A long gap without weeknotes; a busy summer, with no sign of a let-up in autumn. But if I don’t do weeknotes when I’m busy, I never will, so here goes.

I say busy, but I did manage to have my first holiday since going solo last year, to the sparklingly lovely Champagne region of France. It was great. I ate and drank almost exclusively wine, bread and cheese. And, most importantly of all, Leo enjoyed it:

The little poser.

The confectionery project I worked on earlier this year launched: it’s called Wild Thingz. No artificials, no apologies. It’ll be in convenience retail extremely soon, and hopefully everywhere else in the world shortly afterwards. You can read about my role in the project here.

I just finished a project that I’ve been working on for for the past few weeks. It’s working with a lifestyle business to figure out how to cope with the exceptional growth they’ve been experiencing in the past few years.

Like lots of successful businesses, as they’ve scaled they’ve found that the day-to-day demands of growth squeeze out lots of other important things, and have made it hard to get their heads up and plan for the future. They’ve become a little more reactive, a little more frazzled, and a little more thinly spread that would be ideal.

I’ve been working with them to figure out where the bottlenecks are and how to relieve them, to ease some short-term pressure. But beyond that we’ve also been thinking about how to introduce a more structured annual, quarterly and monthly cadence into the business, and how to add a bit more rigour to their NPD process.

I have an excellent variety of projects on at the moment. The first is a new one for me: a science business, spun out of the University of Oxford twenty-or-so years ago and which subsequently went public, based around the commercialisation of a fascinating and possibly world-changing discovery.

In so many ways it couldn’t be further from consumer goods, and yet so much of what it needs to do is the same as a consumer business – only without the same shape of commercial pressures acting upon it. It needs to define and communicate its product proposition, explain where it adds value, build a memorable and distinctive brand, and generally build mental availability with customers who might spend long periods of time out-of-market.

In the meantime, though, I’ve got to brush up on my molecular biology!

I’m working on a portfolio strategy for a spirits business, which has been really interesting. The business is founder-led, and of a size large enough to have multiple brands but not so large that there’s a separate team running each brand with a separate P&L, separate motivations and separate incentives.

That means that the portfolio is of a size where it can be considered easily as a whole, and where different brands can be used for different jobs both inside and outside the business. It’s a great, hands-on, tactile size of business, where the levers we might be able to pull all feel very pullable, without too much politicking or persuasion.

I’ve just started chatting to another travel business, a startup founded by some folks that I first met more than five years ago. It’s amazing when you can strike up a conversation after that long and it feel like no time has passed, which feels like it bodes well for the project.

And finally, I’ve kicked off a new project working on a brand proposition and on- and off-trade strategy for a large liqueur brand. The challenge is to convince retailers and bars that what’s clearly in the brand interest is also in their own: that we’re pushing the category forward and taking to places that the market leader can’t and won’t.

It’s a fun challenge, and also an excuse for some cocktail experimentation. And on that note, I’ll end both the week and my weeknotes, and bid you all a good weekend.