Mark McMillin’s story is not all that different from the stories of numerous other business leaders over the past couple of years.
The economic downturn hit his business hard.
McMillin is a second-generation leader of The Corky McMillin Cos., a San Diego-based custom homebuilder founded by his father 50 years ago. Today, McMillin leads the company as president and CEO, with his brother Scott in the chairman’s role.
But the stability of family leadership still hasn’t been enough to shield McMillin’s company from the harsh realities of dwindling housing starts and the subsequent drain it put on the company’s revenue — $255 million in 2009, down from an estimated $464 million in 2006.
The revenue crunch forced McMillin and his leadership team to make some tough decisions. None of those decisions was more difficult than to trim the work force by about 70 percent. The Corky McMillin Cos. now employs approximately 350 people in California and Texas.
Through all of it, McMillin had to figure out how to buoy morale for the remaining employees, minimize damage to customer confidence and keep everyone focused on the end goal of piloting the company to calmer waters.
“We’ve had to do a significant amount of downsizing and rightsizing, constantly looking at costs,” McMillin says. “It has been a painful process trying to keep the company alive with that much change. The people you are trying to keep, it’s hard to show them that there is a light at the end of the tunnel — and that the light isn’t an oncoming train.”
For McMillin, trying economic times meant getting his company back to the basics of good communication, soliciting feedback from employees and putting the company’s guiding principles and core values back in the spotlight.
There was also the simultaneous issue of making sure the company maximized its remaining revenue channels.
“We had to convince people working on existing projects that there is 18 or 20 months of work here,” McMillin says. “We had to try and give people working in an unstable environment a sense of security for longer than 12 months. Whether we’re doing well financially or not, we still have to keep the projects moving down the tracks. So we needed to have a lot of individualized conversations, pats on the back, convincing people that while there might be a lot of turmoil right now, what we’re working on is important, we need it, and please stick with us.”
