After an impressive career spanning multiple top-tier companies and four decades, Michael Polk faced a pivotal decision in 2019 when he retired from Newell Brands, either continue to work in some context or truly retire. “I started my career in 1982, so I’d been working for a long time and was very fortunate to have had an amazing set of different business experiences at number of great companies and in countries around the world,” he says. After a career full of tremendous experiences and accomplishments at companies like P&G, Kraft Foods, Unilever and Newell Brands, Polk could have very easily taken the decision to truly retire. Instead, he chose a different path, joining Berkshire Partners as an Advisory Director and taking the reins at one of their portfolio companies, Implus LLC.
Michael Polk shares why he has kept working and what he is learning during this next chapter of his career.
Michael Polk On Going From Public To Private Leadership
Michael Polk is the first person to tell you how much he loved his time in public company leadership positions. “I had an incredible set of opportunities to shape and influence the direction of some of the world’s greatest brands and companies in the consumer goods space. I lived and worked all over the world and am a far better business leader, human being and global citizen as a result of those experiences,” says Michael Polk. And he achieved a lot in his nearly 40 years of public company work including leading the integration of Nabisco into Kraft Foods, running Unilever’s businesses in North America and Latin America, leading all of Unilever’s marketing and product development globally, leading the transformation of Newell Rubbermaid into Newell Brands as the CEO for 8 years, and being a member of the Board of Directors for Colgate-Palmolive for 9 years and Logitech International for 4 years.
So why keep working and also why on a smaller scale as he has chosen to do in his most recent role in private equity as CEO of Berkshire Partners portfolio company Implus LLC. The answer is simple in his mind, “I am still growing and learning and certainly have the opportunity to create something of lasting value as we look to build a bigger, better more competitive company in the fitness and team sports accessories market.” Nearly five years into his private equity experience, he is convinced that the private equity model can allow for longer-term growth and support real change. “What private equity does is it infuses capital into a business that needs capital, and it gives companies that are often struggling the breathing room to transform themselves,” Polk explains. “In this context you can take a little bit more risk and reshape the strategic direction of the company, and you can make a few more mistakes along the way without material consequence, as long as you don’t waste too much resource doing that.” When one has a chance to talk with Michael Polk there can be no doubt he is having fun and has found the world of private equity exciting.
Leading Transformation at Implus
“Berkshire Partners bought the original Implus Footcare company in 2015 and then then subsequently bought five other businesses, rolling them up into what is today Implus LLC,” Michael Polk says. Berkshire Partners chose to change the legacy leadership team in early 2020 and Polk agreed to join on a temporary basis to help form a new executive team and help that team successfully navigate a complex leadership transition. Shortly after he started, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, disrupting the business and creating real stress on the company. “The pandemic created a real disruption for Implus, testing our new leadership as we were starting to come together as a team,” Polk explains. Instead of stepping aside as planned after six months, Polk rolled up his sleeves and dove into the day-to-day challenges of managing through the pandemic-driven disruption and implementing a plan he dubbed the “Double Down” strategy, focused on transforming the financial condition of the company, professionalizing the company from a holding company to an operating company, and developing the capabilities for growth. “Our goal was to build the leading fitness and active lifestyle accessories company in the world; essentially a multi-national platform company with competitively advantaged commercial and brand development capabilities,” says Michael Polk. “We needed to strengthen the team, the capabilities and the culture of the company and we did not waste the crisis of the pandemic to build the case for change within the company.”
The team moved with speed to change in the organization design and ways of working. Polk restructured the company, de-layering the organization and establishing a set of enterprise-wide growth functions that supported multi-country commercial teams in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. He took a markedly hands-on approach at Implus. In a smaller, growth-focused company, he found himself leading “by doing,” from collaborating directly with the marketing team to designing go-to-market strategies. This level of involvement provided a unique reward: the opportunity to work closely with the company’s team, witnessing and fostering their professional development firsthand. “We’re trying to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts,” Polk explains.
While Polk would be the first to tell you that the transformation is still a work in process, he and the team are proud of the progress. The changes they have made are paying off resulting in over a 1000 basis point increase in gross margins giving the team more marketing affordability, significantly improved working capital and cash flow, and a new highly capable set of commercial and brand leaders positioned to accelerate organic growth going forward. “With the exception of me, we are a young team that’s grown a ton in four years, especially through the crisis. I have found the experience of helping this team develop and grow extremely rewarding,” Michael Polk says. “I’ve had a lot more fun than and stuck with this longer than I expected at the beginning and I am looking forward to seeing the Implus transformation all the way through this chapter of the company’s transformation.”
From Retirement to Reinvention
Michael Polk could have bought a recliner and kicked back in 2019, but that didn’t appeal to the active entrepreneur. For Polk, Implus has been the perfect setting to channel his experience and passion for transformation into a new phase of purpose-driven work. “As long as I’m capable and I’m leading in a way that helps people develop, I envision myself sticking with this type of work more than other types of things I could do,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of work still to do at Implus LLC and my team has our heads down focused on creating the next chapter of our transformation.”
