The entrepreneurial journey is famously a bumpy one and Planet Organic founder Renée Elliott’s story is testament to that.

For her, seeing the vision for the business she founded interpreted (she prefers “eroded”) through other people’s priorities over the years has been “excruciating, infuriating…and exhausting”. But in 2023, Elliott returned to Planet, more than a decade after she and her husband stepped away from the company.

This unlikely “business fairytale” had an inauspicious start: a phone call informing her that Planet would be giving notice of administration in 30 minutes’ time.

In this week’s episode of Leadership Lessons, Elliott revisits that moment, the scramble to rescue the company, and the collective effort since to pull Planet “out of the mud back into the light”.

“There’s no magic bullet in retail, as any retailer will tell you,” she says. Instead there are “50 or 100 things” the company will need to do if it is to still meet its goal to return to profit this year.

It’s lucky, then, that the 30 years since the first Planet store opened in Westbourne Grove have taught Elliott a lot about resilience, which in her view starts with “care of self”.

Just as important is to “trust yourself”. If you’re having a tough time, Elliott says, there are many different ways in which you can respond. “But if you go into fear, panic about the future, or any kind of what I call contracted state, you go into stress and then you're not thinking your best; you're not accessing the knowledge and the answers and the intuition that you have inside of you.”

If, on the other hand, you can trust yourself, “that stress falls away and you're in a much better place to manage through difficult situations”.

*The interview with Renée Elliott was recorded in December 2024.

Credits:

Presenter: Antonia Garrett Peel

Producer: Inga Marsden

Artwork: David Robinson

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week’s episode of The Debrief, MT’s editorial team discusses whether Elon Musk is jeopardising the Tesla brand and what’s in store for the M&A market in 2025.

It’s official: the richest man on the planet is now the United States’ – and possibly the world’s – most powerful unelected bureaucrat. Twenty twenty-four was a key year in the ongoing metamorphosis of Elon Musk, as he threw his support behind Donald Trump and embraced populist politicians around the globe, while courting controversy at (nearly) every turn. But what does this all mean for the businesses he controls? We put Tesla sales under the spotlight and bring you some expert views on what the future holds for the EV maker.

Is the M&A market poised for an upturn? Bain & Company certainly thinks so. Its latest Global M&A Report explains why it has hopes for a rebound, and how businesses can set themselves up to harness positive momentum in the market. What’s for certain is that any good news couldn’t come soon enough, after last year saw deal value reach a historically low level as a percentage of global GDP, according to Bain. We bring you its reasons to be optimistic.

Links:

https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/elon-musk-jeopardising-tesla-brand/leadership-lessons/article/1905320

https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/m-a-market-poised-comeback-2025-headwinds-ease/indepth/article/1905223

Credits:

Presenters: Éilis Cronin and Antonia Garrett Peel

Producer: Inga Marsden

Artwork: David Robinson

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Negative feedback is a gift; it provides the “gems that make sure you improve what you're doing and take it to the next level”, says Zurich Insurance’s Conny Kalcher.

The chief customer officer of the more than 150-year-old company should know, having spent the last few years focusing on driving customer-centric business transformation at Zurich and, before that, at Lego, where she was instrumental in helping the brand to redefine its purpose, transforming it from a toy factory into a company that ‘tells stories’.

“It's important to embrace what customers are telling us, not try to explain it away or rationalise it, but really look it in the eye,” she says.

Customer expectations of the insurance industry have changed dramatically in recent years, partly because of the disruptive impact of insurtechs but also because of the impact of digital-first companies more generally.

“We could lean back and think we’re different, we’re insurance, but that’s a false truism because today it’s companies like Amazon and Netflix that set the standards,” says Kalcher. After all, if Amazon can deliver a parcel overnight why should you, as a customer of a legacy business, struggle to get your address changed or to get through to a human being on the phone?

For Kalcher, the solution to increasing customer expectations has been to help move Zurich away from being a transactional company to one that connects with customers on both a functional and emotional level.

This isn’t an easy ask for an insurance firm, which aren’t usually associated by consumers with being warm and fuzzy, but that’s part of the point for Kalcher, who claims that in this way the company is able to “surprise and delight, which is really the space we want to be in”.

And it’s a strategy that seems to be paying dividends. The company is growing faster than the market, product density is up (in other words people buy more products), and, perhaps most importantly, says Kalcher, customers are happier.

Credits:

Presenter: Claire Warren

Producer: Inga Marsden

Artwork: David Robinson

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.