CEOs I have worked with
If one of these accounts resembles your own situation, you can book a thirty-minute introductory call at any point. No sales pitch, simply a clear look at where you stand.
The three accounts below are real. To protect the confidentiality of the leaders who trusted me, first names, company names, precise sectors and some figures have been changed. Everything else, the starting problem, how the engagement ran, the trade-offs faced and the results obtained, is faithful to what actually happened.
Frédéric L. — Structuring an industrial group bought by a fund, without losing himself
- Role: Chairman
- Sector: mid-sized industrial group, technical components
- Revenue: 47 M€
- Headcount: 220
- Location: Lille
- Length of engagement: 14 months
Where he started
Frédéric is 57. He has run this company since 2002. In March 2024, after a long process, he sold 78 % of the capital to a French mid-cap fund, keeping the chair and a minority stake. The mandate was clear: structure the business for a secondary sale in thirty-six months, lifting EBITDA from 11 % to 14 %. Frédéric knew how to make the operation work, twenty-two years of it, but he did not know how to industrialise it. The fund was pushing on artificial intelligence. His IT director, in post since 2009, pushed back at every meeting. Frédéric read Votre cerveau, fournisseur officiel de bonheur in early 2024, then met another leader in Lille I was working with. He wrote to me in August.
The Leader's Brain assessment, carried out in September 2024 in his office in Lille, showed a rare profile: excellent resistance to acute stress, but a long-masked emotional exhaustion. Frédéric was running on the company's memory. He could no longer project beyond eighteen months. A quiet anhedonia had settled in. The three-day AI assessment on site identified an obvious use case nobody had dared carry: predictive maintenance on the eighteen production lines. The average breakdown rate was 2.3 %, but 6.1 % on the six critical lines. Sensor data had been sitting in the systems since 2019.
The plan
The plan ran over fourteen months.
- Fifteen individual sessions, seven of them by video call from Lille, with the Leader's Brain assessment revisited at seven months.
- On the AI side, I spent three months working on the relationship with the IT director before the project was even launched.
- I coordinated the deployment of a predictive maintenance model on six pilot lines with a technical partner in Paris, keeping the in-house IT director as internal project lead.
- A second use case started in month eight: a retrieval-augmented system, in plain terms an internal assistant that answers operators' questions by fetching the right information from the company's own documents, without inventing anything, and citing the source document. Deployed across the 14,000 technical sheets produced since 1998, it aimed to cut the onboarding time of new operators, which averaged eight weeks.
The hard moment came in April 2025. Frédéric blacked out at the wheel on a Sunday evening on the A1, coming back from a weekend at his sister's. No hospital stay. Six days off. A session with me the following Tuesday, by video. He said, calmly, "maybe I started dealing with this too late". He cried for the first time over his father's death, which happened in 2009.
Results at six months
At six months, in March 2025, the predictive maintenance pilot was running on six lines. The breakdown rate there had come down to 3.9 %, from 6.1 %. Gross savings over the half-year: 187 k€. The IT director changed stance in February, after the Paris technical partner explicitly credited him with the design.
Results at twelve months
At twelve months, the extension to fourteen of the eighteen lines was complete. The plant's overall breakdown rate had fallen to 2.9 %, against 4.7 % on average before the project. EBITDA for the first half of 2025 reached 12.8 %, against 11 % a year earlier, in line with the plan presented to the fund. The retrieval system has been in production since April; onboarding time for new operators is down to 5.2 weeks. Frédéric took up road cycling again in the spring. He agreed to a full health check in June. He also started talking with his wife about what he would do after the sale.
If, like Frédéric, you are structuring your company for a planned exit while trying not to lose your grip on what you built over twenty years, a thirty-minute call will let you lay out the trajectory of the next twenty-four months.
Stéphane B. — Giving air back to a training business growing without its founder
- Role: CEO and founder
- Sector: B2B continuing education
- Revenue: 12 M€
- Headcount: 78
- Location: Lyon
- Length of engagement: 11 months
Where he started
Stéphane is 51 and runs a continuing education business he founded in 2008. By the summer of 2024 it was moving at a pace he had not seen for three years. Post-Covid demand for managerial soft skills had surged, and his leadership team, now nine people, had been asking since February for a clear AI roadmap. He did not have one. On 14 July, on holiday in Vendée, his wife pointed out that he had not looked up from his phone through an entire dinner with their two children. A few weeks later, at a business club event where I was speaking on deciding under pressure, he came across me. He wrote the next day.
The Leader's Brain assessment took place over a day in late November 2024. Two things came out: an attention system permanently saturated, and a decision pattern that favoured avoiding conflict with his long-standing managers eight times out of ten. In practice, Stéphane had been postponing the appointment of an operations director for fourteen months because he did not know how to tell two of the old guard. The three-day AI assessment, in December, identified four workable use cases. The most mature technically: automatic qualification of inbound leads, which his sales team was handling by hand sixteen hours a week. Estimated return: 80 k€ a year, plus a qualitative effect on conversion.
