Scientific Method

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As Seen in CFO Studio Magazine Q4 2015 Issue Cover Story

TAKING INSPIRATION FROM AGRISCIENCE, CFO BERRY BIER IS TRIMMING, TENDING, AND GROWING BAYER’S U.S. SUBSIDIARY TO REAP REWARDS

BY JULIE BARKERScreenshot (41)

In August of 2014, when the corn was high and ambitious American political figures were already jetting in and out of Iowa prior to the first big test in the 2016 election race, Bayer Corporation CFO Berry Bier made his own trip to the state. He, too, was interested in meeting Iowa farmers face-to-face, but his purpose differed significantly from the politicians’. They were testing the waters for presidential runs. Bier, plucked 10 months earlier from the global headquarters of Bayer AG in Leverkusen, Germany, to become CFO of the Pittsburgh, PA–based U.S. organization, wanted to meet customers and find out from them how growers use Bayer CropScience products. For Bier, such exchanges were every bit as important as a politician’s pressing of the flesh.

The growers he met showed him two side-by-side plots of corn. One was treated with Bayer Sonata™, a biological product, and the other was untreated. The first exhibited green-husked corn bursting with kernels, and it demonstrated to Bier that Bayer was creating value for its customers. He could now better imagine how the businesses in which Bayer invests are improving lives and livelihoods.

That trip came just prior to an extraordinary period, during which Bier was responsible for spinning off part of Bayer. CFOs often have the opportunity to help shape their company through M&As or divestment, but Bier had a high-profile carve-out to accomplish on a short deadline. In achieving his goal, he found it useful to look up from the flowcharts and spreadsheets and envision … cornfields.

Bier and his carve-out team were fundamentally renewing the 150-year-old Bayer’s focus on life sciences: health care and crops.

Shaping the Company

On Oct. 30, 2014, just one year into his new job, Bier was given the task of spinning off one of Bayer’s three major product areas, MaterialScience. This would leave HealthCare (pharmaceuticals for humans and animals) and CropScience (including crop protection products, growth stimulants, and seeds that need less water or that are pesticide resistant). MaterialScience, which makes high-tech polymers, would then no longer compete for resources with the two other business areas. Though it would remain a subsidiary of Bayer AG, MaterialScience, with the new name of Covestro, would be removed from the U.S. corporation entirely and would have its own access to capital markets. (Subsequently, 31 percent of Covestro has been floated on the German stock market.)

Bier took up his role as project leader, and was given two months to clear the first hurdle: executing the legal separation by a Jan. 1 deadline. The target date for the spin-off to begin operating separately was Sept. 1, 2015. Bier calls this assignment one of the biggest challenges of his career. “You are separating about a third of your sales,” he says. “If we are a $50 billion company and you spin off $15 billion of that, that’s a big undertaking. Such a company needs a fully fledged organization.”

He had to divide functions across the whole company, including finance, HR, communications, IT, supply chain, procurement, and sales. He says, “That’s a huge task, but also really exciting.” In addition, he had to start the registration process and transfer contracts with suppliers and customers.

He began by assembling a team, building project plans and a timeline, and then moving on to execution. At that point, the team had to “deliver on all these different action items, and there [were] always things coming up. So you have to be very flexible and pragmatic to solve these things.”

Among these difficulties: reluctance on the part of some suppliers to shift their agreements with Bayer to Covestro. “We had to find ways to convince them, and we had to find ways both companies can operate separately as of Sept. 1,” he says. He praises the spirit of cooperation on his team from day one. But as project leader, when tough choices have to be made, “you have to make a decision.” The team can only do so much.

As he was heading up the project to carve out MaterialSciences, Bier was simultaneously part of the steering committee for the integration of a $14.2 billion acquisition. That process had begun in April 2014, when Bayer beat another bidder to acquire Merck’s Consumer Care business, which includes Claritin®, Coppertone®, Dr. Scholl’s®, and MiraLAX®. Added to Bayer’s aspirin juggernaut, the brands would significantly strengthen the company in its HealthCare area. The integration continued until the end of June 2015 and, depending on how it is measured, established Bayer as either the No. 1 or No. 2 company in the U.S. non-prescription medicines market.

The company’s new profile makes Bayer highly reliant on its pharmaceutical products for earnings. It has best-selling drugs for hypertension, cancer, and hemophilia, among other categories. But the pharmaceuticals industry, Bier says, is a “risky business.” This is especially true of companies that are in a stage of their business life cycle where they have numerous successful products and high growth but are nearing a critical moment in their history, when an important patent will expire and “you lose a significant part of your sales,” he says.

Now that Bayer is solely a life-sciences company, having “cut off [its] chemical legs,” the CFO says more M&As will almost surely occur. To explain why, Bier points to the hard realities of developing a pharmaceutical product: It can easily cost $1 billion to $2 billion to bring a new drug to market, says Bier, and the drug’s patent subsequently expires in as few as 10 years.

