Espresso: David Milner - This ONE Mistake is literally KILLING your brand

0:05What if your audience joins yourintérieur that will stay gonna build your door !yimneKE글 yimneKE글 framework or process to say, right, this is our sort of buffet of options to grow. We're going to go for these two. Electrical delights. Well, first of all, you've got to decide that's it and stick with it. So first of all, you've got to work out what it is you're going to focus on and get it right, because there are lots of choices and not everyone gets it right. So work out in the right, intelligently, what it is that matters.

0:51so there are lots of things you could do which are worthwhile in their own right and they seem good but some are essential to success and you can achieve success sometimes without some of them so if you can get where you want to get without doing some of those don't do those just do the ones that are necessary and essential to your overall goal so it does start with a very clear focus on what you're trying to achieve. And I often start my leadership meetings with the phrase, which is we're only here to do one thing to make the business more valuable. Because there are a million things you can get caught up in as to what really matters in business and what our role truly is.

1:28And without going down the various rabbit holes you can end up in if you're not careful. But if you remember, and if people sit around the table and say, I don't think we are here just to do one thing to make this business more valuable. I think we have many other roles in life well they need to go and do that then because that's not what we're doing around this table if you're working with me and we've acquired one of these businesses i i don't own the business we are executives working on behalf of the shareholders and all they want is us to make the company more valuable so that's what we have to do not get confused by many other things so that's that's a real art though and that's like uh because i think the other thing is distractions sort of masquerades opportunities and it's like oh yeah and it's like but that's what i'm trying to get into is how your brain uh and i think the first way of doing this is like what is the end goal yeah like how do you work out like i know there's the 80 20 rule i think jack mentioned at dash about when you came in and they were trying to do the big bottles of water and you're like again does that grow the business like what are these how do you get into saying this is what we're trying to do do you know what i mean um well i think a lot of it does come down to discipline in that you might have the kind of brain that flips around and you can cope with lots of interesting things all at once.

2:45In fact, you like that. But intellectually, you're smart enough to know that what success is not about doing 27 things. It's about doing two or three things really, really well. So if you've got a smart team of people, intellectually, they'd know that. So they just need help in doing what they know is right. So the way to do that, so if I was working with you, I'd say, well, if you were to write now in order the top 10 things you think you could do in the next year, which would make the business more valuable, and then you did the exercise, I'd say, you're absolutely sure they're in priority order?

3:16Yeah, I've gone through it, and they are. Well, I'd just tear off the bottom seven, give you back the three, and say, right, those are the things you now need to spend all your time on. And then within a week, I'd ask you to come back and say, you can bring your diary with you. and then you put the diary for the week there and the three things there and then say now put a tick against everything you're doing in the next week that relates to those three things wow and if there's nothing if there are if it isn't a hundred percent of those things or let's give you 90 of those things then you you're not getting it and you typically you'd find i'm not going to get you but you're fine i'll do it myself so let's talk about myself if there were three things that i had to do to make the business more successful and my diary was spent 50 of my diary was doing something else, then I've got the wrong business plan.

4:01I'm spending my time on the wrong things because you need to spend your time on those three things because those are the only three things that matter. We've already intellectually established that. Yes. But people are, I mean, what could be more interesting than you saying to me, do you know, I've just come back from a holiday in Portugal and there's a massive opportunity there and I think I should go back and do this. Oh, that's very exciting and fun. Of course you want to do that, but we're not doing it because it's not in your three things. Yes, I love that. So that's one of the ways of doing it.

4:26And then picking the three things how out of that well you've already done that because i asked you how would you do that yourself so with with again with with san pierre right let's i love this as an example it's like those three things there's probably a whole list of different things you could do but like how did you get set on the on the three and what were the three well san pierre was already was quite big it was over 100 million when i got involved so it was big and it made a decent amount of money so it's quite profitable um but the problem with it was that it wasn't a wholly branded business Holy branded as in like?

4:58Mostly private label. Okay. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So the brand didn't make up most of the revenue. And so if we're going to maximize the value of St. Pierre, the key was to make the brand very successful and well-known. And I don't know if you can pick up the packaging behind me. Here's what we made earlier. So that branding there, that's not the branding we had when I arrived. The St. Pierre name was written in a script, very attractive script, but it couldn't actually read St. Pierre. So we were in a I was with Perry in Los Angeles in a supermarket And we'd gone over there to the natural food show at Expo West And he went up to the chap loading the shelves up with this orange packaging.

5:37He said You seem to be busy doing this with this brioche, you know, that comes from France guy. Yeah, it comes from France He said um, what do you do you know the name of that brand? And he said well, no, I don't we just call it the orange one And so Perry came back to me said I told you that bloody packaging was awful. They can't read the name They call it the orange one. So that's no good. No one knows a brand name. So Perry redesigned all the packaging. So my start point on brand recognition is always packaging. And so we changed the packaging so you could read. It was called St. Pierre. And then we went from there.

6:09We had a brilliant marketing director at St. Pierre who come in from the Happy Egg Company. And she created some brilliant online ads and social media stuff. and we did very good PR and built the brand up from there. But that was the one thing I had to sort out in that business. A lot of that business was already good. It was big, it was profitable. It had a US business, but it wasn't a US branded business. So not to the extent we wanted. Everything to that, how do I get value for the shareholders? How do I get it? It was about the brand. Holy brand. Yeah, because if you've got a private label business and you turn over 100 million and you make 10, well, it's changed slightly.

6:49But you used to get sort of eight times EBITDA, so the 100 million per business is worth 80 million. If you've got a branded business and it's 100 million and it's all brand, you can get 15 times EBITDA for a really cool brand. So that's 150 million. So by going from private label to brand, 80 to 150, it's almost twice as valuable. Two months free. Yeah, that's what Espresso sponsors Unleashed are offering. They are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your e-com and accounting software. It's helped Ireland's cut admin time in half, get granular clarity on your margins, know where your stock is.

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