Though Hay planned from the beginning to transition the company into largely renewable production, he shared with us at the time, “The vast majority of the players in our industry thought it was a fool’s errand. There was still skepticism as to whether renewables were just a fad and government incentives would go away.” In his first few years, he focused on bringing in a team of innovative thinkers with entrepreneurial experience. “We had some of the best utility people around,” he shared, “but they were very risk averse.

Some of Ferguson’s personal drive came from having “a problem-solving mindset, so chomping down on a really intriguing problem is for me what the job’s all about.” This was a constant theme in our research and interviews with the highest-performing CEOs. Ferguson, using the analogy of being the architect of a building, was also energized by the challenge of championing his own strategy. “It was very exciting because it is a vision, and I will take all the time necessary to go from rough sketch to blueprint, to bringing in the team, the subcontractors, to actually seeing the building. There’s nothing like it, it’s so very rewarding.” Ferguson also shared that he is comfortable with a “gradually making progress mindset.” “The key to my success,” he shared, “is my ability to keep at it every day.” Sustaining his energy through the long haul of these years also was an appreciation for small wins. “There are small wins even in big marathons. You chunk up these big, long, journeys into steps. Sometimes it’s just a board meeting in which you finally got someone to agree.”

Creating awareness of small wins, and celebrating them, was also key to sustaining his team’s energy after initially exciting them with the vision. “First, they needed the belief that the goal was worth the journey. Why does it matter? Then it was celebrating the small victories. So getting the document ready, finishing the analysis, getting the vote, all those steps.” For the company as a whole, “there were some metrics that we could share about in every town hall, having to do with asset flows, client wins, and our win-loss ratio.

In his first two years in the role, Craigie conducted a deep strategic analysis and homed in on gross margins as the lynchpin to sustainable growth, the “gas in the engine,” he said.

For acquisition, he shared, “We would look at almost anything that came up within the industry for sale, and we had four factors that drove our decisions. One, we would only buy number one or two share brands in their category. We did not believe we could take a dying brand and turn it around. Two, we wanted to buy businesses that had higher gross margin than out company average, so would help our gross margin. Three, we looked for asset-light companies. We didn’t want to buy a company with lots of factories or ones for which we’d have to build new factories. We preferred to bring operations into our own facilities. And four, we went for products that had some sort of advantage versus the competition that we could leverage with our marketing, sales, and operations muscle to make better.” That formula guided the well-measured acquisition of numerous leading brands during his tenure, including Spinbrush, OxiClean, Orajel, Batiste, and Vitafusion. These were businesses that his own business leaders had the expertise to run, and he folded them into Church & Dwight’s existing operations. Focusing on employees with R&D expertise, they kept, on average, only 10 percent of employees, many of whom joined the team at headquarters. “We doubled the size of the company,” he reported, without adding substantially to the number of employees.

That was the result of Cote’s marathoner “go slow to go fast” moves coming to fruition. Rather than flashy, highly risky, and dramatic moves, he’d made rigorously calibrated incremental improvements in business operations. These were combined with a steady stream of divestments and moderate acquisitions. Indeed, he is a standout example of someone who has mastered programmatic M&A, the systematic, highly strategic, and well-paced acquisition of relatively small companies compared the the size of the acquiring firm.