Creating Value by Being Partners

Bier says the most challenging part of his position is not, as one might expect, working out a complex funding structure or working through tax issues. Rather, he contends, it’s the process of developing “a high-performing organization that is constantly able to respond to the challenges coming from the outside world onto the business, and that has the capability to create value by what it is doing.”

He says, “The real challenge is having an organizational setup with creative spirit but that also has the capability of being great business partners.”

In the past two years, he has worked to bring that type of mindset to his own organization through the recruitment of top business-school students from the likes of New York University, Duke University, and Carnegie Mellon University; through high-performance workshops; and through training in soft skills, such as delivering constructive feedback up- and downwards.

Although innovation is the lifeblood of a company developing pharmaceuticals, Bier can’t budget for development of a specific cancer treatment. He says, it’s more like this: “You know you have so much product in the market generating so much sales, and a certain portion of that you’re willing to spend for your R&D.” Certainly there are benchmarks on R&D spending, but Bayer doesn’t attempt to create all its products from scratch. Instead, like most pharma companies, it spots opportunities to acquire small, entrepreneurial firms. (See “Funding the Future” at right, for more on Bier’s strategy regarding R&D.)

Two Years In

Bier brought his family — his wife, Gudrun, to whom he has been married for more than 20 years, and two sons, now 12 and 13 — to Pittsburgh two years ago, from Cologne, Germany. “It’s great to see how well the family adjusted to the new environment,” he says. He’s passionate about his family and credits them with centering him and giving him the mettle to perform in the C-suite of a top global corporation.

There, Bier has not just a stake, but a big role in building the company. He was heavily involved during 2014 in designing the current strategy, together with the U.S. leadership team. That strategy relies on acquisitions, R&D partnerships, and the funding of promising new products. In pharma, you can’t think of your next breakthrough discovery as the product that will bring you growth in the 2020s, he says. You have to view that drug as just a way “to make up for the loss” when another wonder drug you’ve funded loses patent protection.

In Grinnell, IA, Bier recalls that he was amazed at the stark difference in appearance between treated and untreated crops. In the Crop Protection area of Bayer’s business, says Bier, “increasing yields to ensure that growers can meet their targets” is perfectly aligned with the company’s mission, Science for a Better Life. “We can help to meet nutritional demands and feed the world today and in the future,” he says.

The potential for significant ups and downs in the company’s chief areas of concentration — pharmaceuticals and food production — suggest that there will be little stability in the months to come. Bier, though, seems unconcerned. He says that the most exciting part of being a CFO is having the opportunity to focus on both the near-term and long-term planning for the company.

It’s his job, Bier says, to create value. To do that, a CFO must “understand what the success factors of the business are, and then think about how you can contribute to that.” Sometimes that means walking around a cornfield and having all the pieces fall into place.

 

Architects of Decision-making

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As Seen in CFO Studio Magazine Q1/Q2 2016 IssueScreenshot (39)

Architects of Decision-making

Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, coined two terms to describe decision-making methodology. System 1 is quick, instinctive, and often emotionally based. System 2 is slow, logical, and methodical. Although today’s C-suite executives are often pressured by workload and time constraints to adopt the System 1 approach, it is the deliberate, analytical System 2 method that prevents snap judgments and poor decision-making.

John Beshears and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business Review use the term Decision Architect to describe the C-suite executive’s role in decision-making. Using the System 2 approach requires cognitive effort, but the results are a strong foundation for sound decision-making. The three main steps to System 2 include:

(1) Define the Problem. Determine exactly what data is needed to get a clear understanding of the issue. Make no assumptions.

(2) Diagnose Underlying Causes. Have poor decisions been made by managers? If so, it is usually due to one of two underlying causes: insufficient motivation and/ or cognitive biases. Identify these.

(3) Design the Solution. Structure how information and options are presented to managers to encourage good decision-making.

The methodical approach to System 2 thinking helps C-suite executives to be the architects of sound, logical decision-making, which then filters down to the rest of an organization.

Retail Strategy

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As Seen in CFO Studio Magazine Q1/Q2 2016 Issue

CREATING A STRATEGIC PLAN AND SELLING IT TO STAKEHOLDERS CAN BE A COMPLEX YET REWARDING PROCESS

BY JULIE BARKER

In 2012, Ulta Beauty, a retail business carrying everything beauty-related— from mass cosmetics to high-end anti-aging creams and services for hair, brows, and skin—had come to a fork in the road, according to CFO Scott Settersten. “We were executing well in areas to drive revenue growth, such as building new stores and adding exciting new products, but we had not taken a holistic view of what investments in people, process, and systems would sustain those revenue-driving tactics and a healthy business over the long term.”

