The CEO’s Journey: Fabien Le Guillarm, Gimbal Cube CEO

[Antoine Martin – Growth & Scale Facilitator] Today we’re going to talk about scaling a tech company and we’re going to do that with Fabian Le Guillarm. Hi, Fabien!

[Fabien le Guillarm – Gimbal Cube Experiential Reality Makers] Hello!

[Antoine Martin] So, scaling a company a tech company, a digital exploration company, an innovation services company, a company that’s pretty interesting because it’s not a startup, it’s already a scale up as you’ve been starting the business a few years ago already. And it’s also an interesting business because it’s an international one. The team is partly French, it happens to to good people, right? And also very international because you have offices in Japan, offices in LA, and in the middle, offices in France as well. So an innovative enterprise! The question for today is, what are the challenges, the main challenges, when you’re an entrepreneur, and also we’re going to use the discussion to see how we work and how you on the ‘scaling’ side and on the ‘doing something different’ side. First question, what is the core topic of Gimbal Cube?

[Fabien le Guillarm] So we are specialists in what we call immersive experience and more precisely ‘XR’. It’s a short term for Extended Reality, and usually when we discuss this topic, the definition is a bit blurry for people. So what I like to use as a definition is… on the continuum, if you take on one side, the reality, what you can see with your own eyes, and on the other side of the continuum, the virtual, completely immersive environment. And all in between these two sides, you will have different type of realities. You have ‘AR’, so augmented reality. Typically what you can see in Instagram filter where you have bunny ears on your head. And then if you go further into adding more layers and more understanding of our space, you start to go into mixed reality, where the digital layer is placed according to your environment. So something can be on the wall, on the floor, and it knows the space.

[Antoine Martin] That also includes the big goggles that people tend to play with, right?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yes, like this one. So, yeah these devices will capture the environment through sensors and replay it in the in the lenses, in the screens that are inside. And yes this is typically what we say ‘Mixed Reality’ headsets which allows to completely immerse yourself in mixed reality environments. So both your space and a virtual one at the same time.

[Antoine Martin] Technically, what would be the use cases? Companies, businesses, are they big? Are they small? ow do they use those technologies?

[Fabien le Guillarm] If we look at the history of these technologies, it was first used into heavy industries. So manufacturing of automobile, airplanes, and all these big industries because what they are producing is so expensive, it takes so long to create, that doing things virtually really helps them test many many times. It helps them see the invisible. It helps them iterate and simulate a lot of use cases. Instead of doing them in in reality, we can do them in virtual reality. So as these technologies improved and the miniaturization of the devices went better and better, these devices were also becoming more of a personal usage. Fr example, the latest headsets from Meta which is not that expensive, is really used as a gaming device, as a fitness device, or as a personal device for everyone to use.

[Antoine Martin] So there is a very industrial and very functional and very technical use case. There is a very personal use case, as you just mentioned., but you’ve also been installing, well… building, installations, in shopping malls, in museums, in shops, in a variety of places. What’s the importance of this for the Location-Based Entertainment businesses ?

[Fabien le Guillarm] LBEs, so, Location-Based Entertainment, as you said, is public spaces where people go with the expectation of being entertained. So having these kinds of technologies that allow the blend between a physical space and a virtual one is really on point for them because it allows us to use the existing space so we don’t have to build a completely new room or new space. We can use what already exists and augment it with a digital layer of information and pure entertainment. Or you know for museum it could be a virtual visit. There is a good match between this technology and what the customers are expecting.

[Antoine Martin] So the point in the end is to increase food traffic for those locations, right? It’s a question of saying, maybe in a shopping mall we can build screens where people can just use their fingers to figure out where they are. Maybe it’s a question of building a bike in front of a large screen so people are going to play and win something. Maybe it’s a question of putting giant wales in the middle of a museum. Maybe it’s a question of using the same kind of technology to do a theme park kind of animation, right?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yes, yes that’s correct. So increasing the foot traffic, increasing the attractiveness, also increasing the time spent on site. Something else that is very important for our clients is to learn more about their customers. We can build into these experiences some ways to learn more. Fo example you spoke about a car configurator. If we let the user choose the color, we can send back that data to the brand. So the brand knows that the red color is the most chosen one, and they can act on this. It can also gather insights and data for the brand.

