ENTREPRENEURSHIP : Entrepreneur of the month. Mike EFTIMAKIS (EDHEC Global Mba 2005), Baby Bidou, toys and music for children

Mike Eftimakis (EDHEC Mba 2005) has created Baby Bidou, Toys and Music for children, in 2006. He is sharing with us his experience and his success since the launch of Baby Bidou 6 years before.

Mike, Can you tell us something about your background?

Since I was a child, I always have been a geek and a fan of high-tech stuff… so I obviously followed a technical path. I graduated as a microelectronics engineer from ISEN in 1993. This specialization in the design of microchips was at the heart of my first career, where I worked in R&D labs to build processors for DECT phones, Bluetooth peripherals, and Wi-Fi devices.

During this 10 years period, I evolved from a position of chip designer to a position of lead architect, with project management and technical responsibilities. In my last position in a startup, I had the opportunity to handle many different tasks in addition to my technical responsibilities, from sales to customer support… This broad panel of tasks helped me to better understand the inside of a young company and I decided to go one step further: learn about all aspects of a company and access to a general management position.

I thus joined the EDHEC MBA as a full time student. This very intense period of my life was extremely fulfilling: consolidating my previous “hands-on” experience by theory and a bird’s eye view was a great addition to my technical background. This mind-boggling experience opened the doors: everything was possible!

I then worked as a freelance consultant for a few months and finally decided to startup my own company, an old dream that was then possible. Baby Bidou was finally founded in 2006 and it was the beginning of my new career as an entrepreneur. I’m still managing the company now.

What’s the field of your company Baby Bidou?

Baby Bidou provides parents with the toys they need to safely play real music to their children. The company has thus created the first MP3 teddy bears, that play songs or tell stories with a volume-controlled loudspeaker. Those toys can accompany babies in the cradle and children up to 5 or 6 years old.

In addition to these toys, Baby Bidou has partnered with many artists and children music producers to propose a great catalog of tunes to be downloaded from its Website at  www.babybidou.com . Parents now have a choice of more than 5000 tunes mostly in English or French and instrumental music, all designed specifically for young children but also much appreciated by parents! Many musical styles are available, from lullabies to rock, jazz, classical or traditional music.

The company has a broad range of activities: SW development, product design, manufacturing, logistics management, marketing, sales, e-commerce, partnerships management… etc… This is very challenging for a small company but extremely interesting!

Your job as an entrepreneur, how do you see it?

From the beginning I knew that it would be a fresh start: a new company, a new market, a new product, and… a new job for me! I didn’t realize how difficult and how different it was to my past jobs. Founding a company is an extraordinary experience: you cannot just focus on one task, you have to bear a high level of interrupt, you have to foresee the future but also you have to deal with permanent urgency and lack of time, you try many things that simply fail, your to-do list never shrinks down, you work late at night with passion but have to fight inertia from administration and people who just don’t care…

I did many things wrong at the beginning (and I’m still paying for the biggest ones), but I have learned a lot from this experience: it is as if I was a beginner for a second time, and no teaching can compensate from the lack of experience. I regularly read books and articles about startups, management and innovation, I discuss with many people (other entrepreneurs, investors, coaches…), and I always find ways to improve. I would perform a lot better if I would startup a new company now!

This job is really exciting, and creating a living company with happy customers from a blank page is a personal satisfaction. The best experience is also to have the chance to meet many fascinating and inspiring people: entrepreneurs from all around the World, experts, artists, technologists, journalists… and even a Nobel Peace Prize winner!

The biggest frustration comes from the flow of good ideas that cannot be realized because I don’t have time or resources. I don’t yet have a solution for this! ;-)

What are your company’s prospects?

My company has had a difficult start, like most new companies (Facebook-like growth is really the exception!), but I managed to go over those hurdles and find a way to survive and grow. We celebrated our 6^th birthday in June, and we work on new projects to expand the business. I’m now back to investor-seeking mode to finance these projects and continue to innovate.

For the current business, we are still far from the peak and we have a lot of potential in foreign countries (France is still ~70% of our sales), even though we are quickly progressing in the right direction.

We will also do more experimentations, to test new business models, for example I would like to try selling our music downloading gift cards as marketing incentives to companies that want to please their AB+ female customers.

The web is a sector that’s recruiting. What jobs are there for experienced and/or new grads?

Obviously there are a lot of opportunities on the Web right now. It evolved from an empty virgin land to the current wild battlefield covered with blood! It is more and more difficult for a company to get visible in this context… and, by chance, getting people to know and desire brands or products happens to be the job of the marketing specialists!

During the gold rush, the shovel sellers make a lot of money: there are therefore many jobs for Web developers. But the good news for them are that a Web site is never complete: it needs to permanently evolve and adapt to the new trends or technologies, so these jobs are sustainable.

And of course there are plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs. You can establish anywhere and develop your new concept, then go international and scale it quickly thanks to the Web. My view is that it will be a revolution for the businesses’ organization: we just see the surface but I think that the current large integrated structure will mostly disappear. This disintegration will benefit to the people who will build the pieces of the new puzzle.

Discover Babybidou