Brindisa
Company Name: Brindisa
Sector: Spanish wholesale and retail, tapas restaurants
Owner Type: Management
Background Information
Brindisa imports the most extensive and exclusive range of high quality Spanish foods to Britain. As well as supplying the UK’s top delis, food halls and restaurants, it also has its own shop at Borough Market and three tapas kitchens in London.
At the point when GBI were engaged, Brindisa had enjoyed several years of strong growth but, like many entrepreneurially-run businesses, had not adapted its structure to manage that growth and was facing new challenges due to the difficult economic environment.
Causes
Reduced spend by commercial customers, reduced consumer consumption for high-end products.
No clearly defined strategy and no formal competence assessment to ensure that the company had the right people with the right skills for the right jobs in order to ensure sustainable growth in a difficult economic climate.
Turnaround
The key systems and processes designed and built to deliver the turnaround were as follows:
3-5 year strategic direction: GBI worked with the owner, the directors and all of the staff of the wholesale business to develop, agree and define a 3-5 year strategic direction.
Internal competence diagnostic: GBI proposed the structure, skills and competences required to realise the strategy, and then conducted an internal competence diagnostic.
Organisation design: GBI designed an organisation structure that had the product and customer in the centre, and the customer supported by finance and logistics. This organisation design allows for growth and replication to other markets. It also allowed for a more streamlined process to reduce labour costs.
Workforce re-alignment: GBI helped re-structure Brindisa to focus on growth and position the business for sustainable profitability.
Outcome
GBI redesigned the organisation for growth, formalising and defining several functions that had been driven by instinct and judgement, rather than analysis. Proposed a new, more open structure to improve communications.
Each function in the company was looked at carefully before unifying all of the functions to work as a strong team and ensure operational optimisation. Today, Brindisa has a clear strategy with a focused team and has kept and reinforced the core values that have given it market leadership in Spanish foods.