[Antoine Martin] So in the end that’s why you talk about experiential marketing.

[Fabien le Guillarm] It’s because on the one hand it’s a question of building an experience and turning that into marketing for a brand, but it’s also a sales instrument. ur industry really evolved into something that really needs to be integrated into the marketing strategy into the global strategy of the clients. It’s not just a Wow! factor anymore, it must be a tool.

[Antoine Martin] So Gimbal Cube is about experiential marketing and building the experiences for the brands, to build the brands for the clients. An you were talking about industry just a moment ago, what’s the industry like at the end of the day? Are there many competitors? Are you kind of a ‘one of a kind’ company? What is the landscape like?

[Fabien le Guillarm] So when we started twelve years ago, there was not many of us at that time. The skills and capabilities needed to build this kind of experience were pretty rare. But now as the industry becomes mature, there are a lot of studios and freelancers that use the tools, the modern tools that are available to us and who can build this kind of experience. So we have our fair bit of competitors, and that’s great. That means that the industry is mature and a lot of people can enjoy these experiences. As for the way that we work, we usually of course work a lot with agencies. Sorry. Marketing production agencies that work with brands. And we also like to work directly with clients, with industry, with museums as well, directly.

[Antoine Martin] I was saying earlier that you are based in France, but also in Japan and in the US, in LA. Is this an advantage, a positioning advantage, a competitive advantage for the company to have these various places?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Basically, yes. So the joke is, if I am in Japan, that’s to be in the future because we are on the first part of the time zones. We didn’t intentionally did it, but having team that is on multiple time zones allows us to work very efficiently. If we get feedback in the US at night, the friends can work on it and then the next day feedback is taken into account. So that’s really on the organizational part. France, US, and Japan are really, really different cultures and the landscape of business is also very different. So we have these three perspectives on the industry and it’s really beneficial for us to have this top view of what’s happening.

[Antoine Martin] So that gives you a multicultural perspective, we’ll come back to that from a team standpoint, but it’s interesting in terms of business. On top of that, AI… I know you talk a lot about AI and you have a newsletter and a podcast on the topic we’ll put the links in the description. AI, is it a topic? Is it, I mean, an opportunity topic for you guys?
Or is it like a kind of a business killer that has to be tackled somehow?

[Fabien le Guillarm] So if you look at devices like this, you see a lot of, like, brick and mortar here. So it’s hardware, but inside, many, many things are powered by AI. And the recent improvements and developments in AI have drastically improved the quality of these devices. On the hype, I would say… of the technology, maybe you remember three, four years ago, there was a lot of hype on the Metaverse. So the metaverse was like the end goal of virtual reality and Facebook renamed Meta and so on. And last year with ChatGPT the hype was completely stolen, switched to AI. And this year with the release of the vision pro, think connection that will be hopefully made between these two, so AI will help the adoption and the democratization of XR technologies.

[Antoine Martin] Which gives me a very good transition for the second big topic of the discussion. I remember that when we started working together we did a workshop with the team and when I asked people, “what do you guys do?” everyone was saying, “we’re developers.” Okay, what else? “Tech…” Okay, what else? “Developers.” So it was kind of a funny moment to have… The switch, the shift from “we are developers” to “We are making experiential marketing” is kind of a big one. I’m very interested in understanding how things have been evolving. First question. So we’re talking about scaling a company, right? And we tend to say at Impactified that scaling is about turning a business into an asset that’s building value progressively, right? The thing can work for the entrepreneurs when the entrepreneurs manage to take some distance and get less involved progressively. So scaling is a question of a formula, which is organization X sales. X, because it’s not organization + sales, which allows one of them to be zero and still having something. It’s X sales, because if one of them is zero, then the whole thing is not an asset. If we start with the organization point and then we can come back to the sales one, where did you guys get stuck or fill stuck anyway?

