Black Friday can reveal more about a CPG company's leadership team than months of normal operations. When sales accelerate, promotions intensify, inventory gets tight, and retailers and consumers demand more, weaknesses in leadership, communication, forecasting, and decision-making become harder to hide.
Peak season doesn't create leadership problems. It exposes them.
For growing consumer brands, the holiday season is an opportunity to look beyond sales results and evaluate whether the leadership team is equipped to support the business at its current scale—and where it's headed next.
What Black Friday Can Reveal About a CPG Leadership Team
Peak season requires nearly every part of a CPG business to work together.
Sales is managing retailers and revenue targets. Marketing is driving demand. Operations and supply chain are managing inventory and fulfillment. Finance is watching margins and cash flow. Customer experience is responding to increased demand.
When those functions aren't aligned, the pressure shows.
Sales and Marketing Aren't Aligned
Promotional activity can create tension between sales goals, marketing plans, inventory levels, and profitability.
If sales is pushing for volume while marketing is focused on acquisition and finance is concerned about margin, someone needs to own the bigger picture.
A strong leadership team creates alignment around the company's goals rather than allowing each function to operate independently.
Operations Is Constantly Reacting
Peak season naturally creates operational pressure. But if the same issues repeatedly require intervention from the CEO or founder, there may be a deeper leadership gap.
A growing CPG company needs leaders who can anticipate problems, make decisions, and build systems that can handle increasing complexity.
Finance Doesn't Have Enough Visibility
Higher sales don't automatically mean better business performance.
Promotions, inventory investments, retailer terms, advertising spend, and fulfillment costs can all affect profitability and cash flow. Leadership needs financial visibility to understand the tradeoffs behind growth.
The Founder Is Still Making Every Decision
Peak season can make founder dependency particularly obvious.
If every significant issue—whether related to inventory, sales, marketing, hiring, or operations—still comes back to the founder, the company may have outgrown its current leadership structure.
The question isn't whether the founder should be involved. It's whether the leadership team has enough ownership to allow the founder to focus on the highest-value decisions.
No One Clearly Owns the Problem
When something goes wrong, who is responsible for fixing it?
If the answer changes depending on the situation—or everyone assumes someone else owns it—that's a leadership issue worth examining.
Clear accountability becomes increasingly important as a CPG company adds employees, channels, products, and complexity.
The Leadership Problems Peak Season Exposes
Black Friday can surface problems across nearly every major function of a CPG business.
Forecasting
Did the team accurately anticipate demand? Were sales forecasts, marketing plans, and inventory decisions connected?
Inventory
Did you have enough product in the right places? Were stockouts or excess inventory the result of an isolated issue or a recurring planning problem?
Retail Relationships
Did the sales team have the right leadership and resources to manage increased retailer demands?
Promotions and Margin
Did promotional decisions support revenue goals without creating unnecessary pressure on profitability?
Customer Acquisition
Could marketing scale demand efficiently, or did rising competition and advertising costs expose weaknesses in the growth strategy?
Fulfillment
Could operations and supply chain handle increased volume without constant executive intervention?
Cross-Functional Decision-Making
Perhaps most importantly: could the leadership team make decisions quickly when multiple functions were affected?
These aren't just Black Friday questions. They're indicators of how well the organization is equipped to scale.
What to Pay Attention to During Peak Season
Rather than immediately trying to fix every problem that surfaces during Black Friday, use the season as an opportunity to observe how your organization operates under pressure.
Pay attention to:
Where decisions slow down.
If a decision requires multiple rounds of escalation, ask why.
Where the founder gets pulled in.
Repeated founder involvement can reveal areas where the team lacks ownership or expertise.
Where functions disagree.
Disagreement isn't necessarily a problem. But if sales, marketing, finance, and operations consistently work toward different goals, the leadership team may need stronger alignment.
Where the same problem keeps happening.
A one-time inventory issue is different from a recurring forecasting problem.
Where your team is stretched beyond capacity.
If your best leaders are spending all of their time managing immediate issues, they may not have enough capacity for strategic work.
These observations can tell you more about your leadership needs than an org chart alone.
What These Problems Mean for Your 2027 Leadership Team
The goal isn't to come out of Black Friday with a list of new executive positions.
Instead, ask what the season revealed about the business you're building.
Consider:
What capabilities does the company need more of?
Which executives are stretched too broadly?
Where does the founder still need to be involved?
Which decisions lack clear ownership?
What will become more difficult if the company grows another 25% or 50%?
What new channels, products, or markets are coming next year?
Does the current leadership team have the experience to support those goals?
This is where peak-season observations can become a 2027 leadership plan.
If you're building or restructuring your executive team, How to Build a Leadership Team for a Scaling CPG Brand provides a useful framework for thinking about the functions and leadership capabilities a growing company needs.
You can also use What Executive Roles Does a Growing CPG Brand Need? to evaluate which leadership roles may become necessary as the business grows.
When Does a Leadership Gap Become an Executive Hiring Need?
Not every problem exposed during peak season requires a new executive.
Sometimes the solution is better processes. Sometimes it's clearer accountability. Sometimes an existing leader needs additional support.
But a recurring problem can signal that the company is missing a critical leadership capability.
For example:
Persistent sales challenges may point to the need for stronger commercial leadership.
Growing operational complexity may require an experienced operations executive.
Increasing financial complexity may call for a CFO or VP Finance.
Rapid growth across channels may require a broader general management role.
An overextended founder may need to build out the executive team around them.
The key is to distinguish between a temporary peak-season challenge and a structural leadership gap.
How to Identify Leadership Gaps in a Growing Consumer Brand can help you evaluate whether the problem you're seeing is a symptom of growth—and what kind of leadership may be needed to address it.
Turn Black Friday Lessons Into a Leadership Plan
Black Friday doesn't create leadership problems. It exposes them.
Once the holiday rush is over, take the opportunity to look beyond revenue and sales numbers. Look at how your leadership team communicated, made decisions, handled pressure, and divided responsibility.
Those observations can help you identify what needs to change before the new year—and whether your current team has the capabilities and capacity to support the company's next stage of growth.
If this year's peak season exposed a leadership gap, now is the time to determine what your team needs before 2027.
How Fairfield Partners Helps Growing CPG Brands
Fairfield Partners specializes in executive search for high-growth consumer brands, helping companies identify and recruit the leaders they need as their businesses evolve.
With experience across food, beverage, supplements, personal care, and pet care, Fairfield understands the leadership challenges that come with scaling consumer brands.
