Cohort 2026

Jean-Pierre Dewerpe

CEO-in-Residence
HVAC Services & Climate Engineering

“Throughout my career, I have helped ambitious businesses turn complexity into structured, scalable growth across industries, cultures, and markets. Today, I bring that same conviction to build a leading French HVAC platform and create lasting value for customers, employees, and founders.”

Jean-Pierre Dewerpe

About Jean-Pierre

Commercial operator with over 25 years of executive leadership across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with senior roles at Auum, Opale Laboratoires, and mandates at Phenix and Formaplus. Now focused on the French HVAC market, Jean-Pierre applies decades of go-to-market and sales organisation experience to independent SMEs facing generational succession.

Vision

Building a leading French platform in HVAC services and climate engineering by bringing together the country's strongest independent regional companies. The market sits at a historic inflection point driven by building electrification and rising demand for climate-resilient infrastructure, yet remains highly fragmented. The opportunity is to create a national player that combines local technical excellence with the commercial reach, procurement power, and digital capability that founder-led SMEs cannot build alone.

Mission

Acquire a structured independent French HVAC company with a strong maintenance base, then grow it through disciplined buy-and-build across France. The focus is on quality of integration over speed, professionalising the commercial function, and investing in the sector's most binding constraint, technician talent. Throughout, the intent is to protect the entrepreneurial cultures and client relationships that make each acquired company valuable in the first place.

Impact

Wherever he has worked, Jean-Pierre has taken commercial functions from ad-hoc to systematic and turned technical products into scalable, repeatable service businesses. His mandates have consistently produced the same outcome: sales organisations that outgrow what a founder-led structure can carry, and customer relationships that hold through leadership transitions. On the HVAC platform, the ambition is a group that delivers steady margin improvement and durable customer trust year after year; the kind of business quality that outlasts any single acquisition.

Expertise

Go-to-Market Strategy, Sales Organisation Design, Commercial Excellence, Key Account Development, B2B Recurring-Services Scaling, International Expansion, Operational Transformation, Buy & Build Integration, Cross-Cultural Team Leadership. Proven ability to structure and scale commercial functions in multi-site B2B service businesses across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

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