Robert Leechman Joins Pilot Lite

What big CPG brands and challenger brands can learn from each other

Robert Leechman has spent 45 years in the consumer goods industry. Thirty of those years were inside two of the world's most formidable CPG companies — Mars and Coca-Cola. The last fifteen have been spent on the other side of the table, working with founder-led challenger brands as chairman, investor and advisor.

That dual perspective gives him a view of the industry that is rare. Not theoretical. Not consultancy-speak. The kind of view that only comes from having run large businesses, and then watched smaller ones operate in ways that large ones simply cannot.

Scale is an asset. It is also a trap.

The conversation about large companies versus challenger brands is often framed as a competition. Who is winning. Who is losing. Who is eating whose lunch. Robert sees it differently. Both models have genuine strengths. Both have real limitations. And the brands that figure out how to take the best of each are the ones that tend to grow.

Large companies bring things that challenger brands would struggle to replicate. The ability to get distribution quickly. To get face to face with a major retailer and be taken seriously. To throw resource at a problem when it matters. That scale is genuinely valuable and genuinely hard to build from scratch.

But large companies also tend to develop structural habits that slow them down over time. Silos form between sales and marketing, between head office and operations, between any two teams with separate budgets and separate agendas. Those silos create protectionism. People stop asking what will grow the business and start asking what will protect their position. Decisions that should take days take months. Innovation that should be bold becomes incremental.

Challenger brands move fast. They just cannot always go far enough.

Challenger brands are the mirror image. No budget empires. No silos. Everyone pulling toward the same question: what will fast-grow this business? The urgency is real because the consequences of moving slowly are real. A challenger brand cannot afford to wait for alignment. It moves or it does not survive.

What challenger brands lack is the scale to back their speed. They can identify an opportunity, move fast and build something compelling. But getting it in front of enough consumers, into enough stores, at enough volume to really matter — that is where execution capability runs out before ambition does.

The real question is not who is winning.

The most interesting question, as Robert frames it, is not which model is better. It is what each could genuinely learn from the other. Large companies learning to flatten decision chains, protect fewer budgets and move with more urgency. Challenger brands learning to access the kind of scale and infrastructure that turns a good idea into a category-defining brand.

That intersection is where the most interesting growth in CPG is happening right now. And it is where Pilot Lite has operated for seventeen years.

Robert joined as Board Advisor because he recognised a firm that understands both worlds and was built to bridge them. An agile, experienced team that can move at challenger brand speed with a genuine understanding of how large organisations work. The Explore, Build, Deploy framework is not a consulting slide. It is a way of operating that draws on the best of both models Robert has spent 45 years navigating.