The Poncelet Group: Revolutionizing Business Consulting and Investing

The president of the Poncelet Group, Djilali Khordj, has been working for four years to bring his idea to fruition. “The project was to bring together skills to be able to deal with the problems of the manager at 360°”, sums up the Messin manager, who presents the Poncelet Group as an investment bank, namely a strategic and financial consulting company, and not a deposit bank or a credit institution contrary to what the name “bank” suggests. “Our objective with this new model, unprecedented in Metz and in the Grand Est, is to reach 5 million euros in turnover and 50 employees within 5 years”, specifies Djilali Khordj who launched Groupe Poncelet in June 2023 with five other shareholders, to raise a total of €150,000 in capital.

It was in 2016, associated with Florine Muller, that Djilali Khordj launched the accounting firm Strong in Metz, with the aim of dematerializing 100% of the traditional professions related to accounting, in particular by moving towards “zero paper “. “And the other axis of development was to support business leaders in the development of their business, on matters of internal growth or even investment”, details Djilali Khordj.

Work in the same building to bring synergies into play

The firm is recruiting around fifteen employees, but the manager is struggling to respond to his clients on external growth issues. Associated with Hugo Perrin, Djilali Khordj will then launch in 2019 the firm Horus, a structure specializing in mergers and acquisitions, targeting companies whose valuation is between 1 and 10 million euros. The two structures work in synergy and succeeded, over the last financial year, in reaching 1.5 million euros in turnover with around twenty employees.

However, Djilali Khordj wants to structure his activities more efficiently: “The employees of Horus and Strong had to be able to work together”, insists the president of the Poncelet Group. Concretely, to create the new group, the shareholders of the Horus and Strong firms sold their shares to the Poncelet Group, taking advantage of the operation to bring three new shareholders into the capital of the group, Quentin Ciquet as a specialist in mergers and acquisitions, and chartered accountants Floriane Forciniti and Florian Maurice.

Since its creation, the Poncelet Group has launched a new activity around issues related to CSR, structured under the name of the Esslie firm and led by Benjamin Nicolas. “We had to have a structure dedicated to these questions,” says Djilali Khordj. “2 or 3 years ago, I would not have argued that it was something important. But today, CSR is becoming an extremely important subject and managers who do not get on it quickly will have a late train.”

Nearly 4 million euros for a seat steeped in history

Another subject on which the Poncelet Group wants to be able to provide expertise to managers is communication: already in contact with an agency in Metz, the group is looking for the best solution to structure this new branch of activity.

To symbolize this new business bank, the leaders of the Poncelet Group have decided to settle in a 16th century mansion.^e century, rue du Juge-Michel, in Metz. Of the 1,400 ^m2 developed by the building, known as the Hôtel Poncelet, Djilali Khordj will install a billiard room, a jacuzzi and a gym, i.e. nearly 350 m² dedicated to relaxation. Purchased in 2019 for 1.9 million euros, the mansion benefited from 2 million euros of work to restore its shine and adapt it to office use.

“When I bought the building with Florine Muller, my model was not very precise in my mind, but I knew that we needed an emblematic place, steeped in history to structure this investment bank”, recalls Chairman of the Poncelet Group. In the garden, employees have a patch of vegetable patch and a few hours a month to take care of it. “It is by taking care of the well-being of our employees and our future employees that we will manage to reach 50 employees”, estimates Djilali Khordj, without minimizing the recruitment difficulties linked to the proximity of Luxembourg.