Growth and development · Industry · France – Germany
“Lasting growth comes from the ability to identify development opportunities
and to align the organisation in depth — people, processes and resources —
so as to turn them into tangible performance.”
That dual requirement, strategic and operational, has guided every one of my mandates.
It applies today to companies looking for their next step in development.
The levers
In my experience it sits almost always in one of these four places
— and rarely where the company is looking for it.
Lever 01
An industrial company has always served two or three sectors and treats the rest as irrelevant. Yet the product often fits them, with no adaptation at all. The work is to identify those sectors, verify the technical fit, then build the sales approach that goes with them.
Lever 02
The parent company's catalogue was designed for its home market. A product is missing, or a price point, or an approval. Rather than living with that gap, you close it — through internal alignment, a partnership, an OEM agreement or an own-brand range.
Lever 03
A company does one thing remarkably well, for its own needs, and has never sold it. This is the most profitable lever of the four, because the capability already exists: it only has to be structured, qualified and given its first customers.
Lever 04
For a German manufacturer, France is the closest neighbouring market and the most widely misread. The gap is not linguistic; it lies in decision-making chains, distribution structures and the relationship to the contract. That is a growth lever in its own right, and it can be steered.
Services
Every engagement starts with a written scope, a duration and an identified deliverable. The order below follows the usual progression: first identify, then open, then execute.
A full review of the development sources available: uncovered market segments, gaps in the range, internal capabilities worth selling, dormant accounts, geographies. The analysis draws on your actual figures, on interviews with your sales and technical teams, and on a reading of the market from the outside.
The outcome is not a list of ideas: three to five ranked levers, each with the revenue within reach, the investment required, a realistic timeframe and the internal conditions to be met.
For German industrial companies approaching France, or whose existing subsidiary has stalled. Market access analysis, setting up the entity and its partner environment, winning the first reference customers, recruiting the local team, then handing over to a permanent managing director.
The work is conducted in German with the parent company and in French on the ground, which removes the gap in interpretation that costs the most time in these projects.
An identified lever produces nothing until the organisation follows. This engagement means taking charge of execution: structuring the sales approach, putting the offering in place, recruiting and leading the team, aligning processes and industrial resources on the development objective.
It can take the form of an interim managing director mandate, directly or through an interim management firm.
Tools
A command of AI and automation tools shortens the path between an identified lever and its first euro of revenue.
I build them myself.
Building and ranking a prospecting target list from public data: segmentation, activity signals, prioritisation. What takes a salesperson three weeks is prepared in a day.
Making technical documentation, a competitor's catalogue or a history of tenders searchable, so the information serves decisions instead of sleeping on a file server.
Speeding up quotations and tender responses by making the input data more reliable, rather than by replacing the judgement of the account engineer.
Setting up continuous monitoring of market moves, launches and tenders, presented in a form that can actually be read in a management meeting.
Connecting ERP, CRM and mailbox to eliminate repetitive entry in sales administration. The time recovered is measured and reported.
Design and development carried out by me — Python, automation, distributed architectures — which makes it possible to test in days what would otherwise be a project of months.
One useful clarification, because the field is crowded with promises: these tools create no growth by themselves. They speed up the execution of a lever that has been correctly identified, and they make measurable what previously was not.
Recent work
Two platforms designed and built over the past months, each born from a business owner's request.
One creates a commercial offering, the other equips a trade.
Banking · commercial offering
Eligia
The objective — create a new offering, and with it a lever for winning business customers, for a bank.
The result — a platform on which a company selects the public grant that fits its project, then produces a pre-filled application together with its financial simulation.
What changes — the bank is present while the project is being shaped, instead of arriving at the end with nothing but the financing to offer.
View the demo platform →
Bakery and pastry · trade software
Winelo
The origin — a request from the owner of four bakeries: collect the data from his outlets in order to steer purchasing and the hours worked by staff.
The result — an assistant that takes on the daily tasks and supports the trade's processes: purchasing, staff management, sales promotion.
View the demo platform →Background
Advanced diploma in commerce and industrial business development, ESV Mulhouse, 1993.
Two-year technical degree in electrical engineering and industrial computing, IUT Haute-Alsace, 1991.
French, native. German, fluent — including in technical and contractual settings. English, professional.
Connectivity, electrical protection, power electronics, telecommunications. Customers in aerospace, defence, rail, industrial vehicles and data centres.
Contact
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether there is a workable lever and which one deserves to be examined first. Describe the situation by email, or call.
