2022 C-Suite Awards: Large company | Julian Davies, Finlays Americas chief operating officer
Finlays Americas Chief Operating Officer Julian Davies is not looking to be the next Elon Musk; he wants to finish first as himself.
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“I don’t have a specific role model,” said Davies, who joined Finlays in January 2019. “I pick the best bits of what I see. At the end of the day, I want to be myself – me, version 1.”
The lawyer-turned-executive first stepped into Finlays’ C-suite as acting CEO in December 2019, just months before COVID-19 surfaced.
Not only did he steer the global coffee, tea and botanical-solutions supplier headquartered in Lincoln through unprecedented times, but he also oversaw its merger with Texas-based Aspen Beverage Group and completed Finlays’ CEO replacement search.
By May 2020, Davies had earned a permanent place in Finlays’ corporate office. He was promoted from vice president of operations to chief operating officer, even after COVID-19 forced him to temporarily shutter the business.
“I had been acting CEO for six months, and there I was having to close for a week,” Davies said. “It put a marker in the sand that we were motivated to look out for our employees.”
Serving as Puccino’s Co. secretary and general manager, Davies whet his desire to run a company and moved across the telecommunications and grocery sectors, seizing opportunities to grow professionally.
Davies earned his National Diploma for Health and Safety from the National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health as he closed out his 6½-year tenure at Sainsburys Supermarkets Ltd. in the United Kingdom.
In December 2014, he circled back to familiar grounds working with coffee and tea, this time serving on James Finlay Ltd.’s board of directors. Both Finlays Americas and James Finlay Ltd. are subsidiaries of James Finlay & Co., which was founded in 1750 and operates in more than 11 countries, with source farms in Kenya, Sri Lanka and Argentina.
Since Davies moved to Rhode Island with his wife and two children, he has overseen state-of-the-art extraction-and-development technology and a bush-to-bottle model serving more than 500 customers with 600 products in the Western Hemisphere.
Finlays Americas includes a Cranston warehouse, a research and development site in North Kingstown, a small office near the Port of New Jersey, and buildings in San Antonio and Gonzalez, Texas.
A cycling, running, skiing and rugby enthusiast, Davies tapped London Business School and France-based INSEAD School of Management to hone his executive skills. But he also applies lessons learned from people who he perceives to have high degrees of ethics and morals, such as Clive Woodward, whose 2004 autobiography “Winning!” details coaching England’s rugby team to the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
“If you have 100 things and improve each by a small amount, cumulatively, that’s a big change once you add them all up,” Davies said. “That’s how I operate; if I can get 1%-2% improvement in everything, that’s a big improvement across the board.”
Under Davies, Finlays marked 1,000 days without any serious or fatal work-related injuries, ranging from cracked teeth or broken bones to disease and death.
Finlays is among the first food and beverage companies to earn internationally recognized ISO 45001 certification for its occupational health and safety system protecting employees and work-site visitors.
“It is his top priority, not how much product is getting out the door,” said Shaun Galligan, Finlays’ director of environmental, health and safety and one of four directors on Davies’ management team. “If anyone is injured – even if it’s a minor injury – he would feel as though he had failed.”
Financially, Davies’ biggest coup has been meeting 2021 goals despite a challenging labor market with quality employees in short supply.
“We hit all our numbers during the pandemic, and we had a really good safety record,” Davies said, crediting his success to asking questions, listening a lot and showing vulnerability. “I don’t try to be the cleverest person in the room. There are plenty of people who are successful because they were the most clever person in the room. But there are many more who have to be the most clever in the room and aren’t successful because they don’t listen to others.”
