Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Christophe Hille, COO of August Point Advisors, located in New York, NY, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

August Point Advisors is a boutique consulting firm that works in the food and beverage, hospitality, and specialty food retail sectors. Our work targets three areas of need that we see in these sectors: business and strategic planning (i.e., workshopping the concept, creating financial projections, mapping operational considerations, and more), project management (i.e., being an advisor through the actual process of developing a brick-and-mortar location), and talent recruitment (i.e., finding the partners and employees who are needed to make your food business work). Our customers are typically independent owner-operators in the food-and-beverage and retail food world. Due to the range of services we offer—fairly specific but each one pretty different from the other—we find ourselves working with everyone from absolute newbies to veteran operators.

Tell us about yourself

I've been in the food world since the mid-90s when I started working seasonally on a small vegetable farm in northern Virginia. I discovered that I enjoyed the food and the people who work in food more than anything else I'd considered until then. Since that time, I've been a line cook, executive chef, restaurant owner-operator, partner in an artisanal butchery business, and food systems consultant.

We launched August Point Advisors during the first year of the COVID pandemic, as I was transitioning from one consulting firm to working freelance. I had started doing some recruiting in the food world and found that I liked the process, was good at it, and had a hypothesis about how to make a strong value proposition for my approach to recruiting in the food world. I suggested to Jared Lewis—now my business partner at August Point—that we include recruiting among the firm's core offerings, so we did just that, and it's now the area of the business that I mainly focus on.

What motivates me each day is to refine and pressure-test the original hypothesis that I had continually. The fundamental concept—retained, flat-fee recruiting, priced for a sector with high turnover but delivered with an advisory partnership mindset—has held up, but we've had to make some adjustments along the way.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

I hesitate to make claims about "biggest accomplishments" when we're still such a young company. Instead, I'll just say that I feel great about how quickly we were able to determine our value proposition and the core slate of services, and proud of the quality of consulting and recruiting services we've delivered to clients so far.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Pipeline development is what I find to be the most challenging with a new consulting and recruiting business—making people aware that you exist and that you offer a set of services that could be of value to them. Our personal and professional networks are helpful and encouraging, of course, but you can't assume they'll pay the rent. They aren't necessarily in need of your services right then and may not know anyone who is. And as you get underway, it's easy to focus intensely on the engagements you've secured, but you always have to keep part of your mind on pipeline development.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

These recommendations are relevant to consulting-type advisory and professional services, not necessarily just any kind of business.

  1. Specialize. When you've been in a field like food and hospitality for a long time and had success as an entrepreneur and operations generalist, it's natural to think of offering generalist consulting services—whatever you need; I can do that. But I've found that focusing and specializing at this point in my career makes for a stronger and more credible value proposition. I think it's smart to identify three things you (as an individual or team) are really good at and package those three in your "go-to-market" strategy. Customers can understand a package of three related services. Beyond that, you start to sound too spread out and arguably become less competitive with firms that are more focused.
  2. Build your professional referral network. Related to the point above about specializing, August Point has developed a small network of other specialized consultants who we like to work with and who we feel provide high-quality work (e.g., designers, architects, contractors, accountants, etc.). We regularly refer our clients to these associated firms in an arm's length way—we don't push the referral, we don't take any referral fees, and we let the client have their own relationship with that firm. This approach is a significant value-add for our clients and results in great working relationships with a network of skilled consultants and service providers. It's a win-win for everyone.
  3. Be generous. I've tried to balance rewarding myself for my working time—meaning that I focus most of all on paid engagements for identified scopes of work—with ample amounts of non-transactional check-ins, advisory conversations, and discretionary "freebies" for people we've worked with and even haven't. So long as the business is generally moving in the right direction, there's a real long-range value in being available to people for issues and needs that just might not add up to a full engagement.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.augustpoint.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophe-hille-2020/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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