[Fabien le Guillarm] I wasn’t a CEO. I was just like, a founder who was doing development and was doing invoices and doing cash flow and doing bank transfer and, you know… The mindset was really heads-down into the projects, into the day to day without the capability of seeing the big picture. So I think, for me at least, I was starting to get really worried about that. And yeah, working with you is like taking the head and, you know, looking at the big picture.

[Antoine Martin] So that was from… I was going to say from a CEO perspective. But you are saying from a ‘ not yet CEO’ perspective. How about the company perspective? Why did you feel like there was something to do, in including someone from the outside?

[Fabien le Guillarm] When we started, we were very lucky. From word of mouth, we had a lot of clients. So without putting an effort into a sales strategy, we were able to run our business for many, many years. That was the big risk. The company itself wouldn’t have been sustainable without a good sale strategy. And also a good value proposition. As you are saying, “oh, we are dev squad” is not a good enough value proposition.

[Antoine Martin] So that meant you were stuck on the CEO side. Fair enough. That happens to a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs. And that’s part of the mindset aspect of scaling, but there was also a big stake in terms of positioning and repositioning the business which also had an impact on the pitching side, obviously, because if you pitch yourself as a dev squad, which is the term you’re using, or if you’re pitching yourself as an experiential marketing company, the value perceived by a client is not the same.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yeah, After we started to work together, we conducted like a few workshops and studies on the type of projects that we were working on and the margin, the time we spend on them and so on and so on. And yeah, there was some Aha! moments, I would say, where some of the projects that, from the outside perspective someone could think it’s the best kind of projects with a high brand, high budget. But from our side maybe it’s not the best margin and maybe not the most interesting projects. So yeah, there was also a readjustment here on the pricing model and on the placement of our business model in a usual client project process.

[Antoine Martin] Practically speaking that means revising, for instance, the way you are acting or the moment you are acting in the food chain. For instance, it used to be mostly a question of having some marketing agencies calling you as a dev squad, whereas now you’re working a lot more as… not a marketing agency yourself, but as an integrated kind of solution where you can suggest and be part of the project from the beginning.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yeah, that’s it. Instead of being at the end of the chain where everything is already done… and we don’t have a lot of value actually, and we don’t have a lot of capabilities to showcase our expertise, except the technical one. But we also have a deep expertise in innovation, in the design of an experience, in how to get data and get metrics from an experience. And this needs to come early in the process of a project.

[Antoine Martin] Is there any thinking in the company in terms of productization?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yes. So, what we also figured out over the past few years is that we have so many projects… we have more than 300 projects over the past twelve years… So we realized that some of them could easily be transformed into a product. Well, easily… easily transformed into a product that really matches the current business situation. Oftentimes we hear that the budgets are low, clients are looking for ‘off the shelf’ solutions. So with this new business model of productization, we say, okay, we have this, this and this on the shelf. You can send the logo here, you can send sound here, and you’re done for a price.

[Antoine Martin] So there used to be a company with a ‘not yet CEO’ and the company was basically selling a dev squad kind of business model, right? And it turned into something where the core is experiential marketing for brands, for customers, with some big thinking on how to not just sell time, but also turn the assets that you have into products and then turning those products into some kind of a service. So technology as a product, as a service, is it kind of making sense?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yes, it does. And of course, we are not forgetting the big, completely custom projects, which are the front page of what we do. But yeah you correctly summarized. Yeah.

[Antoine Martin] Who used to be your typical client? Who was your ideal client and where are you on that? Are you getting close to your ideal client?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Our clients were marketing agencies. So that was when we started at the time, they were like 100% of our clients. We still work with agencies, but the Persona of clients that we work in the agencies has switched a bit. We work more with the innovation teams, with even the CEO’s with the executive teams of agencies. on top of that the value proposition that we have now is also compelling to brands directly. So when we talk about how to integrate immersive technologies into a strategy, then that is really compelling for the brand and we can discuss directly with them. It’s evolving, it’s in progress, but I see it as being on the right path.

