Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh had a tough story to sell. At the
time that Abu-Ghazaleh led his company to the purchase of
Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. in 1996, the producer, marketer
and distributor of fresh and fresh-cut produce had reaped
some rotten returns. Not only did the purchase come with the
assumption of $300 million in bad debt, but it also came with
a criminal record — or, rather, two criminal records. First,
the company, which had been a part of the Polly Peck
International family, fell on hard times when that company’s
chairman, Asil Nadir, fled as it folded under financial pressures. In the fallout, Fresh Del Monte was taken over by
Carlos Cabal, a Mexican businessman with his hand in banking, hotels and insurance. Within two years, Cabal became a
fugitive of the Mexican government, accused of embezzling
$700 million from his own banks. To this day, charges hang
over the heads of both men. Meanwhile, Abu-Ghazaleh was
left with an internal and external mess.
“The company was like a ship without a captain in the middle of
the ocean, and it was really a miracle the company had gone
through these two dramatic episodes and was still floating,” Abu-Ghazaleh says.
And then, it’s only natural that everybody was a little suspicious
of Abu-Ghazaleh, the company’s chairman and CEO, when he
started to tell the story about how the company was planting seeds
for brighter days.
But Abu-Ghazaleh, the son of a famed fruit importer and businessman, believed that if he could restore faith both internally and
externally he could turn the company around. The story wouldn’t
sell overnight, and maybe some people would never believe it, but
he began healing the company one day at a time.
First, he established a new relationship between management
and employees and external people by setting a new tone for ethical behavior and keeping promises. As he began to establish that
credibility, he improved on it internally by taking his tale on the
road, visiting all of Fresh Del Monte’s locations after doing his
homework to understand where the company was headed.
Here’s what he learned along the way.
