Africa Desk

Jean-Marc FINET (JMF) is a graduate of École Polytechnique (Paris) and MIT. Trilingual in French-English-German, he began his career in management consulting and held general management positions in Industry over 20 years. From 1996 to 2003 he was Managing Director of a BOUYGUES Group energy and telecom infrastructure subsidiary (ETDE). Since 2003, he has been the X-PM partner leading the Large Projects Management Practice. Having led a dozen successful interim management assignments for international clients between 2007 and 2016 in Africa, Jean-Marc was appointed to lead WIL Group’s Africa Desk in 2017.

X-PM African Desk

African Desk was created in 2017 to capitalize on WIL members’ significant presence on the African continent. In recent years, the Group has managed 30 assignments in 20 countries across Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa presents many opportunities: with promising growth and immense need for infrastructure, equipment and consumer goods, Africa attracts investors and companies worldwide. But the continent’s mosaic of cultures and constraints mean that companies (both multinational or pan-African) must devote special attention to choosing experienced leaders and managers.

Interim management is often the ideal solution for securing company operations, whether the priority is to enter and develop a market, safeguard financial flows, get the right human resources on board or to optimize projects and performance.

WIL Group’s African Desk helps WIL members to support their international Clients in Africa, by:
– Processing WIL references and existing leads
– Managing a database of WIL managers with substantial African experience
– Establishing local contacts and identifying local partner firms
– Ultimately – in a continent where African interim managers are very rare and where no significant interim management firms yet exist – identifying potential WIL Group candidates in relevant countries.

Case Study - Novacap

X-PM supported French chemicals company Novacap after it bought a majority stake in a private Chinese firm.
For nine months, it provided an executive with excellent knowledge of Chinese and French business practices to help build confidence between the two partners.
The consultant put in place some western procedures to improve the company’s efficiency, while convincing Novacap to retain some Chinese methods that made sense in the local business environment.