Unlock the secrets of sustainable growth and discover the power of a founder’s mindset in transforming consumer brands, as revealed by industry veteran Mark Tarchetti.

In this episode, Mark Tarchetti, founder of Alchemy-Rx and author of “Pick a Lane: Growth Strategy in a Fast-Changing World,” shares his insights on reimagining businesses and implementing practical growth strategies.

You’ll discover…

• Why relying solely on acquisitions may not be the solution for sustainable growth in consumer products
• How applying a founder’s mindset can drive growth and innovation
• The importance of having a clear, actionable plan and operational disciplines for continuous growth
• What sets Alchemy-Rx apart in helping ambitious teams, from up-and-coming to household-name brands, achieve success
• How rep and warranty insurance has become a game-changer in providing confidence to buyers in transactions

Mentioned in this episode:

• https://www.alchemy-rx.com
• https://www.amazon.com/Pick-Lane-Growth-strategy-fast-changing/dp/1735388017

Transcript

Patrick: Hello there. I’m Patrick Stroth, trusted authority in transactional liability and national practice leader for the Liberty Company Insurance Brokers. Welcome to M&A Masters where I speak with the leading experts in mergers and acquisitions, and we’re all about one thing here. That’s a clean exit for owners, founders, and their investors.

Today, I’m joined by Mark Tarchetti, founder of Alchemy-Rx. Alchemy-Rx specializes in helping consumer brands achieve ambitious yet sustainable growth. Mark is also the author of Pick a Lane, Growth Strategy in a Fast-Changing World. And Mark, it’s great to have you here, because we’re going to look at another element of M&A. So welcome to the podcast today.

Mark Tarchetti: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it, Patrick.

Patrick: Mark, we get to Alchemy-Rx and growth with consumer brands and strategies and so forth, let’s set the table with you. What brought you to this point in your career?

Mark: So I came from pretty humble beginnings, to be honest. I grew up in the 80s without an employed dad in a small town in England. My brother and I were the first to go to college, and I was the first in the family to join a big corporation.

So I always knew instinctively I wanted to go into business, but I didn’t really know what big business was. We’d only worked in tiny mom-and-pop stores and so on. So I chose to join Unilever out of college. I wanted to join an academy company that could get me that great grounding, and it really was one of the very best.

So I’ve always kind of believed in learning by doing. So when I got into a company like that, I put all my energies into working my way up by getting jobs bigger than myself, finding people I could learn from, and finding sponsors who could get me moving up the chain.

And it was really a fantastic experience. I started out in finance, and then a few years in, got into business transformations, M&A, and change, and ended up majoring in business strategies. So my last three years there, I was head of strategy, working for the company’s first outside CEO. So we launched a whole new vision, huge company, $60 billion.

But we launched a whole new vision, a portfolio strategy, and reset a lot of the activity systems, day to day in the company. And it was a fantastic experience. I learned so much being around a C-suite like that. And it really taught me how to get things done, a global perspective, and a lot of playbooks about implementing change.

And I went from there, 14 years at Unilever, I went to Newell Rubbermaid. I was hired as the number two. I ran all the company’s growth functions so marketing, research and development, design, e-commerce, M&A, and we transformed all of those. It was an incredible story. Went from 6 billion of revenue to 16 with the strategies we designed.

An enterprise value increase of nearly eight times at the peak. And I was president of that company at 40. So my whole story was over 20 years of corporate a lot of success very young and working in very big, very complex organizations. So I got operating experience with 200, 300 brands, 50, 60, 70, categories, and a very global perspective. And so that kind of gave me the grounding.

But then those humble beginnings came back into my mind, and I’d been more successful than I dreamed of, and I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I’d been very fortunate to acquire businesses from founders and work with some really talented founders, and I wanted to do my own thing, and I was kind of falling out of love with the corporate ecosystem, and so I decided to quit corporate life and get into advising, co-investing with growth brands. And I set up Alchemy-RX five and a half years ago.

Patrick: And so from all of that immersion in big corporate, then you come out to the brave new world of entrepreneurship. Congratulations. And as you move on now, we get into Alchemy-Rx, and you didn’t name it Tarchetti, so tell me about Alchemy-Rx.

