Santa Fe sale: Yann Blandy interview

The sale of Santa Fe and Sanelo to French family-owned business MOBILITAS, announced on 6 February, marks the end of a four-and-a-half year journey for Yann Blandy, one of the founding partners of Lazarus Equity Partners, who, with the backing of Proventus Capital Partners – and in partnership with Runar Nilsen – bought the struggling firms in September 2019. 

In the relatively short time he has been in the moving industry, Blandy has gained a reputation for his straight-talking, sometimes challenging approach, and use of swearing during conference appearances and in interviews (FIDI Focus has edited this out – which, Blandy jokes, will have people wondering if this interview is authentic).

For Blandy and his investment team, the moving sector wasn’t a hard target. They had entered Santa Fe a few months earlier as consultants for a bank – ‘one assignment among others’ – with a brief to help work out why the business was failing. The project gave them an understanding of the fundamental changes required to its model and, when the opportunity arose, the confidence to take on the challenge of implementing them. 

At the time, Blandy said that while Santa Fe had been operating in a difficult and slow-growing market, most of its issues were of its own making. ‘I’d say 80 per cent of the problems in Santa Fe were created by Santa Fe. We carry the weight of our own mistakes to a large extent,’ he said, citing sizeable missteps, including the manner in which it had entered the US market, tried to sell its immigration business to CIBT at the start of 2019, and, in particular, the way it was managing its people and clients.

‘We saw in Santa Fe two hidden assets that were completely mismanaged: its people and its client base,’ says Blandy, ‘We figured out that we needed to unlock the potential of these two things in the business. It was all about the brand.’

The onset of the COVID pandemic just a few months after the purchase disrupted the timing and format of Blandy’s original turnaround plans. Together with his management team, however, he set about repairing relationships with Santa Fe’s previously dissatisfied customers, and building new ones. 

‘We worked on reaching out, talking to people, not shying away when we were chased by anyone for poor quality or not paying, for example,’ says Blandy. ‘We made sure we went out there and the brand was visible, and we said what we thought, and did what we said. Being extremely consistent in time was key to rebuilding trust in the brand.’ 

One of Blandy’s proudest milestone moments in this process – which those who attended the FIDI Conference in Cannes may remember – was the succession of Santa Fe staff declaring their presence at roll call. ‘I thought to myself, “Yeah, we’re back”,’ he says.

Key achievements during Lazarus’s time at the helm of Santa Fe include fixing the US strategy, which, says Blandy, ‘was completely out of whack’, and he defines the distance the company has come in two numbers. ‘In 2019, when we joined, the retention rate for clients at Santa Fe was 87 per cent – which is a disaster. It means you have lost 13 per cent of your clients every year before you’ve even started. Last year, this was 99 per cent. 

‘This, fundamentally, is the result of the way we operate, the way we serve our customers, the quality focus, the retention focus, the way we put out our teams together – all this work to actually do it right.’

The second metric, Blandy says, is that Santa Fe’s revenues from agents and partners across the industry have leapt to two and a half times what they were in 2019 – to around ¤18m last year. ‘This means we were able to rebuild trust and relationships with players in the industry who would have completely discounted us because of the strategy we had before.’

These two figures also show that the company is back on track with its staff, he adds: ‘We did something right for our customers, which means we have done something right for our people – because we wouldn’t have been able to do this for our customers without doing something for our people.’ 

Given these positives, the sale of the Santa Fe and Sanelo to MOBILITAS came as a surprise to many. However, Blandy says the deal has arisen at the right time for the company. 

‘When we joined the industry, everyone was speculating that we’re not the profile of investors that are going to be here for the long term, and that’s absolutely true,’ says Blandy. ‘Because we are who we are, there would always have been some form of an exit – and, if not now, it would have happened later.’   Most importantly, he adds, ‘as owners, we have taken Santa Fe as far as we could’. The sale to MOBILITAS – the product of conversations with Group Chairman Alain Taïeb and CEO Cédric Castro, who, Blandy says, are ‘great professionals’ – brings Santa Fe the essentials it has been missing to reach its full potential.

‘If you take a step back and really look at what makes a business successful in this industry, these things immediately jump to mind,’ says Blandy. ‘Most are family or privately owned, rather than being owned by financiers like us. This gives them a perspective that lasts for decades and generations, rather than a short-term view over the next month, quarter or year.’ 

He adds that the equity ownership, stock-listed model may be the reason businesses such as SIRVA BGRS or Cartus have experienced difficulties. ‘Going forward, some of these will have to figure out if this is ideal for this type of industry, which has wafer-thin margins and a very, very challenged cash profile,’ says Blandy. ‘This isn’t great for financiers or the stock market, which both look for fast returns. 

