When Ralph de la Vega took over leading BellSouth’s Latin America division, the division and region were both in turmoil.
Each of the 11 leaders reporting to him was operating on his or her own, which created a slew of problems from the onset.
“We had 11 countries, so we had 11 different advertising agencies, 11 different product names, nothing was common,” de la Vega says. “We were not buying equipment as 11 united countries — we were buying them as individual countries, and we were never getting the best prices.”
In addition to that, the unit was struggling financially.
“The business as a unit had never made money, because it was a company that had been set up and was still in development mode when I got there,” he says.
Aside from the internal issues he faced, that particular part of the world also presented plenty of political issues for him. Right as he took over, Argentina went into a depression that devalued the peso 4-to-1, which took the revenue in that country from $1 billion to $250 million overnight.
Then there was Venezuela, which had been the most profitable country in his region, where Hugo Chavez was run out of office for a day and a half, a new leader was elected and abolished the country’s constitution, and then Chavez came back, resulting in business strikes and a gasoline crisis.
Oh, and then there was Brazil, where the unit’s partner decided to not put up a payment that was due on some debt, so it defaulted on a $1 billion loan, and de la Vega had to try renegotiating that with 34 Brazilian banks.
And don’t forget about Colombia, where the government started a new company to compete with him, and the rebels were blowing up his towers.
“Other than that, it was an incredibly stable environment,” he jokes.
De la Vega clearly had his work cut out for him. But by creating a new strategy, holding people accountable and taking a fresh look at things, he worked toward aligning those 11 entities as one business unit.
“You’re obviously up to your neck in alligators in so many different issues that sometimes it’s difficult to think about how you set a long-term strategy and create a vision and align people, but that’s exactly what we had to do to win long term,” he says. “I knew I was fighting fires in all those countries, but I knew that unless we had a longer-term vision for the company and we aligned those 11 countries to act as one, not 11 different ways, we were not going to succeed long term.”
