When Enron offered to buy his software company and put him in
charge of a $6 billion division, Tracy K. Price thought it was the
opportunity of a lifetime. It turned out to be the beginning of a two-year nightmare.
Price’s company, FieldCentrix, was rolled up with three other
companies to create ServiceCo, a new building services company
under the Enron umbrella. Nine weeks later, Enron collapsed and
the newly minted ServiceCo didn’t stand a chance.
“We never even got the stock issued,” Price says. “It made the
dot-com implosion look like a protracted illness by comparison.”
Even though the ink had barely dried on their contract, Price’s
team was buried with negative overspray from the scandal. So he
immediately began damage control and tried to sever his ties to
the sinking corporation.
“I naively thought that we could just unscramble the egg and
have everybody go back to their respective corners,” he says.
But Enron wouldn’t go away that easily. The companies were
dragged through bankruptcy court and put out to bid several
times, but ultimately, Price was able to lead a buyout to take control of ServiceCo.
There was a lot of work to do to repair the company’s tarnished
reputation, and he began by forging a new corporate identity,
renaming the company The Linc Group.”
“What I tried to do with The Linc Group was take a business that
had languished under [the] uncertainty of the Enron debacle and
under the yoke of the despot and try to refresh that,” he says.
To combat the nagging specter of the “crooked E” that continued
to haunt him, Price strove to make The Linc Group the polar opposite of its former parent company. He took employee accountability to new levels, shattered any comparisons to Enron by operating
in total transparency — both inside the organization and with customers — and purged the company of anyone who wasn’t on board
with his changes.
As chairman, president and CEO, Price led The Linc Group from
the ashes of the Enron disaster to more than $500 million in revenue in 2007. He’s not finished either; the 4,200-employee organization is projecting nearly $600 million in revenue for 2008.
