.

Today, we work more and more with smaller social enterprises, or with social entrepreneurs who have set up their own structures, or with investors who are interested in social issues and are looking to make a lasting impact by working on projects over the long term. One of our biggest clients, for example, is the Gates Foundation, with whom we work on nutrition, sanitation and women's health. We help them develop partnerships with private companies and industrialize high-impact products.

Other aspects of our business differentiate us from more traditional strategy consultancies. We act as a bridge between players and sectors which, without us, would not think of, or would not be able to work together.

We work with these foundations and major corporations to promote these projects. We work to create coalitions and alliances that can have a greater impact on society. For example: we helped found the Toilet Board Coalition, to help promote access to sanitation and toilets in different geographies through a mix of technical assistance and grants. The sanitation problem cannot be solved by a single player. It needs many different businesses and professions, each contributing a part of the solution. That's why we helped build this alliance.

Do you have employees in France or around the world?

Normally, most of them are in Paris. Since Covid, our European employees have returned to their families. Some come from Italy, Germany, the UK and Switzerland.

We have one of our consultants in Burkina Faso on secondment. For the past two years, we've been rotating our consultants over periods of six months to a year to bring our expertise to the Meriem project, which we're running in partnership with GRET and 6 other players.

We work with local partners, whom we call Network Partners, who have their own consulting structures. One of them is very active at the moment, working on a project in India. There are others in Latin America and Africa.

We also work in partnership with other organizations that have capabilities in the field.

You have a strong international focus. How has the situation over the past year affected you? Have you experienced any major changes in the way you do business?

During the lockdown, we had one or two months of uncertainty. We had launched several pilot projects, notably with the Gates Foundation. Three of them were put on hold. March and April 2020 was a period of uncertainty. Some activities resumed in June 2020, and even accelerated. As part of the Global Distributors Collective that we helped set up and co-direct with Practical Action and BopInc, we ran a series of webinars to share best practices for overcoming the pandemic. Most of our projects have been relaunched, and we've had a pretty good year in 2020, and 2021 looks set to be good too.

How did we adapt our processes? We were already accustomed to working across several time zones, whether with the Gates Foundation, or our partners and collaborators in the four corners of the globe. Even then, we were used to working remotely over the long term, rather than as an integrated on-site team.

One of the things that makes us attractive to our consultants is the opportunity to travel, to be in contact with foreign contractors and customers. But that's something we haven't been able to do for the past year.

We did the same as everyone else and started using Teams and Zoom. Our team went into full telecommuting at first, then we alternated as a reduced team between the office and our home depending on the different confinements. We adapted, creating team events, pub quiz nights by Zoom. We tried to ensure that all our consultants were in the best possible conditions, telling them as early as October 2020 that they would not be asked to return to France before July 2021, to enable those who wished to do so to return home. We also helped our consultants to equip themselves to work from home, by providing them with the equipment they needed to make telecommuting a little easier.

Are you waiting for the offices to reopen? Do you see a future for full remote?

We're looking forward to the possibility of reopening. We're a small business, but there's a very strong team spirit. Apart from my two partners, who are in their late fifties, there are only two of us with children. The whole team is between 22 and 35 years old. We like to get together and party. So just being able to see each other in the office is good enough, I have no doubt that everyone wants to come back. When we reopened at half-gauge in September, we had to ask some people to unsubscribe - there were just too many of us wanting to come back!

We're in a business where there's a lot of interaction, and we all learn - especially young people - by brainstorming. It's actually harder to do that when you're concentrating for seven hours in front of your screen than when you're live. Despite this, we've found that we're better at it than we thought. That's why, when things pick up again, we'll consider giving everyone the possibility of teleworking one or two days a week. We'll be discussing this as a team to find the best formula for everyone, bearing in mind that the young people still need to be immersed in the structure to progress and stay motivated.

Things haven't changed that much with your partners on the various remote projects?

What has changed is that we have some projects that have started since the pandemic, where we haven't been able to meet people in the field at all. It's taking us longer to build trusting relationships on these new projects.

You were talking about the year 2021, which seems to be off to a good start. Has there been any real change in this approach to inclusive business and impact enterprise? Is it something that's really progressing? Is it working better because we've hit the wall?

There is a collective awareness on the part of consumers, and employees who are increasingly demanding meaning in what they do or buy. On the other hand, as philanthropic resources are scarce - a fact further accentuated by the pandemic and the economic consequences of the crisis, which have also affected foundations and funders - there is a willingness on the part of companies to bring their philanthropic activities, corporate responsibility and core business activities closer together. It's impressive to see how many companies are thinking about setting up an impact fund at the moment, asEVPA has well documented.

Do you have any recruitment forecasts for 2021?

We have recruited three consultants on permanent contracts in 2020 and plan to recruit at least two, maybe three this year. We have a new European Network Partner joining us, based in London, who has spent most of his career in Africa, partly in consulting, partly with the NGO TechnoServe, and partly with Barclays Bank. We're looking for this kind of hybrid profile, people with fairly strong business experience, who also have this sensitivity to social and environmental issues.

If you had any feedback or recommendation to give to someone who wanted to get into consultancy and what it could do for them, what would you say?

Classic" strategy consulting brings with it some very interesting methodologies and ways of thinking. It's an experience that teaches you how to pose problems and make effective decisions for the best possible outcome. It lets you work on a wide variety of subjects, constantly learning new things in new areas.

What sets us apart is the fact that we only work on models that use business to maximize social and environmental impact. This means that we work at many different levels, with a wide variety of interlocutors ranging from small farmers in India to entrepreneurs in Madagascar to the Vice President of a CAC40 company.

Consulting at Hystra is well suited to people who crave this kind of hybrid experience, who want to combine social impact and business environment, field visits and presentations to corporate boards, empathy and analytical rigor. With the aim of bringing to scale the social and environmental innovations our world deserves.

Thank you Lucie for all this, it was very interesting."

Check out our other interviews with YouMeo, Meja and Calyans.