The Australian Food & Grocery Council will be holding its SME CEO Forum on 21 February 2019. This event offers CEO’s from AFGC’s SME member base an opportunity to meet and discuss topical issues within the industry. Their aim is to make a real difference by providing a voice on the key issues that matter to business.

A peer-to-peer group focused on exploring and discussing emerging issues, the forum provides an opportunity to:

• Apprise members on the latest AFGC activities and priorities;
• Hear directly from guest speakers; and
• Opportunity to network with peers.

This year, the forum will host Paul Allen as a Featured Speaker. Paul is Managing Director of Margin Partners and is recognised as Australia’s Leading Authority on Supplier Margin.

For over 25 years, Paul Allen has been immersed in business-to-business categories, from beer to pies and paper to glass, helping organisations to unlock value with their contracted business partners.

If you’re a supplier in the Asia Pacific region who is struggling to maintain and grow your operating margins, whilst ever encroaching procurement teams stretch your resources with new demands, Paul could well become the most valuable resource you have on your team.

He routinely helps clients reclaim upwards of 15% of their customer specific net margin entitlement – profit that would otherwise be lost or silently absorbed as an unfavourable “operational variance”.

As a senior sales, marketing & general manager, Paul has worked with some of Australia & New Zealand’s best-known companies and brands, including Lion, Simplot, TABCORP, Australian Paper and O-I Glass. He has negotiated with relentless procurement teams across Europe, Asia and America – and sold billions of dollars of goods to globally recognised brands.

If you believe the lifeblood of your business lies in the certainty of long term customer contracts, then Paul’s insights will compel you to rethink your ‘true cost to serve’. He exposes the fallacy of over-servicing and invites Suppliers to contemplate how they can inadvertently relinquishing millions of dollars every year by failing to monitor Customer specific net margin.