There has been so much discussion recently about the performance and remuneration of CEO’s that I thought that it would be interesting to contemplate how Aviva, now in need of a new boss following the ignominy of a company general meeting, of all things, telling the last one that he didn’t deserve a pay rise. The content message was bad enough, no more money, but the way it was done sent him a pretty negative ego message too. I’m not surprised he left, ego bruised, but £1.75M richer – who wouldn’t?

Well, my simple take on Aviva is it is just another financial institution that believed the hype that “bigger was better” when Norwich Union merged with CGU in 2000; CGU itself a result of the union of Commercial Union and General Accident just two years earlier. They were all doing it. Consolidation was in vogue then and various interested parties went along with it without getting an adequate answer to the simple question, why? Why did no one ask why? Simple, because too many people were incentivised to play the lucrative mergers and acquisitions game that a dissenting voice would just not be heard. Small shareholders have, until recently perhaps, had almost no voice at all.

All businesses have a minimum efficient scale size, which is certainly a sensible thing to aim for, but beyond that product and service differentiation, branding and several other pretty fundamental things are much more important. A strategy that just says we need to be bigger is a rubbish strategy but sadly many of those in the top jobs in the financial sector went along with it.  Why wouldn’t they? To some extent the bigger the company the more money they were likely to earn and if you insist on reinforcing the egos of the folk we appoint as CEOs, with big money and reputation based recruiting, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy to find out they love that sort of thing.

So, blank sheet of paper then for Aviva, what to do?  Well, to start with it needs to think of doing something differently, just going along with the same old list of reputations and looking for people reputed to be “the best in the world available to them”, which I have seen Aviva quoted as saying that it is looking for, is just going to lead them down a very familiar road. If it wants more of the behaviour we have seen so far, just go on recruiting them in the same way and recruit the same people from the same rather limited gene pool.  If you want change you need a very different approach.

First Aviva should start by defining the problem it is trying to solve. From what I can see of the business it needs a much clearer, focussed and more differentiated strategy. So, do we need someone who can come up with one of them? Well, not really, but we need someone who will recognise one and someone who actually understands what a sector beating business strategy looks like. To do that they will need: to get at the facts, never that easy in a big company; take a view on what the competition is up to and what the future looks like; and take a position in the market most likely to make the most of what strengths Aviva has. The new CEO doesn’t have to do this herself, but she needs to lead the process that gets the company to this level of clarity about its future. It will then find that to achieve this new strategy it shouldn’t have started from “here” and a lot of change will be needed, along with the rest of the industry to be fair, so we need someone to start that process too.

I’ll stop there with my list, which is a lot longer but it does at least, I hope, make the point that no one woman can do all this.  Rather than a traditional heroic CEO, we need a new breed of leader to emerge that can build a strong collaborative leadership team and begin to help the company evolve and release latent shareholder value.  The leader on a par with the rest of the team, just doing a different job, rather than floating above them all. The sort of characteristics that are not normally associated with your average CEO, or a man for that matter. What Aviva needs is some new blood, a different sort of CEO, younger, hungrier, possibly female and one who is more driven by wanting to lead a truly great business than just play the old CEO game.

I am certain that somewhere within Aviva there is just such a person, several levels below the board, who not only has the right qualities and commercial nous but who, with the right support and encouragement, would rise to the challenge. I think you could get them for a fraction of the money too. In fact, I’d pay the CEO the same as other members of the team. Too big a risk?  Well, during the last five years, when Mark Zuckerberg has created something like $100 bn of shareholder value, the Aviva share price has fallen by 60%. Could my slightly idealised tyro CEO do much worse?

That’s what I would do. I’m not holding my breath though.

Mark

The owners of John Deere, the world famous brand of tractors and other agricultural machinery, normally painted green with yellow trim and decorated with a leaping deer logo, can’t spend their capital dollars fast enough at the moment as the demand for agricultural commodities in China and India has led to another boom year for farmers.

Deere & Company, the actual company name, the biggest manufacturer of agricultural machinery in the world, reported better than expected earnings at the end of April. Revenues were $10bn, up from $8.9bn a year earlier and ahead of the forecast of $9.7bn.  The only area not keeping up was its finance arm held back by low interest rates and higher administration costs.