‘Successful businesses in this industry are financially solid; they can invest in their future, whether that be in their people, geographic expansion, technology, diversification – you name it. They’re not saddled with debt.

‘Most are also diversified – in records management, logistics, office moving, last-mile delivery, and so on – and are not 100 per cent focused on relocation; and they have a solid technological foundation that they have developed in-house, rather than relying on external technology.’ 

On every one of these elements, Blandy says, ‘Santa Fe was on the wrong side, because of past management mistakes’. When it came to developing the business and coping with two years of COVID – and the ensuing freight challenges, energy and general price inflation, recession, war, and other difficulties – the company was ill-equipped. 

‘Santa Fe was dancing on one leg, which was global household removals,’ says Blandy. ‘But movers need to diversify and take on technological development, account for macroeconomic changes and fundamental changes in the way we work, to ensure they have a sustainable business going forward.’

Santa Fe’s accumulated ‘legacy’ makes it incredibly hard to fix the issues still at hand within the company, says Blandy. ‘If Santa Fe and Sanelo are to regain their greatness, they need to find a home, which is on the right side of the above elements – and MOBILITAS gives them that.’

Great relief

He feels three emotions about completing his journey with Santa Fe: relief, pride, and sadness. 

‘Finding MOBILITAS as a new home for Santa Fe is a great relief, because I know the company is going to be able to thrive again,’ Blandy says. ‘MOBILITAS has acquired a business that is going to make it even more of an industry leader than it already is, giving it synergies and a fantastic brand to capitalise on, with different strengths from the other brands already in its portfolio.’

With MOBILITAS’s ‘buy don’t sell’ strategy, Blandy says this is a home for the long term, too, ‘not just for the next three to five years. And this means my colleagues at Santa Fe and Sanelo have found a place.’

His sense of pride comes from the fact that ‘there wasn’t anything to sell five years ago’, while his sadness comes from leaving behind the many colleagues he has worked with and friends he has made in the moving industry.

‘You don’t lead a company like Santa Fe without being fully engaged, personally and professionally, with all those individuals you meet within and outside of the business,’ Blandy says.  

Indeed, it’s these people that have made the Lazarus team’s experience in the industry very different from what they were expecting. 

‘In the beginning, people told us it’s very much a relationship business, and we thought that’s like any industry: it’s not,’ he says. ‘This is the element that surprised us most, but once we understood it and embraced it, and we started to build those relationships, it really helped us.’ 

This people focus, and the true nature of moving, was an element his management predecessors didn’t understand, he adds. ‘They thought this was just a logistics business – and, yes, we put stuff in containers – but, on the operations side, it’s anything but. It’s all about the way you sell, the way you talk about it, market it, and the relationships.’

Plus one

Having a ‘relentless people focus’ is behind the company’s biggest successes, Blandy says, citing people from across the firm’s portfolio who have made a difference, including Christine Sperr, Srinivasan Narayanaswami, and Morgan Beaumont, responsible respectively for turnarounds and business growth in the company’s Dubai, India, and BeNeLux offices. Ultimately, he says, leadership is about getting out of your staff’s way, giving them the tools they need, and ‘recognising that they are professionals and they know what they are doing’.

‘I define being CEO as “three plus one”,’ says Blandy. ‘Number one is making sure you have the right people in the right place. Number two is making sure that, together with these people, you’re clear as to where you’re going and why. And number three is “just do it”.’

The ‘plus one’, he adds, is about remembering that 90 per cent of your job is communication. ‘This is about who you talk to and when, how you talk, how you dress, your body language.’

Looking back at his experiences over the past four and a half years, Blandy says he would do two things differently. First, he would change the timing – ‘coming in just before COVID was about the most messed-up timing we could have had. I would have changed this if I possibly could. 

‘Second, I wouldn’t have fallen for Santa Fe and Sanelo with such a crush as I have, as it makes it very difficult to leave now.

‘Financiers are supposed to be very rational, but you cannot enter this business without bringing your whole self to work, and there are a lot of emotions and relationships involved. But if you want to lead a company and make the industry connections you need, it’s about more than rationality.’ 

In January 2023, Blandy passed the Santa Fe CEO reins to Runar Nilsen, who remains at the helm of the company, and reduced his workload to concentrate on other projects in the Lazarus portfolio, which over the past five years has grown by another seven businesses. All of these are outside of mobility, but, he says, they will benefit from his learnings about the immense power of people in a business. 

Blandy exits the company entirely to focus on helping Lazarus move towards its ambitious goal of growing to a revenue base of a billion euros – although he will be taking a short break first. 

Will he miss the moving business? ‘Of course,’ he says, adding that he will keep in touch with many of those he has met along the way. ‘I will miss the people there. It’s a very special industry.’