Mark: Well the big reason for that is it’s not just me, it’s a team. So there’s 15 of us, and then we have some partners beyond that. And this is a great group of people with experience across growth disciplines that I’ve worked with for 10, 15, 20 years. So really hand-picked, and the kind of people that I’ve built and deployed playbooks within those operating roles.

And so we’re really all about two things, and that’s where the brand comes from. The Alchemy is reimagining businesses and imagining where the growth will come from, and then the RX is the practical path to action. Using playbooks that are proven, using techniques that get things done. So you operationalize those ideas.

Because a lot of consulting firms really sell PowerPoint, we don’t think that’s a product. What matters is what happens in the marketplace. And so we have this brand that’s all about transformative ideas, but a practical path to action. And that’s kind of our philosophy, that’s our culture, that’s our skills, that’s our resumes. And so it felt kind of very authentic. And I think authenticity in brands is a big thing.

Patrick: Yeah and when we’re talking about mergers and acquisitions with a lot of the guests that I have, we’re talking about identifying opportunities and moving forward with those. At the bottom of the process, though, you have to find growth, and you can’t financially engineer your way to growth. There’s got to be growth out there in improving execution and generating more revenues than when you started. And that’s a big process.

So let’s talk about this, because where you’re coming from, you’re in an environment with almost unlimited resources, and you can make really big bets, and you know, those are good and bad because if they don’t work. But talk about now where you are with Alchemy-Rx, and what you’re bringing to the table now to organizations that may not have the big budgets.

Mark: Yes, we work with brands of all shapes and sizes, and honestly, an abundance of resources is probably more of a curse than a benefit. I think founders often win because they’re more nimble, they’re more agile, they get a lot more done for much less. So actually, if I have a preference, I’ve learned more from some of the brilliant founders I work with than than from the corporations.

I think abundant resources can sometimes make less choiceful and too comfortable. So we’re very strategic about our growth plans, which means zero basing resources. It means moving money to the most impactful ideas. It means being great editors of activity. There are, in most cases, brands have far too much going on, and an awful lot of it is too small to move the needle. And so we really help people look up and look beyond and get to the things that will really matter and make sure they’re funded first they’re funded fully.

And that’s where you start to operationalize this growth playbook, and the financial engineering is the beta. Anybody can do that, the people who will win and create the most value, they have the alpha. And in our view, organic growth is by far the most powerful value creator. And if you can supplement that with bolt-on M&A, you can get some incredible returns.

Patrick: Well, I can see, when I was looking at organizations, the major ones, Coca-Cola and other major, major brands. It’s such a bureaucracy in there, in these large institutions that if they want to innovate some new product, it’s easier to go out and buy it and so forth. And so talk to that in strategies that you’ve seen, both with your former organizations and how you do consulting now.

Mark: So I think not many people succeed in buying growth. That’s a kind of it’s like Advil. It’s pain relief. It may solve the headache for a few hours, but it’s not going to cure the underlying conditions that are giving you headaches. So I think that’s unless it’s a true transformation of really reinventing your portfolio, people need to lean on the organic growth capability.

And that’s honestly where 20 years of cost-cutting and using the balance sheet to generate returns has left people short of growth capabilities. And it comes back. There’s a very simple formula in consumer products, and I’ve worked in pretty much every aisle of Walmart.

So whether it’s everyday consumer goods, the things you use every day, your toiletries, and so on, or it’s the slower turn things, your cookware, your appliances, I’ve worked in pretty much every aisle.

And the formula is really simple, but it’s profoundly important to sustain it. And that’s ideas big enough to grow markets and brands strong enough to change behavior. So you have to bring things that stimulate consumption, that get people using more, that bring things back on trend, that are good enough innovations to make people re-evaluate, repurchase.

And the brand has to drive that behavior. And that’s where so much activity is wasted, in derivative activity, and so much of corporations, you’re rewarded for annual income. So you get big bonuses for moving the needle just a little bit on organic performance each year with very incremental targets. And so a lot of our playbook I learned from founders.

I was privileged to work with some amazing people in different businesses. Brendan Lindsay on Sistema, Sami El-Saden on Contigo, Mei Xu on Chesapeake Bay, Amin Kashef. And then I also learned from a couple of big business leaders who managed to bring the founder’s mindset to corporations, so Martin Franklin and Domenico De Sole.

