Case Number 3
What is a growth company?
An old established baker of bread and cakes, distributed widely in one of the country’s major metropolitan areas, was bought by a large publicly traded private-equity firm. The bakery’s stock was selling at eight times earnings on the stock market; the private-equity firm had offered fourteen times earnings, an irresistible offer. It paid with its own stock, which then sold at twenty-two times earnings-so every-body was happy or should have been. The president of the bakery-a middle-aged but very vigorous member of the founding family, in fact, a grandson of the Swedish immigrant who had started the business around 1890 agreed to stay on with a five-year contract.
Six months after the acquisition had been consummated, the bakery’s president was called to New York headquarters for a meeting with the corporate president. “You know, John,” the president said, “that it is our policy that each of our divisions show 10 percent growth a year and make a return of at least 15 percent pretax on investment. Your division is growing only at 1 or 2 percent a year and shows only 7 percent pretax – no more than we can get in a savings bank account. Our staff people are ready to sit down with you and turn your business around so that it can meet our growth and profit objectives.”
“I am afraid,” answered the bakery’s president, “that they would be wasting their time, and mine. A bakery is not a growth business, and nothing you do can make it into one. People don’t eat more bread, or even more cakes; as their incomes go up, they eat less. A bakery has built-in protection against a downturn; in fact, we’d probably do best in a really serious depression. But our growth isn’t going to be faster than that of population. And as for profits, we get paid for being efficient. I know we need to be far more efficient, but that would require fairly massive investment in new automated bakeries, and with our price-earnings ratio, we have never felt able to raise the kind of money we need. Even if we did automate, our rate of return isn’t going to be more than 12 percent pretax at best.”
“This is unacceptable,” snapped the president. “I agree,” said the bakery man. “Indeed, this is precisely the reason we gladly accepted your offer to buy us out: we had to free our family’s own money for more attractive investments, and all our money was in the bakery. That’s also the reason why all of us immediately sold your company’s stock. And that’s the reason that I am quite willing for you to buy up my employment contract. If you want to run a bread bakery as a growth company, you’d better buy me out – I wouldn’t know how to try.”
Questions
Can one be satisfied with a business that earns less than the minimum cost of capital and cannot raise the capital it needs to become efficient? If not, what (if anything) can be done? And who is right?: the man who says that this kind of business cannot be run at a 15 percent profit level, or the man who says that if the market is there, it is management’s job to earn a return that can attract the needed capital? Are both wrong? Or could both be right?