Twins Laurence and Paul Olins, their younger brother Jonathan, and cousin Adam had already been working in the fresh produce industry for varying lengths of their careers before joining a Poupart business that was out on its feet in 1987.
They are members of a family that has been part of the fruit and vegetable mainstream since 1919, when the quartet’s grandfather, Louis Olins, opened wholesale firm Louis Reece in Spitalfields market. All four served at least part of their apprenticeship with the family firm. Laurence was first to enlist, in 1969, as, he claims, one of only two university graduates in the wholesale markets (the other being Nicholas Saphir). He was followed into the ranks by Paul, who decamped from the fledgling computer industry in 1971, before Jonathan ignored his father’s considered opinion that fresh produce was not for him, and left interior design in 1974. Adam, the youngest of the four, also tried his hand at another trade, working at Christie’s auctioneers, until becoming a salesman at Louis Reece in 1980.
Jonathan’s tale, in a way, speaks for all four men. “My father said to me, if you want to come into the business, you have to start at the bottom, sweeping the floor in the market,” he says. “I enjoyed interior design, but produce was in the blood - it had always been discussed round the dinner table, it was always part of our lives. I still get just as excited opening a box of fruit and seeing the quality - that was instilled in us by our fathers.”
Valuable lessons were learnt from the difficulties that the family-owned business faced. As many as 10 family members worked together at its peak, with six more brothers and cousins and 10 grandsons - the family did not have any grand-daughters - passing through the company, which was still run by the quartet’s fathers, Wally and Bernard, and uncle Sidney Garber. “As a middle-sized company that was essentially going nowhere, a third generation of the family entering the business made it more than a little overcrowded,” says Paul. “The industry was moving more into the supermarkets and to move up a level, we would have needed significant investment. The money just wasn’t there and, after a slow process initiated by Laurence and myself, Louis Reece was sold to the Glass Glover Group - one of the major players in fresh produce at the time, in 1985.”
The move enabled the family to raise finance and the second generation of the Olins family to retire. The third generation moved into a larger company looking to be groomed into the industry’s next generation of middle managers.
Laurence was divisional director of the company’s London sales office, Paul and Jonathan were in procurement, and Adam was responsible for the Sainsbury’s account.
In 1986, on the other side of town, Hillsdown Holdings, the highly acquisitive food conglomerate, was making one of its relatively rare errors. It bought Waltham Cross-based TJ Poupart from its management team. “It was bought more as a property deal, but I think Hillsdown was encouraged to move into produce by some of its bigger customers. They bought a pup of a business, with people who were throwing money out of the window, and they got ripped off even more,” says Laurence.
By chance, the chairman of Hillsdown Holdings bumped into an old acquaintance, Adam’s father Bernard, at the opera, and asked him to help the company out of the great big hole into which it had fallen. The answer: “Not me, but try my son,” laid the first foundation stone on which the last 20 years of Poupart have been built.
Adam and Laurence met with the Hillsdown chairman, Sir Harry Soloman, and agreed to put a team together to save the Poupart business and become minority shareholders in the restructured business. “It represented the coming together of two separate sets of needs,” says Laurence. “After a year with Glass Glover, it was fairly clear that the produce side of the business was heading for the rocks. It was a publicly listed company being run as a private fiefdom, in my opinion, and it wasn’t working.”
Adam recalls: “Harry Soloman gave us three months to have a look at the business and told us we could keep whatever we wanted, and they would deal with the rest. He encouraged us to look beyond the crap and have some imagination.” And Paul adds: “We were a group of young-ish men being given the opportunity to take our ideas to another business and have some control. For me, it was a complete no-brainer. There weren’t going to be any money shortages with Hillsdown; we just had to trust in our own attributes.”
Not everyone saw it that way, particularly within the trade. Laurence says: “Most people thought we were bonkers, including the other members of our family.” The first few months hardly helped to dispel that impression. “Every cupboard we opened, several skeletons fell out - and most of them were still moving and wanted to shake our hands,” he adds.
The Poupart business owned a packhouse and supplied supermarket customers, as well as being strong in the wholesale sector. Although the company as a whole was listing badly, it contained the odd pocket that was performing well, despite the general neglect. The new management inherited a number of long-serving and loyal employees. Ken Farrell, for example, was running a successful citrus supply into Waitrose, which remains with Poupart to this day. The company needed a clear-out. “We had to get rid of the senior management, and our first objective was to stop the company from shipping £1 million plus a year. That was the easy bit - within the first three months, we had stemmed the losses,” says Paul. Laurence adds: “I think a lot of the staff were just happy to see some professionalism coming back into the company - many had put their whole life into the business and were watching people throw it away.”
Once the ship had been righted, the next job was to cement the structure that would turn it into a major fresh produce player again. External help was at hand. “In 1989, Glass Glover was forced into liquidation, and we were able to take on a significant part of that collapsed company,” says Laurence. “We got a lot of business back that our family had serviced before - which was a big boost to us.”
In the same year, Mark Culley, then the marketing executive of an English apple co-operative, moved into the Poupart business, helping to establish OrchardWorld as a new, grower joint-venture alternative to marketing top fruit, sowing the first seeds of divisional specialisation across the Poupart Group. “They were looking for someone to market their crop for them, but we didn’t want to be a marketing company in the traditional way - we wanted to have the growers’ involvement as owners of the business,” says Laurence.
The grower has been the focal point of the business strategy for many years. “Right at the top of all of our agendas is the need to find ways to grow our supplier’s businesses,” says Laurence. “The vision is that we increasingly become a service company, providing new services that keep our growers ahead of the pack.” The OrchardWorld business has been fully owned by Poupart since 1994, when it was bought from Williamson’s Fruit Farms.
