Brand Growth Heroes- Lessons on building brands that last with Fiona Fitz

0:14Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast, where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vitock, and today's guest is Fiona Fitzpatrick, founder of Brand Growth Heroes and one of the sharpest minds in the world of scaling FMCG brands. We talk about the leap from corporate to startup life, what truly makes a brand scale ready, the difference between strategy and execution, and why being great at asking the right questions might be the most underrated superpower of all. Let's get into it. It would be great to hear a bit more about your background and how you got to where you are today.

0:46Sure.

0:47Fiona Fitz:I was born in Ireland and I lived there until I finished my first degree in 1997. and then I went to London and I joined Nestle on the graduate scheme, Nestle UK. And I was there for very many years doing a bit of everything, brand management, category management, very beginning of category management, actually, sales, retail side, food service side, big brands, small brands. And I ended up working for the chairman of Nestle UK, along with John Walsh, actually, who runs Bio and Me. We were looking at how do you step change growth for Nestle UK, because a lot of the categories that they were in, their kind of traditional categories were back of cupboard categories that were in decline.

1:31Fiona Fitz:And I'd been working for the much smaller cousin of Nestle UK, which was like the food service, the poor cousin department or yeah, team really at the time. Food service wasn't as cool as it is now. And we'd been looking at how to step change growth through acquisition and doing all sorts of kind of equity swaps and investing in small companies that had like chilled vending solutions for hospitals. And it was really the most amazing job. It was called New Ventures. And when the rest of Nestle UK heard that Food Service, the poor cousin, was doing this, I think there was like a what? If they're doing that, then we should be doing that at a group level.

2:09Fiona Fitz:So myself and John got the gig, which was amazing because I was still like 27 at that time. So we did that for two years. And the culmination of that project was a presentation to Vevey in Switzerland, which basically said Nestle needs to invest in two cross-category platforms for growth. So if you imagine traditionally a big beast like Nestle, they'd been in pickle and chocolate powder and sweet cereals. And there was all sorts of things that weren't really doing very well. And the products that they bought or the businesses that they bought over the years that were doing well were things like water and pet food and stuff.

2:45Fiona Fitz:Our job was basically to say to Switzerland, invest in two cross-category platforms for growth, one of which should be super premium indulgent chocolate brand, which you would then leverage all of your assets across all of those different factories and all of those different teams across confectionery, biscuits, cereal, hot drinks. And the way in which you should execute that play, as we called it, a strategic play, should be by buying goo, chocolate puds. And the other cross-category platform for growth that you should invest in, Nestle, Veve, worldwide, is positive health based on fruit. And you can imagine how you would then execute that across water and cereal and healthy iced goods, etc, etc.

3:31Fiona Fitz:And the play, the execution of that should be to buy innocent. So myself and John were sent off to start talking to these businesses. And in the meantime, Veve said, we're Nestle. We do not need to buy goo. We do not need to buy innocent. Here's a brand in Australia that we already own, the chocolate brand that you can use to execute your cross-category play in super premium indulgence. Because the idea of this obviously was not just to get into chocolate or get into indulgence. The idea was to capture a group of consumers globally that were starting to buy into this new cross-category occasion, super premium indulgence, everyday premium indulgence, or everyday positive health.

4:11Fiona Fitz:They were emerging categories at that point in the mass market. So they said, we buy into the plays, the strategic plays, but that's not the way to execute it. We're Nestle. You can have this secondary rate brand from Australia and use that for your cross-category chocolate play and use this other one that we have for your fruit play. so I put my head in my hands at this point and I thought if I can get to this point lucky to get to this point in my career at 26, 27 driving these projects with these people in the room and they're still not realising that you stick Nestle on the pack it's never going to go anywhere so I just thought that's it I'm done.

