Marty Kahn had reached the top just as ProQuest LLC had hit bottom.
It was February 2007 when Kahn took over as the CEO of the information technology firm that provides products and services to educational, government, medical and research entities. But at that point, products and services were not at the front of most minds at ProQuest.
The company was in the midst of a complicated merger and reorganization, due in part to a 2006 financial reporting scandal involving ProQuest Information and Learning, a division of what was then a publicly held company. The scandal was sparked by what Kahn says were intentional misstatements on financial documents. The fallout included an earnings restatement, a drop in the company’s stock price and shareholder lawsuits, among other problems.
“As a result of that, the public company ProQuest decided it needed to sell off the ProQuest Information and Learning division,” Kahn says. “They sold it to a private company, where it was then combined with another business. That’s where it got really confusing, because the private, merged company took the ProQuest name, while the now smaller, public company took the name Voyager Learning.”
The scandal, sale and news of the merger formed a triple threat that damaged the corporate culture of the revised, privately held ProQuest. The lack of trust employees had in management was palpable. The merger and reorganization forced downsizing, creating a companywide feeling of uncertainty about the future. And Kahn had to face it all from his first day on the job.
“I had a company which was now the result of a merger, which is something that always has its own issues,” he says. “The company had been through a severe financial reporting scandal and, as a result, had to be significantly downsized, which was a major blow to our morale and esprit de corps.
“The challenge I had was to carry out a merger, restore the energy and direction of the company, and I was a new CEO on top of that.”
