When I founded ACCENSEO in June 2024 right after I left Groupe Pichet, 3 directions were on the table: pure consulting (high margin but no long-term capital), pure product (thin margin in year one and tight runway risk), or a hybrid model. With limited starting capital, a single-shareholder French SAS, and a team to recruit through work-study apprenticeships, I had to make that call before the first invoice - not after.

I wrote that decision into a 3-page strategic note that mapped 4 things: the addressable market by industry (real estate, manufacturing, e-commerce, accounting), the gross margin expected per offering (consulting day-rate vs SaaS license), the working-capital need across 12 months, and the technical leverage between consulting engagements and the in-house product roadmap - meaning how every line of code shipped at a customer could feed the reusable codebase of the accounting SaaS. I defended the note with my accountant, validated the assumptions during the first commercial meetings, and then structured year 1 around 4 pillars: e-commerce sites (Magento/Next.js), AI-powered product enrichment pipelines, Terraform AWS infrastructure for SMBs, and the accounting SaaS as in-house product.

Across the first 12 months I shipped customer work in more than 10 industries (real estate, logistics, accounting, food trucks, healthcare, construction, wealth management, fashion, viticulture, hospitality) while framing the accounting SaaS - 234 K lines of code, 42 features, 382 API routes, 91 Prisma models, compliant with the 2026-2027 French e-invoicing mandate. Margin from consulting funded the first year of product development without any external capital.

The hybrid model was not a hunch, it was a calculation. And that is exactly the posture a board expects: showing that you can translate a market signal into a quarterly budget arbitration, defend a product trajectory with its unit economics, and not just pick a stack you happen to like. I now reuse that note as a quarterly template to steer ACCENSEO and prepare the next CTO scale-up role.

At Groupe Pichet, the ESB running on Tibco BusinessWorks 6 was the state of the art for the 2015-2020 decade but was starting to show its limits against the cloud shift: monolithic architecture, 18 K euros per month of Docker/Kubernetes hosting OPEX for the run alone, and a clearly identified legacy risk profile. The leadership asked me to defend a modernisation trajectory in front of the executive committee, in the broader context of the IT transformation programme launched in 2022.

I built a multi-year 2022-2024 roadmap framed in business terms rather than tech terms, because the executive committee was not an engineering audience. 3 angles: a 3-year OPEX trajectory (build vs maintenance of both platforms during the transition), a quantified legacy risk profile (service continuity on financial flows, regulatory compliance), and a quarter-by-quarter migration plan with explicit kill criteria for every milestone. I ran the iPaaS audit by evaluating 2 vendors - Middleway SAS and RS2I/TIBCO Cloud Integration - through a full cost-benefit analysis, and I negotiated a 3-year commitment on the Akeneo PIM renewal to lock pricing against a 30% vendor hike.

The roughly 370 K euros annual envelope was approved every year, the vendor price was locked for 3 years, and the roadmap survived 4 consecutive CIO changes - a real feat in an organisation where each new IT director tends to reset the technical strategy.

If the roadmap survived, it is because it was framed in risk, OPEX, vendor dependency, and compliance terms - not in tech terms. That is the posture I now replay every time I have to defend a technical investment in front of a committee. The CTO that gets hired into a 2026 scale-up has to be able to hold that language - market, defensibility, leverage - without giving up technical depth. That competency, I forged it in Pessac.