Interim Chief Growth and Partnerships Officer — Integration (Consumer and Retail)

Who gets to set a price

In most consumer businesses, pricing authority is spread thinner than anyone admits. A promotion is agreed in one market, a partner discount in another, a channel-specific list price somewhere else, and each looks sensible on its own. The Interim Chief Growth and Partnerships Officer is appointed to make that authority explicit. Under the Group Chief Executive Officer, the officer will decide which pricing and channel choices sit with local leaders, at what threshold a decision moves to the group, and what commercial evidence every decision must carry. This is executive authority, not counsel.

Partnerships judged on contribution, not volume

Partnerships and channels are where growth is easiest to buy and hardest to measure. A new marketplace or distributor can add revenue that looks impressive until fulfilment, returns and service are counted. The officer will review inherited partnership and channel commitments against their full economics and decide which carry on and which do not. A partnership proposal that leaves a cost or a risk sitting with a team that never agreed to it will be stopped, and a request to invest in a channel will be declined if it cannot show who will actually trade through it, what it depends on in the supply chain and systems, and what the business loses if it disappoints.

Settling disputes before money moves

Growth roles generate friction with operating leaders, and when the Group Chief Executive Officer and a market head disagree over a promotion or a partner deal, the officer is expected to settle it before the money goes out, not after. The leadership structure for growth and partnerships, and the path by which exceptions travel upward, are the officer's to approve.

Pricing rights first, one standard by month 24

Inside ninety days, the officer and the Group Chief Executive Officer should have agreed pricing and channel decision rights, the thresholds that govern partnerships and a single accountable lead for each commercial exception. By month nine, the inherited partnership and channel commitments should have been through review, and those with nobody accountable or no credible downside case will have been held or ended. By month 24 a single pricing and channel standard should be operating across markets, with the board seeing it at regular intervals and successors developed to carry it forward.

A growth leader with the stomach to say no

We expect your commercial growth record to come from a business with no less than $665 million in revenue, 2,100 people and operations in four countries. Your experience of geographic expansion, platform pivots and succession will be examined closely, and so will the way you kept the story told to a board tied to what the operating numbers showed while markets were being added. Commercial economics is the capability that matters most, at level 4: you understand contribution after every cost a channel carries, not just gross margin. At level 3 we look for revenue architecture, for channel partnerships, and for handling a board and its stakeholders. You have laid a contested downside to a chief executive without softening it, and you stay answerable after the decision, including for the dull work of closing commercial exceptions one by one.

Pricing questions, asked four ways

Week one is spent on screen, in confidence, with the Group Chief Executive Officer, talking about how you would bring pricing and channel authority into the open. A fortnight later, in week three, you sit down with the Board Chair to work a problem through. In week five you face, in person, an executive panel spanning every function, pressing on how your pricing rules would land in their operations. The final stage, in the seventh week, puts you in front of the full board. Our response follows every stage within two working days, in writing.