Openness and authenticity are the foundation of our culture and values. We demonstrate this in the Q&A session during this week's town hall meeting.
Gareth, our Corporate Communications Manager, facilitates a panel session, asking the questions that many of you currently have top of mind. Along with Dennis, our CFO Jonathan Spight and General Manager for North America, Steve Chamberlain, cover market factors and our organisational and business strategy. As always, we seek to integrate your questions submitted for this session. Let us continue the two-way dialogue and keep the questions coming! Thank you for your contribution.
Dennis's Moments of Inspiration
The dreamer, the thinker, the lover and the warrior. These are the big 4 from Erica Ariel Fox's methodology, "Winning from Within". This book provides a contemporary approach to getting more of what you want, improving relationships, and enjoying life's deeper rewards. Check out what she has to say about it by clicking here.
The next book on the list from Dennis is a recommendation from Dominque, our Chief Manufacturing Officer. Described as a page-turner, A Chess Story is by Stefan Zweig. Watch Dennis's review on this and read a further review by clicking here.
North America and Looking Forward to 2023
The North American business has a significant impact on the overall Colart business. Steve provides a clear overview of Colart in North America and why we are in our current state. Gratefully, he further supports this with the plan for North America in 2023, where he states
"Looking forward to 2023, we will see North America and Michaels back into double-digit growth. However, the economy does remain uncertain, and, as Jonathan highlighted, we remain a smaller company without Reeves and Arches - in North America, these brands were around $12m in sales, 15% of our overall business. Rebasing our business on a lower level of sales vs 2019, when we sold Reeves and Arches, means we will need to make some difficult choices. We will continue to regrow, but the reality is that value of those sales lost cannot be easily replaced - we'd need to grow W&N 40% overnight, for example. So, we will regrow in 2023 vs 2022 with Michaels starting to 'buy what they sell' plus additional growth initiatives across the market but not yet returning to the levels of 2019. Key then to our success will also be the resilience from our sought-after brands, with consumer purchases ahead of 2019, and our team in North America to deliver the plan and stay on strategy".
If you want to find out more about our North America business, get in contact with Steve Chamberlin.