How to Build a Billion-Dollar Business

CHAPTER 27BACK ON THE ROAD

As December 2013 approached, the business still faced significant challenges and struggled to improve its performance. We'd closed the door on the American expansion. The grocers had squeezed our margin to zero, so we needed to migrate our grocery customer base back to pharmacies. We could now do this as we had the sales data and we were able to prove to the pharmacies that if we were given the same shelf space as Blackmores, we could achieve the same sales as them. That said, the marketing dollars we invested to help us achieve this outcome were costing us a fortune, and our cost reductions in the supply chain weren't happening fast enough. We were also under a lot of pressure to pay down the debt by cutting even more expenditure. This was tricky to achieve, as we needed to balance the cuts with the need to grow. To make matters worse, the board had turned even further against me. Our back was up against the wall. Oh, and Helen was now up to her sixth IVF cycle.

I did a deep dive into the data to see if it would reveal any insights of value that would help us find a new source of revenue or growth and noticed an interesting anomaly. The sales results showed a trend that indicated pockets of stores in certain areas were doing ten times the sales of stores in other areas. This was intriguing. What was going on? Why did these stores outperform the others?

I shared these insights with Matt Holmes, our National Field Sales Manager as he had mentioned ...