Jean-Louis Lelogeais talks with Jason Barnard about the entrepreneurial long game.

The Entrepreneurial Long Game! Jean-Louis Lelogeais, co-founder of PEO Partners and SVP Global, reveals the mindset shifts that transformed him from startup consultant to managing over $21 billion in assets. Drawing from 40+ years building three successful ventures—including surviving the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis—Jean-Louis shares his proven framework for entrepreneurial endurance. Learn why big ideas require passionate commitment, how setbacks become your greatest teachers, and discover the critical timing for building legacy-focused leadership teams.

In this inspiring episode, you'll discover:- Why "big ideas that change the world" are essential for long-term success- How to build staying power when ventures take longer than expected- The partnership advantage: why 1+1 equals more than 2 in entrepreneurship- How to create feedback loops that prevent costly mistakes- The legacy mindset shift that separates successful exits from failures

This conversation offers a blueprint for entrepreneurs ready to play the long game and build businesses that outlast their founders.

#Entrepreneurship #PrivateEquity #StartupStrategy #BusinessStrategy #LongTermThinking #Legacy #VentureCapital #BusinessGrowth #EntrepreneurMindset #Leadership #BusinessBuilding #StartupLife #Podcast #FastlaneFounders

What you’ll learn from Jean-Louis Lelogeais

This episode was recorded live on video June 24th 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9EHLteRY8

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://www.peo-partners.com/viewer/viewer.html?link=https://www.peo-partners.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Liquid-PE-White-Paper-March-2025-FOR-WEBSITE-APPROVED.docx-1.pdfJean-Louis Lelogeais

Transcript from Jean-Louis Lelogeais with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Entrepreneurial Long Game

[00:00:00] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: When you start as an entrepreneur, you're doing it all, right? So the fun part of it, the intellectual challenge, because I would tell you. Also for me, the big idea also has to be intellectually challenging. But the reality is, your day to day. It's not that you still need to prove the wires.

[00:00:20] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: You need to do the admin side. You need to maintain the QuickBooks. So if you're not passionate, all that kind of, because there's no resources to get a whole team to do a bunch of things for you. So you got to be ready to get your hands dirty and do a lot of stuff that may seem beyond you, and it is not particularly the most thrilling stuff but you do it because that's part of what's required and what drives. 

[00:00:50] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and gets them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.

[00:01:06] Narrator: How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and become their legacy? A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. 

[00:01:19] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And the quick hello and we're good to go.

[00:01:27] Jason Barnard: Oh, welcome to the show.

[00:01:33] Jason Barnard: Impossible to say or sing. 

[00:01:37] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: That was pretty close. and I'm not going to try to sing back to you, Jason even though my wife is Korean and I've spent many hours at karaoke. But, it's still hopeless. But it's very good to meet you. And how are you doing today?

[00:01:57] Jason Barnard: I'm absolutely fine, Mr. Lelogeais. What I did like about that is you said that your name is impossible to sing or say, so I thought I would sing it completely wrong because that's what you're used to. That's been your life. As long as you've been in America, you're from France, but you live in America and you're an entrepreneur.

[00:02:16] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: Yeah, I got to tell you that. That's one big advantage. Having a name like this in the States, I'm the only Jean-Louis Lelogeais in all of America. I can guarantee you that. And what's really nice about the professional journey is if you meet somebody 15 years ago, there's a chance they might remember that name versus Michael Johnson might not quite resonate the same way. So I must say it's been a bit of an advantage that way people typically remember. 

[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: And that's a really interesting point, a unique name is hugely powerful. And in SEO and Brand Optimization within Search and AI, it's incredibly important as we'll see.

[00:03:00] Jason Barnard: But here, when I searched your name, this is the result. I got lots of blue links, your photos. But there's a Knowledge Panel, hiding behind it that doesn't appear. And one of the huge things that I find is this makes you look less impressive than this. 

[00:03:22] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: What you're referring to is the video with my partner, Randy.

[00:03:27] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: Is that what you're referring to? 

[00:03:29] Jason Barnard: It's the fact that Google doesn't fully understand you to the extent that it's willing to present you with this incredibly good looking search result for your name. 

[00:03:39] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: Yeah. So Jason, obviously offline, we should absolutely have a conversation. I'm turning 67. I'm very low tech and we need to make better usage of all the tools out there and so would welcome learning from you. 

[00:03:58] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it's a huge question of framing and how well the algorithms Google, ChatGPT and so on understand you rather than your achievements.

[00:04:08] Jason Barnard: And from what I understand, your achievements are huge. Can you give us a quick rundown? 

[00:04:12] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: I'm not sure. You're too kind. But obviously, 40 years into business, there's obviously a number of kinds of milestones and things you accomplish.

[00:04:25] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: But I'm not sure, for the listeners, whether it makes sense to me going chronologically, which might be super boring. But just to highlight some themes, I started at Booz Allen and Hamilton, which is a strategy consulting firm out of New York. And even at Booz Allen, the way you made a partner is you had to be essentially an entrepreneur. You had to come up with a segment of your intellectual, or IP, if you want to call it that. That would be interesting to a segment of customers, and you basically had to build your own franchise.

[00:05:14] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: That's the way. The old partner said, yeah, he is bringing your business, he's bringing revenues because, at least that's the way it was at that time. So Booz were the formative years after doing business school at MIT Sloan. And in terms of my career, I think I always had the entrepreneurship bug. So I did a two year stint at Chase Manhattan Bank. They were my largest client at Booz Allen. And so they made me the offer. It's a very classic kind of scenario where, you know, come inside and see whether you can implement all those recommendations. And I must say it was a super interesting and humbling experience because you know what seems good on paper in a presentation, you get inside a very large organization like Chase. And you discover that it's more like an oil tanker, meaning that you're pulling your lever and then you start to realize it's going the wrong direction by the inertia of trying to change it again. It's not like you're maneuvering a sailboat. So it was a super humbling and learning experience about the importance of implementation. That became the next chapter for me and very quickly I realized that I've had the entrepreneurship bug since the very beginning. After Chase, which was acquired by Chemical Banks, the course changed and was no longer what I was interested in. I was involved in it in the first wave of internet ventures, and got involved in a Paris space company called DataOps. And that was back in 96 and that journey wind up being a super interesting journey because as you recall, 2001, 2002, all those first waves of internet company that went and fetch amazing valuation.

[00:07:28] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: And then a few months later, they were worth nothing. 

[00:07:32] Jason Barnard: I was in the middle of that. 

[00:07:36] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: So only a few companies could have survived and I must say it was an amazing experience because we were VC backed including a company out of the West coast called Partech and the VCs didn't understand that business.

[00:07:53] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: It was a very innovative business at the time. But in fact, we are ahead of its time, you know. Now with ChatGPT, it looked so easy what DataOps was doing, but DataOps was essentially analyzing words super, super fast and using modeling techniques. It's particularly based on chaos theory to identify among those words, very early signals of change, and even you could program it to focus on tonality and that was really an idea ahead of its time with so many applications.

[00:08:28] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: But the VC guys didn't understand the business model. So you get 5 million bucks from them, then the money is spent, they're pushing you one direction and we got very close to bankruptcy. And thank God the founder of the business, we managed to stop the bleeding if she will. Before it was too late. We bought back the VCs, we did another annual round because it's all about staying power. So we survived that kind of up and down of that internet wave, if you will. And then, the company got sold in 2006 to Lexus Nexus.

[00:09:12] Jean-Louis Lelogeais: Not a great success story. It was sold for 5 million Euros. But I got to tell you,