And they were truly exceptional people who could bring that founder’s mindset. But it’s very rare. And I think culturally, people put too much emphasis just on a CEO. The way you create a lot of value from growth is systematizing it. Flushing it down through all the layers of the organization with detailed plans, detailed metrics, detailed activities.

Whereas a lot of people want to make growth just a single idea or a theme or some PowerPoint imagery or a small product that’s a very small percentage of revenue, that looks great, gets everybody excited, but isn’t going to change the results. And so you’ve really got to be much more systematic than that. And there just aren’t many transformative leaders in corporate America. There’s a dearth of them, to be honest.

And those that there are never moving jobs because they’re very successful where they are. And so you see this big bifurcation. There are CEOs that stay 15, 20 years, and the rest average four or five years. And the reason for that is the sort of curse of incrementalism. So what we bring is things we’ve learned the hard way, and you’re right about some of our big company behavior.

But if you take Newell we peaked at 16 billion of revenue, and there were about 250 brands. So you can do the math and see the average brand size would have been much smaller. And we were burdened with about half a million SKUs of complexity. So the only way you could grow was with many, many initiatives, and really systematizing that and deploying a lot of people to work very impactfully.

And that’s where sharp, choices, clear, strategy, repeatability, really matter. And I don’t see enough of that in big corporations, but that’s pretty much all the founder-led models do. They pick a business idea, they pick a business model, and they just get better at it year after year, and they stick with it for a long time.

So they’re always getting that training. The corporation tends to go zigzag, and it’s usually with 12, 18, month plans. And that’s why a lot of private equity we work with, they get very excited when carve-outs come on the table because they see how undermanaged some of these brands are. But they need the paddles on them.

They need some re-imagination, some refocus, some growth ideas breathed back into them, but then there can be a lot of value. So we made our name in the private equity industry with the Tropicana deal. And that was under secular decline, under big company ownership.

And a great thesis all coming to market in the last couple of years, that business is now performing really well. And we did that business case because we’re not linear thinkers. We’ve reimagined.

We got a cadence of activity that was short-term and creating resources to invest, and then longer-term ideas that would reset the brands and the products to be more on trend, to be healthier. And it’s a great formula. It takes a lot of work, but when we did that work, we delivered a product that was new to the market.

Activity-based growth plans that you could do a fairness opinion on. That you could present to co-investors and lenders, that you could present to a JV partner. It was a very different approach, and all rooted in analytics, consumer research, and specific, tangible ideas that are costed and sized.

And so that level of rigor is not how most brands are working each day. And as a result, they tend to go for maintenance plans like give me about the same, cost me a little less, and here’s your bonus. And then you tend to focus on getting the next job. You don’t tend to say, wow, what can I do in this job for 10 years?

Because that would be the death of your career. So there’s a lot to unpack in these corporate models. They can work when they have momentum, but more often than not, it’s really a maintenance mindset, and that’s why they get beaten by founders.

Patrick: I think that it’s almost sensory overload when you’re talking about all the different factors that come in. It’s a lot easier for somebody who says, okay, we need to just go into this new market. We need to get 10% growth in here, 5% there, and so forth. And it could be overwhelming if you’re not used to this, how you look at it. Is it as simple as you know what to look for and you have a starting point, and you go along, or is it absolutely a whole new approach every time?

Mark: No, so you’re always sensitive to the individual context. But actually, we’ve applied the same playbooks over multiple categories, multiple brands. There are different points of emphasis. Some things are bigger, more complex. Some things, it really is one or two things that matter.

And so we do a sort of systematic playbook to find the opportunity, but then you boil it down to just the few things, that are going to move the needle. That’s where the strategy comes in. So you can galvanize a team around let’s just do these things. Let’s put all our eggs in those baskets, and it will drive enough value.

And then we’re big believers in kind of sticking with strategy for multiple years. So if you get the first wave right, it funds the next wave of ideas, it self-funds. So you’re delivering a lot of value to your shareholders. Because you’re not asking for checks. You’re saying, this is where I’ll start.

This is the value it will create. You have that amount, I’m going to reinvest in phase two with the rest. And people like those balanced plans because they can run along for a number of years. So it’s always system-specific and custom context.

But we have very much playbooks that have been used time and time again, brand after brand, and the category differences really don’t make much difference if you’re following good disciplines and following what the consumer and customer wants.

So our job is to take all of that and boil it down to the things that will move the needle, the growth accelerators, and tell you what they’ll cost, tell you what they’ll deliver, and give them as much rigor as you would a cost-saving program or a supply chain transformation.

