The right plan
With management in place, Chen was ready to re-establish Sybase’s credibility and illustrate its longevity plans to critics. But this proved difficult with Sybase’s extremely limited resources,
as revenue dropped from $1.01 billion in 1996 to $868 million in 1998, while the net loss increased from $79 million to $93 million in that same timeframe.
In an early management meeting, Chen sat down with his team and told everyone, “Don’t ask me for the strategy, because we don’t have any muscle to execute it. Even if I had the perfect
miracle, we just can’t execute it, so let’s pretend there’s one magic bullet out there somewhere. We don’t know if we’ll be successful at it, but let’s make a run at it, and we’ll die trying.”
Chen and his team developed a three-year plan to keep everyone focused on staying afloat, but the key was finding what Sybase’s one magic bullet was.
Chen predicted it was mobility, and everybody laughed as, at the time, the market was only a few hundred million dollars. Despite the skeptics, he felt he was on to something and plunged forward.
“It was difficult to convince people that this was not just branch out into Never Never Land and never return again,” Chen says.
He constantly explained the benefits and possibilities of mobility to both employees and customers so that everyone understood where they fit in to the equation.
During this time of new product direction, Chen also sought out an aggressive track to keep customers, which would at least maintain revenue, and, he hoped, grow it while also easing
employees’ worries.
Chen and his team devised a 24/7 support program for customers to connect with a human any time of day, any place in the world.
During the next six months, Chen also visited more than 300 customers around the world.
“They finally realized, here’s a company that would like to fight their way back,” Chen says. “It was very important at the time that I go out and that my management team go out and see
these customers all around the world because they needed a face to relate to, whether they believed it or not.”
Chen also capitalized on the fact that many of Sybase’s clients were in mission-critical fields, where switching to another company would be challenging, so he kept communication open
and honest, yet upbeat, to prevent the thought of switching companies from creeping into his customers’ minds.
He and his managers each personally called 10 customers at each quarter’s conclusion so they could communicate Sybase’s financial progress.
On top of these efforts, most of Sybase’s customers were preoccupied with the anxiety surrounding Y2K, so it bought the company additional rebuilding time.