• La Sirena, a frozen food retailer which has been successful in Catalunya and is migrating its business model to Madrid.
• Gebomsa, a leader in concrete pumping services.

Martin’s previous roles include:

• President, CEO and Deputy Chairman of Kayser-Roth Corporation – the world’s second largest hosiery manufacture, with annual sales of $340m (1994-1997).
  
• President and CEO of Gruma Corporation – which includes Mission Foods, the world’s largest direct-store-delivery tortilla and tortilla chip maker, with a 55% share of the US market (1997-2000).
• President of the Home Décor Division Europe of Newell Rubbermaid – running a subsidiary with annual revenue of $450m within a diversified global company that turns over $7bn a year (2001-2004).

During your career, you’ve revived the fortunes of many companies.  What advice can you give on turnaround situations?
Martin: The first thing is to act quickly – to dive in, understand the business and find out what’s going wrong.  You have to cover the basics, like financial and market performance, but you have to do it rapidly, so you can come up with a 90-180 day plan that has a sense of urgency.  The plan has to be very detailed – not just what needs to be done but who’s going to do it and how they’re going to be measured.  The plan needs to be sold – to shareholders and management – and it needs to be monitored.  Most importantly, it also has to be replaced by another plan once it’s expired.  A lot of business gurus place all the emphasis on the first six months of a recovery but a turnaround depends on a whole series of 180-day plans.

What part can a company’s existing management typically play in a turnaround?
Martin: To me, evaluating the strength of management is as important as evaluating the market.  You can come up with the best turnaround plan in the world but if the managers don’t get it, it isn’t going to happen.  In practice, I find I need to replace a significant number of the managers but not all of them.  Some managers won’t buy into the new direction and you have to have alternative resources lined up.  However, some existing managers will see where you’re heading, and their knowledge of the business, combined with their renewed enthusiasm, will often make them your most valuable players.  It’s easy to portray a clean sweep of management as some kind of ‘grand solution’ but most of the time, it isn’t.

Which of the turnarounds you’ve led has given you the greatest satisfaction?
Martin: My first turnaround sticks out in my mind, when I was put in charge of the Campbell Soup Company in Mexico.  I’ve managed bigger turnarounds since but my first one taught me a lot.  The company was making heavy sustained losses in an appalling macroeconomic environment – inflation over 100% and people losing purchasing power on a daily basis.  We asked consumers what would make their lives easier, and used the research to introduce a host of new products – supplementing our traditional range with additions like frozen vegetables that helped people lock in their food costs.  In five years we doubled sales, began generating solid profits and started exporting our product innovations to the US.  I applied a lot of the lessons I learned at Campbell’s to other companies, including Mission Foods, where I turned around a far bigger business that had been losing money for 20 years.

You have a great deal of experience in consumer products and food – what are some of the key success criteria in these sectors?
Martin: The list is long – clearly you need a sustainable cost advantage and a concept that others can’t replicate easily.  But I’d focus on two very simple basics – you have to solve real problems for real people, and you have to communicate benefits in a way that consumers will understand.  Salbatoneil, the frozen food business I’m chairing for 3i, is an excellent case in point.  It’s a one-stop shop for frozen meal solutions.  It has 650 products – they’re all great quality, so people don’t need to worry about choosing between different brands.  They have a long shelf life, they’re affordable and they come in convenient sizes for either single or family dining.  These are real, simple benefits that people can quickly grasp and value – the hard part can be making sure that they hear your message.

What are the key challenges you’re facing as you take Salbatoneil forward?
Martin: Essentially the challenge is to take a concept that’s been successful in Catalunya and replicate it in Madrid.  We already have just under 30 stores in Madrid but we aim to take this to over 100 during the next four years.  During 2006, we’ve put a lot of the groundwork in place.  We’ve addressed some efficiency issues in the existing stores to achieve strong like-for-like growth and resolve overstaffing issues.  At the same time, we’ve planned rigorously for the expansion – part of our unique offering is that our stores are close to people’s homes, so we’ve hired the guy who helped Carrefour develop its inner-city presence in Spain.  He and his team have located some great new sites for us in Madrid, at lower rentals than many of our existing stores.  Another aspect we’ve focused on is shifting consumer perceptions – we’ve been seen as expensive, but we’re not, so we’ve been quite aggressive in promoting our price offers.  Combined with some major product launches, I believe we’ve put the foundations in place to drive a very successful expansion in 2007.