Leading with Trust & Responsibility

In 2004, when Virginie Druenne was 30, she founded Pyramidale Communication, a Medical Communication Agency. Rare a l’écoute, the second company, was built in 2020 with Cyril Cassard, her associate - for the past seven years. Both companies operate in healthcare and are specialized in oncology and rare diseases. After Virginie completed her education, she spent two years in a small medical agency where she learned the basics of her job. Very quickly, Virginie had the intuition of what to do and where to go and wanted to do it her way with her own vision. “My ideas were different, my way of working too: I wanted to push my strategy, follow my thoughts, take my risks,” says Virginie.

At the very beginning of her own company, difficulties appeared quite quickly because she was a woman: many clients didn’t take her seriously, and she faced a problem of legitimacy in her job. “My advice would be “don’t listen too much to people,” listen to you: learn, look around you, but you have to decide yourself. When you decide to create a company, the key of its longevity, its stability is “to anticipate”: anticipate the trends of the market, anticipate tomorrow,” elucidates Virginie. “I’m 50 now, and the more important thing for me is continuous learning, to keep training myself.”

“We support our clients to bring them a custom digital strategy and help them find the best way to raise awareness on severe medical conditions,” says Virginie. “We decided to pursue our organic growth. We are also thinking about other ideas on the same model as Rare à l’écoute, a beautiful idea: it’s business but we help people.” Virginie and her team bring emotion and integrity to the professional world and continue to be recognized as a specialized medical agency in oncology and rare diseases, with a different strategy and business approach.

For Virginie, the real success is the idea of the second company she founded: Rare à l’écoute, born in 2020. She tried to raise awareness on rare diseases among 1st line physicians for years, but nothing really worked. Then she decided to use podcast media; easy to find, easy to listen to: where you want, when you want. “It’s available on large podcast platforms: Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Deezer, Spotify. It’s short (8 mins) and it stays in your head. It’s a big success, doctors love it and patients too. It was the right time, and that media fit with the time,” explains Virginie. “And the company has undergone rapid growth. Use that kind of media in rare disease was a small revolution…but we did it!”

Rare à l’écoute brings value to a significant public health issue. Thanks to Rare à l’écoute, some patients could be diagnosed and treated much earlier, and their life can change, which would be the definition of success for Virginie.

Virginie and her team continue to work hard around diagnostic wandering with Rare à l’écoute, including treatment access for everyone. This success is the success of a team, carefully chosen. Recruiting is a challenging art: one must look for talent and a personnality fitting with the current team.

“To retain talents, you need to understand their motivation: they want to give sense to their job, feel that what they are doing brings value for the society, you feel it when you work for Rare a l’écoute” says Virginie. “a happy and productive team is a team whose members progress in a secured frame. I think the first thing I can do for my team members is to be well organized: I transmit processes and method for them to best manage their projects. They learn to be responsible and trust each other. My company needs them, they bring value and identity. We are a team, and we are in the same boat. In a company like mine, team members are pushing the limits ever further.” WL