Born in France, Mathieu went to study in England and joined us in 2005 with a mission: to launch Paprika in Spain. Today, he is managing a team of 7 professionals fully dedicated to our Spanish clients, including Consultants, Trainers, Client Service and Support Engineers. Mathieu speaks three languages fluently, loves gardening, and is the lucky father of four kids (as well as 2 sheep and 10 hens!).
The sector we work for (creative agencies), the people I work with!
My role is Business Manager for Spain. In simple words, I am managing the Spanish office. In reality, my role, as anyone’s within my team, is really diverse. I would say half of my time is dedicated to business development, half is being involved in the projects we are developing. I could be doing a product demonstration in the morning, involved in a development meeting in early afternoon, and preparing an event later on the day.
The diversity of it, but most of it the freedom we are given from our UK head office to manage our Spanish operations. Almost it’s “as long as it works for your clients, your team, and yourself, do it your way”. It’s not common at all in International companies like ours.
The good thing of being so “expert” in one sector (almost 40 years for the company, 15 years in my case, dedicated to the creative sector) is that there is a lot of self confidence in what you do. The challenge is to deliver the projects in an increasingly shorter period of time we are given, which means dedicating a lot of resources to improving and innovating the project’s implementation processes constantly. Challenging but exciting when you see the results!
Not an easy one to answer, it’s been 15 very exciting years. Actually, I have one in mind :-)
It was (some) years ago, we were doing our first implementation in a very popular large international agency in Spain. The CFO and her team that day were doing their first month-end procedure to send the first month of data to their head office in London. As you can imagine, there was lot of pressure and stress. Our office was next to them, and I received a call from her at 6.30pm asking for additional help (I was actually on my way back home).
We had just been through a very lengthy implementation process with them, and there was an amazing relation, so I of course I agreed and went there with one of our best consultants, Oscar Nieto. The Agency was empty, obviously, they put music on to cheer the atmosphere, they had bought some aperitifs and drinks, and there we were, producing reports, reconciling data… and when we pressed the “send data” bottom, late that night, after it all matched, there was a big round of applause from everyone! It was quite an unusual but such a pleasant experience to go through!
This is probably something to ask the people of my team :) I am a really passionate person, I would say, sometimes in a bit of an obsessive way.
This is probably something to ask my wife and four kids :-)
People that have an idea that go against the current trend, but find the guts to give it a chance and launch their business based on that idea. Sometime it fails, sometime it is a success, but I find it amazingly brave in all cases.
Not sure it exists in English, but the translation would be “dress me slowly, I am in a hurry”. So take big breath sometimes, don’t always rush. More than a favourite saying, it’s more something I am trying to convince myself to do every day... not always easy.
That my passion is gardening. I have a small piece of land with 2 sheep, 10 hens, where I grow fruit and vegetables. Gardening is probably one of the most efficient activities against stress.
