When Craig Kearney became CEO of Vitaco in 2018, he inherited a company spread too thin across multiple brands. While most executives would focus on growing their product lines, Kearney took the opposite approach – and the results speak for themselves.

“We used to have probably 10 brands, and that was a problem because you can’t focus on 10 brands at the same time unless you’re a very big organization, and we’re not a big organization, really,” Kearney explains on CEO: Behind the Scenes.

His solution was radical: Cut the portfolio in half and concentrate resources on the survivors. Kearney admits the decision required a fair degree of ruthlessness to remove brands that were no longer fit for purpose. He faced internal resistance.

“Some of my own executives were challenging me and going, ‘Are you sure you want to get rid of these products and these brands? They are generating reasonable income for us and they’ve been in the organization for quite a long time. Why would you want to do that?’” he recalls.

But Kearney’s intuition proved correct. By focusing on just four brands – two vitamin brands and two sports nutrition brands – Vitaco was able to double its business size over five years. The crown jewel of this transformation was the Musashi brand.

When Kearney arrived, Musashi was in decline, having been delisted from major retailers and generating around US$19.8 million in revenue. The brand needed complete reinvention, and Kearney’s team delivered.

“We completely evolved the brand,” he says. “The distribution created a real sense of purpose and took it on a journey which now delivers for us this year, financial year 2025, north of A$200 [US$132 million].”

A widened demographic

The transformation required expanding beyond Musashi’s traditional gym-focused audience.

“It was a brand that was seen as being only used by gym junkies. Guys that just want to put on kilos and kilos of muscle. But we took it out of the gym. We took it from the gym to the playing field,” Kearney explains.

This radical focusing strategy extends beyond just brands to manufacturing capabilities. Vitaco closed peripheral operations like tea processing and green-lipped mussel extraction to concentrate on their core competency.

“We said we’re going to be the best tablet, capsule, powder and bar manufacturing company in the region,” Kearney says.

The company has invested US$46 million in manufacturing capabilities over four years, choosing vertical integration while competitors outsource. This strategy pays dividends.

“As soon as you contract manufacturing, there’s about a 20 percent margin that the contractor is going to take, which is completely understandable and fine, but that’s a 20 percent margin that you are not taking in,” he points out.

Quality, not quantity

The philosophy even applies to talent management. Kearney emphasizes the importance of dedicating proper resources to fewer brands.

“You need to be able to have a clarity of purpose on each of those four brands, a clarity of positioning for those four brands, and an understanding about the resources required to develop those brands and to nurture them,” he says.

“If you’re not prepared to nurture four brands, then do three. But make sure that you can do justice to those four brands and know that you can give them the love, the resource, the energy, the focus to enable them to be as successful as you possibly can. And you have to be ruthless and discard the brands that are not going to survive.”

Kearney’s approach challenges the growth-at-all-costs mentality prevalent in many organizations. His success demonstrates that strategic reduction – cutting profitable but unfocused elements – can unlock exponential growth in core areas.

The key is having the courage to make difficult decisions and the discipline to stick with them. For Vitaco, this strategy has transformed a struggling health company into a market leader, generating hundreds of millions in revenue.

“Focus on fewer and make them better,” Kearney says. “Your brand needs to be focused to really have a chance of success. And if you focus and keep going, you will be successful.”

Listen to the latest episode of our CEO: Behind the Scenes podcast with Craig Kearney on Amazon, Apple or Spotify.