What it really takes to build an SME

As part of its work to support entrepreneurship and innovation in the Jura, Basel Area Business & Innovation regularly brings startup founders and project leaders into contact with experienced local business leaders.

Dukométal director Cyrille Crevoiserat has built his Delémont-based company by staying close to the work, the customer, and the risks others hesitate to take. His story offers practical lessons for SME leaders on reinvestment, resilience, apprenticeships and long-term growth.

There is the type of entrepreneur who does not build from theory.

He builds by doing. By staying close to customers. By solving problems others would rather avoid. By taking risks that feel uncomfortable but calculated. And by putting what the business earns straight back into the next chapter of the business.

That is the impression Cyrille leaves. Over nearly two decades, he has helped grow the company from a struggling workshop into a 30-person business with a major expansion underway. But the most interesting part of his story is not the scale of that growth. It is the mindset behind it.

For other SME leaders, his experience offers a grounded view of what entrepreneurship actually looks like once the slogans fall away.

That is how Cyrille sums it up. Not as a polished formula, but as a working principle.

Cyrille did not begin with metalworking. He first trained as a forestry worker, with a future that seemed largely set. Then a personal tragedy changed his direction. “I had a path that was almost all laid out,” he recalls. “Then one of my friends died in the forest, and it made me question everything.”

He moved into a small workshop in Pleigne, where his father worked and his brother was already active. What began as helping out soon turned into a second apprenticeship.

Later, wanting to widen his experience, he deliberately moved across companies and roles to learn faster. “I wanted to spend time in different departments, different companies, and really understand what suited me.”

That instinct never left him. Even today, his view of leadership is rooted less in abstraction than in direct exposure to the work, the customer and the problem at hand.

Cyrille does not romanticize entrepreneurship. He talks about it plainly. “To build something, you can’t be afraid,” he says. “You need confidence in yourself. But you also need to understand the risks.”

That balance between courage and realism has shaped Dukométal’s development from the beginning. Since the company was founded in 2007, he says he has consistently reinvested what the business earns into the business itself. “I reinvest 100 percent into the company. Every three or five years, we open a new chapter.”

The goal is not growth for appearances. It is to strengthen the company by building capabilities others do not have, or do not want to develop.

That has meant investing early in new equipment, learning new processes before buying into them and expanding the company’s offer over time. Laser cutting, powder coating, engineering support and pre-assembly did not happen by chance, and none of it came without effort. “We did not learn these things between noon and three,” he says. “We learned them from five in the evening until ten-thirty at night.”

One of the clearest lessons in Cyrille’s story is how he thinks about difficult periods.

He describes three major crises that marked his entrepreneurial journey – 2008, Covid and the current economic pressure facing industry. In the earlier crises, the instinct was to stay cautious and wait. Over time, he came to a different conclusion.

This time, he chose to keep moving. “We said: we are not going to hide. We are going to invest everything back into the company.”

That meant buying machines, expanding operations and preparing the next phase of growth at a moment when many others were slowing down. In his view, that decision sends a message internally and externally.

That is a useful reminder for SME leaders: confidence is not built through optimistic language alone. It is built through visible decisions.

Cyrille is careful with the word innovation. He does not use it to describe vague ambition. He uses it to describe practical improvement. “In our business, innovation is not always inventing something completely new,” he says. “It is asking: what can we do that others do not want to do?”

That question has led Dukométal beyond pure fabrication into a broader, more integrated role. The company combines metalworking, engineering, finishing and pre-assembly in ways that reduce complexity for the customer. “Before, a client might need a metalworker, a painter, an assembler and someone else for quality control. With us, they have one partner.”

In other words, innovation in an SME context is often less about novelty than usefulness. It is about removing friction, solving the full problem and becoming easier to work with.That also helps explain why Dukométal operates across both industrial fabrication and construction-related metalwork. Most companies choose one or the other. Dukométal does both. “If industry slows down, building may continue. If building slows down, industry may continue.”

It is a more complex model to run. It requires different standards, different know-how and more internal training. But it also creates resilience.

One of Cyrille’s strongest principles is that no customer should be treated as unimportant.

He tells the story of a man who once came in with an old sheet of metal from a camper van that needed replacing. The request seemed minor. The team still did the job properly. A few days later, the man’s son came to see him. He ran a company that went on to become one of Dukométal’s biggest customers. “That is why there are no small clients,” Cyrille says. “A small client can bring you a big one.”

