As a teenager, Zoë Tibell didn’t want to be a pop star, vet or even a nurse ­ she wanted to be an accountant. There was no point in studying or taking a break after school, instead aged 16 she followed her dream because she believed that was the quickest way to achieve it.

‘I decided at thirteen I wanted to become an accountant. I wanted to be in a profession, have a qualification, and made the decision to leave school at 16 to start working, despite what the teachers said.’

Tibell went to work for Larking Gowen and study for her AAT qualification. By the tender age of 22 she had gone on to qualify as a fully fledged ICAEW chartered accountant.

‘Because I started at 16, I was able to study while working and got practical experience at the same time, which helped me get through that quite quickly. At that time it was quite unusual,’ says Tibell.

‘AAT is still a good qualification and good stepping stone into chartered,’ she says.
Eight years at the firm put her at a crossroads: should she become a partner in practice or the big wide business world? She spent two not particularly enjoyable years at a packaging company as financial controller but at least she cut her teeth there ‘number-crunching’ through group consolidation and reporting.

Then Bounty, a baby marketing group, came along in 1997 and took her on as financial controller. While Tibell was aware it had been sold again after a management buy-out and the incumbent FD was likely to move on, little did she realise that the company would change hands several times, crossing continents, before she got the chance to invest in ownership of the business.

Bounty had been acquired by Snyder, NASDAQ-listed at the time. Tibell reshaped the finance team to deal with international reporting requirements, which included converting figures to US GAAP.

‘It was a great time to join, everything was completely changing. It had been an MBO business yet was still fairly quiet and slow then, but had to change becoming part of Snyder, in particular in reporting.’

FD Alan Hayward moved on a year later and Tibell took the top role, just four years after qualifying, but crucially she points out by then she had ten years’ accountancy and business experience. Bounty has almost become a national institution through its blanket coverage of UK hospitals, supplying ante-natal and post-natal marketing and product packs for parents.

Bought and sold

It has proved popular for private equity firms and each owner has provided Tibell with new experience. For Snyder, Bounty was part of a buy and build strategy at a young investment firm.

‘We were the second substantial acquisition so none of their management was placed into business and they left us to it,’ says Tibell, but Snyder had ‘tight’ reporting deadlines and ‘fairly hard’ profit targets. ‘We had to become much more professional.’

Later Snyder itself was bought by Havas, with Bounty something of a ‘spare part’, Tibell explains. ‘We were acquired as part of the mix and weren’t terribly happy being part of the large corporate environment. They were an advertising agency group and we’re more of a media owner.’

Tibell and her team still reported under US GAAP, so this made little difference to her department, nor did the consolidation work. The biggest relief for Tibell was that Havas sold Bounty just as it was preparing itself to handle Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

ECI Partners wanted to invest in the business, and took Tibell and the rest of the management team along for the ride to another MBO. The team had just three months to put together its business plan for the next three years: ‘Suddenly there was financial and commercial due diligence crawling all over the business, it was a bit daunting at the time.’

With Bounty’s turnover kicking around the £20m mark for the last few years, the business has undergone further change. The finance function for example has restructured so that Tibell’s 17 staff are split between financial accounting and planning and business support.

‘That means on one hand the nitty-gritty is looked after; the reporting and the integrity of numbers, but we can also support the business with decision-making.’

And so to Kaboose, Bounty’s current owners. The US-based ‘family-focused’ online media company has certainly shown some faith in Bounty’s future, and in the process it has provided a nice return for ECI and Bounty executives. The purchase price was £70m minus long-term debts and liabilities of £12m. The opportunity to take the money and head to pastures new was too much for Bounty MD Simon Williamson to resist, leaving the company just weeks after the deal was struck.

But unlike Tibell’s predecessor Hayward, who left a year after the company’s previous sale following the MBO, the potential of the new deal means Tibell has not put a limit on her continuing career at the company.

The Kaboose deal could potentially see Bounty expand into Europe where similar baby scheme providers exist. Bounty’s unique selling point is that it has 400 people who have daily face-to-face contact with mums and maternity units. ‘No-one else can say they do that,’ she boasts.

But Europe is still far off. Bounty will work closely with Kaboose, itself a large provider of maternity marketing services in the US, to expand its online parenting offerings.

Tibell’s role allows her to operate as a general manager rather than just an accountant, which she suggests shows that her accounting qualification was in fact a means to an end: ‘I don’t see myself as an accountant, but as a director of Bounty who happens to be the FD. There’s no socialising with accountants although my hubby owns his own practice,’ she admits.

While Tibell believes that Bounty is more of a support network for parents than a marketing business, it undergoes what she describes as ‘stringent audits’ of how its marketing programmes are used, particularly in terms of renting out client lists to other businesses.

It also works closely with health professionals to make sure the goods and information supplied in the baby packs are appropriate.

‘Health professionals really value what we do, we bring information where parents are completely information hungry, but the professionals have a final say on anything that goes into the packs, if they don’t like it, it doesn’t go in.’

And with the launch of a Bounty charity, begun by Tibell, the company has to be even more careful about not blurring the lines between advice, support and its business model. ‘It’s not commercial. We’re about supporting family-related causes, but our work as a business in supporting the NHS is at the heart of Bounty anyway, that kind of thinking is already here.’

For now the nearly 2.5 million parents subscribed to Bounty services seem happy with its service.

Birth is a big business

While Bounty has had a host of suitors interested in its business model in recent times – it has been acquired five times in 12 years – its core product of new mum packs is by no means a new phenomenon.

In fact its first pack was introduced in 1959 by founders Heinz, which reportedly used birth announcements published in newspapers with addresses to send a congratulations letter and free products direct to new mums. In 1961 it broke through the maternity market by agreeing a deal with the London College of midwives to distribute ‘new mum pack’ claim cards through its 200 branches.

Other highlights included sending a ‘new mum pack ’to the Princess of Wales in 1981, and a ‘pregnancy guide’ in 1983.

Some 20 years on, and the business has changed almost beyond recognition.

Today it distributes 3.4m packs, and employs 590 people – 465 of whom operate as its field operatives, delivering the packs to mums.

While the baby packs are still core, it offers clients a host of channels to access the lucrative baby market: sample packs, information guides, syndicated mailings and email newsletters.

Its website has 600,000 opted-in members, with 19m page hits a month.

‘We have a community of mums online who ask each other for advice,’ says Bounty FD Zoë Tibell. ‘As a club what do mums and families want? That’s what we strive to achieve.’

Tibell admits that some mums will be pleased to receive product marketing, ‘and some won’t’.

‘But we have a stringent audit procedure on how our marketing programmes are used.’

Future product marketing could well be aimed at dads, suggests Tibell, and Bounty is looking at how to provide them with the info and advice they need.

‘You have to consider dads in the mix. We’ve done some research on what dads would like, so we are considering products.’