Country Manager Benelux

The organisation

Privately-owned Swiss family company Hero dates back to 1886. Over the course of fourteen decades, the company has grown into an FMCG brand with a global presence, conserving the goodness of nature for consumers around the world. Across categories like fruit preserves, healthy snacks, and baby and toddler foods, Hero stands for quality and simplicity. With offices and production facilities on five continents and four thousand heroic employees, Hero delivers on its mission of delighting consumers by conserving the goodness of nature every single day.

Hero facilitates an open, flexible, and informal way of working, allowing all employees to have an impact on what the company does and how it is done. Opportunities are there to be seized and ambitions to be realized. Hero operates through four core values: Create Wow, Nourish Others, Everyone Hero, and Take Responsibility. This translates into a focus on delivering on or above expectations, treating others with care, respect, and honesty, collaborating to get the best possible results, and taking steps to preserve nature for future generations.

In recent years, Hero Group shifted its global strategic focus from regional central. The transformation has led to more shared resources and services and a global vision on commercial targets while maintaining a local or regional focus on marketing and sales and a hybrid regional and global focus on category expansion. Within this context, the new Country Manager Benelux will set the commercial strategy and enable the team to achieve sizeable growth.

The position

With its global presence and 137 years of history, family company Hero is a trusted brand for millions of consumers. With products across categories like jams, muesli bars, and baby formula, Hero’s organization is centred on commercial functions. The Country Manager Benelux will lead the Benelux region’s operations and set the growth strategy for the next three to five years.

Tasks & responsibilities

The Country Manager Benelux is responsible for the P&L and all operations of Hero Benelux. They cascade Hero Group’s vision and strategy into a concrete strategy and effective execution for the Benelux, focusing both on the present and on the mid-term future. In terms of the present, they set the bar for the execution of current plans and enable the management team and the entire Benelux organization to make this happen. Meanwhile, they also set an ambition and create a strategy for Hero Benelux’s growth in the next three to five years.

The opportunities for growth at Hero Benelux are legion. The Dutch market is currently responsible for more than ninety percent of the revenue – but there is significant market share to be captured in Belgium. In the Netherlands, the main strategic questions centre around innovation and strengthening the internal core categories. Some categories, such as cassis soda, are highly successful locally but not part of the global mix, and vice versa. It is up to the Country Manager Benelux to figure out the right category mix and, more specifically, what resources to allocate to the marketing and sales of each category to ensure commercial success that fits both the local or regional market and the Group strategy.

Although this role has a strong commercial focus, the Country Manager Benelux is also in charge of all other regional functions, such as HR, Finance, and Plan & Logistics. The Breda office comprises around seventy colleagues. Fifty of them are members of the Benelux team. The other twenty include Group roles, like Quality and the IT Group Function: not reporting to the Country Manager Benelux, but part of the organization, culture and (HR) policies.

“For the strategy to be successful, buy-in at Group level will be required – as well as strong initiative and entrepreneurial drive. A seasoned commercial leader with strong stakeholder management and influencing skills, who role models accountability across the organization, can create a lot of value in this role.” – Jim Frandsen, General Manager Northern European Cluster

This position is ideal for a candidate with at least twelve years of experience in several commercial functions: mainly sales and marketing, but also e-commerce, category management, and other related functions. The candidate has people leadership experience and is comfortable managing an office of circa fifty employees, six of whom are direct reports. The Country Manager Benelux reports to the General Manager of the Northern European Cluster. A successful candidate will, after realizing growth for the Benelux region in the next three to five years, get the opportunity to continue their career in a leadership role at Group level.

Candidate profile*

• Over 12 years of experience
• In a mix of commercial fields
• Including at least sales and marketing
• Within FMCG
• Fluent in Dutch and English
• Strategic vision
• Stakeholder management on local and Group level

* Research shows that while male candidates feel confident enough to apply when they meet about 60% of the requirements, female candidates only apply when they tick every box. So if this role has your name on it, but you’re not sure about the criteria, we still want to hear from you.

Interested?

You can apply for this position by using the link below. Hero is working with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.