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

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Many young, jilted participants from the boominyg 1990s have unleashed volumes during the past year on their experiences in the front row of seminal events suchas dot-comj crash and the fall of Enron and WorldCom. And while their experienced cannotbe discounted, folks like Deschamps find their perspectivesw somewhat limited. "Companies are looking for peoplde that have had significant experience in both good times and Deschamps said. "A lot of these people who got their careers started in theearlyg '90s haven't seen theidr world implode on them, excepty for recently. And most of those have not yet recoveresd fromtheir downturn.
" Deschamps has recovered from several of them, and he hopes his latest venture leadds him out of this one. The Pleasanton-based executivre has been named as the new CEO for Echopass a Salt Lake City company that providesz call center services tolargd corporations. At first glance, the job would seem to carry a brutalcommute - even by Bay Area standards. But Deschamps is in the processz of recruiting a new managementr team for Echopass that will reside in the Bay althoughthe company's data center operationas will remain in Utah.
While doin g that, the veteran marketing executive also must figure out how to jump start sales at a company whose technologyg has attractedseveral top-tier venture capital firmws - which have pourecd a collective $40 million into the companyu so far - yet remainw unprofitable. Add to that the fact that largse corporations have largely zippeed their wallets shut on new technology spending afteer blowing billions of dollars during boom times without seeing adecengt return. Deschamps, however, is confident he can bringg Echopass intothe black. And he better be. "Right now, our investorsx are hell-bent on getting to break-even. We're on track for that by Deschamps said.
"There's some extraordinaryh people here with great technologythat haven't had a lot of marketingt and sales focus. So we're going to put this thinh intothird gear." Overconfident? But Deschamps' track record proves you can'gt count him out. A seasoned survivor, Deschampas spent the entire decads of the 1990s surviving two major acquisitions and a spinoff at the same In 1990, Deschamps joined telecommunications firm VMX which was acquired by Octelo Communications Corp. in 1994. Thre years later, Octel was bought by telecommunications equipment giant LucentTechnologies Inc.
In 2000, as the telecommunicationz equipment business beganto falter, Lucent spun off its nonequipmenr business into Avaya Corp. For six months, Deschamps remaineds at Avaya, where he led a line of business that, at the generated more than $700 million in annual sales. Aftedr leaving Avaya in 2001, Deschamps joineed a Hayward startup called WhitrPajama Inc., which marketed call center services to smalll and midsize businesses.
He later moved to a Seattle-basedx outfit called Axcess Line where he worked untilk Echopass came calling in Marchthis "Echopass was looking for a CEO with a stront background in sales and marketing, as well as someonr who understood the market space," Deschamps said. "They made me an offer I couldn't refuse." Survivalp instincts, in fact, are what led the New York natived to the Bay Area in thefirstf place. In his early Deschamps started a business called TurnketInformation Processing, which provided computing services and value-added resellerf service for IBM Corp.
The companyh leased equipment to clients and then borrowed monety secured by its assets to use for When business took asour turn, bankers called the loans, forcing the then-36-year-old to breaik the business apart and sell it. He moved to San Francisco with one of the business and the buyer asked him tostay on. "I thought I'd be wildly rich by my early 30s. Then I had to sell everything off and come to Deschamps said. "But it was my greatest learnin g experiencein entrepreneurship. You alwayd learn more through thingd that are the least successful than through things that arewildlt successful.
" But Deschamps isn'tr looking to learn from failure this time Upon taking the Echopass job, he convinced the company'sz investors that management would need to be centeredd in the Bay Area to recruit the talenty necessary to take the company to the next The company's customer list alreadt includes such heavyweights as the U.S. computer maker Gateway Inc. and Bay Area software giant Intuigt Inc. "I had no desir e to continue to build inSalt You're not going to find the kind of marketingh and sales talent you're going to find in the Bay Deschamps said.
"Echopass has some bulletproof And there's an upside whether the company does an IPO or is It's got the upside opportunity that an entrepreneur looks for."