Identify problems
Pierre Foods’ struggles, while difficult, were not too severe that the company would never recover, and Toler knew that when he took over as CEO.
“You have to make sure you know that you have a good company under the problem,” Toler says. “Is the company the problem, or is the problem the balance sheet? In this case the problem was the balance sheet. It was a fundamentally good business inside of the problem, and a lot of times, it’s not. Make sure you’re doing the due diligence and the assessment upfront to make sure you’re going into a business that can be fixed. Does it have the fundamentals to be fixed? Is it a business that’s cyclical with the economy? Is it one that has a real competitive advantage that can be leveraged? Or is it a business that’s just a problem? In the case of Pierre, it was a strong business that had some unfortunate things happen to it all at once. I knew that we could get in here and fix it because it was a fundamentally good business underneath.
“The kind of business that you’d want to avoid is one that has parts undifferentiated or where you are in a commodity business where one product can be replaced easily for another that customers don’t value. That would be a problem or scenario that you’d be hard-pressed to go in and fix.”
Unprecedented inflation in the food industry in 2008 left Pierre without the systems, analytics or tools to understand how that inflation affected its products.
Toler’s first priority was to fix the obvious problems.
“They didn’t really know what the profitability of their various items or the profitability of their various business segments were,” Toler says. “They were unable to properly price the business to make sure they stayed up with inflation as that hit in 2008.”
Oftentimes when a new CEO takes over a company, the amount of data needed to successfully right the ship or move in a new direction is unavailable.
“We had quite a bit of limitations on data here,” Toler says. “We didn’t understand our profitability by item. We brought in an outside firm who developed a profitability tool and model for us that we still use today that essentially allowed us to understand the profitability by item. We also didn’t have all the plants on one ERP, so we moved all the plants to one ERP and got common visibility and common information across all the items. That allowed us to understand where we made money and where we didn’t and be able to take appropriate pricing and be able to work constructively to make sure that we knew what businesses to stay in and what businesses to get out of.”
Data is usually available; it just usually isn’t pulled out of the system in an effective way that leaders can use. Companies with data issues need to mine the data and then get a plan in motion to fix the problems they find.
Besides a lack of data, productivity was also an issue.
“The other thing we identified when we first got here was the idea that their plants were very good plants, but they hadn’t been stretched to [maximize] productivity,” Toler says. “We immediately began focusing on improving the productivity of the plants in terms of how they operated and the number of people per line and the efficiencies of the plants and the waste in the plants and all the things that can cost money to businesses. Really, it was about getting visibility on pricing and also driving productivity. Those were the two things we focused on when we first got here.”
Pierre had also made two acquisitions that they were struggling to integrate. That challenge, along with the condition of the industry and the economy, served to be too much for the company to handle all at once. Faced with the challenges of lack of visibility in data, lack of integration of acquisitions, and lack of pricing, Toler had to prioritize each task in order to get Pierre back on its feet.
“It was all about knowing where you made money and where you didn’t,” Toler says. “Once you have those things in place, you are able to act pretty decisively. You prioritize in the places were there is the greatest payback. Where can you get the most return for your efforts? Is it understanding the data, is it in moving the ERP’s together, is it in pricing the business or in driving productivity? You look where you get the greatest payback and you put your efforts into that.”
