A scale-up worth 200 million dollars, a business leader reinventing the textile industry, a bank chairman taking up his post in the middle of a storm: what do they have in common? A sparring partner.
At a time when French mid-sized companies (ETIs) are absorbing a succession of shocks — rising interest rates, sector-wide restructuring, the acceleration of AI, increasing pressure from investment funds — a still little-known practice is spreading through boardrooms: calling upon a sparring partner.
Neither consultant, nor mentor, nor psychologist: a peer, a former business leader, whose mission is to help the chief executive make better decisions.
The firm Visconti Partners, founded in 2010 by Hubert Reynier, now supports more than 300 executives per year in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Three entrepreneurs have publicly shared their experience. Here is what they have to say.
Co-founder of Ogury in 2014 alongside Jean Canzoneri, Thomas Pasquet is one of the most notable contributors to the VISCONTI Talks. The episode, recorded in May 2023, retraces the journey of a French scale-up as it became a global player in mobile advertising.
In 2023, Ogury operates across 17 countries, employs approximately 500 people, and was anticipating an international turnover of close to 200 million dollars, with nearly half generated in the United States.
Thomas Pasquet, then Chairman of the Board, describes the most defining decision of his journey as co-founder:
"It was essential for one of the two co-founders to be on the ground. To maintain the relational dimension, to show the Americans that there was a genuine commitment and a real willingness on the company's part to be international."
Note: Thomas Pasquet left Ogury in 2024, after nine years at the helm of the company. This testimony is taken from the podcast recorded in May 2023.
Ogury's most significant turning point was its move to a cookie-less model at the start of 2020 — a conviction-driven decision taken a few months before Apple announced the deprecation of IDFA.
This kind of radical, counter-intuitive-in-the-short-term yet structurally defining decision perfectly illustrates the moment when executive coaching changes its status: it is no longer an HR support tool, but a genuine strategic decision-making infrastructure.
Sophie Pignères founded Weturn, a French company that industrialises the second life of textile raw materials, fighting against waste in the fashion industry — a sector where environmental urgency has become a business imperative.
In her testimony published on the Visconti website, she writes:
"Being supported by Visconti at the launch of Weturn was a real asset, even a privilege, both in defining our culture and in the strategic choices around our first key hires."
Using coaching to structure the CEO's posture from the very launch is one of the most instructive cases: it is not about correcting a malfunction, but about laying, from the outset, the strategic foundations — vision, culture, key hires — that will prevent costly overhauls when the model reaches the industrialisation stage.
Hervé Varillon leads Crédit Agricole Leasing & Factoring, one of France's major players in financing and leasing. His transition into the role took place against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, the widespread adoption of remote working, and strong expectations from his teams.
His experience is documented in a Visconti Talks podcast, recorded with Jean-Philippe Martin, partner coach.
This is one of the configurations where executive coaching for large organisations is most structurally significant. Visconti approaches it as a strategic project in its own right:
The sparring partner does not provide ready-made answers: they help to formulate the right questions at the right moment.
What strikes you when bringing these three testimonies together is less the diversity of the situations than the convergence of the need.
As a company grows, the executive gradually loses their truly independent sounding boards:
No one within this ecosystem has the role of challenging the executive themselves.
This is precisely the role of the sparring partner — a term borrowed from elite sport, where it refers to the training partner who pushes the athlete to discover their limits before the competition.
"I have observed business leaders lost in the complexities of management, sometimes blinded by the weight of their responsibilities. I firmly believe that an executive must continually keep learning." — Hubert Reynier, founder of Visconti Partners.
The idea is not new. In 2001, investor John Doerr advised Eric Schmidt, then the incoming CEO of Google, to take on a coach — Bill Campbell, as it happened. Schmidt spoke about it in Fortune Magazine:
"The coach doesn't need to play as well as you do. He needs to watch you and help you bring out the best in yourself."
More recently, Hubert Joly, the French-born former CEO of Best Buy — who turned the retailer's share price around by more than 270% — publicly acknowledged having called upon an executive coach (Marshall Goldsmith) from the moment he took up his post.
All Visconti coaches are former business leaders, trained and certified through the Visconti Academy. "Who better than an executive to guide another executive?"
The coach answers only to the executive they are working with, ensuring the complete absence of any conflict of interest.
"We will always favour a face-to-face conversation and a flipchart over a PowerPoint presentation."
Whereas consultancy operates through one-off assignments, coaching is built over time — typically several quarters, or even several years.
Beyond the three portraits, Visconti's documented client cases cover a remarkably wide spectrum:
This diversity confirms that executive coaching is no longer limited to a niche audience of tech founders. It has extended to every phase of a company's life.
Pasquet, Pignères, Varillon. Three executives, three entirely different contexts, one shared observation: not one of them turned to a coach because they were struggling. All of them did so from a position of strength, to go further still.
This is the real subject of executive coaching in 2026: not a remediation tool, but a performance investment — as an elite athlete surrounds themselves with a coach, as a company undergoes an audit before a problem arises.
Who, within my ecosystem, is able to tell me what I do not want to hear?
If the answer is "no one", that is in all likelihood the most reliable signal that the moment has come.
Want to go further? Discover the Visconti Partners approach, explore the client case studies, or listen to the VISCONTI Talks channel.
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