Éric Devaulx, coach and partner VISCONTI, welcomes today Stéphanie LEDOUX, founder and CEO of Alcyconie, a company dedicated to the prevention and management of cyber and digital crises.

Operational reservist at COMCYBER Stéphanie accompanies, advises and trains companies and institutions to manage complex situations and establish effective crisis communication, mainly on digital issues.

Who is Stéphanie LEDOUX?

Stéphanie combines different roles: that of business manager, that of mother of young children, that of sportswoman and that of operational reservist. In general, Stéphanie is committed and does things “thoroughly”.

What are Stéphanie's drivers? And what gave him the desire to start an entrepreneur?

The engines are numerous:

• The passion for crisis management: Stéphanie discovered this discipline quite young, at the beginning of her career as part of a first internship and it quickly became a passion.
• Stéphanie comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and she always wanted to follow this path.

Alcyconia is the result of the union of these two engines.

Cyber crisis management specialist is a surprising position compared to Stéphanie's career...

Today, Cyber is a sector of expertise with very specialized jobs. But Stéphanie went the other way around: she brought the expertise she had in crisis management to the cybersecurity sector. A few years ago, we started talking about cyber crises and Stéphanie's observation was that these discussions remained very technical.

She was surprised not to find in these crises the dimensions that we see quite classically emerging in other types of crises: human, reputational. So there was a need. It was on this observation that Alcyconie was born, which became the first European player specialized in this subject.

But once the need is identified, you still need to know what it is about. Stéphanie therefore went back to school for a year before launching Alcyconie to train in cybersecurity and economic intelligence, etc.

Women represent 15% of business leaders in France, with those who managed to raise funds 2%.

In this context, how does Stéphanie explain her success?

When you want to get out of the “all-clear” path, it is not uncommon to hear questions around you such as: “Are you sure? ”, “Is that reasonable? ” or “But you have a good position in a group, with good conditions...”, if you listen to these external opinions you never get started. With her desire to be an entrepreneur and to do things differently, Stéphanie started without paying attention to all this.

In the Alcyconie team, there is energy, adherence, commitment, what is Stéphanie's “Secret Sauce”?

Stéphanie's “Secret Sauce” is to make sure you remain yourself. If you want to have people who adhere to what you do and who relate to it, you must also know how to remain whole and honest with yourself.

Because it's important to believe in your project, but you need people to join us in what we're writing.

Stéphanie also wanted to create the company in which she always wanted to work, in which we are happy to come, in which we have the feeling that we are doing something useful, in which there is a good team spirit, a good atmosphere and established trust.

So is Alcyconia a family, a team, a collective?

It is a bit of all three but it depends on the periods of development of Alcyconia that we are talking about. As mentioned earlier, there is this trust that must be established and maintained within the team. Today, Alcyconie employees form a team with a common objective.

Stéphanie has this team spirit at heart, which is not surprising coming from this former synchronized swimming swimmer. Stéphanie wants to advance as a team with the same level of standards as in competition. The requirement does not prevent us from being united; it is essential to have an ambitious objective and to make sure to stick to it.

At VISCONTI, we are not managers, we become managers. Can Stéphanie retrace some key stages of learning as a manager?

Looking back at the past five years and looking at the future ahead, Stéphanie notes that her leadership role has changed a lot.

At the beginning, Stéphanie was in “warrior mode” or “construction site manager”. When you start a business, you do everything, you dive into it, you intervene a bit at all levels. Then, there was the stage of building together by bringing people together at his side. A first core is then formed to prepare for acceleration.

You become a “coach.” This went on for two years. And now, Stéphanie is reaching a new stage in which she is no longer taking on the role of “ship captain”.

In this time, it is necessary to make the boat go faster, more efficiently and efficiently by having more and more crew members on board. Beyond a leadership challenge, it is a human challenge. The challenges evolve and are completely different from each other, requiring different skills. Stéphanie has evolved to be more focused on humans and the development of the various members of her crew.

What has changed in Stéphanie since the creation of Alcyconie?

People around Stéphanie tend to say that she is where they thought she would be. Because for them it was obvious that she would follow in the footsteps of the other members of her family by embarking on entrepreneurship. As for Stéphanie, she feels she is the same person she was five years ago.

But things have changed, the people we talk to have changed, Stéphanie feels more assertive than before. She also dares to do more things because making a company evolve means taking risks, which, with the growth of the company, no longer involve only oneself. This last criterion must be taken into account in any decision.

If Stephanie had a magic wand, what dream would she have for herself and Alcyconie in the next ten years?

The dream at ten years is to have been able to remain a company in which employees always enjoy coming in the morning. Stéphanie believes that this will last if employees continue to find meaning in what they do, because they feel that they are serving the common good.

Indeed, they help managers, companies, teams to go through extremely complicated stages. If they still manage to do that in ten years, that will be very good. Then, the larger dream is to be able to extend Alcyconie on a European scale so that it becomes a European player in cyber crisis management and cyber resilience.

And what is the dream for this year?

The short-term challenges are numerous. This year 2024 is crucial for Alcyconie, it is the year of transformation, of acceleration. In 2023, they raised funds and expanded the team. For 2024, three types of challenges:

• Continue to keep the consulting business alive, develop it and launch an activity around the product in parallel because they are in the process of developing two software programs.
• Support the teams. Indeed, they went from ten to 22 employees. So how can we ensure that this collective develops well? How to set up middle management?
• Evolve as a manager for Stéphanie. The management profession is no longer the same as it was five years ago and it must evolve with it. Also, she must take up the challenge of finding the “Secret Sauce” between being in close proximity and letting everyone do their job, take a step back. Because Stéphanie is expected to take Alcyconie towards her goal and follow her trajectory at ten years of age, with a different level of interlocutor.

Key advice from our partner coach Éric Devaulx

• Remain yourself
• Maintain proximity with the team
• Embodying company values on a daily basis