You meet some leaders and know within five minutes why their teams follow them. Dan Williams is one of those. Laid back in his own head, apparently intense to everyone else, and completely unapologetic about both. He runs Orean Personal Care, a premium beauty and personal care manufacturer with sites in the UK and US. When Dan arrived in 2012, Orean was a £3m outfit. Today it’s roughly £30m with 300 people and a US operation in Indiana. No magic wand. No blitzscaling deck. Just an unsexy, relationship-first strategy and a CEO who thinks like an Ironman. It probably helps that he actually IS an Ironman – but more on that later.

Why is Dan the kind of leader you know people will follow? Well, he had me with his first statement once we’d hit record on the podcast:

“Optimism is a superpower.”

Let’s be clear though – this isn’t fluffy optimism. This is the realistic kind. The type you need to keep a 300-person factory moving when supply chains fall over, the Suez Canal jams, tariffs change overnight and two of your biggest brands get acquired and taken in-house. When others catastrophise, Dan reframes. That’s not the same as ignoring risk – he pairs optimism with realism and a sprinkling of healthy pessimism.

The counterintuitive growth move: Stop chasing new logos

When Dan joined as sales director, the default play would have been obvious: more brands, more meetings, more “new business” noise. He did the opposite. He rang every existing customer, asked what was working and what wasn’t, and stopped targeting new accounts.

On a spreadsheet, that reads boring. In the real world, it’s brave. It meant doubling down on service, shortening lead times, taking friction out of compliance and packaging, and generally being the easiest manufacturer to work with. It meant investing in R&D (six development chemists) without monetising development hours, and passing IP ownership to brand partners so their valuation increases – while Orean wins on relationship and repeatability. As Dan says: “We put the value on the relationship, not the contract.”

If you’ve ever scaled a manufacturing business, you’ll recognise the wisdom. New customers are expensive, long-gestation bets. Your best growth often sits inside the customers you already have – if you can make them successful and remove pain. Dan’s team built a desirable manufacturing experience across two continents so brands could scale on either side of the Atlantic without starting again.

Ironman lessons for operating at scale

The sport chat isn’t garnish here. Dan taught himself to front crawl as an adult because he promised his son he’d learn to swim. Then he signed up – while still a non-swimmer – for Ironman UK.As Dan got more serious, he set his sights on qualifying for the World Championships. His coach disagreed with that ambition, telling Dan he was “a hobby guy, not a qualifier.” So Dan sacked him. Instead of allowing an ‘expert’ to put him off his dream, Dan found a friend and fellow Ironman competitor who believed he could do it, and appointed him as his coach instead. Guess what? Dan qualified for the World Championships in Barcelona in 2022. 

What’s that got to do with business, you might ask? The two main takeaways from Dan’s athletic successes are as applicable in the boardroom as they are on a running track. Or on a bike. Or in water. You get my point.

The first big parallel is that – in any area of your life – belief compounds. Surround yourself with people who can see a bigger version of you (and your company) and say so out loud. Dan’s “no limits” mindset shows up everywhere—from setting the “50/50 in 5” target to refusing to let temporary setbacks become the story.

The other similarity between athletic endeavour and business success is the importance of marginal gains. The athlete’s obsession with nutrition, recovery, pacing and micro-adjustments is now part of Orean’s ops DNA. Every department asks how to get from brief to product in warehouse faster, with fewer defects and less friction. Not a transformation project—a succession of small improvements that, added together, result in records being broken.

Vulnerability, properly understood

Another of Dan’s beliefs is that we explored on the podcast is that success is driven by vulnerability. The day-to-day practice of saying, “I made a mistake; help me fix it,” and creating a culture where managers don’t feel they must look competent while they are actually drowning. He shared the classic manufacturing trap: promote a top operator to manager without training; watch them struggle; lose them entirely. Orean’s answer is boring and brilliant. Clear pathways (line operative to team leader to shift manager to supervisor), accompanied by real training, and a safe environment to ask for help early. After all “it’s not weakness to ask for help. It’s how we stop small problems becoming messes.”

