Manufacturing
Corrosion controller
How William Larkin shook the rust off Corrpro Cos. Inc.
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Akron/Canton | March 2008
When William V. Larkin became president and CEO of Corrpro
Cos. Inc. in August of 2006, the business was in need of a major
overhaul.
The corrosion control and protection company had gone
through three CEOs in three years and the constant change in
leadership had wreaked havoc with the company’s culture.
“If you came in and analyzed this company, you would have
seen the issues within a week,” he says. “You don’t need 30, 60 or
90 days.”
Morale was low from a major reduction in the work force that
occurred two years ago, its employees were unhappy, there was
no direction, and Larkin needed to fix it.
From a conceptual perspective, the problem was simple.
The trick was taking a disgruntled work force that didn’t trust its
leadership and completely change its attitude.
Earn their trust
Executive indecision led Corrpro to become stagnant, along
with a demoralized work force and a company culture that was
on the skids.
Larkin needed to fix the overall attitude so the company
could move forward, and it meant doing one thing: walking the
talk.
“My predecessor and others in other companies, they can do
the 60,000-foot stuff,” he says. “They have all the wonderful
strategic plans, they understand and assess the marketplace,
and they do all the analytic work. But they don’t take any
action. Or they’re not willing to spend money and resources to
take advantage of some of those insights. The key is to understand what the issues are. If there’s a big decision to make,
make it as quickly as you can.”
Larkin prides himself on being the type of leader who puts
the “execute” in “chief executive officer.” Shortly after beginning his tenure as president and CEO, he embarked on a trip to
visit each of the company’s offices. He wanted to meet the people working for him, and he wanted to show them he was more
than just CEO No. 4 in four years.
Corrpro has 21 offices in the U.S., seven in Canada, one in the
U.K., one in Portugal and one on the way in China. Larkin visited
employees all over the Corrpro network, donning overalls and
getting out in the field with them to learn about the challenges
they faced every day.
“When they see that, I think they see it’s real,” he says. “I told
them what they see is what they get. There’s no façade here.”
Winning over the jaded engineers and corrosion protection specialists was an important step in reforming the culture at Corrpro. Larkin
liked to introduce himself with, “Hello, I’m the CEO of the month,”
and everyone would have a chuckle. But he was truly determined to
earn the trust and respect of Corrpro’s more than 1,000 employees.
“Taking action is the most important thing,” he says. “Even if it’s the
wrong action, it’s the best signal to the employees that you want to make significant changes. Even if you take the wrong action, you can
change it. But no action is the worst.
“It frustrates people. The morale in a company goes down.
But if you start making moves, and you’re communicating why
you’re making moves, and you’re showing the benefits behind
why you’re making the moves — if you do that, you create a
momentum that people get behind, and things start to click.”
The changes didn’t all come at once, but he made it clear that
it was not business as usual.
“When you’re trying to change a culture, you’ve got to start with
baby steps,” Larkin says. “We’ve got 1,000 employees worldwide,
and I can’t be talking to 1,000 people every day.”
Larkin says the best way to get your message out is the trickle-down effect. For this to work, you need to be constantly communicating with your direct reports, and the message must be
absolutely consistent. Those managers will then provide the exact
same message to their direct reports, and the information trickles
down to the lowest level in the organization.
It takes time because if there is a break in the consistency of the
message or if too many people aren’t following along, you won’t be
able to successfully change the culture.
Larkin spent time with employees several levels down the management chain to make sure morale was improving. Whether
through trade shows, town-hall meetings or simply taking a small
group of employees out for lunch, it’s easy to get a feel for employee morale.
“None of this is rocket science,” he says. “It’s how you deal with
your family, your friends — how you deal with life.”
Sometimes it just comes down to how you treat people.
“If people will treat me with respect and how I want to be treated, then it’s easy to deal with them,” he says. “If you treat people
nicely and you’re not always threatening to fire them or pounding
your fist on the desk, and you use some humor and logic, generally, people will say, ‘Wow, this is a nice place to work. Why would-n’t I want to follow this guy?’”
Selling buy-in
When Larkin joined Corrpro, the company had no marketing
department — a shock to Larkin, who has an MBA with a concentration in marketing and strategic planning. Larkin sees marketing
as leading the way and also sees the sales group as being a part of
that effort.
“The marketing group should be the main aorta between the
company and the consumer,” he says. “Without sales or marketing, we all go home.”
Corrpro tried to implement a marketing department before, but
it failed. Larkin says if management decides to bring in a marketing department populated with outside marketing experts, it’s generally doomed to failure. That’s why he tried a new tactic at
Corrpro, one that would establish crucial buy-in from all levels of
the Corrpro staff.
Larkin rounded up his key operational people into one room and
had a little educational seminar on the basics of marketing. Then,
after consulting with his management group, he picked several
operating engineers — employees who knew corrosion — and
sent them off to sales management training. They became regional sales managers, and the cornerstones of Corrpro’s new sales and
marketing effort.
Larkin says the move resulted in immediate buy-in from the operational staff, which fostered a true spirit of cooperation throughout the company.
“It’s because here is a regional VP who selected one of his operations guys to be the regional sales manager, and he doesn’t want
to see him fail. He’s a friend of his, and so he will do everything he
can do to make that person succeed — as opposed to hiring somebody from outside and saying, ‘You don’t know our business, you
don’t know our customers, and you don’t know our company.’”
Larkin says the actual training process went smoothly. The engineers, who already were experts at corrosion service, were able to
easily grasp the structure and nuances of building a good sales
team. Also, the newfound unity between the engineers and the
sales and marketing team was good for morale and a boon to the
struggling company culture.
Make decisions
The revamp of the sales and marketing branch of Corrpro was
just another example of a change that was just waiting to be made.
Larkin didn’t hesitate, as so many had before.
“They’ve been talking about changing the marketing and sales
here for about five years,” he says. “We did it in four months. You
can’t just wish for things to get better. You’ve got to try to do something that will make a change.”
Larkin calls himself a benevolent dictator. When dealing with
employees or a management team, it is important to get their input
and insight, but the final word always rests with Larkin.
“I’ve seen a number of CEOs who can do the fluff,” he says. “They
can do the analysis, they can hire the consultants and have a lot of
segmentation analysis and mission statements and all those things,
but it’s just fluff. It doesn’t mean anything. Employees say, ‘Oh, this
is the program of the month or the CEO of the month,’ and it does-n’t mean anything.
“You do have to have a vision, and you do need to have a game
plan, and you do need to communicate it. But you have to do
things. You can’t just wish things to happen. You have to take
action, and the sooner you do that, the better.”
Larkin knows his way of doing things is working, and people
are starting to come around to it. The company posted revenue
of $157 million for 2007, up from $139 million in 2006. Net
income was $2.8 million, up from a loss of $4.8 million in that
same time period.
Corrpro’s board of directors asked him about the metrics he uses
to measure the progress of rebuilding the company, and while he
looks at revenue, turnover and margins, he says the most telling
measurement is harder to quantify.
“We’ve been able to hire a bunch of people from our competitors,” Larkin says. “And we’ve been able to hire people back who
were at Corrpro, left and now want to come back because they see
it as a different organization.
“There are not a lot of metrics there; it’s just anecdotal, but when
we have hired back about a dozen people who used to work for us
and then left because they were disgruntled, that’s a pretty good
indication we’re doing the right thing.”
HOW TO REACH: Corrpro Cos. Inc. (330) 723-5082 or www.corrpro.com