There’s no reason for growth to be fuzzy. Growth can be detailed. It should be specific, and then it needs to be nurtured over time. So it doesn’t all come in year one. It needs, it needs sort of multi-year ideas that will will grow with the business.

Patrick: It is a sustainability element that you have. It’s robust growth, but sustainable, which is even more attractive. You mentioned working with private equity. At what stage are you doing this? Are you doing this when they’re identifying a target, or are you being brought in after they’ve made an acquisition?

Mark: So we work from three angles. So we do quite a lot of deal assessment work, particularly on carve-outs, particularly on founder-led businesses, where they’re trying to figure out, is there another double or triple still in this? Where are they at? We then quite often get called in by the portfolio companies themselves, rather than the PE firm.

We get called by the CEO who’s got something on his mind. So where do I take the brand next? Which categories should I go into? Do my owners want more growth? Where do I get it from? So that those are our two main models, and then we work with quite a few family offices.

We’re trying to get more into co-investing and partnerships on deals over multiple years so that we can operationalize this playbook with management over 2, 3, 4, years, rather than short-term consulting engagements.

So family offices are pretty rich for that, where they need operating partners effectively, and they want us to create the plan and then help oversee it and partner the teams so they can get more done than on their own.

And that’s what really helps that our team are all proven operators because we gel with management because we don’t have any 25-year-olds. Our team averages 20 years experience.

They’ve all got functional skills and experience, so they bring real, practical expertise, and it makes it a very impactful model for getting further than a business would on its own. And those can be really exciting journeys with founders that have big ambition.

Patrick: I think also you get into certain brands where you got owners of founders, and they are the biggest zealots, they’re the biggest believer in their brand. That doesn’t mean everybody else is going to believe in it or has the same passion or the commitment to it. So I think you bring that. Explain a little bit more when you said, particularly with the family offices that you would co-invest. What does that look like?

Mark: So we’ve done a number of things this year exploring. So there was a situation recently where we were going to put half the equity in a deal that we hadn’t consummated yet but has been under active discussion. In other cases, we would, you know, effectively, play an operating role and and receive sort of most of our returns through equity rather than cash.

And we’re quite entrepreneurial about that. So it’s very situation-dependent as to who you’re working with, who you’re partnering with. But, we bring everything to the table, apart from capital. So we’re looking for capital partners, and we’re looking to get paid for value created, rather than for PowerPoints and short-term consulting cycles.

So we spend a lot of energy in that trying to find the right partners, the right deals to partner on, and a very entrepreneurial mindset that’s very much about, what could we do together? And if you can bolt a team like ours on with a successful founder-led team, pretty magical things could happen there, where you don’t derail momentum, you accelerate it.

But you help the team get further than they would on their own. And then, we bring quite a lot of value to carve-outs, because we’ve done, I’ve done 40 billion of M&A in my career now. Kind of absurd to say it, even. So I’ve done big integrations, I’ve done big disposals and carve-outs.

So we bring a lot to the table of if you’re looking at a semi-formed business coming out of a public company where the team is semi-formed, doesn’t have everything it needs. For a financial buyer that’s really, really tough. They’re excited about getting their hands on an academy brand and a really pedigree, prestigious business.

Patrick: Iconic. Yes.

Mark: But they don’t come with a full team. They come with more questions than answers. They’ve probably been underperforming and undermanaged. Because they’re a low priority, that’s why they’re being sold off. So we can add a ton of value in that situation as well. But that only works if you were there for 3, 4, 5, years in the investment cycle. Otherwise, it’s again, it’s just PowerPoint plans, which you know that they’re a commodity in our view.

Patrick: And then as you’re looking at a prospective acquisition, you get engaged to take a look at a target. Any red flags seem fine, or just, not necessarily case studies, but just what do you sometimes look for and find that they don’t have other than resources?

Mark: So most businesses, whether they’re being sold or not, don’t have a three to five-year strategic plan. They have operating plans, and if they have a three-year plan, it was done by the CFO. It’s mainly metrics. All the metrics are good. They’re all hockey sticks, but you drill under it, there isn’t much there.

So you know, the best you hope for is activities in market that still have some runway. But typically, almost all brands we work with don’t really have multi-year strategies. So there’s always a need to sift through, what have we got here. What’s working, what’s not working? Are we positioned for whether customer and consumer are going to be in the future?

