It all made sense to Bryan Bedford. He was confident that the move Republic Airways Holdings Inc. had made to buy Frontier Airline Holdings Inc. and Midwest Air Group Inc., acquisitions meant to help Republic remain competitive in the volatile airline industry, would result in a smooth cultural integration.
After all, each of the companies had a pretty strong culture before the move was made.
“Our assumption was that it would just continue,” says Bedford, chairman, president and CEO at the 10,340-employee Republic Airways. “We weren’t doing anything to change it negatively, therefore it shouldn’t be negatively affected. But that’s not what happened. What really happened is the management team was waiting for us to tell them how the new regime was going to work.
“We were assuming that by not telling them to change anything, they would continue to do things the way they always did it. And essentially what happened was things just stopped.”
Unfortunately for Bedford, it wasn’t the first miscalculation he and his team had made in the acquisition of Frontier and Midwest. Republic’s team had also assumed that one of the company’s technology platforms, either Frontier or Midwest, would be suitable to serve as a template for the combined entity.
“But as it turned out, neither one was robust enough to do the work for the consolidated airline,” Bedford says. “That was a huge distraction and a fairly substantial setback for us in the integration process.”
Faced with a group of employees uncertain about their future and a question about how to integrate different technologies, Bedford had a lot of work to do to keep this important transaction on course.
“We knew there was going to be some pain due to these technology limitations we were saddled with,” Bedford says. “The question was: Could we retain loyalty while we worked through this transition process?”
