Published earlier this year and soon to be an audio book, ‘Guardrailing’ is a primer that goes beyond just leading natural products start-ups through successful acquisition. The book’s principles are a guide for how to lead a principled, ethical life at work.
“I think good decisions are universal when once you get past the black and white business principles of things,” Bush said.
‘Getting past’ means following the tenants that Bush describes. He said in the process of guardrailing, a company must ask two essential questions: Does a particular decision move a firm or an individual toward the destination that is outlined? And is the decision a good one?
“I don’t care how you get to the destination, so long as the decisions you make are good and as long as it’s in keeping with the culture and the morals of the business,” Bush added. “It should keep us heading toward the destination.”
At 159 pages, ‘Guardrailing’ is a fast read on purpose. Bush wanted to be the antithesis to big city consulting firms such as Bain Capital or the Boston Consulting Group that take simple, commonsense exercises and makes them “wildly expensive and wildly complicated,” he said.
An indirect path
Bush is the former CEO of probiotic ingredient manufacturer Ganeden, which was eventually acquired by the Kerry Group in 2017. In ‘Guardrailing’, Bush draws on his time at the company and how he abided by some of the same decision making he expands upon in the book.
His path to the world of acquisitions was not an obvious one, Bush said. He was a non-traditional college student, earning his bachelors in his late 30s. He worked in biotech, bioinformatics and healthcare but not in the capacity of a CEO until later in his career.
However, Bush drew professional inspiration from reading anything he could, from business topics to philosophy to mindfulness and meditation. When he worked in medical equipment repair, he wrote a letter to an Ohio-based CEO that said he was interested in learning about acquisitions. The CEO took a chance on Bush and said he would offer him a full-time role in business acquisition, but Bush could not afford to take the job on without keeping his medical position, so he worked around the clock, mostly underpaid. Then things began to get lucrative.
“We bought 12 companies over the course of 18 months. We really figured out how to buy businesses,” Bush said, adding that they even sold one company to General Electric. “It was the best education ever.”
Keeping grandma in mind
Bush’s insight into acquisitions propelled him to write ‘Guardrailing’, which is not only about good decision making but also about how the process of making these decisions mitigates risk.
Essentially, the book pushes business leaders to take chances on the things they have already done calculations on, he said.
That risk, however, has a high standard to meet. Bush said in the natural products world the litmus test has to be if “your grandmother take the product.”
“If you’re not 100% confident that this is the right product for her to consume, then whatever initiative you have in play is not a good decision,” Bush said.
In other words, transparency and honesty are key.
Bush said these goals should be put into practice early in the acquisition process because investors and portfolio companies are often not on the same page.
“If you have an investor that says they would be happy if they sold a business for $100 million, but you have a CEO who thinks that they need to sell a business for $300 million… it helps to put the investor and the entrepreneurs or the management team in alignment regarding expectations.” Bush said. “It changes what can sometimes feel like an adversarial relationship, that things are being hidden from investors.”
Ultimately, the destination and good decisions are about how people are treated.
At Ganeden, the company was structured to do as little harm as possible to the employees, Bush said.
The accounting department was not large by design because Ganeden knew that having too large of a division meant some employees would lose their jobs, as an acquiring company already had an accounting department.
“I didn’t ever want to hire somebody knowing that at some point they were going to lose their job,” he said.
