Executive Onboarding

Executive Onboarding
during the first Balkan war, the chewing gum producer
Dandy/STIMOROL decided to open sales affiliates in some of the
Eastern and Central European markets. At the age of 26, I was
given the opportunity to become General Manager of one, and
later, a handful of those markets. The product portfolio
(STIMOROL chewing gum) had been sold through a local
distributor for a couple of years and was stuck with low singledigit
market shares. My task was to build a full-blown subsidiary
with its own sales and marketing organization – and to win
market share. Being young, naive and eager to be successful, I
lacked experience and, at first, did not possess all the necessary
competencies and skills for the job (coming directly from
academia). However, what I lacked in experience and certitude, I
made up for in creativity and willingness to learn. One of my first
objectives in the job was to create one or two early wins that could
earn me respect among the employees, customers and
competitors. I decided first to target the competition as we were
being dealt serious blows from them – particularly the marketleading
competitor. This market-leading competitor had been on
the market approximately 15-20 years before STIMOROL and
commanded a market share of approximately 70% (numeric and
value) – the remaining being shared between STIMOROL and a
handful of other local and international brands. The market leader
was known to be a tough player and was, at the time of my start,
whipping up significant obstacles to the growth prospects of
STIMOROL by systematically removing our chewing gum displays
at the cash register of the retail outlets. The displays were, in fact,
the property of STIMOROL, but with four times as many people on
the ground, this did not seem to discourage the market leader
from pursuing this activity. To mend the situation, one of the first
things I did was to seek a dialog with the country manager of the
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