A short profile of Pierre-Antoine Poussier, entrepreneurial consultant and Managing Director of Fair/e, by Ludovic Roubaudi, novelist.

As a child, when given a present Pierre-Antoine Poussier would proceed to take it apart so he could understand how it worked. Today he’s a Partner at Financiale Gestion Privée and still goes about his work in the same fashion: analyse and understand his clients’ needs and objectives, most of whom are business owners, to offer them advice adapted to their respective situations. His unusual career path gave him a deep understanding of wealth management and how businesses work. In his first business training, following an audit on a logistics platform, he created his first business – a surplus inventory brokering company. “This was an enormous learning experience about the complexities of the bond an entrepreneur weaves with his company. I discovered, after I sold my business, all about that intimate dimension which exists between a man and his company. I am convinced that before being a line on an accounts sheet, one’s legacy is the result of a life’s path, of choices and convictions.”

Passionate about wealth management, he went back to college before going to work at BNP Paribas Private Banking, an experience from where he drew the following conclusion: taken alone, tax exemption and the desire to create one’s own firm is not an investment project – something that he realised when he purchased his first client portfolio. “I’m not a converted banker but the boss of a business, therefore when I meet a client for the first time I don’t talk to them about investments, I ask them to tell me about their lives, to project themselves over the long term. This is where the pertinence of my advice is born.”

But what use is this advice if one cannot get it across? Nothing. That’s why Pierre-Antoine became a lecturer at the IAE in Paris Master 2 in Wealth Management, to cultivate his ability to explain complex mechanisms.

“I built my business around three verbs: protect, foresee and pass on.”