These profiles explore what strengthens a business’s ability to keep earning, and what can gradually wear it down.
We use the Meridian framework to connect visible results with the decisions, relationships and organisational conditions behind them. Each profile examines a pattern that helps explain the company’s direction and offers a question you can explore in your own business.
The analysis draws on public sources, including company reports, regulatory findings, research and reporting. Some evidence was available as events unfolded; other material emerged later and helps explain what happened. Looking back can reveal patterns that would have been much harder to establish at the time.
These are independent analyses of public evidence. None of the companies featured is an Adaptiv client, and we have not examined their organisations from within.
How Patagonia protected its purpose from the next owner
In 1957 an eighteen-year-old climber walked into a junkyard and came out with a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, some tongs and a few hammers. He taught himself to blacksmith in his parents’ back garden in Burbank, made his first climbing pitons out of an old harvester blade, and sold them to friends at $1.50 each. He could forge two in an hour. Money was thin enough that before one summer in the Rockies he bought two cases of dented tinned cat tuna from a damaged-can outlet in San Francisco and lived on that.
That was Yvon Chouinard. Sixty-five years later, in September 2022, he gave away the company that grew out of that forge, valued at around $3 billion, and announced that Earth was now its only shareholder.
Cadbury’s takeover began before Kraft arrived
Cadbury wasn’t sold because it was failing.
On 19 January 2010, one week after reporting performance ahead of market expectations, its board recommended Kraft’s final offer. Revenue was growing. Margins had improved. The business had just made the strongest possible argument for its own future and received an offer valuing it at 13 times underlying 2009 EBITDA.
Cadbury could still say no. But it didn’t have anyone left with enough power to make no a final answer.
What do these patterns bring to mind in your business?
If one of these stories feels familiar, tell us what you are noticing and what you would like to understand. We’ll arrange a 30-minute conversation to discuss whether an analysis would help.
For analyses commissioned by 31 December 2026, the founding client rate is £900 + VAT. This covers one business or named competitor and one agreed commercial question, including a 90-minute fact-find, research and written analysis, and a 90-minute working session. We agree the scope before you commit.