Cyril Bergerault

Hello Laura, I am doing very, very well.

So, my academic and professional path: after a business school, I joined the Bouygues group in 1997, Bouygues Batiment International, I wanted to work abroad and I was not disappointed: they sent me to Uzbekistan, a real posting. So a fairly harsh, difficult country, very cold in winter, very hot in summer, and clearly a country quite closed in on itself, no internet. We were building a hotel, so that was a very interesting two-year experience.

I stayed there two years. Then I went to Prague. So after Uzbekistan, a fabulous contrast, a very, very pretty capital. We were building an office block for Americans and hotels for the Accor group. At the end of those two years I came back to head office, where I worked on the North and Central America side. Those were the first projects Bouygues had won in Cuba, plus some complicated projects in Haiti, another fairly difficult country at the time. Throughout that whole period, my job was management control.

That is it, on the more financial and economic side of the project. After that I worked for SGE International, which was a subsidiary of the VINCI group. There it was mainly Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal essentially, mostly French-speaking Africa, still in management control. Then, after launching a project in Slovakia that the group had won, since I knew the Czech Republic, I went to launch that project. And then I moved to the Blois area, to a subsidiary called ETDE at the time, Bouygues Energies Services today, the energy subsidiary of the Bouygues group, where we had just bought a number of companies in France and needed to bring management into all that. So I worked for that company. Then, still at Bouygues, I moved closer to Orleans, where I was head of management control for the entity. At that point one of my bosses told me: look, management control is fine, but you like people, you like talking, you should move into sales. So I made that transition, I changed jobs. I went from management control, where you are in the back office, to sales, where you are rather in front of a blank page.

Human relationships. And that is how I switched. So I kept working a bit for the Bouygues group in sales. And then I joined a company called Baudin Chateauneuf, a very old family business in the Orleans region that does, among other things, steel structures. And there I went back into export, fully, to redevelop exports. So it was sales, mostly bridges and steelwork. So it was Morocco, Tunisia, a lot of Cote d'Ivoire. I would go on assignment, then come back to France, and when we had projects we would study them in France and then send the teams out to build. So we built bridges in Cameroon, a stadium in Cote d'Ivoire for the Africa Cup of Nations. I did that for four years and it was really interesting, not always simple family-wise, because I was away for quite long stretches, I traveled a lot. Then six years ago I joined the BEG Ingénierie group in Orleans. I had known the current managing director at Bouygues. I had known one of the company's shareholders in Cote d'Ivoire. And they told me: we want to strengthen our sales force a bit. We are looking for a sales director.

So, come and join us. And so now, for six years, I have been sales director at BEG Ingénierie.

At BEG Ingénierie we have three activities. The historical activity is project management, design and works supervision. That is where we design buildings, where we file building permits, where we follow the authorizations to obtain them. That is project management. And we also deliver buildings under project management on behalf of the client. There is a property development activity through a company called OCA, where we look for land and develop programs. And there is a construction activity, I am in that one, which we call the turnkey activity. So my daily job is to go and see the clients we already have to identify future projects, and then to reach out to other clients, through the network, through associations, through meetings, through Afilog too, with all the encounters we have, to understand their needs. When a deal is identified and senior management tells me OK, let us go, we set up a project team with a design or engineering lead who takes charge of the technical side. Yes, of course, a whole team from our engineering office: we have architects, structural, civil engineering, MEP and electrical leads working at BEG, so we work on that project. And when we are lucky enough to win the project, we hand it over to the works teams who build it, set up on site and deliver the turnkey project to the client. So it can be as a general contractor, or under a general contracting arrangement; in logistics it is very often a property development contract, the famous CPI. And there we cover the whole chain: the project is delivered to the client, turnkey, ready to use.

Really, from start to finish, we can fully design from an idea, from the client's idea, all the way to delivery, turnkey delivery. On some buildings we also carry out maintenance operations.

My own scope stays French, but we work in nine countries abroad, so I have a colleague in charge of international sales. With some clients I do dabble now and then in Spain or Italy. In Italy I had supported a client, we worked on a big platform for Vailog, now SEGRO, and the end tenant is an American e-commerce giant. And that is because I knew that particular client. But otherwise we really have a separate entity with an international director and I have a counterpart on the international side. But in France, there is a lot to do.

Was my path different? To be clear, 25 years ago, to go off to slightly complicated, rough countries like Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, it was not offered to many women. There were a few, I knew a few, but it was not really the spirit of the times. When I arrived in Uzbekistan I only worked with men. In every meeting there were men, they were fairly closed countries. We do not always realize it, but we work a lot on parity in France, we try to move forward. There are countries that are still much further behind than others.

When I worked for Baudin-Chateauneuf, notably in Africa, there were times I did assignments, in particular in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we would go out in 4x4s, we had bodyguards to avoid kidnappings, it was rough. I did a lot of scouting, so living in fairly spartan hygiene conditions, of course women could do it, again, but I think perhaps there were not very many, and perhaps senior management did not necessarily offer it to them. The last thing is that it happened to me several times to leave for a one-week assignment and stay three weeks in the country. It is not a question of man or woman, but there is always the issue: I have children, you needed someone to hold the home front and who could... So, the life choice we had made, my wife did not work, so she had that ability, which gave me great freedom to leave, and to leave for long stretches. It could work in another setup: the husband stays home to hold the home front and the wife leaves. So it is not an objective obstacle, but well, now and then it is not always simple. Yes, I think in my particular case it would have been different if I had been a woman.

Parity, not yet, but the will, yes, and very firmly. In 2021 we had 27% women, in 2024 we have 31% women, so it is progressing. What is certain is that actions are being implemented. A new graduate, man or woman, will start on the same pay. That is really quite important. We measure the pay gap by category, by age bracket. In individual reviews we raise managers' awareness. If we notice a gap, for example, we will tell a manager: in your team, Marion apparently does the same job as Jean and earns 5% more. Do you think that is normal or not? It does not mean we will automatically raise Marion's salary, but simply, we ask the question. Before, we did not ask that question.

Today, in our recruitment, and we are a communications-minded company, so a lot of LinkedIn posts, we show the faces of our female colleagues. At trade shows, when we go to the ESTP fair and a number of recruitment fairs, there are always female colleagues who come and are there. In our associations, in our actions, we ask our female colleagues to be present, to say: if you want other women to come, the best ambassadors can be you, and they will be asked very practical questions, how does it work? We should not kid ourselves, there are also real topics: a pregnancy has to be managed, there is a leave, how does it work, what happens afterward, will I get my job back, questions really tied to being a woman, but it can be interesting to discuss. So yes, what I can say is that the company is really very committed on these topics. And you see it, I only work in project teams. Working with mixed teams is really a joy, all the time.

I think the initiatives taken at BEG are good initiatives and they can be reproduced. Today, with Women4Warehouse, you also show that a number of groups are not reserved for women, and that is why I accepted, because I find it interesting to be with you all to work on these topics. But showing in our communications that women are present, being able to recruit a bit more... There are other actions we implement. We take on a lot of work-study students. We have a target: 40% female work-study students, 40% female interns. Today we are not there. Why? Because we already get far more applications from men. But at least we have that target. For now I think among work-study students it is around 27% and among interns 30%. We progress year after year. We prefer to take small steps but keep moving. I think that can also be good practice, and companies tell themselves: hey, that is a good idea, how do things work with our interns? Let us set ourselves targets, 30%, 40%, 50%, depending on where you start. And then let us measure and see if we make progress year after year. That is what I can suggest.

Thank you very much. Thank you. See you soon.