4:50Fiona Fitz:I'd been there for I think 8 years at that point with a break in between when we got sold to Premier Foods where I was working on Cabri's drinking chocolate which was a licensed thing that Premier Foods had for Cadbury's on behalf of Cadbury's. And that was an amazing experience, actually. But yeah, I just thought, I can't do this. They're never going to get it. It's just like an aha moment. So I rang Goo Chocolate Puds and I got to speak to James Averdeke. And I said, look, I'm looking to move. And he said, do you speak any languages? And I said, yeah, I speak French and I speak Italian. I speak German to a fine degree.

5:20Fiona Fitz:And he's brilliant. I need someone to launch Goo France. So I had three months notice and I left to set up Goo France. And that was how I made the jump from big FMCG into small startup. And I was number five into Goo. And literally, I would say I was the founding CEO of Goo France because I had to sit with the lawyers and set up the SRL, which is a limited company, employ the people, find the office. And James was very good. He would say, what should we do? And come with me to some of those meetings. And then I'd make a recommendation and we'd both decide. But at the end of the day, I was running that business from day one.

5:55Fiona Fitz:so I've been on the ground even if it was 20 something years ago when did I finish with Goo? 2010 so I've been on the ground doing all of that so I think it was a nice juxtaposition to have that incredibly strategic starting off with kind of being a really bad assistant brand manager I was a desperate brand manager right really bad assistant brand manager all the way up making my way up all the way up and learning having to learn how to do it what it meant to be a good brand manager what it meant to be a good marketing manager what it meant to be a good salesperson against all odds because I wasn't good.

6:29Fiona Fitz:But what I was very good at was trying to make sense of something when I didn't understand it. And I think that's why I am where I am, why I have ended up building what I've built today, which is a way of making sense of how to build and scale a brand in consumer packaged goods. And that's why I'm so passionate about helping founders. I think because I think when we're passionate about something, it's often because we're trying to heal a wound. And I am trying to help people not go through what I went through. It's like, I'm just not sure I'm getting this. There must be a better way. There must be a way that makes more sense than just doing it ad hoc all over the gaff, as we'd say in Ireland.

7:12Absolutely incredible background. So explain for anybody who doesn't know what Brand Growth Heroes is, what it does, who it's for. Sure.

7:21Fiona Fitz:So it started just as a podcast, but basically, I think just very quickly when I came back, I had to leave France when I was living in France for three years after having been in Dublin, or sorry, in London for seven or eight. Goose sold to Noble Foods and I left and I came home with a baby under my arm, little half French, half Irish baby who's now 16. And I had to set up by myself as a consultant. So I was consulting for years and years with CPG brands in Ireland and in the UK. And at the same time, I was wearing another hat, which was with a company called Brand Learning, who is in capability development.

7:54Fiona Fitz:And I realized I much prefer lifting other people's capabilities than actually doing the stuff myself. So that happened naturally. And as we got towards lockdown, I'd already built a lot of programs with Brand Learning for people like Michelin Tires, O 'Brien Fine Foods, that is Ireland's 200 million quid ham and chicken company. for all of their senior execs. And traveling to China and France, like learning how to deliver programs, learning how to build programs that help people go from not really understanding how to build, say, for example, a brand plan or a sales and marketing, joined up sales and marketing plan or annual business planning.

8:32Fiona Fitz:How to bring them from not understanding to understanding to really feeling comfortable with, to being able to do it, to being able to actually critique it, to being able to actually build their own process. That's like a learning journey. And people think that writing a program or bringing people on a, making people better at something is just basically sitting them down and helping them out. There's actually a whole load of design behind it, capability development design, and that's what I love doing. And Brand Growth Heroes started as a podcast, but then I realised that actually what I was doing with the podcast when I was speaking to founders who are scaling brands was that I was fuelling my curiosity and my learning and others as I did it.

9:12Fiona Fitz:I was like, why am I listening to all these people, amazing people and learning from them? Everybody should be learning from them. And it always drove me nuts that everyone was making the same mistakes over and over. Like we all go out and we launch a business. And then we realized I saw a lovely post this week where someone said, I think it was a lovely guy who was launching a kohlrabi business. And you see that post and it wasn't. Yeah, I was tagged in it. You were tagged in it. That's how I was remembering. And it wasn't until like once and once down the line, you realize that from a kind of a food tech manufacturing point of view, it wasn't going to be possible or even supply point of view.

