Balancing the best parts of DCC’s entrepreneurial spirit and the benefits of scale: new CEO Michael Hughes joins HBI Health & Beauty Innovations and reveals his vision for the business
“I’ve worked for large public companies where you have the stability, systems and tools, but taking decisions can be as slow as molasses. And I’ve worked on the private equity side where we made decisions in an instant daily and we were off to the races, but those companies would rarely invest in the longer term because of the goal to be sold in five years,” says Michael Hughes, CEO at HBI Health & Beauty Innovations.
“We have the best of both worlds at DCC,” he says. “We not only have stability and the benefits of scale, we also have leaders who run their businesses with an entrepreneurial spirit. It’s challenging to keep those two things alive. That’s part of the job – I’m learning to balance the best parts of both,” says Michael, who stepped up to his new role at HBI Health & Beauty Innovations this April after a 25-year career in personal care manufacturing, mostly in the US.
He’s enthusiastic about the investment in new processes, ingredients and formats that DCC’s financial heft enables. “I like to think of us as an innovation company first, that just happens to manufacture exceptional products afterwards” he says. The backing of a leading sales, marketing and support services group means the HBI Health & Beauty Innovations team can focus on high quality and service, and work as a trusted partner for some of today’s most successful health and beauty brands. And the scale of the group means they can take the long view on investing to build capability in areas like sustainability.
How DCC uses sustainability to stand out
One of the HBI Health & Beauty Innovations businesses, HBI Thompson & Capper in Runcorn, recently tackled its Scope 3 emissions, for example, figuring out the amount of carbon embodied in its upstream and downstream supply chain.
“We funded an extensive study to calculate the carbon footprint of every ingredient in all the products we make on behalf of our customers at HBI Thompson & Capper. Now we’re pooling that data to learn across the business so, at some point in the future, when a customer briefs us on a new product, instead of going back to them with ‘Here’s the formula and here’s the price,’ we can also tell them: ‘Here’s the carbon footprint. And here are two or three alternatives that provide the same benefit to the end consumer but with lower carbon,’” says Michael. “They can use this as a selling point, and hit their sustainability targets,” he adds. “It will be a driver of our growth in years to come.”