Cover Story
Guiding light
How Cory Meyer got everyone at Catalina Lighting to challenge the way it does business
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Miami | May 2008
Page 1 of 4
Four days after Cory Meyer took over Catalina Lighting Inc. in
2006, he stood before the entire company and told them a grim
truth about the struggling company.
“I shared the gory details, and I don’t think everybody down the
chain understood the details,” he says. “I simplified it. I used a
metaphor that we’re a patient on the operating table, and the doctor hasn’t decided whether we are going to make it or not, and we
have to do some quick surgery. The bottom line is, we’re going to
do some surgery to cut out those issues that are going to take us
down, which may mean that some of you are going to lose your
job, but, for the whole, we’re going to make this work.”
The basic facts had the designer, manufacturer and distributor of lighting products feeling low: Back-to-back years of $20
million losses meant there wasn’t much room for error at an
organization with around $200 million in sales (Catalina does
not release revenue figures; its last publicly reported revenue
was in 2003 with $202 million, while Dun & Bradstreet estimates current sales around $172 million). But while the speech
was sobering, Meyer, Catalina’s president and CEO, didn’t
want the mood to be one of forfeit. Instead, he emphasized that
changes could be made quickly if the company could act on
problems internally. The idea he shared with them was that
being stagnant was a surefire way to end up cold on the operating table.
“I constantly push that the worst thing you could do is nothing,” he says. “If you are going to move a company that is in
trouble like Catalina was, you’ve got to make decisions and
keep moving in a direction.”
To push that change, Meyer had to get to the core of the company’s thought process. He wanted his employees questioning
everything that went on at Catalina because the systems in
place were inefficient. So he started off by giving the diagnosis
and then spent time operating on each individual section of the
company. As the results came in, he emphasized the opportunity for change and made the personnel moves to create a new
way of doing things for the roughly 250 employees at Catalina.
