Merging Phidias with Portcities France.
#34 - Going out of your comfort zone.
TL;DR:
The algorithm: every major growth (spurt at Portcities) came from forcing ourselves into discomfort.
Growing with opportunities: I misjudged a 7,000-employee giant as a “small village shop” because my GPS took me to a Kampung.
The Crash: That success intoxicated us. We expanded to 10+ countries, grew too fast, and hit a wall.
The new chapter: We just merged with Phidias in France. Here is why we chose stability over speed this time.
Hi,
I wrote this piece from Marseille airport on the way back to Singapore, after 2 intensive weeks to close the Phidias acquisition and initiate the merger with Portcities France. Back to this later.
Today, I want to talk about “going out of your comfort zone” and then how it brought me to the Phidias merger.
If you know me, you know I am not a natural-born entrepreneur. Deep down, I am a reserved geek.
Since my childhood, I have been terrible at communication and catastrophic at foreign languages. So, I did what any engineer’s mind would do when facing a bug: I forced a hard reset.
When it was time to go to college, I chose the path to business school, the antithesis of my personality, just to force myself to become extroverted. Then, to start my career, I took a one-way ticket to Tegal, Indonesia.
This philosophy of “seeking discomfort” is my algorithm to perform and how we built Portcities.
Agenda
The furniture factory
Indonesia: a large but not easy market.
Growing with opportunities: the story of the cosmetic workshop
The complexity trap and the focus on stability
Merging with Phidias
1. The furniture factory
Tegal is not Bali. It is a working-class city in Central Java.
My mission was to improve logistics for a furniture factory with 1,100 people. I started by trying to fix their Excel sheets. Soon enough, we concluded we needed an ERP. We used Odoo version 6 or 7 for one pragmatic reason: cost.
2. Indonesia: a large but not easy market.
In 2015, my job at the furniture factory became too comfortable. Routine set in. Time to get out.
On February 15, 2015, I rented a house in Semarang. The deal was simple: the employees lived in the bedrooms, and we worked in the garage. Portcities Indonesia was born. We wanted to grow like an American startup, but with bootstrapped means.
The environment forged us. Southeast Asia is obsessed with “low cost.” Why invest in IT when you can hire 10 more admins for cheap?
Especially in the early days, the daily rate for an Odoo consultant was very low, so we needed to scale to pay European-level salaries.
This forced us to be frugal, ambitious, and tough.
We made it and built the largest Odoo partner.
3. Growing with opportunities: the story of the cosmetic workshop
In our early days, I was hunting for business in Jakarta, the capital (with over 30m people!).
I found a prospect: Paragon (Wardah group). Their website said 4,500 employees.
After riding for about 50 minutes on my motorbike, I arrived in a “Kampung” (Indonesian for “traditional village”) neighborhood inside the city. I pulled up to a big house. I thought: “It’s a small local business, the website is outdated.”
I was right, they didn’t have 4,500 employees, they had 7,000 by now.
Wardah was a small cosmetic workshop that had a sudden exponential growth for 20 years in a row. The “big house” was their first office, and I realized later that their HQ was the entire street, as they bought all the houses one by one and partially glued them together. A few kilometers away, they had three mega-factories and 2 being built. Welcome to Asia!
That won’t be easy, but we took the challenge. We started small and gave 110% for this client. They asked me to move fast… After 15 months or so, we had 15 full-time staff on the project. We made a few mistakes, and part of the project didn’t work well, but we onboarded hundreds of users on Odoo all over the country.
This is one of the “stories” of how we went all in on the best opportunities coming to us and how we learned.
4. The complexity trap and the focus on stability
Such stories pushed our luck, and we started to love big opportunities. We sent young talent to open offices in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore. I went to Mexico and Japan. We opened up to 13 countries.
The problem? Complexity compounds, and such a network of companies is more difficult to manage than we thought.
We lacked all the key ingredients: experience, scale, and cash. We learned brutal lessons and had to close some offices.
So, it took time scaling down and fixing the foundation. We structured our back office, organized our outsourcing centers, and stabilized our operations. To leverage our 9 remaining offices, we still need the scale.
We need to be the leader or at least a significant player in each country. We want to be leaders in our key markets.
5. Merging with Phidias
France is our most strategic market in the short term. We had the international experience and scale, but we lacked local touch, and started networking. Even competitors had become neighbors and then partners.
For over a year, our Marseille team worked alongside a local pioneer: Phidias
A small 20-year-old “Odoo boutique” founded by two engineers, Jean-Marie Micallef (Sales & Management) and Daniel Deyris (Tech). Jean-Marie was ready to retire. We proposed a takeover, but he had one non-negotiable condition:
“You must legally commit to keeping the entire team.”
I knew then we were dealing with an entrepreneur of integrity. The values matched ours.
On January 23 2026, we signed, and the merger officially started.
Meet “Portcities Phidias”
This isn’t just a buyout. It’s a fusion of two DNAs:
Portcities: International ambition and rapid scaling.
Phidias: Local expertise, technical depth, and 20 years of stability.
To run this new machine, we appointed a duo we call “The Nico²“:
Nicolas Grill: Founder of Portcities France.
Nicolas Micallef: Former Commercial Director of Phidias.
Now we have 2 short-term priorities
Ensure all employees and clients have a smooth transition, so nobody leaves.
Integrate the systems and processes to have one new business, with the best of both.
Best,
Gaspard
Ps: We are hiring Odoo people in Marseille. Willingness to go out of your comfort zone is a plus ;-)
