Envu‘s CEO, Gilles Galliou and Envu North America’s Head of Commercial Operations, Mark Schneid, talk to Landscape Management Editorial Director Seth Jones and Editor-in-Chief Scott Hollister about the company’s recent acquisitions. The two discuss Envu’s journey post separation over the past two years.
Transcription:
GG: Gilles GalliouMS: Mark Schneid
GG: When we got separated from Bayer originally, you have to accept that you you’re starting from a very different organization than the gigantic organization that was behind us before. It’s been a journey, and we have to accept humble beginnings in a way. I think we have invested a lot of time on making sure that our customers are with us, making sure that our teams are with us, and making sure that the engines that we carry, which is innovations, brands, products, solutions, for customers, and that we can continue to do that. So we had to go through some rough time at the very beginning of the separation. And it’s normal. You change IT, you change systems, you change everything. But I think now we are pretty much where we wanted to be two years later. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done with the team, with our customers, with our portfolio, and I think we are, we are on track, and the announcement that we’ve made around the acquisitions recently to show that we’re ready to do the next step. And after two years, I find that this is pretty remarkable, in a way.
MS: When we turned around and we started Envu, we had an aspiration to be a certain kind of company built around growth, built around leadership for the segments we participate. And you know, as Gielle said, the initial out of the shoot was a bit difficult. I mean, obviously all the changes created challenges for the team, but what makes me most proud is the resilience of our team and the fact that, between our team our customers, we’ve been able to stabilize the business, and we’ve made huge improvements. Now we’re not fully pleased with where we are. We think we can get even better, and that’s our intent. But I would also say what’s also coming to the to the forefront is while we were working on stabilizing the business to move forward as a standalone company, there was a lot going on in the background around partnerships, around innovation, around acquisitions, and I think now people are starting to see the true beauty of what we’re seeking to create and how we can benefit not just our business, but all of industry.
GG: The acquisition is very much in line with what we are and who we are. FMC is a company that is based on research, science, brands, customer service, technology training, so very much around the values that we have ourselves. So that fits very, very well. The portfolio, in many ways, is complementary to ours. But what it brings on top of all those elements, I think it brings us the opportunity to really drive additional innovation, new ideas, the capacity to interact with our customers in many different ways, and it will bring us, I mean, give Envu the opportunity to create new solution, but it will also allow us to work differently with the customers and find ways of collaborating differently than what we have in the past. I think this is a great opportunity for the industry as a whole.
