Today I savour the day

Today I am savouring the day, everything is perfect.

Is every day perfect? No
Has every day been perfect in the last 20 years? That would be a joke.

Today is a perfect day, because I get to reflect on the 20th birthday of my business Exportia.

It’s a perfect day, because tonight my 17 (soon-to-be 18) year-old daughter will join me in Paris. She is moving to Europe for her studies. I am proud maman.
It’s a perfect day because my partner, his son and my family and friends are all well.It’s a perfect day, because Exportia is 20 years old.

It’s a perfect day because my team is amazing. I have key pillars by my side Isabell Carmen , Leo and Bev and the others.
It’s a perfect day, because I feel a whole new journey has started.
It’s a perfect day, because it feels very good to be old.

In October 2005, I let my employer know, IBM Paris, that I wanted to take a long unpaid leave to start my own business in Australia. Thanks to Patrick Kesler and Jose Luis Catalan I moved to Adelaide on January 2006. I had packed my business plan in my luggage. Now was the time to find out if the information I found online was correct.

Thanks to Lyn Hay I joined the 30 under 30 Entrepreneurs Program facilitated by Kristine Peters and Cath Duncan. On this journey I made lifelong friends Jaqueline Bartmentloo and Teresa Golin. I also met mentor and now friend Gordon Kay. Two of my longest suppliers Handley Accounting and Cliff Milne as well as Bev our Finance department!

In my first years in business, South Australia gave me my first customers Redarc Electronics with the trust of Anthony Kittel, who at the time wanted to become a major Australian electronics manufacturer. His vision has now become true and far beyond. Redarc is still a customer of ours today, which we are very proud of.

The very first customer was Alcidion and then Soniclean, lead then by Julian Smith and the very much missed Susan Lee. In 2006 people kept asking the same questions: Why on earth did you move from Paris to Adelaide? The second question at the time was: what are you importing into Australia? My response was: I am focusing on exporting technology to Europe from Australia. The reaction was always the same: Does Australia have anything to export? Over the years, these reactions have thankfully changed.

My daughter was born on 4 July 2008 and the joy of international travelling with baby and then kid started! The dad and I separated and the logistics were organised like a mechanism that is not allowed to break. Any spark or any dust in the mechanics and that would have been a disaster. With the support of Normandy-based grandpa turned full time babysitter and my parents in the south of France, my business trips in Europe revolved around these two poles, so that I could be back every night for baby Maya. And run Exportia!
I did not mind driving.

Sydney is calling. I start to secure customers in Sydney. A long-term one was TTGTT lead by Dale Coleman, whom we introduced to SNCF and we supported throughout the years, before Dale sold his business to a Queensland-based business. I can still see SNCF as one of the clients they advertise. It makes me proud.

Fast forward I move the business to Sydney, for business and for my daughter to get access to Lycée Condorcet in Sydney and make sure this Adelaide-born girl speaks perfect French and keeps her bond with her French family and cultural heritage.

From there on, the journey, as a single-mum entrepreneur, travelling internationally gets more interesting. I expand my business Australia-wide, but the interesting thing is that Adelaide businesses find Exportia more interesting since I moved to Sydney (yes really!). In 2010, I also start our French delivery arm Exportia France SAS, with Stephane Duvivier, who stays with me several years, before going in a happy retirement.

Overall the business grows in spikes and plateaus to stabilise the new direction. It’s not a continuous steady growth. For us it works in breakthroughs.
In the early years, it’s really fun to realise that people are actually buying our services!

In 2012, I get introduced by Topaz Conway to the Alex Birrell then CEO. I get trained and within 2 weeks sent on a plane to France for a Trade Show with a Sales Director business card in my pocket. I am meeting and discovering the European market of Safety. I will work 10 years as a contractor for CleanSpace. When I arrive in Lyon, 2 weeks in the job, I get interviewed by French TV about the Australian CleanSpace innovative device! What a start! It was an incredible experience and I am grateful for the privilege to have worked alongside Alex Birrell and Jon Imms and the rest of the team for 10 years.

Then through the Key Person of Influence program. The program exposed us to a number of tools and mentors that enabled me to write my first book in 2016, Ready, Tech, Go! And in this process I start formalising our proven method. We have so much experience building multi-million Euros revenue, that I am confident our recipe works, I write the Four Steps to Generate your first million Euros in Sales, it won the Best Australian Business Book in the Category of Sales & Communications and was a finalist in the Entrepreneurship category. Andrew Griffiths sparked the desire to write books and has been my book mentor since day one. He kept saying it was a good book.

I did not believe him at the time.

Jon of CleanSpace recently said, I am probably the rep he has travelled the most kms with. We particularly enjoyed the German highways. The Exportia team and I sold devices, set-up distribution, hired and supported the set-up of sales teams and I directly managed a few of them along the way. From setting the European industrial market, to the pandemic global boom, to the recovery from the pandemic. It’s been an incredible experience.

It’s time for me to move Exportia beyond being a major contractor to couple of customers to an amazing business. It’s time for me to shift my business to apply our method and learnings to more SMEs and to grow our team. This is when we signed our first US customer from Florida. Another breakthrough. My motivation goes tenfold. I am super excited to apply our own method to our own business. That is to grow an international customer base! We now have customers globally, we are very grateful for our US, Korean, European, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand customers. We work with start-ups, scale-ups and mature businesses. We also are grateful for our government customers.

Today is a perfect day and I am grateful to savour it.
Thank you !

With love from Paris
Christelle