The situation.

A manufacturer of consumer and light industrial products, sold worldwide. I ran their entire non-European business — six owned subsidiaries and sixty-five distributor markets across Asia, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Seventy markets, €100m+ P&L, full accountability from sales through to EBIT.

The thing that made it work.

Every market gets hit by something. A currency moves against you. A government changes import duty. An election freezes commercial spending for six months. Credit tightens. In seasonal categories, demand disappears for two quarters. None of it is predictable and most of it isn’t manageable.

What is manageable is how many markets you’re standing in when it happens. At sixty-five, the shocks stop arriving together. A duty increase in one market lands in the same quarter another one comes good. Southern Hemisphere markets sell while Northern ones are quiet. The business delivered positive EBIT in every quarter of the year, which had nothing to do with clever management — it’s what a wide enough spread does on its own.

Forecasting works the same way. Every year some markets overshoot and some undershoot, and you never know which. At that number they largely cancel out — stock one distributor didn’t take goes to another having a better year than expected. With five markets you just carry the error. Same with concentration: losing a partner out of sixty-five is a problem to fix. Out of five it’s a hole in the budget.

The outcome.

15% compound annual sales growth over nine years and a 250% increase in EBIT.