For this 16th episode of Visconti Talks, Fabienne Saugier, Partner at Visconti welcomes Vincent Feltesse, president of SAS NFU Prod.

NFU Prod. is positioned as a platform for the production and operation of real estate with impact.

Vincent's career

A graduate of HEC, Vincent is above all passionate about history. He holds a master's degree in history from Sorbonne, a master's degree and a DEA in contemporary history from Sciences Po. He is also a man of conviction, especially on a social and societal level, and spends most of his career in the public world, mainly in politics since he was an elected official and advisor to elected officials for twenty-five years, before co-founding a start-up in 2022.

More specifically, Vincent was first a journalist, researcher and “penholder”. He then started a career in the world of local authorities and ministerial offices.

In 2001, at the age of 33, he was elected mayor of Blanquefort, a town of 16,000 inhabitants near Bordeaux.

In 2007, he became President of the Bordeaux Metropolis.

In 2012, he was elected deputy, then joined the Elysée in 2014 as Political Advisor to President Hollande.

In 2017, he became a magistrate at the Court of Auditors, where he worked mainly in the health, medico-social and pension sectors.

In September 2022, he co-founded the company NFU Prod. and took over the presidency.

Among other things, Vincent Feltesse is the author of:

• What if everything had happened differently, secret chronicle of the Elysée under François Hollande, ed. Plon, 2017
• Tomorrow is today, a love story about Bordeaux, ed. The edge of the water, 2014
• The Bordeaux decade. What urban policy at the time of metropolises? Interviews with Jean Viard, ed. Dawn, 2012

What did Vincent remember from the key moments of his career and how does he use them in his current mission?

One of the key moments in Vincent's career was his mission as mayor of Blanquefort, in Gironde, from 2001 to 2012.

Beyond the political and media facet, being mayor is basically being a team leader, both with the elected officials (the City Council) and with the administration. At the time, the Blanquefort team consisted of a hundred people on the Administration side, and 33 municipal councillors.

You have to manage a budget and lead these teams. In his mission, there is daily life because a mayor is the one who can be disturbed all the time, for everything, because he is elected for that. At the same time, he must have a strategic project for his municipality. There is a need to combine these two scales.

In addition, as public action is now extremely fragmented between the municipality, the intercommunality, therefore in this case the Bordeaux metropolis, the department, the region, the State and private actors, the mayor has a role of assembling and as ambassador of his territory to advance major issues, obtain subsidies, obtain subsidies, invent concepts, and bring personalities into his municipality who will in turn play the role of ambassador.

What lessons did Vincent learn from this period?

First of all, the human aspect. When people ask you for everything, when you are the one who announces the death of a child to a family, when you are at the side of Ford workers because the factory is going to close, when, on the contrary, you manage to help a company develop, or a young person to study, this “human thickness” takes on all its importance.

Another lesson: learning a form of leadership. With the constitution and animation of teams during the electoral campaign and the animation/management of municipal teams after the election, including volunteer or semi-volunteer teams. In France, 98% of the 500,000 elected officials are not paid or almost not paid.

In summary, Vincent especially remembers:

• The deeply human job of the mayor
• the three-level mission found in business leaders: the role of ambassador, the management of the back and forth between the short term, the daily and the long term, the strategy
• Building and managing teams, which requires developing leadership
• But also the “technical” side. If the mayor does not go into the details of the files, obviously helped by his administration, he loses credibility with his interlocutors at some point.

Vincent held various positions at Bordeaux Métropole from 2001 to 2020, including the Presidency from 2002 to 2014. What did he learn from this experience?

First of all, the change of scale.

A change of scale on a financial and human level, since the Bordeaux metropolis manages a budget of 1.9 billion Euros and has nearly 9,000 agents, including those linked to the delegation of public services (management of water, waste, tram, etc.).

A change of scale in terms of time, as public service delegation negotiations may last from 7 to 25-30 years. And numbering in billions of Euros.

In a certain way, the metropolis can be compared to an ETI..

Second, more complex governance.

The President of Bordeaux Métropole is not elected by the population, but by representatives of municipalities, in this case the mayors, and a certain number of metropolitan councillors. The President must therefore create a kind of consensus within the 27 municipalities that represent 800,000 inhabitants. In 2002, an additional factor of complexity, the left and the right were almost at parity, with 61 advisers from the plural left, and 59 from the right. Vincent was President and his first Vice President was Alain Juppé. Between them there was a form of co-management/emulation. Everyone defended their interests, but also sought to go beyond them. Quite an amazing model but “terribly effective”.

Third dimension: the strategic project and the need to invent what the metropolis was. The metropolis has extremely technical skills. People tended to say, “There is no political project behind it.” Vincent, on the other hand, had the same feeling as the population, who knew what “living in a metropolis” meant: living in one municipality, working in another, having leisure activities in other municipalities. It was necessary to give a global strategic vision of this. With this in mind, they created the Metropolitan Factory, which brought together a few elected officials, but especially all the actors, including economic ones, present in the metropolis. It contained this notion of collective invention and necessarily of extreme technicality. This is how they managed to pull the whole country up, with a very powerful lever: the arrival of the High Speed Line in Bordeaux.

