You are Élise Vasseur, founder and CEO of Atelier Lumière, a print house in Lille. The bank has just cut your overdraft, and the board has given you four weeks to bring a new business model or prepare the company for sale. Before you design anything, you have to tell the board what is actually failing.
The situation
It is Thursday, 11 June 2026. You founded Atelier Lumière in 2009 after eleven years running production at a larger print group, on one bet: a small house serving regional shops, restaurants and cultural venues directly could beat the big houses on turnaround and service. You built much of the roster of some 600 accounts yourself, and for years you reinvested the profit instead of taking it out.
In 2017 the company turned over €9.8 million with 70 people. In 2025, as clients moved budget from print to digital, revenue was €5.4 million, the gross margin on print had fallen from 34% to 22% and the staff was down to 38. Print sales have been falling by about 12% a year for three years. The plant, always the centre of the business, costs about €95,000 a month whatever happens. On the servers sit eight years of design files, brand assets and content made for those clients, largely untapped.
This morning the bank cut the overdraft from €600,000 to €200,000. You have €1.8 million of net cash left, about fourteen months if nothing changes. Tonight the board turned it into an ultimatum: a credible model by Thursday, 9 July, or a sale. The lead investor has already said he will not approve a digital line bolted onto a print house left as it is. And a Paris agency has approached the two senior designers best placed to build any new offering.