The plan
- Fourteen individual sessions, one every three weeks, quarterly framing notes, and unlimited phone access, which Stéphane used seventeen times over the period, usually at the end of the day.
- On the AI side, the business had no IT director; I selected an independent technical partner and coordinated the deployment of the first use case in four months.
- A second use case, automatic generation of commercial proposals from templates, went into production in month eight.
The path was not linear. In March 2025, after a week in which he nearly lost a 400 k€ client, Stéphane announced he wanted to stop the engagement: "the coaching is doing nothing". I called him back on a Saturday morning. The conversation lasted forty minutes. He stayed.
Results at six months
At six months, in May 2025, the first use case had been running for six weeks. The sales team had recovered 13.8 hours a week, less than the sixteen targeted, but enough to move two people from qualification to closing. Stéphane's watch showed an average of 6 h 40 of sleep, against 5 h 20 at the start.
Results at twelve months
At twelve months the figures consolidated. The first use case generated 73 k€ of annualised savings, slightly below the initial estimate, but with an unplanned side effect: conversion on inbound leads rose by 6 %, because the team called highly scored prospects back within the hour. The second use case freed 4.2 full-time equivalents in sales from writing quotes; gross margin on the large-account segment gained three points. And in July 2025, Stéphane appointed his operations director. He also took up the habit of leaving at six on Fridays. His eldest daughter sat her baccalaureate in June; he was there.
If, like Stéphane, you arbitrate every week between fatigue and clarity, and part of your leadership team is waiting for an AI vision you cannot yet put into words, a thirty-minute call will let you lay out what is blocking you.
Do you recognise your own situation here?
Thirty minutes on the phone is enough to judge whether the method can be useful to you.
Anne-Sophie M. — Ending a standoff with her co-founder
- Role: CEO and co-founder
- Sector: B2B software, HR and compliance verticals
- Revenue: 22 M€ of annual recurring revenue
- Headcount: 145
- Location: Paris
- Length of engagement: 9 months
Where she started
Anne-Sophie co-founded her company ten years ago with Julien, her chief technology officer. They raised 18 M€ in November 2023 from two European funds. The business was growing, recurring revenue was climbing, the team had doubled in eighteen months. And since the first quarter of 2024, nothing worked between the two of them. The board, backed by the investors, was pushing for a fast pivot to the healthcare vertical. Anne-Sophie judged that the product's technical debt would not carry the commitment. Julien argued the opposite. Leadership meetings froze. Two directors resigned at the end of 2024, both saying the same thing off the record: "impossible to know who decides". Growth in recurring revenue, running at +12 % in the fourth quarter of 2023, had fallen to -3 % in the fourth quarter of 2024. Anne-Sophie contacted me in January 2025, on the recommendation of a professional coach she had been seeing for three years, who told her: "I think you need someone who also speaks the technical language".
The Leader's Brain assessment, in February, named a diagnosis nobody had put words to: her decision system had gone binary, Julien is right or I am right, with a saturation of the prefrontal cortex showing up as broken nights and solitary work in the evening, from ten until one, to compensate. The three-day AI assessment surfaced a fact neither founder had seen: 22 % of the product decisions taken in the fourth quarter of 2024 had been taken without Julien, from usage reports generated internally. I got them both to agree to look at that figure together. It was the first time they spoke on the basis of the same data.
The plan
- Anne-Sophie had twelve sessions over nine months, and I ran three three-way sessions with Anne-Sophie and Julien.
- On the AI side, two use cases were deployed: a retrieval system over the product base and the sales documentation, which let both founders and their leadership team reason on shared facts; and automation of the monthly board reports, which took Anne-Sophie nine hours every month.
The three-way session in June was the hard point. Julien offered to resign. Anne-Sophie refused. In July they signed a written six-page arbitration pact defining each one's decision perimeter.
Results at six months
At six months, in August 2025, no further resignation had been recorded in the leadership team since the start. The retrieval system was used by 23 of the 32 managers. Two board meetings out of three had run with no visible tension: Anne-Sophie was keeping count herself.
Results at twelve months
At twelve months, the healthcare pivot launched in October 2025 with a minimum viable product Julien considered acceptable and Anne-Sophie considered defensible. Recurring revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 showed +9 %, against -3 % a year earlier. Gross margin held. But what Anne-Sophie wrote to me in November, in a short message, was something else: "he and I are still standing. That was what was at stake". She no longer works on Sundays. She has taken up tennis again, which she had dropped in 2022.
If, like Anne-Sophie, you are locked in a standoff with a partner or a key director without being able to name it in a meeting, and the economics are starting to pay for it, a thirty-minute call will test whether the method can carry that weight.
Shall we talk about yours?
Thirty minutes on the phone, no sales pitch, simply your situation laid out plainly. Answer within one working day.