An opportunity to lead a private equity owned, premium food business with a hugely exciting future.
Salary: Excellent package + Significant Equity Stake
Location: UK
A leading independent private equity investor acquired this business with a view to continuing its strong growth within what are clearly on-trend UK food categories. The business is a wonderful, expert food manufacturer with a highly credible senior management team.
Their products are distributed across all of the key sales channels, but particularly in grocery and the premium retailers. The CEO will be able to capitalise on his or her expertise in brand building, experience in delivering a step change in manufacturing capability and efficiency, and also leverage their UK customer network to drive top line growth.
Drayton Partners are working exclusively with our PE client to identify and secure an outstanding Chief Executive for the business.
The key responsibilities of the role include:
- Agreeing the vision and enacting the strategic plan to achieve rapid and sustainable profitable growth.
- Leading the management team to deliver brand market share, profit contribution and sales targets, through building and maintaining strategic partnerships with customers.
- Leading the continued development of key, selective own-label customers.
- Creating a resilient and high performing, collegiate leadership team with a clear and focused agenda.
- Ensuring the senior management team continue to be developed and coached to become even more effective leaders.
- Ensuring that the business culture, with people and product as its cornerstone, remains embedded within its DNA even as the organisation grows.
- Driving a wide breadth and depth of profitable brand distribution, across the UK Grocery, Convenience, Specialist, Wholesale and Food Service channels.
- Internationalise the brand, working intimately with premium distribution partners.
- Ensure the business is capable of delivering the very highest quality standards, continues to innovate way ahead of its competitors, and is seen as the clear aspirational choice of both customers and consumers.
- Being a highly visible figurehead for the business, both internally but equally across the wider stakeholder population, such as with the banks and the PE owner.
- Enhance the use of consumer insight to deliver an innovation pipeline capable of ensuring successful category and channel development.
Personal attributes to include:
- Substantial general management experience; an expert in leading and inspiring sizeable teams, preferably within a fast-paced, UK food environment.
- A commercially astute, highly strategic leader with a strong and intimate focus on the consumer.
- Deep expertise in brand-building, ideally within a UK challenger brand context.
- Strong financially, with excellent budgetary, forecasting and future planning skills.
- Experience of managing a substantial growth programme and offer a strong project management mind set. It would be highly advantageous if this was within a PE context.
- Sharp intellect and well developed analytical and critical reasoning skills.
- Natural self-confidence and awareness, combined with extremely high levels of emotional intelligence.
- Strong leadership, coaching, development and change management skills.
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills. A willingness to roll-up-the-sleeves, when appropriate, and lead from the front.
- An appreciation of the challenges of manufacturing a premium food product would be highly advantageous, albeit direct personal manufacturing management experience is not necessary.
- High levels of drive, energy and resilience.
If you have the skills and experience and you are looking for a new challenge, we would be delighted to discuss this opportunity further.