Last year, Dave Wathen was facing the same issue that a lot of business leaders have faced during the recent economic downturn.
In a nutshell, what was OK a couple of years ago wasn’t OK anymore.
Wathen’s company, TriMas Corp., wasn’t playing fast and loose with its money. But like a lot of businesses around the country, it had loosened its belt a few notches over the years, spooning a few extra helpings of debt onto its plate.
Soon after the full force of the economic downturn hit TriMas in early 2009, Wathen quickly realized that even a few extra pounds of debt and a few extra discretionary expenditures could pose a health hazard for the company.
But with 10 business units located around the world, playing to a large degree by their own rules, it wasn’t as simple as sending out a memo from corporate headquarters. Wathen, TriMas’ president and CEO, had to refashion the company’s approach to business.
“The biggest challenge we had was converting the way we operate to put an equal intensity on cash as we have on earnings,” Wathen says of the $1.02 billion provider of engineered and applied products. “Basically, TriMas had been run as a holding company with a group of businesses; now we needed to convert ourselves to an operating company. We had to convert from a holding company mentality and culture, metrics and processes, to behaving like an operating company, which has a different set of processes.”
Wathen and his leadership team needed to build a plan, cascade it and create buy-in throughout all of the organization’s units.