It said it was expecting things to continue so it is building more capacity to take advantage of these boom times in the agricultural sector. In all it has 12 major projects around the world including seven new factories. All this has come about because of a rare boom in a broad range of agricultural commodity prices. Not since 1973-4 have so many risen in price at much the same time. Along with China and India, this demand is coming from the US, and Eastern Europe, but the rest of the world is doing just fine too.

While Deere & Company are unlikely to be much affected if they over invest on the back of this boom, I have met many people who have invested in things that have also had a boom period only to find out that it was a bust for them. I have found that it is rarely a good idea to pile into a “mature boom”. It can work out but it is often more of a speculation than an investment.

As far as agricultural commodities go we have already had an exceptional period of demand growth so overcapacity, that will drive prices down again for at least some of these commodities, will be on the horizon pretty soon. I predict some big pay days coming up for commodity brokers who pick the peak for pork bellies, or the like and wonder if, in the end, it will be John Deere or its customers who find themselves over capitalised.

Will the lovely new tractors be idle and unproductive in the factories, or in the fields?

Mark

The mobile industry is an interesting place at the moment. Blessed with license-based market protection, not available even in the wildest dreams of most business owners, mobile network operators have successfully held serious competitors at bay for some time now. But as this highly regulated market matures cracks are appearing in its defences.

In July roaming charges are reducing, a bit, thanks to Brussels, in a popular but not particularly painful move against operators’ margins. Now Free, the newish French mobile phone group, owned by French billionaire Xavier Niel, through his listed company Iliad, is beginning to unnerve French operators, adding 2.6m subscribers in the first 80 days of operation. Free was launched in early January and has created the perfect competitive storm by offering some mobile phone usage, to subscribers of its fixed-line business, at no charge. The big guys are now publically worried about future profitability and Vivendi in particular is in a spin. They are all slashing their dividend and profit forecasts. Whilst they may be surprised by the timing they knew it was coming – one day.

The inevitable emergence of this low tariff market, echoing the emergence of low-cost airlines, caused Orange to blink whilst its peers kept a poker face, and arguably Orange have taken the competitive lead. It has become rather unpopular amongst other operators by allowing Free access to its network, in a pre-emptive strike that it says is a hedge against this emergent market threat.  Elsewhere, O2 is a notably exception in recognising the threat and doing something about it with its development of gigggaff, a novel self-service offering. I’d never heard of it until it began to sponsor my favourite TV show, The Big Bang Theory, so I thought I’d investigate.

Like Free, giffgaff has a low price proposition. It is owned by O2 and delivered on the O2 network and it has a strong relationship marketing theme.  It has been positioned nicely as “The Mobile Network Run By You” as you can not only earn credits for doing some of the customer service, like answering other users’ questions, marketing and sales, but there are also benefits for friends if you sign them up too. A “collaborative network, run by you to get a better deal” is how it is sold. It incorporates a new twist on a referral scheme and is a very good defensive move in a world that could soon be populated with Free clones. giffgaff has also integrated a community/charity theme – a sort of “big society” vibe.

While mobile operators have had to invest big bucks in building and upgrading networks, they haven’t done badly out of it. But I think you can only protect your margins for so long and we seem to be entering a new competitive phase with more utility characteristics for the big guys rather than early adopter ones. I guess few will sympathise with them too much as margins shrink.

Few businesses have the benefit of such strong competitive protection. Licenses have been the industry’s main source of competitive advantage to date. Most people have to rely on much softer things, like brands and reputations and relationships with customers and they are all much easier to attack. This is why it is so important to not only understand where your competitive advantage comes from but to single-mindedly protect it.

It is one of my axioms that excessive margins always disappear, because someone is going to come after them, the only question is how long it will take. Whatever business you are in you need to do just what the mobile operators have done and hang onto your margins as long as possible.

Mark

Sports personalities can be a source of a lot of wisdom.  Eric Cantona gave us the classic line “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Bret Hart, a Canadian writer, actor and retired professional wrestler currently signed with WWE, under a Legends contract, came up with my title line above.

Believe it or not, I got thinking about all this when I heard about the plight of Adventis, a UK based marketing and advertising agency, that seems to have got itself into a bit of a liquidity pickle. It recently attempted a £3M equity fund raising round that didn’t come off. This leaves it with a bit of a problem as it owes Lloyds Bank £1.5m and the bank seems to want it back

Without new equity Adventis has decided to sell off its two technology businesses in order to raise some funds. If successful, the group will be left with a property marketing business and no debt. The bank seems to be putting the pressure on saying that they are willing to launch insolvency proceedings, or force the group into administration, if the sale doesn’t generate enough funds.