9:44Fiona Fitz:Why do so many people make these mistakes when we've all, so many other people have made them and we could all just have this co-created understanding of what works and what doesn't work and shared hive mind. So that's what I started doing with the podcast. And then all of the programs that I started building during lockdown, which were just needs must lockdown, let's get some founders in a group for six weeks and bring them through how do you build your business plan based around a brand and brand insight. And then I just realized that actually the podcast and the programs that I was building were one and the same thing.

10:18Fiona Fitz:So Brand Growth Heroes became the umbrella. And by the time it became what we call a mini MBA in inverted commas, that's a, I'll tell you, that's another story for another day. But by the time we, we leveled up to becoming a mini MBA in to whatever that means, we'd already had 100 founders through the programme, including Freya Bone Broth, Bold Bean Co., Perfect Ted, Stocked. We've had some really lovely successes and some fabulous groups of founders who adore each other and talk every day or every few days on the WhatsApp groups and feel like a real, I don't know, like a real, that they're each other's back.

11:00Fiona Fitz:They've got each other's back and that's lovely. I love being able to facilitate that. Yeah. Has there ever been a moment where you've wanted to set up your own thing? Why? It's just not who I am. I think you're either an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur. I suppose, well, set up your own thing. I have done. The pivot I'm making now is realising that Brand Growth Heroes is no longer just a podcast and some courses. It is a business. I have some really big partners in terms of Elantra Investment Bank, Isery, Jolson, the most fabulous corporate lawyer with incredible experience in CPG and Nielsen IQ.

11:39Fiona Fitz:Like you couldn't want better partners. So it is a real business and I have set up something. I should have said, sorry, set up your own food or drink. Yeah, I know. But I'm almost making that turn, that pivot in my head right now, because for a long time I didn't see myself as a founder. Whereas now I'm like, no, do you know what? This is a proper thing. No, I'll tell you why. Because I'm quite risk averse. you're the same yeah I don't I would not the thought of having stock and that much cash flow and I'm just just not me it's just not me and that's why I've always worked for other people and I'm very entrepreneurial inside that structure so I that's why I ended up when they took me out of my innovation role in Nestle I was working on a food service innovation and they're like new ventures they created this role for me because I do think in quite a different way Yeah, so no, absolutely not.

12:32Fiona Fitz:And if anyone asked me, should I go into food? I don't know what I would say. And certainly if anyone said, should I go into chilled food? I'd probably say no, unless you have experience. So I do think about those things all the time. And I think because I know it's so difficult and it's so difficult, that's why I want to help. Do you think from, and we'll get into some of the common traits that you see coming through the programme, but do you think that it helps to be fresh to the industry? What do you think is the biggest strength, like naivety and being fresh to the industry or experience? I think it depends.

13:06Fiona Fitz:I think it depends on the type of person you are. So I think if you have experience and you are also very broad minded and flexible and quick, then that is probably the number one profile to have. Yeah, because there are so many founders who've got tons of experience. So if you're new and you come into food or beverage or CPG and you don't have any experience, you are up against people who do have shed loads of experience and are entrepreneurial. So that's the first thing. And I'm thinking of, say, for example, the boys from Dash or Freddie from Wilde, typical examples of that. Or Emma Heal running, co-running Lucky Saint.

13:43Fiona Fitz:Tons of experience and it shows. if you are if you've tons of experience and you're not flexible and broad-minded and an ideas person and able to chunk up into the big picture and then chunk down into the detail and you're just quite no this is the way it happens this is the way then that's a bad place to be and actually I'd put that in third place of who's likely to win second place for me would be someone who is just got an incredible brain also able to is able to be an incredible executor or able to get the right people around them to execute and is able to learn very quickly. And those people, the ones that succeed are the people who are always looking to learn and not thinking that they know how it works.

