About

After graduating from a leading Engineering School in France, I gained 7 years experience both in Production and Finance abroad and in Paris. That is when I had my first go on a shooting simulator. It was in Germany just before a shoot. Like most French hunters, my father and grand father had been sharing their hunting passion with me since my youngest age. It went along with the discovery of nature and wildlife. Yet I had never really trained before, they say it comes within your blood. We were in 2014.

Like most French hunters, my father and grand father had been sharing their hunting passion with me since my youngest age.

Impressed by the analysis capabilities of Marksman’ shooting simulator founded by Tommy Andersson, I quit my job in Finance and opened my first training center in Paris – including a retail store – to embrace the life of an entrepreneur. I have never regretted that move, being one of the most exciting decision of my young career. This was a great success.

My first training center registered after 5 years, 12.842 coached sessions, 1.357.399 shots and 97% happy customers. We have welcomed different kind of customers from experienced hunters and competition shooters who come to train regularly, to newcomers who want to discover the hunting and shooting world.

Since 3 years, we have been installing more than 30 simulators in France & Belgium, and trained more than 50 instructors. Our main customers are retail stores, hunting federations, and entrepreneurs.

Working closely with Tommy all these years, it is in July 2019 that I purchased Markman Training Systems. The main goals were to get control on product development and business strategy. An all new exciting adventure!

I BELIEVE IN TRAINING. Involved in the world of hunting from an early age, I deeply believe in the use of new technologies to improve sport performance, including shooting. Training is a key part of this improvement, and, thanks to new technologies, it allows us to go much further in analysis. Too few hunters train for lack of time; thanks to ST-2 shooting simulators, they can progress quickly by analyzing their own errors in a very educational way.

I believe that Security and Ethics go hand in hand. Confidence in its shooting is a crucial element; by eliminating stress as the main disruptor, shooting becomes safer. This is why I decided to continue developing our product by integrating a security module into it. We have since noticed that a viewing angle of 30 ° has a significant impact on the shooting technique: the hunter respecting this angle tends to position himself in front of the game and slow down. This slowing down will very often produce a very bad shot, in the posterior organs, having the consequence of injuring rather than killing its target; that’s the last thing a hunter wants.

I believe in continuous innovation and realism. In order for Marksman to maintain its leadership in the professional shooting simulator industry, we must constantly strive to improve our product. With an unbeatable precision of 1MOA (about 1cm at 100m), an impressive reactivity of 1ms, the ST-2 is the only simulator integrating a ballistic calculator allowing a reliable analysis of the movement and the impact position of the ammunition. With more than 750 scenarios, it offers the possibility of traveling in multiple biotopes, and this with real weapons. There are many lines of development underway and I will be very proud to be able to share them with you when they are released!

19 years after Marksman’s creation and my 5 years experiences promoting Marksman in France and Belgium, I am please to join a dedicated team and to benefit from Tommy’s experiences. I promise to continue to honor your confidence, your support, your momentum… We have many projects in developing new technology and worldwide expansion for the coming years!

I HAVE BEEN A KEEN HUNTER ALL MY LIFE. At a very young age, I followed my father on hunting trips. Later I took up target shooting with rifle and even won a few competitions. When I was 15 years of age, the Swedish championship in Skeet shooting was held in my home town and was won by a man from this town. He shot one round with 25 hits. I was instantly fascinated by clay shooting and I decided I should try it out.
My first visit to the shooting ground however was such an embarrassment that I never went there again. The experienced shooters there broke nearly all clays – I did not break a single one! Advice and suggestions were bountiful but they all seemed contradictory about whether I was shooting above, below, in front or behind the clays.
The fact that there was no way to definitely determine where my shots ended up in relation to the target presented a problem that I wanted to solve.
The product that I envisioned was an indicator showing the hit position at clay shooting – not simulated but real clay shooting at the shooting ground.

IN THE MID-NINETIES, I decided to pursue my ambition. A hit position indicator for clay shooting was actually designed and even demonstrated for potential users: representatives for clay shooters and hunters. A Swedish government sponsored program called NUTEK, supporting inventors in the early phase of development financed part of the costs. The balance came from a software consulting company I was running at the time. The product never took off, mainly for the reason that it was impractical for use in the field. Components at the time, and in particular cameras and processors, were bulky and unfit for mobile use. The prototype never matured into a useful product. Meanwhile, when we demonstrated the product, representatives from the hunting and sport shooting organizations told me that they would like to be able to practice indoors, independent of weather, time of day and local shooting restrictions.

IN OTHER WORDS, they were asking for a simulator. Two hunters associations already had plans to purchase a “simulator” – a primitive laser based military model with slide projectors to project the scenarios. Knowing there was a technical solution to the problem of how to determine shooting direction in the hit position indicator we had already made, and that it could be adapted for use with projected images, an important part of the design work was done. To build a simulator, we also had to produce animated targets and diagnosis functions to show results. We found the tasks doable in reasonable time and were able to convince the two organizations to sign orders for our more modern and cost effective solution – although not really finished at the time. These first two systems were installed in 2002. Sales soon picked up speed and by now the company is well established as the leading producer of the world’s most technically advanced system, renowned for its close-to-life realism, accuracy, diagnosis features and reliability.

I have personally been involved in every step of the development.

IT HAS BEEN A FANTASTIC JOURNEY and it continues to be. I have personally been involved in every step of the development – from the initial idea to the ‘finished’ product: a simulator used by thousands of people around the world. Financially, the research and development has been an intensive undertaking. Guided by demands from our customers and users, we continue to invest and develop the system: its scope of disciplines, diagnosis and features that makes it easier and more fun to use.

A PROJECT LIKE THIS IS A TEAM PROJECT. I have been fortunate enough to work with inspiring, engaged, knowledgeable and dedicated people. I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to the success of the MARKSMAN system and the company. I am now stepping down from CEO to focus on R&D and am very happy to hand over to Baudouin; I could not have found a better new owner and manager for the company than him.

Today, MARKSMAN ST-2 is the leading professional training simulator for sports shooting and hunting and it is our intention to keep it that way.