Make tough decisions
Knowing the season of change was upon him, Heyman had to first make some tough decisions about how to adapt the company.
He decided to invest in the bright future he believed the company had, but everyone had to sacrifice a little to do that — going without raises last year and giving up 401(k) matches. In addition, he had to slightly reduce the work force.
He also went to supply partners, who agreed to significant concessions in order to partner with Radiant. Despite all of these changes and concessions being made, he didn’t cut any initiatives that affected customers.
While these weren’t necessarily easy conclusions to come to, Heyman referred back to the vision, values and strategy that Radiant already had in place — to strive to be a remarkable company to work for, to buy from and to invest in — to guide him as he evaluated the possibilities.
“The first thing is you have to be able to face the facts and face the reality of your business,” he says.
“The facts and the analysis around it are really important. You have to understand the key trends both in terms of what your customers want, what their customers want, what are competitors doing. At the end of the day, the essence of strategy is for a company to understand what can they be best at in the world and why can they be best at it. What value are they going to bring to their customers, and can they bring that value to their customer base in a way that creates a sustainable model to add value to the customer, to channel partners, to their employees and to their shareholders? That’s all really easy to say, but that’s really hard to do on a sustainable basis.”
He also had to look at all of the possible scenarios.
“There’s the short-term scenario, which could be the next quarter,” he says. “There’s the medium-term scenario, which could be the next couple years, and then longer-term scenario, which could be three years out and longer. The two key elements there are the revenues of the business, which brings money in, and the cost of the business, where money goes out. The key for us was understanding in, with the analysis, what part of our revenues were at risk in what industry across what product lines, and we had to make certain assumptions about all the scenarios of uncertainty.”
Once you look at the scenarios, then you have to look at the cost-structure.
“From the cost-structure standpoint, that’s where you have to take a step back and say, ‘What things may impact the quarter or the year or the strategy?’ and that’s where the balancing is of different priorities,” Heyman says.
Lastly, you have to act fast. It took Heyman about 60 days to do all of this and make his decisions.
“What leaders don’t realize is that the people who work in their organizations, they want the tough decisions to be made and they want them to be put behind them and they want to move on from there. The biggest lesson I could say is act prudently but act fast — probably act more conservatively than you think you need to — and get those tough decisions behind you so you can build from there.
“Continuing to make incrementally tough decisions can create a loser mentality versus I think people can really rally behind a leader who is transparent, paints the vision, paints what needs to be done, is empathetic with people and makes sure that he or she knows the pain, and get those behind you. From there, you can go recreating a winning team,” he says. “It’s not unlike a football team that may be unsuccessful for a long period of time, and they realize they need to rebuild their team. They may have a tough year, but they start rebuilding quickly to get strong again whereas some teams don’t recognize the need to rebuild their organizations.”
