7 Steps to a Business Model — Reinvent Atelier Lumière

A five-round, advanced business-model design simulation set inside Atelier Lumière SAS, a regional French print house in Lille (founded 2009, peaked in 2017 at EUR 9.8M and 70 staff, now down to EUR 5.4M revenue, a 4% operating margin and 38 employees). Print revenue is falling ~12% a year and gross margin has compressed from 34% to 22% as clients commoditise the work. On Thursday 11 June 2026 the lead bank cuts the overdraft from EUR 600k to EUR 200k; the board issues an ultimatum — present a credible reinvented business model at the 9 July board meeting or prepare the company for sale. You play the Founder & CEO with EUR 1.8M of runway (~14 months) and the crown jewel of eight years of design files, brand assets and content for ~600 regional SMEs who now need help managing their own digital presence. Applying Denis Dauchy's 7-step discipline, you (1) DIAGNOSE why the print model is failing — a commoditised value proposition, an eroding margin and a fixed-cost drag — before redesigning anything; (2) REDESIGN the value proposition outside-in around the SME's real job-to-be-done, not around what the printing press can make; (3) CHOOSE the monetization logic deliberately (project fees, recurring subscription, platform take-rate or freemium) and model the 14-month cash curve, confronting the subscription cash trough before break-even; (4) ENGINEER operational coherence so the EUR 95k/month plant, the 38-person team and the two senior designers being courted by a Paris agency actually fit the new model; and (5) PITCH the complete, coherent model to the board and the lead seed investor, who will block a plan that merely bolts digital onto a print P&L. The scoring rewards a coherent, peer-anchored, honestly-sized pivot funded within the runway and punishes the five classic errors — redesigning without diagnosing, an inside-out value proposition, mis-modelling subscription cash flow, an incoherent operating model, and over-assuming conversion of the 600-client base. Final KPIs track Business-Model Coherence, Investor Confidence, Cash Runway in EUR, and the pivot Budget committed against the EUR 700k cap.