14:28Fiona Fitz:So you're saying yes to me. There's a lot of people that I find that people will send people to me. Yeah, I'm sure they send them to you. And those people, when I know they're not the right people for me and I'm not the right people for them in terms of working together. And this could be like a one-to-one or to speed one-to-ones, which some people will say, you've got to talk to Fee, do a one-to-one with her or get her on your board or whatever it is. And those people will spend weeks and weeks and months and months and it'll go back and forth. It'll never happen. And what I've learned over the time is I don't push that anymore because they are not in the mind space that they want someone like me in their life or they don't want to listen.

15:04Fiona Fitz:That's not right for them. They're not there yet. That's fine. And they're either going to do it in the around they're not. The people I work best with, and you're nodding as well, are the people who are like, yes, I don't know it all. I really need to learn, even if they're absolutely amazing. And this is one of the things I say, I'm working with Emily Tate from Mighty Slice. It was the same with Ellen in Better Nature. They are way better than I ever was. Can I say this all the time? They are way better than I ever was. And I'm really happy to say that to them because it's true. But what potential and where they're and they're going to, they catch up very quickly and then they move on.

15:38Fiona Fitz:and that is the right thing for them to do. Those are the kind of people who I work best for. I have a shelf life and that's the way it should be because I work with people who are so strong that Jesus, within years, they are two or three years, boom, they're gone. And Emilia from Bull Bean, for example, Shani and Marissa from Perfect Dead, boom, gone. Great, I'm happy. I'll always be a part of that at the right moment, but I do not need to be the person for the next phase as well. Yeah, I always think that a good founder knows what they don't know and is happy to ask for advice. And that's when you can tell.

16:12And to your point, I was nodding very vehemently through everything you were just saying. Because if someone won't listen, then there's just, it's not going to work, is it?

16:20Fiona Fitz:That's their prerogative. I'm sure there's loads of people who actually don't need to listen. I think there are a few people in the world, in any profession, who don't need to listen and then just ace it. I'd love to be one of them. Maybe not, but it'd be amazing to be so good that literally you always had it sorted. There's few and far between. And then... Everyone's good at everything, though. There's always going to be gaps if it comes to running a business. Exactly, exactly. And I think I've become very comfortable as to where I can help and where I sit in a certain group of founders' lives for a certain period of time.

16:53Fiona Fitz:And I'm also very comfortable with how invaluable and transformational that can be. Yeah, whereas before I used to feel upset if time was to move on. I'm happy. Now I feel good. what are some of the biggest common threads you've seen across the most successful brands you've worked with i would say the ability to execute from day one really make things happen so always be focused on transformation even if that's just a task is this task going to transform something i always use the analogy of a sausage machine it's less appropriate nowadays but could be a plant-based sausage, right? But I always say to founders, especially if they're young and they haven't had a lot of work experience or experience in the workplace, every meeting, every conversation should be, you should be designing it to have inputs, transformation and outputs.

17:45Fiona Fitz:So you go into a meeting with some colleagues or some people who are working with you or a supplier or anything, a buyer, you've got inputs into that meeting, you know what you want the output to be as in terms of the outcome. And there has to be something in terms of how you design that there's going to be a transformation happens because you want some people, you want certain people to do something or feel something new. Otherwise, nothing changes. I think people who automatically get that, who naturally get that, that they have to transform all day, every day, rather than just be, rather than just read, rather than just think.

18:23Fiona Fitz:I think that's a biggie because then you're a machine, right? So I'm always asking myself, am I transforming? I think that's the first thing. I think the second thing is they also need to be able to chunk up and chunk down very quickly. So chunking up into the big picture and the strategy, what are we trying to achieve? Where are we going to play? How are we going to win? Realizing that strategy is all about decisions and there's a set of decisions that you make. You're placing your bets. Nobody has all the answers, but that's what you're doing as a leader. But then you're chunking back down into making sure that transformation happens at the execution level in the right place at the right time and trying to leverage those chips in a really cost-effective and energy-effective way.