On a personal level, what did Vincent learn in the exercise of power and the art of leadership, from his career as an elected official in the Bordeaux metropolis?

Vincent has acquired the art of negotiation in a very complex environment.

He experienced a professional “upgrade”, in a very direct treatment of cases with Alain Juppé.

And above all, he learned that, even when the legal-technical-financial constraints are extremely important and when apparently there is no room for manoeuvre, you should never accept the evidence, to always find room for improvement for a territory. This seems to him to be able to be found in business.

During his mission to the Elysée between 2014 and 2017, Vincent became Advisor to President Hollande. Some lessons?

Before the Elysée, Vincent ran in Bordeaux in the 2014 municipal elections against Alain Juppé.

While he was brilliantly elected in 2001, then in 2008 as president of Bordeaux Métropole, and when he was the youngest President of a metropolis in France, Vincent set himself a challenge. The failure was terrible. After the 2014 elections, he lost everything.

It was a situation that made him reflect on fragility and taught him humility.

Finally, he joined the Elysée in 2014 as Political Advisor to President Hollande for three years, with the very particular experience that the Elysée represents.

He saw the implosion of the left and the explosion of the country with the wave of attacks in 2015. And observe that the smallest error is fatal, in this hyper-acceleration and this density of Elysian time.

In this context, Vincent learns, beyond speed, to know how to delay. The symbolic power of the Elysée is extremely important. How you react or don't react has a very strong impact. And then there are also all the people he meets, the leaders of the great powers. It's an incredibly intense experience.

After this experience where he was at the heart of power, alongside President Hollande, Vincent left politics by joining the Court of Auditors in 2017. What changes did this introduce for him?

For Vincent, the Court of Auditors is a fantastic school of rigor.

As judges, members of the Court of Auditors have judicial power.

After these hectic periods, there is this change of pace which also makes it possible to return, in a way, to the policies that we have built ourselves. When you are at the Elysée, you work on the State budget, the CICE, industrial policy,... and in the end, what were the results?

The rigor and subject of evaluation and control are also essential when running a business. Vincent very recently decided to join the private sector. And not in any way: he co-founded a start-up. For what reason?

For Vincent, it is first of all a desire and human encounters. He co-founded this start-up, NFU Prod., with two main partners: Benjamin Delaux, a real estate specialist for just over twenty years, and Kevin Polizzi, from the tech world. So at NFU Prod. there is a dimension that is both real estate and digital, areas that Vincent also worked on during his elected career.

For Vincent, there was a desire to move into the private sector, and to discover this universe. And also a desire to create, to invent a product, a new concept and not simply to join a large company, the logical continuation of its career.

NFU Prod. operates like a film production company, but in real estate. The company designs concepts, creates them, has them built, and then operates them.

NFU Prod. focuses its projects on digital technology, health and culture.

A few examples.

In the field of culture, NFU Prod. won a call for applications from SAMOA on the island of Nantes, around the consolidation of the music sector. They offer a 6,000 square meter building with recording studios, coworking spaces, offices, especially for SACEM, but also places of residence for artists. NFU Prod. brought together the musical community that had been carrying out this project for 5 to 10 years, convinced the public authorities, and found funding by joining forces with Magellan, a major real estate company from Nantes. They will then build the site with general construction companies, then ensure its operation.

In the field of health, NFU Prod. has two ongoing projects — in Bordeaux and Toulouse. They are designing “new generation” health centers. These are similar to the profile of dispensaries, but include a mini-emergency service and medical specialties so that there are care pathways. The whole thing is put in place with the spirit of coworking, integrates public health research, an extremely important tech approach with information systems that communicate well with each other; and data mining, which does not exist in urban medicine.

On each project, NFU Prod. systematically has this fairly global approach, due to the complementary experience of the Founders.

The adventure started in September 2022 and nearly 15,000 square meters are already “in the pipeline”

What is the ambition of NFU Prod. for the next two or three years?

The first victories were quite quick but more are needed.

The company will have to continue to structure and recruit.

Second point: on the health aspect, NFU Prod. is in the process of inventing a brand so that people fully understand the specificity of what is offered to them. Today there are city doctors, hospitals and clinics. NFU Prod. is on an interim proposal, which is similar to what is called in the United States the Outpatient Centers.

How can this concept emerge in France? How to properly specify the differentiation of the NFU Prod. offer to public authorities, both local and Regional Health Agencies?

It will also be necessary for society to refine its level of ambition in order to both raise it to a high level, but also not “explode in flight”. So there will necessarily be the question of consolidation. And maybe in 2023, that of a fundraiser.

Winning markets, building products and refining the concept are the 2023/2024 goals of NFU Prod.

To conclude, what are your thoughts at the end of this podcast?

In summary, Vincent compares the world of the public and that of business.

There are, of course, similarities in the areas of leadership, teamwork, professional requirements, failure management, and emergency/strategy coordination.

However, in a start-up, the question of turnover and cash has an extremely short timeframe. In politics, you can also lose everything at some point. However, when you are elected, it is for five, six or seven years, and there is thus an ability to project yourself. In the company, even if the company is off to a promising start, Vincent, as when he was elected locally, remains very pragmatic and does not lose sight of the importance of turnover and cash flow.