Well, that brings me to my main thrust of this blog. Everyone now knows that Adventis have to sell, so how likely is it that it is going to raise enough funds now that it has something of a fire sale on its hands? Nick Winks, Chairman, thinks that the sale of the two businesses will generate sufficient funds to cover the debt, although the company did acknowledge that there was “no certainty” that the funds would cover the outstanding debt.

Watch out for trawlers following this one over the next few weeks and let’s hope that Bret is right and that Adventis can pluck a songbird off a nearby tree and it all works out fine as they predict. I’d say that is not the most likely outcome though, as it is never a good idea to have to sell anything when you have the sad combination of: time pressure; few options; and everyone knowing about your plight. Others will probably try and take advantage of your misfortune.

Of course, you can view this as just a salutary lesson and make sure you don’t get into this sort of position. I can’t tell you how many people leave it much too late before they start preparing to sell their businesses, let alone how many overstretch themselves financially. So, don’t take on too much risk and always plan far enough ahead, particularly when you want to sell your business, so that you and not the seagulls are in control. There are many more squawking gulls, hungry for an easy meal, than there are songbirds in the corporate jungle.

Mark

In economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain, more popularly known as “cutting out the middleman”. The world is currently coming to terms with the diminution of power of the traditional supply side intermediary. The internet allows us to circumvent them and buy direct from suppliers, or other, newer, intermediaries. From Clinton Cards to Tesco traditional retailers now have to contend with new intermediaries like Amazon, or none at all as we increasingly go direct to suppliers, or intermediaries higher up the value chain.

For the younger generation I should perhaps explain that once we used to go to the high street to buy what we wanted from department stores and supermarkets, which have now mostly migrated out of town, or from a shop on the corner of the street.  To a large extent our choice was limited by what they decided to stock. They were gatekeepers to the supply chain and like a big kid playing piggy in the middle in the school playground it was hard to bypass them. We are no longer limited to the choice on offer in our local shops, we can now buy a much wider range of products and services online and we are doing it more and more.

As intermediaries are changing on the supply side new forms of intermediary have developed on the demand side to help us to choose from the many alternatives now so easily available to us.  With such wide choice comes the relatively new form of intermediation, from price comparison sites and the like, to help us to make the right buying choice. I think of them as a new form corner shop, open all hours, but with much more choice: the corner of your living room rather then the corner of your street.

We now live in a world where bright young middlemen are trying to jump in front of every purchasing decision we try to make and several of the most popular brands have done rather well. We are quite happy to pay higher prices so that they can be rewarded for providing their clients with leads. It clearly has utility for us too.

In a sector dominated by such success it may come as something of a surprise then that Experian, the credit ratings and data company that operates in 41 countries, has just sold PriceGrabber and LowerMyBills for just a quarter of what they paid for these price comparison sites in 2005. Although they expect to get about $120m of tax relief on this transaction over the next two years there will still be a net loss of about $300m on this foray into the consumer market.

I have never heard of either of these brands, which may say more about me than them, but it may also point to the maturity of this form of intermediation too. While in the UK we seem to have bought into the idea of using price comparison sites for financial services, of one sort or another, we can still wander into stores and get free advice about what electrical goods to buy before we go and buy them online. This may not be the same in the future when these sites may come more into their own. More likely though, the owners of these brands have not had the confidence, or the focus, to promote them adequately in order to establish a big enough market share.

Clearly Experian have better things to do than wait and see and they have decided to cut their loses. Arguably, this isn’t the business they are in so no wonder they didn’t push it. It looks to me like a smart call to move them on. It will be interesting to see if Ybrant Digital, a digital marketing company based in Hyderabad, that has bought both sites, has made a wise move. Will they become more successful and valuable with a little more focus and possibly as the rebalancing away from bricks provides more value to their target audiences?

Mark

I’m not sure if you can buy a greeting card in Clinton Cards, the dominant greetings card retailer found on most UK high streets, that will encourage someone to “remember their mortality”, which is what Memento Mori means. Recent events suggest that if there is they should perhaps send one to themselves.

