Swing for the fences

Selim A. Bassoul, chairman and CEO, The Middleby Corp.

You probably don’t want to listen to anything that Selim A. Bassoul has to say.

Sure, sure, the guy has a great story to tell.
And nobody sums up the turnaround by The
Middleby Corp. in 1999 better than Bassoul.

“We had very limited resources and capital, we were running out of cash, we were
very highly reliant on three customers that
generated more than 60 percent of the
sales,” he says. “We lacked innovation, and
the products we were generating or creating were very me-too products. … Roughly
30 percent of the orders were not shipped
on time, so we had a case study of a lousy
company.”

But the turnaround that Bassoul,
Middleby’s chairman and CEO, made is a lot
to handle. He completely refocused his
company almost overnight, slashing nearly
30 percent of Middleby’s sales to focus on
new directions.

The key mindset needed to change like
that? The willingness to find one or two
market differentiators and take a big swing.

At the core of this process is a willingness
to pick up on things beyond what people
are complaining about by listening to the
current state of their business. At Middleby,
for example, Bassoul sat constantly with
people who bought his competitors’ products and listened to their take on the market. He heard two things in restaurants that
might not seem directly related to his business. One, restaurants were cutting back on
costs; two, the trend of casual dining out
was growing every day.

So Bassoul decided to build the brand up around more casual dining — going so far as
to make that brand global — and put all of
Middleby’s engineering focus on the innovation required to make energy-efficient ovens.

Both moves were completely different
than anything that Middleby’s competitors
were doing — and that’s exactly the point.

“When you look at our competitors, they
are still trying to change knobs,” Bassoul
says. “… We’re working on huge disruptive
technology, we’re working on plasma TV
versus tube TV.”

As a result, Middleby has been growing its
international business by double digits
annually, and customers have been pretty
interested in the more efficient equipment,
as it has helped push the company beyond
$500 million in net sales.