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Sprint to the finish

By Mike Cottrill

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The Yallen file

Robert B. Yallen was trained as a collegiate sprinter, but even hethought his company might run out of steam in the early ’90s.

Yallen — president and chief operating officer of Inter/MediaGroup of Cos., the company started by his father — saw a brightfuture ahead for the advertising agency and media organization thatblends direct response advertising and general market techniques.That is until a slew of significant clients went into bankruptcy. Losingbusiness would have been bad enough, but Inter/Media was on thebilling end of the media needs for those companies.

“So it was like the double whammy,” Yallen says. “The clients wentinto bankruptcy, we got held holding the bag on their debt, and welost their revenue, so it was pretty awful.”

Want the gory details on the word awful? At the time, Inter/Mediawas doing less than $75 million in billings. The debt it got left withwas roughly $2 million.

Oh, and losing those accounts basically cut business in half. “I had our bank talking to me and my father like we were 2-year-olds,” Yallen says. “It was rough. That type of debt would still hurttoday, trust me, but we could weather that. Then, that was devastating.”

That’s not to mention that for some of those accountsInter/Media had set up specific local offices, which were suddenlyrunning with high overhead and no revenue stream.

If ever there was a time to circle the wagons, this was it. Yallenpulled in his top advisers, and they began creating a plan to diversify Inter/Media’s business by adding more clients and makingthemselves less of a commodity while focusing on accountableproduction. But before they could act on anything, they had tocalm down nervous employees, make sure they had the right people in place to add new elements to the business and then give people the autonomy to create the services that would get Inter/Mediaback on track.