Settersten, who had been with the company since 2005, was appointed Acting Chief Financial Officer in October 2012, when the CFO resigned. Settersten got the CFO job permanently in March 2013. The CEO’s office was also in transition that year; current CEO Mary Dillon came aboard that July. So, late that year, the new leadership team undertook to create a long-term strategic plan.

Investor expectations did not necessarily align with “how the business was actually operating,” nor with “what we thought we really needed to do to support the long-term health of the company,” says Settersten.

The Process

Rather than bring in a consultant like McKinsey or Bain to direct, develop, and craft a strategy, Bolingbrook, IL–based Ulta Beauty developed its own hybrid model with a small internal strategy group that reports up through Finance. They brought in a third party to help facilitate the strategy development with the senior team at various touch points throughout the process. “Senior management was going to own the strategy-development process, because at the end of the day, we were the ones who would have to implement it,” says Settersten. “As a leadership team, we needed to better define What is Ulta Beauty? What do we stand for? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our business model? Then we needed some external subject-matter experts to help us think about competition, our positioning in the marketplace, what the future of retail and beauty might look like from a guest [Ulta Beauty’s term for customer] perspective, and how consumer expectations might also change.”

Brand partners spoke to the group about the beauty category and the competition and where they saw future growth levers. Other subject-matter experts helped the group think through real estate strategies and how to meet guest expectations on the e-commerce side.

The company had been growing rapidly for many years, both through opening new stores and e-commerce growth of 40 to 50 percent each year. “You’re so focused on managing the day-to-day business to support the high growth that you don’t often have time to sit back and think about the future. At the same time, we had made certain assumptions about business drivers that had never been formally tested,” says Settersten.

For example, Ulta Beauty’s now roughly 875 stores include full-service salons, and provide brow and skin services as well. “We had theorized that guests using our service offerings were our most valuable, because of the repeat nature of the service business and the retail product attachment. But we didn’t fully understand how much each guest spent at Ulta Beauty on an annual basis or exactly what types of products they purchased. We also wanted to determine what percentage of our guests used our services and what we could do to get more of our loyalty members to try our services —a huge opportunity.”

The strategy group led the leadership team through a fact-finding exercise, which included a review of historical operating metrics and a deep dive into Ulta Beauty’s data-rich loyalty program. Then Ulta Beauty’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team, which also reports to Settersten, got involved, gathering future-looking data from the business units. “We believe it works best for us to have the linkage between strategy and FP&A under the Finance umbrella,” he says. “You eliminate confusion and inefficiencies when everyone is using the same numbers and metrics, and it makes it much easier to link past performance with future financial targets.”

Finally, with the strategy group facilitating, senior leadership created six “strategic imperatives.” These spelled out what future growth would depend upon, from acquiring new guests and deepening loyalty with existing ones, to investing in infrastructure to support growth. And then the team agreed to a timeline to communicate the strategy to its stakeholders.

Countdown to Investor Day

“During the one-year-plus window, job No. 1 for me, the CEO, and our Vice President of Investor Relations, was to manage investor expectations,” says Settersten. “Oftentimes the word ‘investment’ carries a negative connotation to investors, especially when the company’s share price is based on a high earnings multiple.”

In each of the quarterly earnings calls and in meetings with investors during this period, the company fielded questions about the type of investments needed, how much they would cost, and what the implications were to the long-term financial guidance. “We can’t share that with you until we complete the strategy work,” Settersten told them. He promised that the leadership team would announce the complete financial picture at an Investor Day in the Fall of 2014— the company’s first such event.

Some of the investments would be large, such as the cost to reengineer Ulta Beauty’s supply chain, including several new distribution centers with IT systems to help the company better forecast and more rapidly replenish the more than 20,000 products it stocks in each of its stores. These investments would involve, too, large down payments, so there would be short-term deleverage in the profit-and-loss statement in order to capture long-term operating efficiencies.

“We were concerned with how investors would react,” says Settersten. “Of course, we believed the good news was that these investments would improve the guest experience and make us a stronger and more profitable business over the long term.”

Ulta Beauty’s Board of Directors was uneasy too. (See sidebar at right to learn how Settersten worked to calm their fears.) With management and the Board aligned, the investor communications were finalized. The Investor Day was held in Chicago in October 2014, and management’s presentations, including Settersten’s summary of investments, benefits, and long-term financial outlook, were well received. Wall Street’s response was very positive. The verdict? Ulta Beauty’s growth story was strong and clearly communicated.

Ulta Beauty’s stock price soon reached all-time highs. Recently the company’s stock price was in the $185 range, which Settersten attributes to the team’s successful execution against a well-constructed and -communicated long-term strategic plan.

Meanwhile, he and his team have quickly refocused on ensuring the strategy process becomes part of the company’s day-to-day operating activities and now are engaged in a long-term strategy refresh. Ulta Beauty, thanks to the exercise of creating a long-term strategic plan, has a good sense of what it takes to be effective in 21st century retailing.

Copyright 2017