Each of our business segments provide different experiences and challenges. By navigating your career through roles in two or more of our segments (i.e. Petcare, Food, Mars Wrigley, MGS, Vet Health), you open yourself to broaden your understanding of the Mars business through exposure to different business models, brands, and customers.
I have been able to work within Mars Wrigley, Food and Pet Nutrition and each segment has its own unique feel, strategies, opportunities and challenges – it helps you become a better finance leader by being able to navigate different businesses and the economics of how to maximize value creation
Cross segment experience is invaluable as you can learn about different business models, categories and how to maximize value in very diverse businesses across Mars, Inc. Further, cross-segment experience allows a finance Associate to learn very diverse differences in terms of products, supply chains, route to market strategies, customers and consumer behaviors. Working at Mars with such diverse businesses and categories allows you to expand your knowledge base and influence, and makes you not just a better finance Associate, but a better business leader.
After 6 years within Mexico’s Pet Nutrition business, I joined the Wrigley business as CFO. Three years later, as result of the Mars Wrigley integration, the Chocolate category was added to my career experiences.
The key learnings from this journey include perspective, business acumen, the possibility of being part of different Regions with different ways of working, profitability stages, category dynamics, strategies -from being leaders/followers-, OD structures, business sizes, etc. This experience diversity is a key enabler to become stronger professionals and improves the decision making skills.
Adaptation is always a challenge. Staying open to new solutions, strategies, etc. after being successful in any given environment is challenging. It´s very tempting to use the same tool for every single problem. The key is to stay open and learn from those who know regardless the context you join (of course connecting the dots help too!).
Cross segment experiences diversity has shown me that you have to use different approaches according to the context (and empowered me with the right ones to improve my success probabilities). It broaden my knowledge of the Mars business, and made me a stronger leader.
I have been lucky to work across most CPG segments. I started in Chocolate Supply Chain in the UK before moving to cover Petcare in Poland as the CFO. I then returned to the UK as Chocolate CFO including Global Retail. I am currently in probably the most diverse segment role in Multisales where I cover all segments including KIND across 50+ differing countries.
Mars has a very diverse portfolio in the segments we operate in and choosing where to invest to drive growth to maximise value creation is sometimes difficult as there is never enough funds to do everything. This is common across all my roles and requires you to understand the differing market dynamics and align with the leadership team and functions where to get the best return. I also believe we have iconic brands where we need to focus on growing our core through a combination on physical and mental levers and adapt out market strategy to our consumers and learn from our competitors.
Moving to differing segments where the businesses operate differently means you have to quickly adapt. On top of that our portfolio is complex with differing focus in all our various markets. So you need to use your intellectual horsepower and your change agility to quickly embed yourself into differing ways of working so you can best support the business. I have also needed to quickly develop great working relationships across the functions to ensure we make the best decisions based on the data that we have. The data is rarely complete so you need to use your experience, understanding the diverse market specifics plus the differing roles of portfolio to get to ultimately the correct decision for Mars.
Working in the different segments and geographies massively accelerated my perspective across business models, portfolio, culture and people. This experience then allows you to have a broader range of solutions to issues that arise plus a enlarged group of stakeholders who you can connect with for help. It has also allowed me to build knowledge across the differing segments and share best practice across more units which ultimately allows us to generate more value. I also think it has allowed me to better understand Mars and how the role and unit I’m in plays in a broader context. Working with the best people in differing segments has helped me develop by learning from them.
The Breadth layer is about having a variety of experiences. It’s about becoming more comfortable with the way we do business whether in a new country or in a new segment. Experience in this layer empowers Associates to make credible and informed decisions and create value for the business.
Experiences expand your business acumen; they help you understand how Mars works as an organization. In this layer you can demonstrate your ability to make strategic choices and create value in a variety of situations and scenarios. Successful experience in this may demonstrate that you can manage better business outcomes.
The People layer gives you experience in people management, a critical capability for managers and leaders across the organization. If you wish to manage large scale teams, significant experience will be required as part of this people layer.
Gaining experience across Finance pillars will help Associates gain perspective, business understanding and be more credible when making decisions. You build functional skills by gaining experiences in at least two of the three job families within the Finance function (i.e. Innovative Business Partnering, Smart Financial Operations, Enhanced Specialized Services) as well as some experience in the Digital space.
The Breadth layer is about having a variety of experiences. It is about becoming more comfortable with the way we do business whether in a new country or in a new segment. Gaining this experience empowers Associates to take more credible and informed decisions and understand where the value comes from. Some of these experiences can be checked off simply by working in project teams that are cross-segment, cross-country, or within different types of business models (i.e. Mature vs Emerging markets, CPG vs Retail, DTC or Services business, Shared services business).
