Adam E. Coffey never thought he’d be the president and CEO leading the turnaround of a company that makes its money collecting quarters from washing machines.
“I wanted to be a goalie for the Detroit Red Wings or a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers,” Coffey says. “That was my childhood dream, but somehow I wound up in laundry.”
A Jack Welch disciple since his days at General Electric’s John F. Welch Leadership Center at Crotonville, Coffey has become a turnaround specialist. He has run several business units for Fortune 500 companies and worked as president and CEO of numerous organizations before joining Web Service Co. LLC, which posted 2008 revenue of $220 million.
“I’ve taken turning a company around and turned it into a tight, precise formula that I’ve practiced at multiple companies and have had great success with every time,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Coffey about how his formula works and how following his plan can help improve your company’s efficiency.
Figure out what you want. Typically, the biggest issue that someone faces when they come into a company is you hear things like, ‘We need to cut expenses; we need to take cost out of the business.’ Too often, people indiscriminately make cuts without putting any great thought into what they’re trying to accomplish.
I put it into a five-step approach: Establish the ground rules, analyze the existing processes, ask ourselves why we’re doing it, reinvent processes that are irrelevant, then you implement, implement, implement.
The first step is to establish the ground rules. Who am I? What am I trying to accomplish in the marketplace? In this particular company, I am the premium product supplier. I’m the Neiman Marcus; I’m the Mercedes-Benz. So when I look at my ground rules for success, anything I do can’t hurt the customer satisfaction or my position in the marketplace.
