Key insights from Maxime Lavoie's Stratégies PME 2025 presentation. How top-performing SMEs use strategic clarity, discipline, and data.
At the 2025 edition of Stratégies PME, Maxime Lavoie, President and Founder of LevelOps, shared a simple but powerful message: improving performance isn't about doing more, it's about doing what matters, better.
Based on more than 15 years supporting manufacturing and retail companies, Maxime explained how the most effective SMEs consistently achieve better results by building clarity, discipline, and alignment into the way they operate.
Performance starts with three simple elements: a clear vision tied to a small set of meaningful priorities, fewer initiatives each connected directly to strategic outcomes, and a structured execution cadence that keeps teams aligned.
Most companies don't struggle because of bad ideas, they struggle because execution is inconsistent. High-performing SMEs use a practical rhythm of reviews and standups to stay synchronized, remove ambiguity, and focus on rapid problem-solving.
To sustain performance long-term, companies need more than a good plan. They need a system. The Operational Excellence System is built on three pillars: engaged people with clear roles and a culture of accountability; clear, repeatable workflows that allow teams to act, measure, and improve continuously; and technology that serves the strategy, not the other way around.
As Peter Drucker famously said: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
Improving SME performance doesn't require more tools or more projects. It requires clarity, discipline, and the right operating system. Companies that build this foundation first are the ones who successfully leverage AI and technology to grow.
Maxime Lavoie
Founder & CEO, LevelOps
Industrial engineer by training. Former Deloitte supply-chain consultant. Former VP Operations at Goodfood Market. Now writes the ERP, MRP and B2B order playbooks he wishes had existed in 2018.
Operations
LevelOps' Operational Excellence framework for AI success: Team, Process, and Tools. Before bringing in AI, get the fundamentals right.
Operations
The second pillar of LevelOps' Operational Excellence framework: building clear, aligned, and measurable processes before automating anything.
Operations
The first pillar of LevelOps' Operational Excellence framework: why AI success starts with people. Clear roles, the right skills, accountability.
At execution, not at the strategy. The point Maxime made at Stratégies PME is that most companies do not struggle because of bad ideas, they struggle because execution is inconsistent. Check whether your priorities are reviewed on a fixed rhythm and whether anyone on the floor can name the few that actually matter.
Fewer than most do. High performance starts with a clear vision tied to a small set of meaningful priorities, with each initiative connected directly to a strategic outcome. An initiative that cannot be traced back to one of those outcomes is competing for attention rather than contributing to it.
It is the structure that stops performance from depending on individual effort. Three pillars hold it up: engaged people with clear roles and a culture of accountability, workflows clear and repeatable enough that teams can act, measure and improve, and technology chosen to serve the strategy rather than the other way around.
A practical rhythm of reviews and standups, not another reporting layer. The purpose is to keep teams synchronized, remove ambiguity about who owns what, and get to problem-solving quickly while the problem is still small.
After the foundation, not instead of it. The companies that get real leverage from AI and new technology are the ones that already built clarity, discipline and a working operating system. Without that, a new tool simply inherits the confusion that was already there.
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