4.1.1. The origins

Born into a cosmopolitan family (father: Italo-Guadeloupean; mother: Haitian), Chrystèle oscillated for a long time between France and the USA where she has ties. She is said to be the child of two nomads and “exoticism is sedentary” in her eyes. It is in France that she developed in the end, not without always wondering even today what her life would have been like if she had chosen the USA.

A woman of intuition, she very quickly understood that her life would not be in a conventional approach and her journey bears witness to this. It was a permanent search to reconcile paradoxes.

It is a paradox to seek a balance between the absolute necessity to always go beyond our imitations, while preserving a reassuring comfort. It is a paradox to want to make law, which leads to support functions, while seeking to participate in the process of creation in a company.

This paradoxical personality (and this is a compliment coming from me) has finally found its balance in entrepreneurship as you will discover.

4.1.2. A voluntary journey

Chrystèle tried to combine two passions: law and the media. “I love law and I always wanted to be a journalist”. A leitmotiv in the development of her knowledge: to reach BAC + 5. It was a desire on the part of the young Chrystèle who did not address it in a linear way. Because of the hazards of life, at the time Chrystèle started her working life (I will come back to this later), she only held a master’s degree in business law. It is with the determination that I know of her now that she sought other knowledge, other skills with a Master 2 in Multimedia and Information Systems, then an MBA in International Economic Strategy.

All this has forged her skills that were all the more solid as they were acquired during her professional career. Thus, corporate law, management, media law, litigation, negotiation and contracts are all areas that hold little or no secrets for her.

4.1.3. Towards working life

Her professional experience has been in the media industry. Chrystèle was a lawyer at the time. The convergence between her interest in law and the media could now be achieved. She spent many years there, and during all these years, she did not forget to continue her training, no doubt in search of a broadening of her competences. A somewhat “peculiar” jurist because, without in any way directing this against her colleagues, Chrystèle would have liked to be able to go beyond her mission. Going beyond her mission was a necessity for her in order not to be confined only to the boundaries of the legal world.

As you can imagine, in the world of large groups, schools of thought are still the norm. If you’re a lawyer, then you might as well not have any opinions on the marketing thing, for example. I would guard myself against expressing an opinion on the matter. It’s also understandable that the person whose job it is to market doesn’t really want to be challenged every five minutes. All points of view can be defended. In any case, this environment forcing Chrystèle to stay in a company led her to add another string to her bow.

4.2.1. The emergence of an entrepreneur

It happens more often than we think, that between what we do and what we are, things are not completely aligned. Chrystèle likes to call herself a “deviant legal partner”. It is a self-diagnosis resulting from studies and research that she did to better understand how it works. Convinced that this notion of positive deviance from the management sciences was as much a key to personal understanding as it was a solution proposal, she started out as an independent consultant serving small-business entrepreneurs, individuals or founders of start-ups.

If you want and know how to have opinions on much more than what is in your field of responsibility within a corporation, this, as I suggested above, can be tricky. The freelancer doesn’t have that problem.

4.2.2. Her first entrepreneurial experience

As an independent consultant, you have more freedom to advise, defend a point of view and decide with whom you finally want to interact. For an empathetic Chrystèle, always listening actively, with a broad smile, being independent was the first step to manage her paradoxes and finally live better.

Someone who thought for a long time that she lacked sufficient references to find her inner balance and in her relationship with others, ended up living better. “I have my own ideas, and they are no less than those of a great thinker”. Many would tell me that Chrystèle shows false humility or pretension with such a statement. Either that is not the case or there are two and many of us in this world who are like her. To want to share with others because “Without others, nothing has any flavor”, and still have self-esteem and the will to give or receive meaning, what could be more relevant to be fulfilled in life. This is all the more estimable as this type of profile takes as much pleasure in being fulfilled as seeing others do the same.

I feel that if Chrystèle’s profile wasn’t built in a day, this experience as an independent was a cornerstone that would lead her towards the creation of a start-up.

4.2.3. FULL’STREET, the launch

During the entire interview, there is a notion about her that I found very structuring. Chrystèle told me about her memory lapses. For a long time, she was complicated by her ability to move on, to unburden her memory, especially when in front of people incapable of questioning themselves. What spontaneously applies to people, bad memories, uninteresting content, applies all the more so in moments of decision-making. By way of illustration, originally the current entrepreneurial project that she and her partner and companion were carrying out was to create a network of distribution boutiques … and this was to become a digital platform that I will describe to you shortly. We can’t even talk about a pivotal point, but about a change of project trajectory. Chrystèle lives fully in the present moment and makes choices in the present. This approach allows her to circumvent obstacles and to deal with the surprises that every professional encounters and is full of.

FULL’STREET is a “WorkTech” that provides professional services to entrepreneurs to simulate and then launch the creation of their company. This solution seems to me to echo Chrystèle’s propensity to offload what weighs heavy. With this platform, entrepreneurs can free up time to work on their strengths; those who are truly involved in creating value in business. There is no business virtue in wrestling with administrative complexities or fumbling around for the right resources.

With FULL’STREET, Chrystèle has moved from the security paradigm to that of risk-taking because “the unknown is tamed and I reveal myself in reality, the spontaneous”. But this is a risk-taker who remains cautious: “To launch FULL’STREET, I did not generate any debt”. She finds it heroic, as well as insane, that the entrepreneurs who are least able to exercise entrepreneurship are proportionately those who generate the most debt before they even earn anything.

Beyond risk-taking, what she likes above all is to wear the same hat for creative, strategic and managerial roles: thus covering the entire timeline of the company’s existence.

Today, more than ever, Chrystèle’s adventure continues. Her network, especially in the media and the entrepreneurial ecosystem was built patiently. Chrystèle seized and activated during her career history all the opportunities of encounters and this constitutes, it must be said, a precious asset for the development of such a company. Human capital is at the heart of her method as well as her objective. So many individuals who have, over time, participated in the empirical construction of her career and led her to where she had dared, alone, to imagine finding herself.

All the best!

I retain two essential points from Mrs. Chrystèle Sanon. The first is a quote: “One meets one’s destiny by the paths one takes to avoid it”. The second point is an invitation to readers: “Renounce the experience of others as a guide to follow, but use it to better understand your own path!”

Question 4: what does Mrs. Chrystèle Sanon’s journey inspire in you?