Cover Story
Changing the menu
How Selim Bassoul cut 30 percent of Middleby’s business to get the company to No. 1
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Chicago | September 2008
Page 1 of 4
You probably don’t want to listen to anything that Selim A.
Bassoul has to say.
He wants to help you turn your company around, but the fact is
most people won’t do what he’s recommending.
Sure, sure, the guy has a great story to tell. And nobody sums up
the plight of The Middleby Corp. in 1999 better than Bassoul.
“We had very limited resources and capital, we were running
out of cash, we were very highly reliant on three customers
that generated more than 60 percent of the sales,” he says. “We
lacked innovation, and the products we were generating or
creating were very me-too products. The competitors were
stealing our best employees, and the turnover at Middleby was
more than 33 percent. Roughly 30 percent of the orders were
not shipped on time, so we had a case study of a lousy company.
“Externally in 2000-2001, we had a recession. Patents on our
highest margin product line, which is the Middleby conveyor
oven, had just expired and competitors were all jumping in.
Good scenario to start the story, eh?”
OK, it’s a good place to start the story. But the turnaround that
Bassoul, Middleby’s chairman and CEO, made is a lot to handle.
He slashed nearly 30 percent of Middleby’s sales and dropped
the company from more than 10,000 SKUs to 1,000 in a matter
of 90 days. He came up with a plan to completely rearrange the
provider of restaurant and food service equipment because it
was stuck around $100 million, and he had the audacity to
focus that strategy on taking giant risks on innovation and
building a global brand. This is the kind of stuff that you don’t
try at home. But, if you’re still interested, Bassoul wants to
show you how to completely rethink a company.