Are we growing with the growing customers and channels and figuring out what the gap analysis is? And then, of course, we’ve had 1000s of people work for us in our corporate role. So people ask us to assess the talent and say, have I got what I need in the team?

And that can be done in a pretty short cycle. Because a bit back to your earlier question, it sounds complex, but you have repeatable methods. You know where to look, and this crazy amount of brands and categories and M&A projects, the sound bites of how many things we’ve been you just learn a lot by doing.

The best people I’ve learned from, they were brilliant in many ways, but they’d just been around. They’d seen so many things, and it helps you join the dots quickly. And so a lot of our success is the playbooks coupled with the practical experience. And so we can make pretty fast starts.

And to a financial buyer that’s gold dust because they’re asking the questions or their peers are asking. The edge on the deal comes from seeing what other people didn’t see. And that Tropicana example was great. The firm we worked with, used two big firms, and they’d come back with linear projections.

It was us that came up with, how do you beat the linear projections? And getting that to a point of specificity and confidence that could carry the business case and is now coming to market. So we really believe in ourselves in that space. And so you don’t come to us for the obvious, you come to us for the impactful.

Patrick: And then let’s talk about who your ideal profile is for a client because you had mentioned Tropicana and Contigo. I mean very large brands. Who are you looking to serve now for Alchemy-Rx?

Mark: So let me answer two ways, Patrick. So first, from a culture perspective, we’re looking for ambitious teams that measure themselves against their potential, not their past performance. We’re all about growth, and we’re not incrementalists.

So we really warm to teams with ambition. It can be really well-articulated ambition with a clear plan, or it can be just an intuition that says there’s more here than we’ve realized. How do we find it? But that attitude is really important to us, because we ask the tough questions as to where we could get to, not just sort of patting everybody on the back for what the rearview mirror looks like because that’s value creation.

That’s how we all make money and get paid. So that’s attitudinally, the thing we’re looking for. People that will hold up the mirror. And I can tell you, particularly if results are good, it’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to say this is great, but what’s next? What’s more? But that’s what the winners do, and they do it continuously and objectively.

In terms of the nature of work we do, we do work with a lot of up-and-coming brands, so probably half our client book is in sub $200, $300 million revenue at least. We then work with some public companies on a project basis, where they’ve got issues on a brand, they’ve got issues in a particular area.

And then private equity, it ranges from $50 million of revenue to a Tropicana multi-billion. We’ve been asked to help with big and small there and and we’re happy with both. I must admit, I’m really about growth.

So if you want to talk to us about something big, like a Tropicana, it’s a big turn. And you have to have a philosophical fit on that. If it’s about, can we maintain and manage a Tropicana much less interesting to us there.

You can just do the predictable cost savings and so forth, and that’s not our playbook. So again, it’s really growth ambition, but the majority of our work is brands that are up and coming, growing strongly. Maybe could still double or triple, and exciting categories.

This year we’ve worked in areas like pet for the first time, which has been great. Tons of growth there. We work in vitamins and health and wellness. Tons of growth there. Love personal care. Got a lot of experience there, but really kind of all aisles of a WalMart. We believe you can grow it. Just needs the model that says our idea is big enough to grow consumption.

Patrick: And as you get through this process, particularly as companies are looking for potential acquisitions and go forward plans and so forth, there’s a lot of risk, because you gotta have the best plan in the world. And there could be something out there that nobody counted on.

Not market-wise, but just internally, that nobody saw. And so in mergers and acquisitions, there’s quite a bit of risk. Even when you’ve got a very robust game plan going forward, there’s still what you got to deal with. And so the parties have to figure out some way to spread that risk around.

The insurance industry has reps and warranties insurance, which has really accelerated the pace for M&A activity. But, you know, don’t take my word for it, Mark, you’ve been involved with a lot of these big and small deals. Any experience you can share with us on rep and warranty insurance? Good, bad, or indifferent.

Mark: I think it’s been a game-changer in recent years. The way it’s really grown and become readily accessible, there’s an increasing market for it. So it’s very easy to get multiple partners, multiple quotes, the kind of competitiveness around fees, and so on. So it’s accessible, it’s affordable, as a result of the growth of recent years.

