Craig Britton – Partner
Focus: Identifying, developing and aligning organizations to a stronger competitive advantage.
I am driven by seeing small businesses out-think and out-execute competitors, especially bigger ones.
I grew up in Colorado where I learned to love mountaineering and rock climbing, but moved to Minnesota in ’79 where I learned to love canoeing and woodworking. I have an undergraduate degree from Colorado State University. I received my masters in Marketing at the Carlson School of Management.
After that I was at Pillsbury for 13 years, where I was tapped for 10 business turnaround and new business development assignments. My most interesting two experiences were turning aroun
d one of their commodity businesses with a weak market position in a declining category … and developing a take out restaurant concept.
I left Pillsbury and co-founded a personal care products business, which my partner and I shut down after regulatory changes made the business financially not viable.
For the next 8 years I was the Chief Marketing Officer at two Fortune 500 companies, one a turnaround and one a post merger restage.
For the past six years I’ve been consulting with entrepreneurial and privately owned businesses who compete in mature, crowded industries – helping them develop clarity in the three areas that effect business growth the most: their overall business strategy and direction, the understanding the organization has in how to execute that business direction, and how they attract and retain customers.
I am deeply involved with Small Business Mn, which is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that advocates for the real needs of smaller businesses.
My wife ran for the state legislature recently, which was a challenging and interesting endeavor. Talk about broken systems!
And my three kids are grown college graduates – one with a great career at General Mills, one an entrepreneur, and one an engineer at a small company in Denver with a similar passion for skiing and rock climbing.