Out of crisis, opportunity

Marc Chassinat sits behind his command center desk in Toda La Prensa's Escandon office, effortlessly slipping between Spanish, French, and English as he negotiates the day's work with his staff and suppliers. The level of activity is evidence of the company's success, but surviving more than three decades of doing business in Mexico has required managing through volatile times.

Image:Shauna Leff

Toda la Prensa's Marc Chassinat.

Chassinat came to Mexico from France thirty-three years ago to work for a French publishing company, but soon launched his own enterprise, a delivery service.  Business grew quickly, and he began delivering credit cards for Banamex and commemorative gold and silver items for the Franklin Mint. The Mexican economy fell into crisis in 1981-82, however, and the dollar/peso exchange rate went from 22 to 150 over the course of a year. Banamex was nationalized and forced to use a government delivery service; the Franklin Mint could no longer afford to sell in Mexico and closed its operations.

"Within six months, we came down from fifty messengers and three or four thousand deliveries per day to six messengers and just a couple hundred deliveries per day," says Chassinat. The shift forced the company to search for new clients, and Chassinat pitched his delivery services to Mexico's two largest distributors of foreign periodicals. When the companies turned him down, he decided to import and distribute the publications himself, thus giving birth to the Toda la Prensa periodical business and a related P.O. Box business for foreigners in Mexico.

"[Despite the crisis] I had a feeling that there was a market for the service I was creating... and I could see the commercial results immediately. We had filing cabinets with rows of hanging folders, and by the end of that first month, two rows were filled with new clients; six months later, the whole cabinet was filled."

Success bred confidence, which generated new ideas and new businesses. Among Chassinat's ventures in the 1980s and 1990s were a chain of newsstands called La Casa de la Prensa; a service that delivered late-arriving baggage from the airport to airline customers' hotels or homes; and a Lacoste shop in the Zona Rosa.

Aggressive expansion, he says, was one of his biggest mistakes, and both the baggage service and the Lacoste store faltered. By early 2000, he decided to focus on his core businesses, periodical distribution and the P.O. Boxes. "Administration is simpler, control is simpler," he says.

Like all businesspeople, Chassinat is streamlining expenses and preparing Toda la Prensa to weather the current economic crisis.  He's also reacting to the decline in the demand for print media by once again seeking new markets, this time through delivering electronic print-on-demand versions of daily newspapers to Mexican hotels. He's also targeting foreign businesspeople and baby boomers living in Cuernavaca, Puebla, San Miguel, and other communities, who still enjoy reading their favorite publications in print rather than online.

Marc Chassinat says Mexico's modernization and large consumer market make it attractive for entrepreneurs.  "The exchange rate is [very attractive], land is not that expensive, operations are not that expensive... it's a good time to invest money."