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Introduction
Journalist Olivier Ducuing painted a portrait of Tracy Cohen - Sayag, the director of the Champs-Elysées Clinic group, in the Journal Les Echos for November 29, 2019.
Tracy Cohen can smile. The official inauguration is this Thursday evening of a clinic in Lille and for her, it’s the sign of a spectacular reversal. Arrived in 2011 with her father to save the Champs-Elysées clinic in distress, the director general made it a Mecca for aesthetic medicine. The north of France is just a stopover. Another establishment should soon open in New York!
The fascination with numbers has always been
From her adolescence, the world of numbers challenged the young Tracy Cohen. Her first internship at 17, was in a trading room of Société Générale just after her bachelor. "I loved this environment! She says.
Then she headed to Dauphine for a master's degree in Corporate Finance and Financial Engineering. In 2008, she left for a gap year to accompany three Deutsche Bank alumni including one of her teachers in an investment fund project, Acadia. Launched in the midst of Lehman and Madoff's tumult, the plan did not succeed. "But it was the most formative moment of my career", judge, with hindsight, Tracy Cohen.
After having obtained her diploma, she joined Rothschild as a junior analyst in "capital market", with the idea of acquiring three years of banking experience before joining a "private equity" fund.
But the catastrophic situation of her father's clinic in 2011 disrupted her plans. At twenty-three, eldest of six sisters, who had always wanted to avoid working with the family, took over the reins of the father's business.
The rescue of the paternal clinic
The new director spends a month in each department, HR, block, reception, etc. to understand the malfunctions and improve the system. "There was not even a computer for making appointments, it was the Middle Ages! She said today. Alas, after a year the situation deteriorated further like the rest of the entire aesthetic sector in France. The clinics were disappearing one after the other, weighed down by the fixed costs of operating theaters and the ban on communicating . "I convinced my father to go into receivership in 2013," says Tracy Cohen. With a ten-year moratorium to repay a liability of 4 million euros.
A renaissance brought to the new aesthetic market
A new name and a renovation of the premises for an additional 3 million euros greatly helped development focus on aesthetic medicine that was much more profitable and capable of increasing loyalty and popularity. This showed to be successful when in 2016, 1.7 billion was spent in this area in Europe. The return to balance comes in a year, also driven by the end of taboos. Men themselves no longer hesitate to cross the door. They are 35% of the patients in the group which also rejuvenates its clientele: one in two patients is under 35 years of age. From 2016 to 2018, the clinic reached 13 million euros in activity with around 100 employees. Furthermore, the Lille clinic should be followed by little sisters in Bordeaux, Nice and Lyon. As for New York, the opening should be done, this time on joint venture, on 57th Avenue.