Today, I ran into a very awesome website called InPractise. InPractise is a treasure trove for nerds or curious minds like myself. It interviews folks, mostly former & current executives at major firms with tribal and insider knowledge as well as domain expertise, to shed light on great business insights, practices and strategies. The content is delivered in audio and text format, which I appreciate greatly as while I sometimes like to listen to interviews, taking my eyes away from the screen, I mostly consume content better by reading. For $20/month on a monthly basis or $200/year, subscribers gain access to 10+ interviews per month. If you do the maths, it comes down to $2 per interview, which is quite cheap for valuable insights. Another cool thing about InPractise is that they let you try it out for two weeks first for free without asking your credit card details.
I gave it a try today and have been spending hours reading the previous posts. I am talking about it here as a token of my appreciation to the website for letting me read their stuff for free for two weeks, even though I have every intention of becoming a subscriber already. Below are a few insights that I found very helpful
Aldi: Hard Discounter Business Model – With Former CEO of Aldi UK
Finally, as a hope, I would say, a discounter like Aldi when entering a market would prefer that its competition is stock market listed. Stock market listed companies have programs, management incentive schemes, which means that the management is not likely to react to a new threat until the last minute. They’re whole compensation package, what is expected of them as a management team, their contracts, their job descriptions are all based on maximizing shareholder value, maximizing profits.
Source: InPractise
Basically, we did everything out of those first 15 years to get ourselves what our goal was. Which is to match the quality level of the best-selling brands on the market. Now, some of that was easy. We could do it within four or five years. Some of it was dreadfully hard. You try making a KitKat even in a normal chocolate factory, which rivals a KitKat. It is really difficult to do. Either the chocolate mushes into the biscuit, or the biscuit is too hard and breaks your teeth. So on. It was really a journey to end up with a thousand products, which truly were rivals for the best-selling brands on the market under the private labels which the company was doing. Enormous fun. I never had a corporate lunch in 25 years because every midday, I was involved in testing product to see whether or not you could tell the difference between the Aldi version of Cornflakes and Kellogg’s. Or the Aldi version of Ketchup up and Heinz. Eventually, we got there. It was truly very difficult to tell the difference. That’s when you’ve got a business concept, which the majority of consumers will not turn their noses up at.
Source: InPractise
Scale means purchasing power with an individual supplier. You can’t have hundreds of suppliers all making one product and just selling it in different places. You actually have very few to start with one, maybe two or three in the future who are producing enormous scale. If you lost one of those, it’s an absolute catastrophe. First of all, it won’t be possible for the other suppliers, even if you have a dual supply, to make up another 50 percent overnight. Secondly, you run the risk that the quality is not the same.
Thirdly, you have the situation where your reputation is put at risk with companies that would have to make serious investment decisions to be able to make your private label to the same quality as brands. We were always incredibly protective over the suppliers. Quite actually forgiving when mistakes were made, so long as they weren’t made on a constant basis. Tried to be more than fair with that supply base. What does more than fair mean? To be people who agreed things on handshakes and don’t need 50-page contracts to endorse it. Secondly, to pay on time. The biggest single question every supplier will have about its retail partner is: Am I going to get the money for the product that I’ve put all the investment into and delivered to their warehouse 15/20/25/30 days, whatever the contract actually says, later. I will tell you, you’d have got fired in Aldi if you paid one day late. A CEO would get fired if he deliberately paid one day late a supplier.
Source: InPractise
After only a few years, most Aldi management can tell you exactly how long it will take to clean a store in minutes. How long it will take to merchandise a pallet. How long it will take to unload a truck. How long it will take to process a hundred customers through the cash registers. There are prizes given for people who can invent a small change to the business process that can quicken something up even if it’s only a few seconds because that few seconds is multiplied by thousands of stores and hundreds of days per year.
The final bill for this super, little idea is often worth an astronomic amount of money in terms of cost reduction. That’s the philosophy for which the business is built on. A nice little example. If you pick up a product, I don’t have one in front of me, but if you pick up a product and you show it to a normal food retailer, he will look at the colors. He will look at the messages that the product has on it. He will look at how beautiful this item is. He’s thinking how many of those I can sell. I’ll tell you, you put this product in front of any Aldi operating manager and the first thing he’ll look at is, how big is the barcode? If that doesn’t scan with one sweep of the arm across the cash register, that’s going to cost me money. That’s just one of a thousand examples I could give you of how this cost mentality is built in from day one.
Source: InPractise
Netflix Business Model & Economics – With Former Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Netflix
I’ll take the other side of it. I don’t think they want to move into it, nor do they need to for growth. I think to further saturate the US, they would probably move into news and sports more aggressively. They are growing just fine in the US and are growing even better internationally, so I don’t think they have to. I think they would do that as a distraction tax for a few reasons. If they were to move into news and sports, live is largely supported by advertising. Advertisers pay a premium and people don’t skip the commercials as much. Do they want to go out and build an ads sales force of hundreds and thousands of employees, insertion of dynamic ads, data which Facebook and Google have been collecting for years to do this at scale? It is beyond their focus right now, especially when they have this massive opportunity to take what they’ve already done and port that over to new countries with different content. They’re dabbling with news and sports and reality and other categories and they’ll push those. But you’ll see non-scripted, the reality competition shows they’re doing, before news and sports. Sports is extremely challenged and maybe that will shake out over the next three years, but I don’t see it as a near term focus.
On the question of whether Netflix should move into sports. Source: InPractise
The real question, if you look at more of a five-year view, is do they have pricing power domestically? I absolutely believe they do. They’re going to continue to accelerate their spend, the number of shows and categories such as unscripted theatrical movies they are investing in. I think that will, eventually, result in what Disney is now doing. Disney is experimenting with bringing a $30 super premium movie, like Mulan, which was supposed to go to theaters, and bringing it onto Disney Plus and expecting consumers to pay a regular subscription fee, plus $30 on top. Netflix would take that same movie, that is maybe on a par with Mulan or The Irishman, and give it to users for free.
Eventually, they are going to say, you are getting these movies at Disney – who are charging you $20 to $30 – so we are going to increase our price from $13 to $15. They are still not the price leader, as they are behind HBO Max which is $15. Netflix has a $15 price but its average user is not there, as they are on a lower tier. They have a chance to move people up those price tiers, but I don’t foresee that happening in the near term. They have that option when they choose to exercise it and I expect them to exercise it very diligently and thoughtfully.
Source: InPractise
Lidl in Ireland: from 0 to 12% market share in 20 years – With Former Head of Sales Organisation, Lidl Ireland
It is very difficult to give a percentage on that because it is a changing product group. Some items are discontinued and some are coming in, so every day or every week that changes, but probably around 10% to 15% as a rough guide. When you look at the shelf. you have your top shelf, middle shelf and bottom shelf. Sometimes there are four or five shelves, but the own brand will always be at eye level, first in flow. The brand will be on a shelf but always hidden. It might even be on the floor. I remember Nescafe coffee never ever made it off ankle height, but there’s a reason for that, that was always to promote the own brand and give it the best possible chance.
Source: InPractise
Minh Quang Duong 