Like so many high street retailers struggling with the internet Clinton Cards has been under pressure to change for some time. In October it appointed the ex MD of Starbucks UK to help it make some changes. Just as he is about to announce his plans it looks like it has been taken out of his hands.  It seems that rather than a turnaround it is facing administration after its main supplier bought control of £35m of its debt from the banks in order to protect its supply position in the event of the sale of the business.

Clinton Cards has 800 stores and 4800 full time staff so high street landlords will be worried along with the employees. Again and again we see that with market dominance, in this case on the high street, comes considerable risk when the world changes. As substitutes appear and start to take your lunch it can be difficult to respond, or even know how to.

Since Clinton Cards was founded, by Don Lewin in 1968, the world has changed and sadly Clinton Cards have not responding quickly enough to these changes. Of course the internet has completely undermined the proposition of several high street retailers. In addition, this market has had to face another massive technological change with the development of digital printing which means that it is now much easier and economical to print one-offs.

The personalised online greetings market is dominated by moonpig.com that has something like 90% of online greeting card sales in the UK. Rather than offering standard products most of its products are personalised. Having survived the dot-com bubble this business, only formed in 2000, has positioned itself very effectively in all our minds as the market leader in the UK for innovative personalised greetings cards and products and must be having a significant effect on Clinton’s Business.

Clinton’s fist half sales, to January 29, were £197m, on which it made a small loss of £3.67M, so all is not lost. It has a strong brand and there will always be some form of distressed “bricks” market for greetings cards, but it will require some fancy footwork to reinvent this business to compete with the likes of the now established moonpig.com.

The greetings card value chain used to be: design + mass printing + distribution + storage + retail sales. It is now: personalised and automated online design + one-off printing + direct mail to customer. Few value chains have undergone such radical change so I can sympathise, to some extent, but why haven’t Clinton Cards acted sooner? The answer is that change on this scale is normally too far outside the box for incumbent management to deal with and new blood is normally required. From what is happening it seems that it is likely to be in place soon.

Mark

Albagaia, a recent start-up, has quickly realised one of the most important value creating steps you can take in any business, particularly when you find that Plan A isn’t working quite as well as you had hoped – the need to think a little more generically about the business.

Albagaia now states that it is in the “destruction of harmful chemicals” business but originally it was aiming at just one market. It started out focused on the disposal of chemical weapons. Chemical weapons disposal was, thankfully perhaps, not an easy business to break into so it looked for other applications for its technology.

Albagaia’s website tells us that it “holds patents for highly-innovative photocatalytic technology processes which use chemical-free, natural processes to destroy the reproductive capacity of bacteria and viruses and reduce harmful organic compounds to their harmless constituent parts”. Not having given up completely on the chemical weapon disposal it now lists it as one of five business areas.  The others are much more addressable.

Albagaia, based in Linlithgow, has just announced that it has secured £500k of new funding; half from an angel investor group and half from Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Investment Bank, to develop its test for Legionnaires’ disease, the worlds fastest apparently. The test takes 25 minutes rather than 2 weeks in a traditional lab. It is also developing its water treatment systems and a smartphone system that speeds up the process of reading test results.

Early stage businesses, often with a good idea and some market advantage, are normally still searching for the right niche and the best ones are frequently not the ones they first thought of.  For that reason it is very important not to focus too early unless: you are very sure about demand; it is addressable; and you are sure that you can convert it into sales. Otherwise, it is often best to approach the market a little more generically.  Marketing is an iterative process and there is much you can only learn from engaging with the market. This is important for most early stage businesses that usually have far less to go on than a more established business.

Patented technology can provide market advantage, provided you are prepared to defend it and the technology is not too revolutionary.  If it is you run the risk of it being copied in some way by the big boys, or of being taken out of the game at an early stage before you have been able to fully exploit its value. However, there is much more to running a business than having a patent or two and building a team with the breadth of skills required to grow a business is a considerable challenge for most.  I have worked with several businesses with great technology who have struggled to exploit it. Rarely is the technology the limiting factor.

If in doubt widen the scope of how you approach the market and ask yourself two important questions: “what business am I in?” and “why should anyone buy from me?” If, as Albagaia found, you didn’t find that “chemical weapon disposal” and “because we have new technology” was sufficient to make a business of it on its own, then think more generically and try again. In this case “Legionnaires’ disease testing” and “water treatment” seem to have become a more attractive focus for the business, at least for now.