19:02Fiona Fitz:So I would say that's the second thing. And the third thing I was going to say is it's about people and mindset and leadership. And I think you asked at the beginning when we were going over the discussion guide that you very kindly sent through, you're saying, what's the thing that surprised you the most? I think what surprised me the most is the founders of today, the very successful founders that I've worked with throughout the years of the programme since 2021. Say, for example, Amelia and Ed from Bull Bean or the Perfect TED team or so many of them, even much smaller brands. It is their approach to leadership, which has surprised me.

19:35Fiona Fitz:At such a young age, I'm going to be 50 in 20 something days. Believe it, that's just, I can't believe it. Less than a month. When I was 26, 27, 28, I didn't have a bloody clue. I mean, I really didn't. Okay, I didn't have an Instagram that I was able to watch shorts on leadership and stuff. And had I had that, I think I would have eaten it up. But I was just blind to all of that, made shed loads of mistakes. People today are trying to be so self-actualised and I love that. I feel I'm so in awe of them that they are on this journey of self-actualisation and self-actualisation in terms of how they lead and how they lead people and how they motivate people internally, intrinsically.

20:13Fiona Fitz:And I think that's beautiful. That is the third thing that I would say differentiates these people. I think it's that desire to do things better, isn't it, that you get now, whereas business being seen as a force for good in a way that it wasn't 10, 20 years ago. And these younger founders like Ed and Amelia who are doing things their own way and showing that you can have success through that, I think is really quite something. And to your point, at that age, I was not able to do that. Where were you? Where were you at that age? I was at Popchips. And to be fair, we were trying to do things differently.

20:50Because my boss then, a guy called Will Bowler, who you may have come across, he was ex-innocent. And so the culture that he did create at Popchips was the same. So I think I wasn't leading the team, he was, but that's where I learned, And, you know, how you can work really hard, but also have a good work boundaries and you have to be kind to people and nice to work with was like the utmost priority. That was one of our guiding principles as we wanted to be a brand people like doing business with from suppliers to retailers across the board. I think that, you know, that is very different running your own business to our earlier point of how hard you can see that it is and being risk averse.

21:32So embedding a culture within a company, a young startup is one thing when you've got no kind of skin in the game. But doing it when actually you're making these bets and that could affect the bottom line of your own business, I think is a much bigger and braver call, isn't it? Completely. We can have a nice time here while we're selling all these crisps.

21:56Fiona Fitz:Yeah, it's massively different. It really is. And I found that very stressful. I think when I was running Gou France, I was in a situation where I was signing off the bank every night, logging on to the French bank and approving each of the costs. We didn't have a finance director who was doing that. And that was a lot of responsibility to have on such a young person in a foreign country, hiring and firing senior people, making those first big hire mistakes in a foreign country where the labour laws are very different. huge learning curve. And I think another thing I did which was really I think what's the word fundamental to my understanding of how you actually build is Chobani the US Greek yogurt company.

22:39Fiona Fitz:I joined them in 2010 I worked with them in 2013 and at the beginning we were flying over the yogurt on airplanes. Now can you imagine that? I can. Like flying it over on airplanes. Can you imagine? That's how different the world was. But you learn so much about setting up a company when you're setting it up for somebody else in a big way in a foreign country in terms of co-manufacturers, agreements, employment law, finance, suppliers, ops, internal joined up processes such as joined up sales and marketing. You learn so much and you don't have that risk that the founders themselves are holding.

23:22Fiona Fitz:So I suppose maybe coming out of all of this, maybe what every founder needs is to get to a place where they can afford to have a really strong number two chief of staff person. Like we might have played that role where you know that person is able to do all of that and give you the space to lead and to think about all those bigger strategic questions. Because certainly that's the role I've always played, I think. Why do you think Chobani didn't work here? Aside from the air freighting yoghurt. It's not why I think, it's I know because I was in it. That is, it's the untold story in the food industry.