Impacting the P&L the RB way

Last week I had a really good training session in Germany. As I’m still Trainee in Germany and some of my trainings are planned in the long-run, so I was getting together with my ex-trainee colleagues and some other colleagues from the Netherlands and Austria for a training which is called “impacting the P&L (profit and loss statement)”.

 The primary content of the course was to understand the Reckitt Benckiser Profit and Loss calculation and more specifically, the annual financial statement of RB, which was the principal reading material of the course (and which I have seen before but never passed the director’s comments and the brand comments). We even discussed the cover and the fact that on the 2007 statement, the slogan was : “seeing is believing” – because apparently analysts didn’t believe that RB’s growth was sustainable. Well, they proved them wrong, hence the headline.

 Part of the course, and I guess that’s the reason why colleagues value it so highly, is to play a simulation game between the theory sessions and apply some of the things that we have learned. We had to plan our production, investments into new products and “media” in order to win orders and hence grow our company.

 When it came to pitching for sales orders with the course leader, everyone showed the RB spirit and became really excited and competitive to get the orders. This behavior resulted in the first big learning of the course: price dumping doesn’t help to get a healthy P&L. Well, that’s not news exactly, but we were victims of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ first hand and lost a lot of money. I must admit, our team didn’t exactly make profit in the first rounds but we came around in the last one, taking some risks and going for higher margins. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to win but we had great fun and understood a lot about the mechanisms that affect the companies P&L.

 I learned a lot in this course especially- but apparently this was part of the course’s goal – learned what I don’t know (or forgot since my studies). But in the end one thing was very clear: RB has a very healthy P&L and we can all impact on keeping it that way.