In 2004, when Robert Post
joined TravelCLICK Inc. as chief financial officer, he faced a
huge challenge.
The company — which provides interactive distribution
solutions and marketing services to hotels — needed to be
restructured. It fell to him to do
it, and one of the first things he
looked at was performance.
“Performance is the one thing
you can’t hide,” Post says. “You
can hide a lot of silly things
inside organization structures, but when the revenues have
become flat and the profitability
isn’t there, and you’re not hitting the objectives that the
company set for itself, then
something is wrong, and that’s
when you know you have to
restructure.”
In the years to follow, Post
moved up to the president and
CEO roles, and he put the company back on track, allowing it
to earn $154.4 million in revenue last year — up from $52.3
million just three years before.
Smart Business spoke with
Post about how to get your
business back on the path to
profitability.
Create a plan. First, look at the
assets and decide, do we have
something of value here?
That’s when you have to go
back to, what’s your core
value proposition?
If what you’re doing doesn’t
track to that and you’ve gone
off the track, then you have to
get back on it.
Always go back to basics. If
you’re in a particular business
and you experience success,
somewhere in there, you know
what your core competency is.
Focus on that core mission,
and you have to constantly be
looking at everything you do
and bring it back to it. Then
once you come back to your
core principles of why your
business exists, it’s not hard to
connect the dots.
Look at your objective facts.
Your financial numbers tend to
be your most objective facts.
You have to look at it from an
analytical standpoint.
Sometimes for founders, that’s
hard to do because they’re
very emotionally tied to their
business. If they can’t do it
themselves, bring in somebody
— maybe a local CPA — to
look at their business with an
objective eye.
You have to go back and
look at, where’s the market,
how good is the market,
where do we fall in it, how is it
we can compete? It tends to
be a financially oriented view.
Establish hope. Restructuring is
pretty straightforward, but the
real art form is that you need
to get the management team
and people in the company
behind you.
First, there has to be a sense
of hope. Companies don’t get
restructured unless there’s a reason, so you have to give people
hope that there’s a future there.
No. 1, you have to believe in it
yourself. People have great
radars. They pick up on the B.S.
factor pretty quick out of their
leaders. If you don’t believe it,
there’s no reason they have to.
The second thing is, you can’t
lead from behind. You can’t
shove people out in front. You
have to go out there and take
the bullets and show the group
what you want them to do and
what things you believe in. It’s
not what you say but what you
actually value. If you value
engineering in a company but
you don’t make those people
the center of the world, then
they know that’s not the case.
Your actions speak louder than
words.
Once you outline where you
want to be, if you’re true to
what you say, people catch on
quickly what’s really the key here. At some point, you see
the transformation where the
CEO doesn’t need to be saying
it — it just becomes part of
the culture, and they go off
and do it on their own.