Dan also clocked a self-awareness blindspot: he feels laid back; others experience intensity. That’s useful data for any leader. Intensity is great when you need to raise standards but can be terrible if it suppresses differing views and opinions. He uses that feedback to invite more voices in the room and actively stop the senior team “looking down the table” for the CEO’s answer.

From £3m to £30m: the operating system

Leadership team evolution

At £3m it was Dan, an ops lead and the MD. At £30m there’s a true SMT across finance, procurement, H&S/quality, warehousing and more, with very low attrition for the sector. The pandemic pressure-cooked them into a unit – daily calls, shared problem solving, no silos. When meetings drifted into pointlessness (“the MD reads out the month”), they re-cut the format.

  • Monthly: 60–120 minutes on performance and the few hardest problems, then breakouts.
  • Quarterly: a look-back by function (what worked, what didn’t, what’s next), plus forecasted risks.
  • Anytime: if a big issue hits, don’t wait. Get the right small group in a room.

Time back for the CEO

The early trap Dan fell into (and admits) was trying to understand every function “to the minutiae”. The unlock was trusting functional leaders, asking better questions, and setting crisp expectations. On the commercial side, he kept senior relationships but elevated account managers – naming their work explicitly in escalations so clients learned where real progress was being made. Result: fewer escalations, better development for the team, and Dan’s time freed for the work only he can do.

Hiring and succession

Dan’s honest about his own interview blind spots. Two practical takeaways any scale-up can steal:

  • Use your best interviewers. Some people are exceptional at structured interviewing; most aren’t. Put the right assessors in the room and don’t let senior leaders “answer their own questions” mid-interview.
  • Succession or stagnation. If you can’t make yourself redundant, you can’t be promoted. That mantra only works in a psychologically safe environment – so they built one.

The vision: 50/50 in 5

On a run, Dan found the phrase that stuck: 50/50 in 5. Half UK, half US, in five years. Memorable enough to shout across the factory floor; clear enough for every function to translate into their own plan. Will it take six or seven? Maybe. But that’s not a reason to avoid the stake in the ground. A good vision creates a shared language for decisions.

“We asked: if we simply help existing partners hit their goals, can we hit ours? The answer was yes.”

The discipline that supports the vision is selection. Because they could hit the target with current partners, they became more selective with inbound brands. Not a brush-off – an honest “why” when the fit isn’t right. That serves everyone better.

The US bet (and why it matters for clients)

During the pandemic they set up in Hobart, Indiana. Not for a vanity flag, but to shorten lead times, cut freight, improve cash flow and remove cross-border friction for brands expanding into the States. UK-originated brands can now produce domestically in the US. US brands can scale with a partner who understands premium category expectations. It’s the same service ethos, applied to geography.

When the rug gets pulled

Manufacturers know this pain: you help a brand win, then a bigger player buys it and pulls production in-house. It happened to Orean – twice. They didn’t sugar-coat it. They kept people, kept standards, and found growth elsewhere. That’s where optimism needs teeth. You don’t positive-think your way out with the help of some worry beads and a yoga mat. You operate your way out: cost discipline without killing capability; redeploy talent; focus on the next wins.

Books that shaped his thinking (and how he uses them)

Dan reads widely and cross-trains his brain. A few standouts from the conversation:

Unbeatable Mind (Mark Divine) – mental control under pressure, meditation, calm in the fight.
The Obstacle Is The Way (Ryan Holiday) – stoicism as an operator’s toolkit.
Start With Why (Simon Sinek) – helped him articulate vision and values in a way people remember. (We’ll respectfully agree to disagree on this one though)
Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl) – perspective, purpose, optimism in the bleakest circumstances.

Final word

If you want a case study in how endurance translates to enterprise, Dan Williams is it. He didn’t chase shiny objects. He chose optimism, doubled down on partners, set a vision people can remember, and did the thousand dull things that make factories hum. The result is a transatlantic, premium-segment manufacturer that quietly wins – because its CEO won’t settle for second.