Meanwhile, Adam had expanded an embryonic berry business in Hampshire, and in 1994, the second specialist division sprung from a new involvement with soft-fruit grower Peter Vinson. BerryWorld was formed as a joint venture, modelled very closely on OrchardWorld.
By 1997, Poupart had been bought from Hillsdown by Argent Group Europe, another private investor in the food business, and the move worked well for the Olins management team, as Argent planned to continue with the existing structure of the company.
A planned phased exit from the wholesale markets was already well underway. “In the first 10 years, the wholesale business was the money-spinner and provided the cashflow that allowed us the time to see what else we’d got,” says Laurence.
“But we decided to focus on our strengths in supplying the supermarkets, and in 2000 we had closed the last of our five wholesale businesses and by 2004 also exited the foodservice sector. It has proven to be exactly the right decision.”
It was by no means goodbye to the wholesale markets though, as Jonathan manages Poupart Imports, a business set up in the early 1990s to supply produce into the markets and the burgeoning non-retail sector. That arm of the business currently turns over in excess of £25 million, and has been built around a wealth of wholesale market background and expertise.
Having invested heavily in the packhouse in Waltham Cross, which they owned, the company also divested itself of that facility, as it looked to home in on its core attributes - and move away from areas where it recognised it was harder for Poupart to add value. “We have positioned ourselves firmly as middlemen between our worldwide grower base and our UK customers,” says Laurence. “We have subcontracted out all of the activities that we weren’t best at.” He uses packing as an example. “Our English growers are more than capable of packing their own product, as well as our imported product when required. And when we need additional capacity, we have Cross & Wells to do that for us.
“The approach has evolved over 20 years. We have closed things down that didn’t work and opened up things that do - and it will continue to evolve.”
The Olins name sits alongside the Saphirs, Emanuels and Glasses in the produce world, but the third and now fourth generation of the family are setting new benchmarks. “Like many produce families, our ancestors started in the east end of London, and there were many second- and third-generation families working in Spitalfields and Covent Garden 30 years ago,” says Laurence. “One by one, those family businesses have disappeared, but we’re still here.”
“I think when you put any four completely different people together 20 years ago, you would not have expected them to still be together now,” says Paul, who heads up Poupart Citrus.
The influence of first Hillsdown and now Argent has been a crucial factor in that happening, they all agree. “If there is a secret, it’s the unique combination of majority outside ownership and family management,” says Paul. “We have the discipline of a public company and the benefits of a family business. Most people are surprised to learn that we don’t own the whole business, but that layer above has given us the freedom to run the business,” says Paul.
David Gray, who is that layer, was with Hillsdown Holdings for thirteen years years before it sold its meat and produce business to Argent, and made the switch with the sale. “He is sensitive to the family and the business,” says Paul. “And he really understands what we are trying to do. He has travelled with us, he knows our shippers and has immersed himself in the produce business. The layer also removes the need for the awkward personal negotiations that every company has to undergo, being intra-family affairs. Paul adds that the removal of potential personal battles from the equation has led to a relatively smooth co-existence. “We all do different things. The business was broken up into divisions and it is big enough for us all to have room to do our own thing, whereas in many family businesses, we’d have ended up fighting over the scraps.”
“I thought the model worked better without us owning it,” says Laurence, “as I believed that ownership would provide us with political disruption and distract us from our objectives.” Paul adds: “We had seen the worst of what a family business can be like and we knew we could not go that way and needed to avoid the pitfalls.” Jonathan admits that with Laurence and Paul as older brothers, he didn’t have much choice but to go along with them.
The model has changed with the times - Adam, for instance, is now a minority shareholder in the group, as is Mark Culley at OrchardWorld. Both Hillsdown and Argent have been open to management going down the route the Olins family have chosen not to follow.
It is indisputable that the approach has worked. In 1987, the business had an annual turnover of £30m, with spiralling debts and losses. In 2006, it made an operating profit in excess of £5m on a turnover of £188m, putting Poupart in the top bracket of companies in its specialised field in the UK. “We still have a few years as a team to go yet before Paul and I retire,” says Laurence, who handed over the managing director’s reins to Adam this year and has taken on the position as chairman.
The Olins’ input at Poupart extends beyond the central quartet. Paul’s son Adrian is now part of the BerryWorld team - although he was not approached or brought in by Paul, it is stressed. Adrian was taken on first to cement relationships with BerryWorld growers in Spain in 2004, and is now based at Poupart’s head office. “I didn’t think I’d come into the company,” he says. “But Laurence approached me to do a very specific job and it appealed to me that it was away from the office.” When asked if it feels like working for a family company, Adrian gives the diplomatic “yes and no” answer, and Paul expands: “There is certainly no nepotism involved here - anyone who thinks he has it on a plate is wrong. Just because you’re an Olins, you are not necessarily going to be the right person for the job. It’s a long game - there is no instant success in this industry.”
Adam says: “The main reason we’re all still here is our strict business model and, going forward, the strategy and the discipline will become even more important. We all grew up in the markets, but you just don’t see people coming out of the markets and moving into a different side of the business like you used to.”
“The industry has changed dramatically, and it will change again in the next decade. Some of the things that I did as managing director, which were right at the time, will not be right for the next 20 years of this business,” says Laurence.
Adam nods - knowing that to him now fall the decisions that will continue to drive both Poupart and the Olins name through that period.
No comments yet