Comment j’ai multiplié mon CA par 10 en 4 ans grâce au Kaizen, Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle

Summary

Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle describes how Theodo used Lean management and continuous improvement to scale a digital-services business. The company positions itself between consulting and IT services: it identifies a client’s business problem, develops a software solution, and aims to put it in users’ hands within two months so it can be improved through feedback.

Strategy and business results

• Theodo’s core promise is to improve client productivity or revenue—not just deliver recommendations or code.
• The presentation title claims a tenfold increase in turnover over four years. The speaker also reports average annual growth of around 80% and a rise from 12 employees in 2012 to 84 in 2016.
• Two client examples illustrate the model:
  • Accessibility audits: Software replaced manual note-taking, photo sorting, and report writing. The process fell from two days of work to two hours. The speaker says the software generates €6 million in revenue with a 30% net margin.
  • Flight-data analysis: A portal connected an existing software product to airline customers that wanted outsourced black-box analysis. The platform reportedly brought in 60 new clients and tripled revenue over four years.

Lean and Kaizen playbooks

• Measure customer satisfaction every week: Each project team asks clients about delivery speed and support quality, along with additional open-ended questions. The two main ratings are combined into a score out of 10; 8/10 is the standard.
• Turn poor results into team-led improvements: Scores below 8 trigger investigation by the project team. A Monday management review—called the “Tactical” meeting in the talk—provides escalation and support when teams cannot resolve an issue themselves.
• Standardize what teams learn: Examples become company-wide practices:
  • A client decision-maker must attend at least one in every two weekly demonstrations, following a case where a product failed on a client’s Internet Explorer 6 setup.
  • Put software into production early—ideally by the second week—to expose security and deployment issues before the end of a project.
  • Track client-rejected features. In one project, 15 of 20 features were returned; recurring translation problems led to a checklist that was then applied more broadly.
• Share and practice standards: A weekly “Scrum Dojo” lets employees review projects they were not involved in, identify gaps, and spread useful practices.
• Run Kaizen experiments: The company held 18 Kaizen sessions simultaneously, with teams testing changes rather than waiting for a specialist to prescribe them. The project team owns its own improvements.
• Use customer feedback to reinforce improvement: The share of satisfaction forms below standard fell from 52% in 2012 to 15% in 2015. The speaker also reported 120% repeat purchasing in 2015—enough existing-client work to support 20% growth even if no new customers had been accepted that year.

Scaling recruitment and delivery

• Recruitment became a major operational constraint as hiring needs grew from 6 people in 2011 to a target of more than 80 in 2016.
• Engineer candidates went through five interviews, including algorithm, logic, and programming assessments. In the programming interview, the candidate and a developer code together and switch keyboards every five minutes, testing both technical ability and collaboration.
• With an approximately 10% hiring conversion rate, the company estimated it needed around 840 candidates to make 84 hires. Recruitment targets were managed as operational standards; missed targets prompted review and training.
• One recruiter’s LinkedIn results improved after using an engineer’s company profile rather than a non-engineer’s profile; the speaker says conversion tripled. A standard follow-up after three days was also introduced.
• Rather than simply shortening interviews, management focused on reducing wasted effort earlier in the process—for example, explicitly checking whether a candidate was genuinely interested before starting the full process.
• By 2016, only 8 of the 12 employees present at the start of 2012 remained, illustrating the scale of team turnover during growth.

People, leadership, and sales

• The company invested in structured training, including Scrum, coaching, and recurring practice sessions. Managers were called coaches, with a maximum of five people per coach.
• Employees were involved through regular company-wide updates on projects, sales, recruitment, and the market; collaborative Open Space strategy sessions; and twice-yearly strategy presentations.
• Career progression was formalized through a system in which employees applied for the next level against clear criteria and were assessed by a unanimous jury.
• The company also created opportunities to work abroad and to launch related spin-off businesses. One spin-off reportedly generated €2.1 million in its first year.
• A Kaizen experiment in sales aimed to reduce the number of meetings required to sign a client. The team believed it had reduced the average from four meetings to two, although the speaker said the result was recent and exact figures were not yet available.
• The speaker’s three concluding principles were customer focus, investment in people, and a meaningful company purpose. He emphasized that continuous improvement works best when teams can see and respond directly to what customers think.

Presenters and sources

• Presenter: Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle, Theodo.
• Other speaker: An introductory host and audience members appear in the recording; they are not identified in the subtitles.
• Source: Institut Lean France, Lean Summit France 2016 presentation.