Orisha is a group of B2B software publishers, a European leader, whose solutions are part of the daily life of its 50,000 client companies. Orisha equips retailers, construction firms, healthcare facilities, winegrowers, and real estate agencies with specialized SaaS solutions.
A giant that most of us have crossed paths with through its everyday, invisible tech, and one that has grown at the pace of dozens of acquisitions. A model that's been particularly effective for rapid growth.
But this model also creates a challenge for Orisha: each entity has its own history, habits, reference points, and ways of working.
The challenge today is to move from a collection of entities to a more unified organization. This unification work began with an internal reorganization and the building of the Orisha brand. The next step is to unify the ways of acting.
"Before starting work on our branding and culture, many employees didn't necessarily feel like they were part of a group. Some still had a strong sense of belonging to their former company."
Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff at Orisha
How do you bring entities together around a shared mission? How do you unify behaviors and best practices without erasing the specificities and strengths of each entity?
"When we asked the COMEX what Orisha's mission was, everyone had their own version."
Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff at Orisha
It's to answer these questions and help Orisha build a distinctive culture shared across the whole group that TheDots stepped in.
Objectives :
Help the group articulate its mission and the thread that unites all its entities.
Lay common working foundations that go beyond theory.
Design concrete actions to cascade and bring this shared culture to life across the whole group
Making Culture a Real Leadership Topic
Within Orisha, one intention emerged quickly: not to treat this as just another HR initiative.
Because it wasn't simply about formalizing values or producing an internal document. It was about clarifying what should guide teams through the group's next stage of growth.
The project was driven by Alexandre Fretti, the new CEO. He's one of those CEOs deeply convinced of the power and importance of culture in building an aligned, high-performing collective. Operational responsibility for the project was given to Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff, who joined the company in early 2026 with this as his first priority.
"Culture can really be a very vague, intangible topic that leads to a very consensual outcome. Here, we wanted to produce something deeply embodied, distinctive, that truly reflects who we are."
Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff at Orisha
TheDots became a key partner in structuring complex material:
Starting from the reality experienced by employees.
Aligning the COMEX around a shared WHY: Orisha's mission.
Then co-building a distinctive HOW to achieve that mission, through operating practices that resonate with Orisha's history and identity.
"I'm deeply convinced that what will make the difference for Orisha is its culture. You can copy a strategy, products, technology. But you can never copy the way we act. My goal wasn't to produce generic, 'vanilla' values. Everyone likes vanilla, but nobody loves it. I wanted this work to surface what truly makes us unique — our unfair advantage — and translate it into pillars that speak both to who we are at our core and who we need to become to achieve our ambition."
Alexandre Fretti, CEO of Orisha.
Aligning the Leadership Team Around a Shared Vision
The starting point for TheDots was the Great Place to Work survey conducted by Orisha in 2025.
The survey provided a useful baseline, but it wasn't enough to finely understand the group's blind spots and cultural reality.
That's where TheDots' methodology came in:
Analyzing the survey results.
Identifying areas to dig into further.
Then conducting a series of qualitative interviews to understand real practices, tensions, blind spots, and points of alignment.
From this material, TheDots facilitated a series of workshops with the COMEX.
"TheDots ran a series of workshops and individual interviews around our mission and pillars: defining our shared DNA, why we get up in the morning, and translating that into something concrete. The COMEX was very engaged. The workshops were always enjoyable, collaborative, and constructive."
Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff at Orisha
This support gradually helped build:
A clearer mission, to give the group a shared direction.
Cultural pillars, to name the behaviors to encourage.
Concrete examples, to avoid overly abstract values.
A culture playbook, to make the work directly actionable.
Regular deliverables, to keep a clear trajectory throughout the project.
A process of articulation, clarification, and prioritization, designed to be used well beyond the COMEX.
At the end of this work, Orisha now has 4 distinctive cultural pillars, brought together under the acronym PACE. An acronym that's no accident: for a company as ambitious as Orisha, speed is a key to success, essential to accomplishing its mission, "Build essential technology that makes daily lives easier."
Performance — We act as Orishas for our clients. A nod to the brand name, borrowed from Yoruba culture, as well as a reflection of the strong closeness between Orisha teams and their clients — a closeness that has driven the success of its vertical SaaS products.
Ambition — We start at base camp. We aim for the summit. A reference to the company's origins, whose very first acquisition was a camping software company. But also a recognition of the humility and resilience required to build a European leader.
Collaboration — We build bridges to turn oneness into velocity. A reflection of the organization's necessary evolution: breaking down silos between entities, functions, and geographies is what will let the collective move faster, together.
Entrepreneurship — We bring different roots into one purple blood. A recognition of Orisha's history, built through acquisitions. Every acquisition carries its own entrepreneurial journey and its own strength. These roots and this diversity are what make Orisha rich.
Cascading This Culture Across the Group
A structuring first step. But Orisha wants to go further, embedding this culture across the whole group to create more synergies and keep improving performance.
"The final result is high quality, and it would be a shame for it to fall through due to inertia or lack of ownership. There's a real challenge in deployment beyond creation."
Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff at Orisha
So a network of 70 ambassadors has been mobilized to relay messages and surface concrete initiatives, with COMEX sponsors attached to the main workstreams.
A few examples:
A skills directory, to better identify the expertise available across the group.
A project incubator, to encourage cross-functional initiatives.
Client-relationship initiatives, to connect culture to a business topic.
The next phase must also bring in the leadership team and local leaders, to prevent culture from remaining a topic carried only by headquarters or a handful of volunteer ambassadors.
The goal: to make sure the messages are picked up, adapted, and embodied within each entity and by as many employees as possible.
The first year of implementing a culture is critical. Communication will bring it to life. Working on its embodiment will make it last.
That's why TheDots is currently supporting Orisha on a new 12-month engagement.
TheDots, Summarized by Orisha
"I've led several culture projects in my career, and it's often the case that it turns into a communications exercise rather than a deliberate effort to have real impact. I always approach that with a lot of caution. Here, I was pleasantly surprised: TheDots came in with a perspective that wasn't 'communications agency,' very pragmatic, with a clear framework that kept us focused on concrete deliverables. One of my concerns was that we wouldn't stay sufficiently grounded in reality, and that's exactly the point TheDots' founders were particularly attentive to."
François Guyeux, CHRO of Orisha
"What TheDots helped us produce is very high quality. They helped us build something embodied, distinctive, that truly reflects who we are."
Grégoire Le Mouël, Chief of Staff at Orisha
"You can feel TheDots' genuine commitment. They manage the project as if it were their own company, with clear deliverables, structured reports, and a real mastery of the subject."
Alexandre Fretti, CEO of Orisha
"The hardest part of any culture initiative is the first year of cascading it so it actually sticks. Working alongside Jennifer in our brainstorming sessions unlocks an amazing flow of creative yet pragmatic ideas to address this moment precisely. Because culture is built by everyone through every small everyday action and having Jennifer on my side is helping us turn that vision into daily practice."
Milena Mariano, Head of Talent, Leadership & Culture d'Orisha,