Initial Offering
My Mentor : Wingman to Mr. Winging It

By: Ben Mattlin
March/April 2007 , Page 26

Fresh out of Hofstra in 1991, Marcel Legrand joined a small Yellow Pages advertising agency called Telephone Marketing Programs. Six months later, he met the CEO, Andy McKelvey, who had launched the company in 1967.

Over the next 14 years, during which Legrand attended night school part-time to earn an MBA from Baruch College and a master’s in economics and finance from Columbia, TMP grew mostly through acquisition and became Monster Worldwide, owner of the wildly successful job-placement site Monster.com.

Now McKelvey, 72, a graduate of Westminster College who never pursued an MBA, and Legrand, 37, are partners in a new private-equity venture, Blackfin Capital.

LeGrand: I first met Andy at a sales conference. He was surprisingly approachable for a chief executive — soft-spoken, very knowledgeable about the nitty-gritty and interested in what we were working on. If you’re lucky enough to meet senior management early on, it helps you develop a passion for what you’re working and fighting for.

McKelvey: I don’t actually remember that. Marcel is younger, so his memory’s better. But it was clear early on that he’s a bright, analytical guy. If I come up with a concept, he’ll drill down to see if there’s anything there and then take the next two steps. He’s a numbers guy, which I’m not, and he can gather a tremendous amount of information and, without a lot of direction, pinpoint where there are, and aren’t, opportunities.

LeGrand: You never end up where you started — that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned from Andy. It comes from his age and experience. He has a long-range vision that young, aggressive people don’t always have. I’m more financially pragmatic, but he’s taught me to be flexible and comfortable with a degree of ambiguity.

McKelvey: When I started TMP, I had no concept of where it was going. My objective was growth, that’s all. You know, they don’t give you a manual when you’re 2 years old, so life is to a great extent what you make it.

Footnote:Blackfin will invest its $250 million in health care, tech and real estate — but not pure Internet plays. “The opportunities are in leveraging Internet efficiencies in traditional businesses,” Legrand says. “There was a time when people referred to ‘electric toasters.’ Then they became just ‘toasters.’ We’re looking for the next toasters.”