The Machine That Was Never Built

Marc had been Export Director for nine months when he stopped pretending the spreadsheet was a strategy.

He had inherited the role from a man named Patrick, who had held it for eleven years and was, by every account, exceptional at it. Patrick knew every distributor personally. He had attended every trade fair, called every partner on their name day, and managed every difficult conversation over dinner at the right restaurant at the right moment. The business had hummed along. Nobody had asked too many questions.

Patrick retired in April. Marc arrived in May.

By July, Marc had the full picture — or rather, the full absence of one. Eighty-five markets. Eight people on his team. Four per cent of company revenue in export, which meant €24 million on the P&L. And those €24 million had been exactly €24 million — give or take — for four consecutive years. The category had grown 14% in that period. The company's domestic business had grown 11%. The export business had not moved.

Every time Marc asked why, the answer was the same: the distributors weren't performing. When he asked which ones, exactly, and in which markets, the answer changed: the data didn't exist. There were no sell-out reports. No joint business plans. No performance scorecards. No tiering of markets by priority. No defined criteria for what a good distributor looked like, or what a failing one looked like, or how you would tell the difference.

What existed was a folder of signed contracts, a contact list in an aging CRM, and a shared memory of what Patrick had known — which was now gone.

Marc did everything a reasonable new director would do. He updated the pricing templates. He introduced a weekly call schedule with the top distributors. He asked the team to send a reporting format to each market at the end of every quarter. Three-quarters of them sent it back blank. Two didn't respond at all.

The problem wasn't the distributors. The problem was that the export operation had never been built as a function. It had been built as a person. And a person is not a machine. A person cannot be transferred, documented, tiered, or scaled. When Patrick walked out the door, he took the machine with him — because the machine had always lived inside his head.

What Marc needed wasn't a new reporting template. He needed to build what had never existed: a team structure that could manage 85 markets without running on personal memory, a playbook that made every distributor relationship work the same disciplined way regardless of who was managing it, a channel strategy that told the team where to push and where to hold, and a performance system that showed him what was happening on shelf before it became a crisis.

He just didn't know where to start — because nobody inside the company had ever had to start.

What keeps Marc awake:

• Four years of flat export revenue in a category that grew 14% — and no one inside the business can explain why
• 85 markets, 8 people, no tiering, no JBPs, no sell-out visibility: the operation looks like a business but runs like a contact list
• The entire export network was built on one person's relationships — and that person is gone
• No channel strategy: which markets to prioritise, which channels to develop, and in what order
• The pressure to show results in year one without the infrastructure to generate them