[Antoine Martin] So you mean that before, in the V1 one of GimbalCube, there was no Persona so in the end, your own marketing efforts were kind of complicated? Or is it that there was no Persona, so there was no marketing effort? And we’re coming back to the word of mouse point that you were making before, which means people were coming to you and you were not going to them.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Exactly. We didn’t work on our Persona and our ideal clients. People were coming to us. I remember that we tried sometimes to go out and because we were not prepared then of course it failed. Now that we have a more compelling message and more compelling materials and value proposition, then, yeah, we get much more traction.

[Antoine Martin] One of the exercises we quite like is the ABC client which is basically a game where, we look at the typology of clients that are in a company, and then we play with the data in the same way that you are using the data from the experiences you build. We use that data to see, okay, who are the clients? What kind of projects? What is the amount of money charged for that project? How many hours have you spent on that project? And then we come up with KPIs (key performance indicators) that tell us that, maybe this client is the big one and is generating a big amount of money. But in the end, the profitability on that client is very low because it demands an awful lot of work and blah, blah, blah. Did you come to any interesting conclusions in that regard? And was that a way for you to pivot, change, go to your new market?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yes, definitely. So… we already knew it, in a way, but putting these indicators on it was really eye opening, I would say. The projects were… a lot of them, but maybe not that much budgets. And as you said, exactly, a lot of time spent on them. So it really opens up in two ways, I will say. One way is the productization of the business model to go to lower budgets, but higher repeatability. And also the other way, reach out to the big projects with high budget. We are now looking at, you know, six-months time frames on some of the projects., so there is really a shift in there as well.

[Antoine Martin] When you scale a company, there is a big team aspect, a big team element. As the business is growing, what’s on the table for you? What are the challenges?

[Fabien le Guillarm] So we started very organically to increase the size of the team over the past twelve years, and we were all very busy into our daily day to day tasks. Switching to a well organized company raises some issues that we work together on. What is the role of everybody? Their assignments? Do they need to be only informed? Or do they need to be decision-makers on some topics? We had kind of a blurry area there and being able to really put names on the role of everyone was really helpful into also empowering them into their own role.

[Antoine Martin] How about communication? Is it something that was already efficient? Something that was already a topic?

[Fabien le Guillarm] So we’ve been remote from the start. It needs effort. A good communication does not automatically appears so they efforts that are needed by everyone into communicating efficiently. The personality of each other, being able to know what kind of personality we are, what’s the favorite way of communication really helped us into improving the way we communicate and avoid hitting walls.

[Antoine Martin] That point about internal communication and the behavior aspect is very important. because it’s a blind spot. It’s something… it’s hidden behind the ears and people don’t realize it, but whenever they move their head, the topic stays hidden. And unless you actually start putting it in front of their eyes, there is no way they’re going to be able to use it. But as soon as you start saying “look at this kind of logic, look at how you think, look at how they think”… then the entrepreneurs change because they feel like, “oh, that’s something I didn’t see coming and that’s something I can leverage.” And they leverage it!

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yeah. And especially as you mentioned at the beginning… so we have French culture and American culture mostly, with some Asian culture as well. And these are really different communication styles. That’s really important to have them in mind.

[Antoine Martin] Scaling is also a matter of finance, what would you say are the stakes?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Let’s take the cash flow as a perfect example. I was looking at the cash flow. But only from technical aspect of it. I would say okay, in three months we will have that amount. Now that I’m looking at it and using it as a prediction tool, it really puts a highlight on some issues or advantages of some business models. So as we mentioned, we are looking for example, at six-months projects now. But in six months, when will we be paid? Is it in six months? How do we finance ourselves between now and six months? It’s not only a technical tool, it’s also a tool that sheds very good insights on the business model itself.

