Sell, Sell, Sell — Then What?

Why Growth Without Strategy Is the Biggest Risk in Food Ingredients

I had a conversation recently with a senior commercial leader at a PE-backed food ingredients business. 

It was one of those calls that started as a catch-up and turned into something much more revealing about the state of the sector right now.

He didn’t hold back. 

The business had grown. 

Revenue was up. 

The team was delivering. 

But underneath the numbers, something wasn’t right. His words have stuck with me since…

“We’ve built a culture of sell, sell, sell - but nobody’s asking where all this selling is actually taking us.”

It’s a line I’ve heard variations of more times than I can count in the past 12 months. And it points to something the food ingredients sector needs to confront honestly: revenue growth without strategic direction isn’t progress. 

It’s a treadmill. 

And at some point, the belt stops.

The “sell, sell” culture and where it comes from

Let’s be fair, there’s nothing wrong with a strong commercial culture. 

In food ingredients, the businesses that win tend to be the ones closest to their customers, fastest to respond, and most aggressive in pursuing new accounts. 

That energy is valuable. It’s what keeps the lights on.

But there’s a difference between a commercially driven culture and a commercially dependent one. 

When “sell more” becomes the answer to every question, how do we grow? Sell more. How do we hit this quarter’s target? Sell more. How do we impress the new owners? Sell more. 

You’ve stopped building a business and started running a treadmill.

I see this pattern most acutely in PE-backed food ingredients businesses, and there’s a structural reason for that. When a business changes ownership, the new investors need to see growth. 

That’s understandable. 

But the pressure to show attractive numbers quickly can create incentives that work against long-term strategic thinking. Revenue gets pulled forward from future quarters to make the current period look strong. Targets get stacked month on month to cover shortfalls. Before long, the commercial team isn’t selling to build the business - they’re selling to fill holes.

And when that becomes the operating rhythm, it’s only a matter of time before the wheels come off.

What gets lost when strategy takes a back seat

The most immediate casualty is clarity of direction. 

I regularly speak with commercial leaders in food ingredients who can tell me exactly what their revenue target is this quarter, but can’t articulate where the business is supposed to be in three years. 

That’s not a failure of those individuals. 

It’s a failure of the organisation to provide a strategic framework that gives the selling a purpose beyond the next set of numbers.

Without that framework, several things tend to happen. Innovation slows down because R&D gets pulled into servicing today’s customers rather than building tomorrow’s pipeline. Talent starts to disengage because high-calibre people, particularly at senior commercial level, want to feel they’re building something, not just firefighting. And the business becomes increasingly fragile, because when your entire model depends on the next sale, one bad quarter can create a crisis of confidence that cascades through the organisation.

I’ve also noticed a more subtle effect. 

In businesses where the culture is relentlessly short-term, the quality of decision-making at C-suite level starts to deteriorate. 

Strategic hires get delayed because this quarter’s numbers take priority. 

Market entry plans get shelved because nobody has bandwidth to think beyond the current pipeline. 

Partnerships and potential acquisitions that could transform the business get parked because the leadership team is too consumed by the operational treadmill to lift their heads.

The private equity dynamic - accelerant or constraint?

I want to be careful here because I’m not anti-PE. Far from it. I actually work directly with a number of PE firms. I’ve seen private equity ownership transform food businesses for the better - bringing discipline, capital, governance, and access to networks that founder-led businesses often lack. 

The best PE operators understand that sustainable value creation requires strategic investment alongside commercial execution.

But I’ve also seen the other side. 

New owners who are still learning the food ingredients business model, applying playbooks from other sectors that don’t quite translate. Transition periods where the C-suite is so focused on managing upward, demonstrating value to the new board, that they lose connection with the operational reality of the business. 

And perhaps most damagingly, a tendency to confuse activity with progress. 

Revenue went up? Great. 

But did the business actually get stronger, or did it just get busier?

The leaders I speak with who navigate this best are the ones who have the confidence to push back. To say to their board: here are the numbers, but here’s also the context. Here’s what’s working and what isn’t. Here’s the honest picture, and here’s the plan. 

That kind of transparency requires a certain type of leadership, and frankly, a certain type of board. But it’s the only way to build something that lasts beyond the current reporting period.

The talent cost nobody’s counting

Here’s the part that hits closest to home for me, given what I do every day. 

When a business operates in permanent sell mode without a strategic anchor, it becomes very difficult to attract and retain the best people.

Senior commercial hires - the people who can genuinely move the needle don’t just want a target and a territory. They want to understand the strategy. They want to know what they’re building toward. They want to see that the leadership team has a plan that goes beyond this year’s budget. 

When that’s absent, the best candidates either don’t join or don’t stay.

And the bonus question is a real one. 

You hire talented commercial people with a compensation structure that’s partly base, partly performance-related. 

If the business then pulls revenue forward, restructures targets mid-year, or creates conditions where the pipeline can’t realistically deliver what was promised, you’ve broken the psychological contract. 

One year of missed bonuses might be tolerable if the explanation is credible. Two years, and your best people are taking calls from people like me.

The irony is that the businesses most dependent on a “sell, sell” culture are often the ones least able to afford losing their top sellers. 

It becomes a vicious cycle: the strategy deficit creates the talent risk, and the talent attrition deepens the strategy deficit.

What good looks like

The food ingredients businesses I see thriving right now - genuinely thriving, not just posting headline growth, tend to share a few characteristics.

They have a clear strategic narrative that the entire organisation can articulate, from the C-suite to the sales team on the ground. 

They invest in innovation with a three-to-five-year lens, not just a this-quarter lens. 

They bring genuine diversity of thought into their leadership teams, people from different geographies, different functional backgrounds, different industry experiences, because they know that a homogeneous C-suite tends to produce homogeneous thinking. 

And critically, they have the discipline to be honest about where they are, even when the numbers tell a flattering story on the surface.

None of that is incompatible with strong commercial performance. 

In fact, the businesses that get the strategic foundations right tend to sell more effectively, not less, because their commercial teams know what they’re selling toward and why it matters.

The question worth asking

If you’re leading a food ingredients business right now, or sitting on the board of one, the question I’d encourage you to ask isn’t “are we hitting our numbers?” It’s “what happens when the selling gets harder?”

Because it will get harder. 

Market conditions shift. 

Tariffs disrupt established trade routes. 

Key accounts consolidate. 

Competitors catch up. 

The businesses that survive those inflection points aren’t the ones that sold the hardest. They’re the ones that built something underneath the selling - a strategy, a culture and a team that could absorb the shock and keep moving forward.

Sell, sell, sell is a tactic. It’s not a strategy. And in a sector that’s evolving as fast as food ingredients, the gap between the two has never mattered more.

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This is part of my “Behind the Scenes” series, where I share insights from conversations with the leaders, founders, and operators shaping the future of food. If something here resonated, I’d love to hear your perspective.

Mike Meyrick 

Meyrick Consulting

Leadership Transformation | Food & Ingredients | Behind the Scenes