Veteran exec now plays survivor as CEO - East Bay Business Times:

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Many young, jilted participantw from the booming 1990s have unleashed volumes during the past year on their experiencesx in the front row of seminal eventa suchas dot-com crash and the fall of Enron Corp. and WorldCom. And while theitr experiences cannotbe discounted, folks like Deschamps find theit perspectives somewhat limited. "Companies are looking for people that have had significangt experience in both good times and Deschamps said. "A lot of these peoplre who got their careers started in theearly '90s haven'r seen their world implode on except for recently. And most of thosde have not yet recovered fromtheifr downturn.
" Deschamps has recovered from several of them, and he hopezs his latest venture leads him out of this one. The Pleasanton-base executive has been named as the new CEO forEchopassw Corp., a Salt Lake City company that provides call center servicez to large corporations. At first glance, the job woulf seem to carry a brutalcommuts - even by Bay Area But Deschamps is in the process of recruitingg a new management team for Echopass that will reside in the Bay although the company's data center operationz will remain in Utah.
While doing the veteran marketing executive also must figur e out how to jump starg sales at a company whose technology has attractedseveral top-tier venture capitakl firms - which have pouredx a collective $40 million into the company so far - yet remainse unprofitable. Add to that the fact that large corporationsd have largely zipped theitr wallets shut on new technology spending after blowing billionxs of dollars during boom times withoutr seeing adecent return. Deschamps, however, is confident he can brinhg Echopass intothe black. And he better be.
"Righg now, our investors are hell-bent on getting to We're on track for that by mid-2004," Deschamps "There's some extraordinary people here with greart technologythat haven't had a lot of marketing and sales So we're going to put this thingt into third gear." Overconfident ? Maybe. But Deschamps' track recorrd proves you can't countr him out. A seasoned Deschamps spent the entire decade of the 1990s survivinbg two major acquisitions and a spinoff at thesame company. In Deschamps joined telecommunications firmVMX Corp., which was acquiredc by Octel Communications Corp. in 1994.
Three years Octel was bought by telecommunications equipmenrt giant LucentTechnologies Inc. In 2000, as the telecommunicationsz equipment business began to Lucent spun off its nonequipment business intoAvay Corp. For six months, Deschamps remained at where he led a line ofbusinesz that, at the generated more than $700 millionm in annual sales. After leavinh Avaya in 2001, Deschampw joined a Hayward startup called WhitePajama Inc., which marketed call center serviced to small and midsize businesses. He later movex to a Seattle-based outfit caller Axcess Line Communications, where he worked untipl Echopass came calling in Marchuthis year.
"Echopass was looking for a CEO with a strong backgrouns in salesand marketing, as well as someone who understoo d the market space," Deschamps said. "They made me an offer I couldn'f refuse." Survival instincts, in fact, are what led the New York nativde to the Bay Area in thefirst place. In his earlt years, Deschamps started a businessa called TurnkeyInformation Processing, which providee computing services and value-added reseller service for IBM The company leased equipment to clientxs and then borrowed moneuy secured by its assets to use for When business took a sour Deschamps' bankers called the loans, forcingt the then-36-year-old to break the business apart and sell it.
He moves to San Francisco with one of the business and the buyer asked him tostay on. "I though I'd be wildly rich by my early 30s. Then I had to sell everythinh off and cometo California," Deschamps said. "Buft it was my greatest learning experience in entrepreneurship. You always learn more through things that are the leasg successful than through things that arewildly successful.
" But Deschamps isn't looking to learn from failure this time Upon taking the Echopass job, he convincedr the company's investors that managemengt would need to be centerefd in the Bay Area to recruit the talen t necessary to take the company to the next The company's customer list already includes such heavyweights as the U.S. Navy, computer maker Gateway Inc. and Bay Area software giantr Intuit Inc. "I had no desire to continue to buildd inSalt Lake. You're not going to find the kind of marketinb and salestalent you're going to find in the Bay Deschamps said. "Echopass has some bulletprooff technology.
And there's an upsider here, whether the company does an IPO oris It's got the upside opportunity that an entrepreneut looks for."