Thinking more generically will often open the door a little and allow you to move forward again with a better focus for your business.

Mark

On The Daily Show, in 2011,United States satirist Jon Stewart joked that Weetabix wasn’t a breakfast, it was a building material. It may seem a little indigestible to some but it has been rather successfully sold as a breakfast cereal ever since it was invented in Australia in the 1920’s by Bennison Osborne. Bright Food of Shanghai, one of China’s largest food groups, has just bought 60% of it from it’s venture capital owners in a deal that values it at £1.2bn including debt.

Whilst Chinese breakfasts have traditionally been congee, rice gruel, and Yu Za Kuei literally “deep fried devils” made of dough, the country’s economic success and the growth of the middle classes is driving change and demand for western food brands. According to Euromonitor, the Chinese breakfast cereal market is still quite small but it has been expanding at double-digit growth rates for several years and that is expected to continue.

However, there is more to the deal than just satisfying the changing breakfasting habits of upwardly mobile Chinese. There are food safety concerns in China and Bright was implicated in a scandal in 2008 when six babies died after baby formula was contaminated by industrial chemicals.  No wonder then that Chinese consumers still distrust domestic food producers and associate foreign brands with higher safety standards.

Bright Food is state owned and it has been on a buying spree for foreign food brands in recent years.  Of course the brands are themselves valuable financial investments with utility characteristics.  But they also bring access to foreign management that, along with perceived greater safety, bring proven operational management and brand marketing expertise that a rapidly emergent global business must value highly.

Many Chinese ventures have underperformed.  In fact, the acquisition trail is littered with deals that sound good at the high concept stage, as this does, but fail on implementation. Private equity group, Lion Capital, that sold 60% of the business to Bright Food, have been looking for a buyer for a while but none came along until now with deep enough pockets. It will be interesting to see if the “concept” works out and Weetabix can evolve to make this deal seem cheap in retrospect.

To make a significant impact in China Weetabix may have to be very different to what we all know and love in the UK. I’m imagining deep fried Weetabix in a congee soup on Chinese breakfast tables and Weetabix fortune cookies for dinner flavoured with vanilla and butter. But that’s just my wild imagination getting the better of me. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

The deal brings the potential for economic, competence and positioning benefits to Bright Food in addition to the opportunity to significantly increase penetration of the rapidly developing Chinese market for breakfast cereals. While Jon Stewart may not like Weetabix in a way he is right about it being a building material.  For Bright Food it has potential to make a significant difference on many fronts, using Weetabix as a building block in its much bigger government-funded corporate construction project

Mark

Terra Firma Capital Partners, led by Guy Hands, is a London based private equity firm that specialises in leveraged buyouts of asset-rich businesses with complex structural or regulatory issues. However, its acquisition of EMI, for £4.7bn in 2007, was a very public proof that not all venture capital deals work out. By the time it was unwound Terra Firma had lost about a third of its investors’ capital and Guy Hands is reported to have lost 60% of his own money too.

Although it can’t have been that easy to attract fresh cash after EMI, Mr Hands is still raising money and making bold investments confident that portfolio investing will pay off in the end, which appears to be true as long as you limit the scale of your failures. EMI was a big one. Admittedly, it is hard to assess the risk of a one-off deal like EMI, but arguably easier if you do a lot of them.

A leveraged buyout is simply a deal where you buy a business with a significant chunk of debt. Not using all your own money is where the leverage comes in.  Providing the investment grows the owners keep all the increase in value which, even after you have subtracted the interest cost of the debt, can leave you with a very much higher return on capital than you would get if you used all you own money. You not only stand to make a bigger return but you are taking on less risk too as you aren’t risking all your own money. That is why this sort of financial structure is so popular with investors like Mr Hands, but not necessarily so with employees or other interested parties. The acquisition of Manchester United by the Glazers in 2005 was a classic leveraged buyout and look at the controversy that caused amongst fans.

Mr Hands is now buying the Four Seasons Healthcare Group, with £300m of his investors’ money, in a deal that values the debt and equity at £825m. It is significantly smaller beer than EMI although Four Seasons is the largest independent healthcare provided in the UK with 445 care homes and 61 specialist care centres and something like 24,000 beds in all. It is now the UK’s market leader after the failure of Southern Cross Last year. The Royal Bank of Scotland took control of the business in 2009 in a debt for equity swap after it was unable to service £1.6bn of debt that it had built up in a period of rapid expansion before the financial crisis. This is Terra Firma’s second recent acquisition of a company that was taken over by its lenders after it failed to service its debt during the financial crisis.  Last month it bought the UK’s largest garden centre business The Garden Centre Group in a £279m deal with Lloyds.

