Technology
Survival guide
How to turn your company around in a financial crisis
By Kristy J. O'Hara
Smart Business Dallas | June 2008
Page 1 of 2
Bill Conner
chairman, president and CEO, Entrust Inc.
When Bill Conner was
earning his MBA at the Wharton School, he took many
classes on how to manage sustainable growth rates.
However, there were no classes on how to manage sustainable cut rates, a skill he needed
when he joined Entrust Inc. as
chairman, president and CEO in
2001. At the time, the online
security company was earning
$30 million a quarter but was spending $55 million, and it
doesn’t take a genius to realize
that burning $25 million a quarter is a great way to guarantee
going under.
Conner had to cut about 800 people from his payroll and refocus
the company and its products
and services. And while leading
a turnaround isn’t easy, Conner
succeeded, and last year,
Entrust’s 455 employees carried
the company to $100 million in
revenue.
Smart Business spoke with
Conner about why sometimes
you have to sacrifice a limb to
save the body.
Save the body. Where does the
next dollar need to be? I do that
based on the customer, the market and the financial return on
it. It comes down to knowing
your customers, knowing your
market and knowing your company well enough to know what
you need to invest in versus
what you need to cut. That’s not
a popular thing.
When you’ve gone through
this big of a cut, it’s not like
there’s low-hanging fruit. I’m
going to take a finger, I might
take a toe, I might take a hand, I
might take an arm, but I’m trying to save the body.
You have to save the patient,
and sometimes, that’s more difficult with trade-offs than others.
Create a market. A lot of leaders
say to build to where it’s going,
but you’ve got to build to where
it should be going. ...
... If you build to where it’s
going, you’re still going to be
playing catch-up because a lot of
other people will see that. Go to
where you should go to because
that’s a whole different space
that not everybody’s running to.
Get in front of people. As you’re
reducing people, if [the people
who remain] don’t see a financial
viability, they’re not going to
believe you, and they’ll be in fear
of their job. If they don’t see us
investing to re-engineer our products or get new products, then
they’ll fear that our products
aren’t going to be sustainable.
If my employees and customers don’t believe in me, it’s
not going to work.
The only way to create credibility was to start with projects
— be it an R&D feature development, a customer service
issue or a sales opportunity with
a particular customer. Use those
little dialogues. There was a resiliency to that group the
more I worked with them in
smaller groups on certain items.
It became dialogue and communications, and then you could
build that because it’s viral in
nature.
That’s how you earn credibility in leadership. It’s starting at
the top, but it’s also servant
leadership. Rolling up your
sleeves and getting a little dirt
under them is important. You
need cheerleaders when everything is great, but when things
are going down, they want to
know the leader is in there trying to bail out the water with
them and not just holding everyone else accountable.
