Assembling a team and a plan
Once up to speed, Peterschmidt started preparing his game plan.
“First and foremost, make sure there is a well-thought-out strategic plan and strategic vision for the company that the key executives and management team buys in to and they helped develop, and that it’s based on reality and you’re not kidding yourself,” Peterschmidt says. “Have a real inventory of these strengths and weaknesses of the company, and understand how you can use those to create value for your customers.”
He took what he learned from his travels throughout the organization and brought in an outside firm to help management create a strategic plan for the company.
“The idea here is that it’s not a case of, ‘It’s my plan, coming off my desk, that was done by me alone,’ but rather, I like to have everybody in management have their fingerprints on the murder weapon,” Peterschmidt says.
One of the biggest problems was transitioning the company from a survival mode mentality of “Let’s try everything” to a growth mode with a single business focus.
The group agreed to focus on developing new software products and created what the business model should look like. It concluded that 18 percent of revenue should go to research and development, but in reality, that came in at about 25 percent. To get that number down, Peterschmidt abandoned participatory rule and let his CEO instincts take over. “I just dictated to everybody … we’re going to consolidate from 12 development sites to three,” Peterschmidt says. “I don’t care what the three are, and I don’t care how you do the consolidation, but that’s what we’re going to do.”
He gave them a six-month deadline, and it sent tremors through the organization.
“That was really a shock to the system because the company had all of these sacred cows,” Peterschmidt says. “I said, ‘I don’t care about nostalgia. I care about taking the company forward and us executing our strategic plan.’”
He also created a team to evaluate competitive threats, the company’s strengths, the competition’s weaknesses and what products the market would need two or three years out. He wanted to know where these points intersected and what opportunities they brought.
Peterschmidt also examined his management team and its skills to determine if he had who it would take to execute the plan.
“I wasn’t making the assessment on, ‘Gee, do I have a lot of people that I don’t want in here anymore?’” he says. “I was doing it more, ‘That’s where we’re going — what kind of skill set do we have to get there?’”
Peterschmidt evaluated his team’s gaps in terms of bodies and experience.
“In some cases, we flat didn’t have the skill sets and had to recruit it,” Peterschmidt says. “In other cases, we were now at a growth level beyond the experience headlights of some of the executives, and we needed to bring in executives with more experience.”
The company, which holds more than 100 patents, lacked a chief technology officer. He found nobody inside suited for the position, so he recruited from outside and also sought a chief marketing officer to better position Openwave in the market. He also hired a human resources director to ensure fairness in evaluations, bonuses and raises, and he brought in a new chief financial officer with more experience to capitalize on merger and acquisition opportunities.
While augmenting his management team, if people didn’t like their new responsibilities or the new direction of the company, Peterschmidt let them walk.
“It’s a matching exercise, where they go, ‘OK, this match is the type of company I want to be a part of,’” he says. “In some cases, it doesn’t match up anymore to what they want to do. Where it didn’t match up is where we were a $200 million to $400 million company with slow growth versus becoming over a half a billion and doing the high growth … Those are different types of people.”