Many years ago, Miranda Higgins’ father offered her a simple piece of advice: Always put your strongest people in your weakest areas.
Higgins is MD of the confectionery and baking ingredients maker Dollar Sweets, a 79-year-old family-owned business she describes as “a gangly teenager” – not small, not large, with no HR department; one where everyone has to work together.
Over the 22 years under Higgins’ leadership, the company has seen off many a rival; sometimes it “feels like I’ve been here five minutes,” she shared with Amie Larter of Inside FMCG, and Angeline Achariya, Asia Pacific chair of the Food Systems Innovation and Resilience Wing, with the G100 Mission Million, in the latest edition of the podcast series Women Transforming Food.
Higgins describes her father’s advice as one of the most valuable lessons she can share with people starting out in the food business: “Because you cannot do everything by yourself”.
“You need a really great team around you. And for me, that would be in areas like finance and operations, because my background is in sales and marketing. So, making sure we have really great people on the team, plugging the areas I am not as strong in, that is really important.”
Another key lesson is resilience. Every leader is going to make mistakes. “I have made so many. But as long as you’re focused on getting up in the morning, one foot in front of the other, and you keep going, you will eventually find the wins as well. You are going to make mistakes and have failures, and that’s actually okay. That’s how you learn, that’s how you grow, that’s how you get better.”
Do not be afraid, she furthers. “I started at Dollar Sweets when I was 26, and I felt like a fraud for a long, long time, surrounded by a factory full of men twice my age; I felt like I did not belong and I did not deserve to be there. But you have to back yourself.”
One lesson it took her a long time to learn – and she confesses she still struggles with it every day – is that when you wake up in the morning, do the hard things first.
“Wake up and go to the place you don’t want to go and do that thing first because organising your emails and reading them every morning might feel good, but you are not really achieving anything. So do the difficult things and get them done every day.”
Fad or forever?
From a product development perspective, even after 20 years, Higgins admits you cannot always know if a new product concept or category will work. She looks to the US, the UK, and Europe for confectionery and baking trends, estimating that Australia is usually about 12 months behind them.
“One thing you need to be able to identify is what is an evergreen long-term opportunity and what is a fad. It is okay to jump on board with fads. We’ve done that, knowing that you sort of make hay while the sun’s shining; you make the most of the opportunity, but it won’t last forever.”
One such fad was freeze-dried candy, which the team knew would probably not stand the test of time, “but you make the most of the opportunity as long as you’re not carrying too much stock or you’re too heavily invested in it, you can move through it”.
Key to Dollar Sweets’ longevity has been maintaining a solid base of everyday products that will always be in demand. That allows a little risk-taking with new products along the way.
Relationships are critical
Higgins says the most important thing in the Dollar Sweets business is relationships – whether they are internal within the team, with customers or with suppliers.
“Things go wrong, right? Whether it’s in the supply chain or with product issues. So, we need a team around us that is really supportive and can come up with really good solutions. You do that by having relationships you can lean on when you need to. Respecting those long-term relationships is really important.
“I know we talk a lot about AI and the future and that people don’t talk to people anymore, but I genuinely think the one thing that will never go away is relationships. If you are a young person and you need a skill set, make sure you can deal with people because that will put you right in the hitting zone of where you need to be.
“That is so important,” Higgins concluded.
- Listen to the podcast and hear Higgins share what happened when ‘dot cakes’ went viral, how Dollar Sweets has managed expansion into new categories, complementary lines, and export markets, and why the company is “always reinventing” itself.
