I serve Business Owners to grow, maximise their company's value, and be exit-ready. Seeing entrepreneurs own, not be lead by their businesses.

FMCG / CPG Consumer discretionary sector.ADDIS® is a 108 year South African legacy enjoying 95% brand recognition with consumers. As a Board member, I oversaw:- Merchandising.- Hardware.- Exports.

B2BFunctions & Achievements:• First two years a turnaround agenda.• Moved quickly to prioritise team & customer.• Aligned Ops to a customer centric-agenda.•. Introduced “responsible-selling”, e.g. from revenue to GP based commissions.• Market share growth with margin control/expansion.• Customer-centric strategy via customer closeness programmes. Management in the trade weekly. • Developed highly de-centralised culture with National alignment.• Pioneered a marketing department.• Optimised (shelf-life sensitive) inventory investment• Improved WCM with 95% on-shelf availability.• Product rationalisation, SKUs from c. 4000 to 3000.• Lead and inspired staff to expect more.• Fostered a sales-driven environment, to exceed the approved annual budget, while ensuring strong working capital management, and a healthy balance sheet. • Mechanised production, e.g. conical mixing tanks, automated decanting and filling, commissioned a wax-plant to reduce import dependency on raw material.• While under Bounty Brands ownership from Dec 2016 to Dec 2021, I learnt and adopted free cash flow as a key financial metric alongside healthy earnings. Achieved this through careful Opex and Capex management, focussing on working capital efficiency.

Assigned to high-potential bursary mentees, mentoring these students for a year at a time.

B2B• Africa’s largest and leading import-wholesaler and manufacturer of cleaning products. • A highly highly profitable, well entrenched and multi-dimensional medium sized business (employing approx. 300 staff) with multiple product ranges, markets and customer channels.• The business and it’s model had proven success over two decades in B2B markets. • The various brands had an established footprint in South Africa & most of the Sub-Saharan Africa. • Strategic acquisitions were scaled nationally via four branches in the major Provinces.• A key capability was inventory availability and margin growth to optimise returns. • Working Capital Management critical as a high percentage of the stock was imported.• Maintaining strategic relationships with key suppliers included travel to China, UK, and the Netherlands. • Costing was key, within ad-valorem and ROE boundaries ensuring “sweet spot pricing” for re-seller on-selling.• Fiduciary oversight of a decentralised national team with a dominant market position. Each Branch Manager holding extensive experience, product specialists and regional experts in their own right.• Clearly defined a vision and values for the company to rally an autonomous culture around.• Transitioned to live-stock. As the single-largest cleaning supplies import-wholesaler in Africa, inventory management was a key focus, and became a critical competitive advantage.• Our B2B model saw a growing, robust national and cross-border network of distributors/re-sellers.• Well-priced product ranging, favourable financial terms, just-in-time stockholding, and warehouse-to-warehouse deliveries became unrivalled value-adds. • We did not actively seek out acquisitions, these “no-brainers” fell in our laps so to speak, and as such were highly profitable to our national footprint.

Functions & Achievements:• Relocated business for planned growth. • Bolstered cash, business had negative working capital needs. Drove retail business (cash upfront), and in turn on financial terms with suppliers.• Used free cash flow to bulk purchase scarce raws.• Secured over-runs from cotton mills looking to recover waste.• Migrated from Pastel to a cloud-based ERP system with live-stock.• Re-branded to better reach new customer channels and segments.• Introduced a well known brushware brand and other cleaning ranges to the basket.• Drove revenue with new customers & channels.• Migrated cash wages to electronically paid salaries.

Functions & Achievements:• Drove market share via strong relationships and trust that enabled incredible sales growth.• Increased revenue, cost management and inventory availability.• Supply chain between Cape Town sales office and Johannesburg manufacturing branch.• New business development.• Quality control of colour variations via spectrophotometer, batch numbers, and retained samples.• Full responsibility for budgeting and so profitability of the Cape Town branch.• Developed stronger relationships by leading a dynamic staff compliment and consistently meeting with clients.

During my tenure I earned a diploma from the Exercise Teachers Association (ETA) in Personal Training.

In 1994 when conscription was abolished, I was accepted into the South African Navy's Voluntary Military Service for two years. These were formative years of my life and career, instilling leadership, discipline, resilience and teamwork.