[Antoine Martin] And what would be the typical traps? If you were talking right now to the Fabien from three years ago where would you put your finger? As in, be careful, that’s a trap.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Wow, there are so many… A bit out of topic, but I think it’s the main one … it’s the sales strategy. I would really, really put the focus on this and on the finance one. Actually I will go back to what I was saying before taking a really good look at the cash flow. Because at the end of the day, if there’s no money in the bank we could have the best technology, we could have the best team, it’s not going anywhere.

[Antoine Martin] Back to you, as the entrepreneur, one of the entrepreneurs in the team, but as the entrepreneur who’s also the CEO, what are the stakes? What have been the stakes over the past few years? The big challenges?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Before starting this whole process, it was kind of comfortable. You know, being heads down doing coding every day, it’s something that I was doing for like, you know 10-15 years. So something that I’m really used to. So yeah, it was a comfortable position. But it wasn’t sustainable. And now once the head is looking at the big picture, yeah, it’s less comfortable. The challenges are quite high, but also it’s kind of fun, right? Looking at the big picture, the perspectives… so there is a real mindset switch there. That was a challenge, yeah, definitely.

[Antoine Martin] The point about managing teams… was it easier when you were just a developer and you were talking from geek to geek so it was easy to understand each other because, you know, you just understand each other. But now that you’re stepping up and playing CEO, do you have to communicate differently? Are things happening differently?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Now that we moved from being at the end of the food chain to having an increased scope of work, we need to be able to communicate of course, technically, very efficiently with the team, but also collaborate with them on the bigger picture. Before, maybe having metrics or analytics in an experience was an option that we used think at the end, “Oh, wow, we forgot about the analytics, let’s put something very quickly”. Now, metrics and analytics are… this is why we are doing marketing projects. Right? So, communicating that with the team, it’s the core of what we are doing. That’s just a very simple example, but I hope that highlights the change in “just being technical” into “having a more broader scope”.

[Antoine Martin] So you mean the point here is, now your job is to explain to the people you work with that the point is not just to develop, You have to explain them that it’s to build an asset around their skill.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yes, yeah, that’s correct. The end goal is still, of course, the technical quality. But it’s also that the product is a part of an ecosystem, whether an industrial ecosystem or marketing ecosystem. And we need to take that into account so it integrates seamlessly.

[Antoine Martin] I hear a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs, CEOs say they can feel alone at the top. Is it a myth or is it reality and how do you cope with that?

[Fabien le Guillarm] I say it’s a reality, yeah. At the end of the day it’s our responsibilities as CEO to move things to take the decisions and to push the company forward. Of course, we are not alone, I have co-founders and I have a team. Also discussing with you is helping to still look at the big picture, but having also like a sound board that helps making these kind of decisions. Yeah. The whole exercise also give you a way to communicate more with the teams in the sense that the work we are doing together, as in the questioning, the brainstorming, the sounding board side…

[Antoine Martin] Do you also replicate it with people in your team? Do you have more time for them to just listen and give them some space and some attention?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Oh yeah. Now that … through all our discussions and taking the head out of the day-to-day, I have much more time and I don’t develop anymore. Maybe you know, just sometimes for fun. But I have much more time to write, to educate, to discuss with the team to really focus on strategy and that’s really a game changer.

[Antoine Martin] Somehow, it’s a question of learning how to coach and lead them, right?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yeah, that’s a good point. Having been through this change, I can also see how some of them are getting more experience and getting more responsibilities and the challenges that come with that.

[Antoine Martin] Is there anything we missed? Something we want to add to this discussion?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Maybe one point on innovation. So we talk a lot about innovation in technology but I think there are also innovation in business models. It’s also about process and how to innovate on business models and value propositions.

[Antoine Martin] So the best way to scale a company in your case, is to build innovation by innovating for yourself?

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yeah, that’s a very good summary.

[Antoine Martin] That’s a good one. We should keep this.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Yeah…

[Antoine Martin] All right! Well, Fabien, thank you very much for your time.

[Fabien le Guillarm] Thank you, it was an interesting discussion and good to be here.