For pretty much any transaction we see, it’s the go-to product. I think it works super well because particularly in the last two, three years, there have been so many known variables, costs, inflation, covid demand spikes. Covid demand spikes being lapped. The known unknowns were really scary, and the unknown unknowns were, like, incredibly frightening.

So that product was a game changer for giving, particularly family offices and on some of the smaller brands with less mature processes to give confidence to the buyer that there was a solution here that would allow you to just move quickly through the transaction. So I really, really like that side of it, and I think it just takes a lot of tension away.

So many deals get held up with second-guessing each other, and it’s the stuff that you would insure against that is a big part of what you second-guess each other. So taking some of those dynamics out fuels the deal as well. I guess the areas I see that it works a bit less well are where there are specific issues that are known.

And that’s a shame in that you almost have a bifurcated process. And many deals in the last two, three years, there’s been a few known issues, and so that doesn’t, it doesn’t help that it’s not a full solution, I guess, but you can understand economically why it isn’t. And then I think maybe there are a few too many exclusions that, hopefully over time, will come out.

Like things that happen between sign and close or with the way things like cyber security and that are going some of the areas that might be omitted in forward criminal acts and things like, I just feel like maybe as it matures, there’ll be a few less exclusions, and people will be able to get all the way to the finish line. But great product, something we see on pretty much every deal. And I think as the market keeps maturing, it will get better product, like all these things.

Patrick: I think as the product matures, I agree that there are going to be innovations that come in. One of the most recent innovations is now that rep or warranty insurance is available for transactions as small as a million dollars.

Mark: Oh, wow, that’s great.

Patrick: Yeah, so there’s a program out there where there’s an insurance program that will insure deals that are priced between $1 million and $30 million in enterprise value.

Mark: That sounds great.

Patrick: Little bit, yeah, it’s a little more narrow, but it’s going to cover those major, major issues. Tax, financial, material, contracts. Those types of operational things that are there where smaller companies really need the protection, and they are unable to get it because the larger traditional programs are just structured in a way that they’re built for 100 million dollar deals.

They’re not built for $15 million add-ons. And so what’s nice is that there’s a program out there at $15,000 per million dollars in limits, it’s a fraction of the cost. And so that’s what’s doing great that’s been out there.

Mark: I’m glad I learned that today. We see deals that would really benefit from that.

Patrick: And we’re all over those types of things. And so long as it’s not into a regulated industry like energy or banking, we’re okay. But it will be consumer products, consumer brands, light manufacturing, those types of things, it’s wide open for and we’re looking forward to that. So we wanted to bring that top of mind.

But then you could have the best-laid plans, Mark, and you go forward with the new venture, and the growth is just not there. And talk about how growth can be elusive to companies and what they have to keep in mind on a go for because if you can’t get a game plan and then, boom, your problems are solved.

Mark: I mean, I think that’s why over and over we come back to it’s what you operationalize that matters. The ideas are the easy bit. It’s implementing them well and with impact, that means much more choicefulness. Your first comment on resource allocation and are you sharp enough, with the limited money you’ve got, you put it in the places with most impact. And people just don’t apply the rigor to growth plans that they should.

They treat it very thematically, and they would never do that with a supply chain program or a cost savings program. They’d want the detail. They’d want the actions. And so that’s really the important bit. But it depends really on the challenge. I mean, you should always build a steady cadence. So if it was a big turnaround, we would be very cautious.

We’d build everything from carrying on as it is. We’d say our ideas are built back from the continued decline, not built back from flat. We would extrapolate the issues, and we’d build back from that. We look for a balance across time.

So if everything’s on one innovation that’s going to take two, three years to build, that’s way too risky, and there’s always execution-led growth opportunities and consumer products getting pricing, promo, distribution, ranging, pack size, assortment right. You can sweat so much out of that.

And making sure you’re big and got best shares with the customers that are growing is really, really important. Years ago, people made mistakes, not betting on Amazon, not betting enough on Costco, Walmart, Target. They were obviously going to be the winners. And so there’s a lot you do in the low risk, high confidence, to fund the bigger plays, and then we validate everything.

So we use as much consumer research as we use data. We don’t pretend we know what the best project is, we go ask the consumer. When I was at Newell tested over 4000 product innovations. And we did it with the same method so we could compare ideas. We could know which the winners were rationally.

