Jeffrey runs a holding company with snack foods in the Dominican Republic, water bottling, juice businesses, a bakery, and shipping operations across the Caribbean. With advisor Francis Wade, he built a unified culture around three values: openness to ideas, measurable leadership metrics, and "reality," which means managing by numbers and overestimating risks when deciding where to invest.
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Yeah, I agree with that. I'm— a couple of years ago, pre-pandemic, we acknowledged who we were, which was a holding company. We make value investments. So our investments are in different countries, different geographies, and different lines of business. So our— in the Dominican Republic, we have a snack food operation with maybe 300 employees. We have a water bottling business in the— in Santo Domingo and in Bávaro with another 300 employees. I mentioned our juice business, another juice business in Barcelona, a bakery in Jamaica, port in Jamaica, shipping line in— you get the point. And we said, okay, let's be able to articulate for all these businesses a set of values that cut across them. And shameless plug, Francis Wade helped us to do this and to actually write down what we care about in ways that cut across all the businesses. So we care about openness to new ideas as a principle. We care about leadership in very specific ways, metrics that a leader can measure herself or himself against. We care about, uh, what we call reality, which is management by numbers, um, overestimating the opposition, um, burdening the financial models that we use to take capital investment decisions. And so all of this is spread across the team, and then the team is able to cascade these values down to actual decisions. And so we're trying to express precisely who we are on paper, and then we can hold ourselves against accountable for these values at every level in the organization. And I think that served as a way of organizing sustainable accountability and growth.