The founder's story
In 2000, Nicolas Moreau started a business in his garage. An electronics and IT engineer by training, he had a vision for building products that the lighting industry didn't know it needed yet. The early years were exactly what you'd expect: long hours, tiny margins, and the constant feeling that everything could fall apart tomorrow.
It didn't fall apart. Over 26 years, Nicolas built that garage operation into a company with 5 offices worldwide, 2 manufacturing plants, and a position as an industry leader. He mastered every aspect of the business — sales, technical development, operations, manufacturing, and management. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to.
Along the way, he tried every major platform to manage his growing operation. Salesforce came first — expensive, bloated, and it required a dedicated admin just to keep it running. HubSpot followed — great marketing, but the customization hit a wall fast. Freshdesk handled support tickets, but it lived in its own world, disconnected from CRM and sales. SuiteCRM was open-source and flexible, but it was always fighting against what it wasn't designed to do.
The breaking point came when Nicolas realized he was spending more time adapting his processes to fit his tools than actually running his business. His support team used one system. Sales used another. Marketing had its own stack. Nothing talked to anything. Data was siloed. Insights were impossible. And every vendor's answer was the same: "Buy more modules" or "Hire a consultant."
So Nicolas did what engineers do — he built the solution himself. Not from theory. Not from a business school case study. From decades of sitting in every chair in a real business: the customer's chair, the employee's chair, the manager's chair, and the owner's chair. He knew what every stakeholder needed because he had been every stakeholder.
That first-hand experience across every business function — and every major platform — became the foundation for SCM and the 360 Value Mapping methodology. It's the reason SCM doesn't just ask "what fields do you need?" It asks: how does this workflow actually work for every person who touches it?