And then you pace your investments. You measure the successes. Launch monitors, investment monitors. It’s a detailed playbook, and most people don’t use the information they’ve got. There’s an abundance of data out there from your customers, from consumers.

But you have to organize to use it and ask the so what’s and that’s all part of our process, which is why we’re much more interested in partnering through an investment horizon than just coming up with the initial plan because the execution failure rate is too high. And if you have to adapt, the beauty of having a clear plan is, you know what’s changed, so you can rationally adapt.

No matter how difficult that is, you know what’s gone wrong, what you need to reprioritize and think again about and it’s a continuous process. And again, that’s what I learned from founders. They stuck to core ideas. They gave it time, but they were incredibly innovative if they needed to be.

They were nimble if they needed to be, to say, this isn’t working. The ideas are right, but the executions are off. And that’s really the importance of operating disciplines with growth, and that’s what we see missing. So we do create the ideas. We have a big focus on innovation ideas. That’s the Alchemy, but it’s useless without the RX.

Patrick: Let’s not forget about this. Your book Pick a Lane, which is strategy in a fast-changing world. And let’s talk about that real quick. Is this your overview conceptually of what you do and what you’ve learned, or are you kind of laying out the preview of here is the process that we would go through as an introduction.

Mark: No, so the story of it was, I’d always wanted to do it. When Covid hit, we were a year old as a firm, so our client book went to zero in about three days. And a group of us said, let’s do the thing we’ve always wanted to do, which is do the book. And it is the principles, it’s the practices. It’s very operational in there.

It gives you the tips and tricks of the growth playbook I’m describing. So it embodies our firm and what we’ve learned and how we think. So it’s much more in the preview, but it’s designed to be readable in 90 minutes, two hours, and it’s built on all the things I’ve learned from the different people I’ve worked with, particularly the founders.

And so gives you a playbook, and it was we started the firm, and I wrote the book at a time organic growth in consumer products was at a 20-year low. So the industry was struggling overall. We’d never had so little growth. And we set up the firm to deal with that dilemma. And the book is all about that dilemma, and making moves, making bets, looking forward, having a point of view on the future, and positioning your business to take advantage of it.

That’s what gets me up every day because that’s what strategy fundamentally is and you’ve got to have a point of view. It might be wrong, but having that point of view allows you to design activity to the best of your data, knowledge, abilities, intuition, teams, ideas, and move forward decisively against it. Don’t hedge your bets, don’t place 100 chips.

But get some balance to the risk. It can’t all be long-term. It can’t all be short-term. Can’t all be big. It needs to be a balance and give it time so that wave one funds wave too, and that’s all embodied in the book. And a couple hours of your time, it will tell you, really what we’re all about and how we think, how we act. And again, deliver a lot of value.

Patrick: I think what’s great about this is that you’re sharing your vision and your overview, theoretically and conceptually of this very big topic. And I think for anybody that’s considering Alchemy-Rx, have a look at that book to get an idea. Because then you can go from concept into execution, and you don’t have to go through a learning curve on everything, because you can kind of see your overall direction on that.

And you know, that’s why I really appreciate having you out here, because there are a lot of owners and founders out there that are looking for moving to the next level. This is one area they can do it and unless you’re immersed in marketing, or immersed in all of this all the time, you have nowhere to turn.

Otherwise, you’re going to turn to some big institution where you will be underserved and overcharged. And I think you’re in this realm, which I think is great, and also the market with family offices to get them to a sustainable next level, I think is fantastic. Mark Tarchetti from Alchemy-Rx, how can our audience members find you?

Mark: Two key ways. I spend a ton of my time just networking, chatting to people, sharing stories, hearing from people. So please feel free to reach out to me. It’s Mark@alchemyrx.com and if you go to www.alchemyrx.com you have all of our thought leadership, our content, our blogs. Tell you all about the firm. It’s all there in a one-stop shop.

So either way, feel free to reach out to me. I’m always looking to listen and learn and build my network. And feel free to see what the broader team is, who they are, what we do, who we work with. That’s all kind of answered on the website. Maybe more succinctly than I’m able to do. So feel free to have a look there.

Patrick: It’s just another view and another element of business that we weren’t exposed to. And Mark, I really appreciate you. So Mark Tarchetti from Alchemy-Rx, thank you again for joining us.

Mark: Thanks, Patrick. Great to see you.