Romuald Ribault did not intend to be a statistic at the tender age of 35. Yet last March the slim, soft-spoken entrepreneur was forced to shut the doors of his small IT company for the last time, becoming one of the thousands of small businesses that collapsed in a record month for corporate failures in France.

“It was very hard. We were very close, very young. We started with nothing and we created a brand. We were all proud of that,” he says, as he recalls the moment he and his business partner had to tell their eight employees that they were to lose their jobs.