If you are a venture capital firm you can do this sort of thing. You can restructure the balance sheets of businesses that have got the balance of reward and risk, which comes with all debt, a little wrong. It doesn’t seem to matter that is just what Mr Hands did himself with EMI because if you keep flipping the coin some of the time it will come up heads. As long as you don’t make too big a mistake you’ll come out ahead in the end.  EMI though is beginning to push the boundaries of what a big mistake might be.

This isn’t the same if you are a business owner who wants to borrow money because you want to grow your businesses. You often have just one crack at it and if you get it wrong you won’t find it as easy to keep trading as Mr Hands did. However, leverage, borrowing money, is vital at certain stages of the growth of any business. Debt is hard to avoid in a growing business, but making huge errors and taking on too much risk is.

Venture capital is a lot more speculative than even the venture capitalists admit and if it’s your business you should avoid as much speculation as possible. How? Well, if you haven’t done it before make sure you get advice from someone to help you to get the balancing act, between risk and reward, right for you.

Mark

I live across the road from the headquarters of Premier Foods, owners of Hovis, Mr Kipling, Ambrosia, Sharwood’s, Lloyd Grossman, Oxo, Bisto and Batchelors. Which just happen to be most of the things I eat, but I guess I am not alone. From the outside you wouldn’t know that this is a business struggling to recover from many years of ill-considered acquisitions that have reduced its equity value from over £2bn in 2007 to less than £400m today. I take my hat off to them, with such strong brands that must have been quite difficult to do.

Premier Foods has grown by acquisition ever since it was founded in 1975 as Hillsdown Holdings by Harry Solomon and David Thompson. With that sort of business model you’d have thought that a core competence would be being pretty slick at buying businesses but, alas, in later years this doesn’t seem to have been the case at all. Clive Black an analyst at Shore Capital described the 2006 acquisition of Campbell’s UK and Irish businesses and of Rank Hovis McDougal, in 2007, as “the worst sort of deal”.

No wonder then that eventually the board got the message and in August last year Michael Clarke, who used to work at Kraft, was parachuted in to refocus the business. Mr Clarke has now got it focused on just eight core brands. He has also refinanced the debt and sorted out relationships with a key customer, thought to be Tesco, that went wrong last year.

I particularly like the positioning theme that he is developing around the idea of a portfolio of UK products, even renaming Mr Kipling’s French Fancies as Great British Fancies to celebrate the Queen’s diamond jubilee. The Sharwood’s brand is also running a Great British Curry marketing campaign too. Mr Clarke has noticed that, unlike its biggest competitors, its brands are more dependent on UK workers to make them with 82% of ingredients coming from the UK.  He thinks it’s an angle worthy of exploiting in these difficult times. It all goes to show that he is concentrating on the basics, the brands, once again.

I think the signs are encouraging and that Mr Clarke is doing the right things. Kraft know a thing or two about brand management after all, which you would have thought was enough of a challenge in the retail food industry, dominated by so few big and powerful retailers quite capable of selling own brand products to under cut any brand. You need skill and money to maintain brand share as the world changes so that you can protect your market share, margins and share of supermarket shelves. Wasting cash on ill-judged and poorly executed acquisitions seems a silly mistake to have made.

Premier Foods is not the only business to get overly ambitious. Though hardly comparable with the RBS fiasco, there is a common theme. It is surprisingly easy for folk at the top of a business to let their egos get the better of them and think that because they have had success in one area that they can turn their hands to anything. In fact, it is a very common entrepreneurial mistake too. On any scale you should be very careful about making big decisions if you are not very familiar with that sort of decision. Success managing a handful of brands doesn’t necessarily equip you at all to buy another one, or two. I know that might seem obvious, but sadly the blindingly obvious can be obscured by the smoke and mirrors of corporate power.

Take a lesson from Premier Foods. If you have a big decision to make and you haven’t done it, much, before you will always have more success if you get help from someone who has, even though you might think otherwise.

Mark