Dillon Barker Advisory

Strategy and turnaround counsel for ambitious consumer goods businesses

"Senior counsel for consumer goods businesses — from someone who has actually done it"

The decisions that shape what happens next

Dillon Barker Advisory works with a small number of consumer goods businesses — big enough to have real ambition, but too lean to carry a full strategy function in-house. The work is the questions that most occupy their leadership teams: where to compete and how to win, how to build brands that earn their place, how to grow internationally without losing focus, how to scale, and what to fix when the numbers have stalled.The value is honest counsel aimed at the right outcome rather than the comfortable answer — easier to hear from someone with no internal agenda and no stake in the prevailing view.

  1. Brand and portfolio strategy

  2. International market entry and go-to-market planning

  3. Turnaround and commercial reset

  4. Capability assessment and organisational design

  5. Channel and customer strategy

Three decades of building brands and winning in market — brought to a select few as independent counsel.

A former Managing Director International — not a team of analysts

  1. As MD International at Premier Foods, I nearly doubled revenue and more than tripled profit, moving international from a group risk to one of its primary growth pillars. Transforming organisational capability.

  2. Launched Mr Kipling into the USA, Canada and the Gulf, Häagen-Dazs into Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, and The Spice Tailor across seven new countries.

  3. Built brands to category leadership — Betty Crocker from sixth to first, and Nature Valley from a standing start to the UK's number-one snack bar.

  4. Three decades across Premier Foods, General Mills, Nestlé and Diageo, spanning the UK, Europe, North America, the Middle East, Australasia and beyond.

Dillon Barker Advisory is led by Tim Dillon, who brings more than three decades in fast-moving consumer goods — senior roles at Premier Foods, General Mills, Nestlé and Diageo, and operations across the UK, Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East, Australasia and Africa, including a Managing Director International role that delivered a substantial turnaround.The approach is grounded in what works in the market and in the boardroom rather than in theory: leading multi-market programmes, building brand architecture from the ground up, turning difficult businesses around, and leaving behind the capability to sustain the result. That judgement is now offered to a select group of consumer goods businesses as independent counsel.

Senior by design, not by scale

Rather than large teams and long decks, the practice offers direct counsel to leadership — sharp on the commercial reality, honest about the trade-offs, focused on the decision being made well and on leaving you able to deliver it. Most engagements begin with a short exploratory conversation to test whether the fit and the problem are right.

Facing a genuine strategic inflection point ?

Dillon Barker Advisory is open to an exploratory conversation.