The broader point is not just about service. It is about posture. SMEs often talk about relationships, but this is what that looks like in practice: treating every request seriously, because reputation compounds in ways that are not always visible at the time.

The same mindset shapes Dukométal’s approach to prototypes and unusual jobs. Some projects are profitable immediately. Others are stepping-stones. “When we do a prototype, we know we are not making our living on the prototype itself,” he says. “We look further than that.”

Even as the company has grown, Cyrille has kept a direct role in sales, quotations and client relationships. “When something goes wrong, it is me who gets the call,” he says. “That is normal. I am the boss.”

He still travels to customers. He still handles problems. He still says yes early, then works out how to deliver.

What follows is not guesswork. He relies on specialists, internal know-how and the experience of the team to turn difficult requests into workable solutions. But he believes saying no too early closes off too much opportunity.

That contact with customers also keeps the business anchored in real demand. It reduces the risk of drifting too far into internal assumptions or technical comfort.

As long as you stay close enough to the customer to understand the real need, you stay closer to the next opportunity too.

Cyrille is direct about quality. Customer complaints are not something to deflect. They are something to learn from. “If one of our parts causes a problem for the client, it creates disruption for them. So, we always trace that non-conformity back.”

He describes himself as demanding, but not arbitrarily so. He expects a lot because he applies the same standard to himself. “What I ask from my people, I also ask from myself.”

That level of personal ownership seems to shape the culture around him. People know that quality matters, that problems are dealt with directly and that responsibility is shared rather than hidden.

It is also one reason why the company appears to have built strong commitment internally. In conversations about Dukométal, one theme keeps returning: the people are involved, proud and closely connected to what they produce.

For Cyrille, one of the company’s most important long-term investments is training. “I believe dual vocational training is one of the best systems there is,” he says.

He is particularly keen to challenge outdated assumptions about industrial trades. “This work has changed. Today everything is computer driven. We even have girls doing apprenticeships.”

At Dukométal, training starts with direct contact with materials and real work. Apprentices do not spend months kept at a distance from production. They learn by doing, then gradually take on more responsibility. “What young people like is touching the material,” he says. “They want to weld. They want to make things.”

He is also unusually relaxed about the idea that apprentices may leave after training and return later.

That reflects a broader point about ecosystem thinking. Good leaders do not only build for retention. They build for long-term capability, even if some of that capability circulates through the region before returning.

Cyrille is open to AI, but not naive about it.

In Dukométal’s work, AI already supports some administrative tasks, material optimization and machine programming. New equipment will push that further. But he is wary of becoming too dependent. “It is a good help,” he says. “But it can also make people stop thinking.”

That tension will sound familiar to many SME leaders. The issue is no longer whether AI is relevant. It is where it creates real value without weakening judgment.

For Cyrille, one of the biggest opportunities lies in quotations and offers. Preparing them takes a huge amount of time and involves many moving parts, assumptions and calculations. “This morning I did an offer that was nearly 350 pages,” he says. “If someone could really help us innovate there, that would save an enormous amount of time.”

It is a striking example of where industrial innovation may matter most in the coming years – not only in production, but in the commercial and operational work that surrounds it.

Dukométal’s next expansion is significant. The company has already grown from a modest workshop into a much larger operation, and total space is set to increase again to more than 3,000 square meters.

But for Cyrille, the real challenge is not only the building. It is what growth changes in leadership. “We are 30 now, and I cannot run everything the same way anymore,” he says. “That is really the glass ceiling.”

His goal is to move beyond that threshold, but he is clear that doing so will require the right people and a different level of structure.

It is a useful point for other founders. The capabilities that help build a 5-person or 15-person company are not automatically enough for the next phase. Growth does not just demand more investment. It demands a different version of the leader.

Still, he has no intention of standing still. “Our competitors move. Our clients move. If we do not move, we become too slow and too expensive.”

There are many practical lessons in Cyrille’s story. Reinvest with intent. Stay close to clients. Treat small jobs seriously. Train the next generation. Use technology carefully. Build quality through accountability.

But the deeper principle underneath all of them is simpler: stay close.

Stay close to the work. Stay close to the customer. Stay close to the team. Stay close to the problems, especially when they are uncomfortable.

Asked what advice he would give someone starting a company, Cyrille’s answer is blunt.

For SME leaders, that may be the most valuable insight of all. Not because it sounds dramatic, but because it does not. It is a reminder that sustainable growth is usually built the old-fashioned way – through credibility, consistency and the discipline to keep moving.

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