Tweet
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
This is a sort of continuation of the story that I went on about in 3 previous threads:
God, I quit my job... left the family biz... and I'm so happy I could just scream!
Ten Days that Shook My World
and
All The Lies That Are My Life, or, JohnT vs. his Parents
You don't have to read the above to understand the following, but it provides some interesting and (maybe) entertaining background.
(names will not be provided to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent).
OK, the first thing you need to understand is this: my parents company was really, really screwed up managerially-wise. The number of people who left the company to form competitors total 7, and include:
M, part owner (hell, he owned 40% of my parents company and just walked away) who left around 1990 to form his own company (and they are doing very well, with a couple of lucrative Sprint and Yellow Book contracts).
J, T, and H whom left together in 1998 to form their company, CRG.
R, who left in 2000 and is doing very well volume-wise, though his biggest client is one of those that expects you to cut your margins to the bone.
Yours truly was going to start a distribution company, but because of events described in the last thread listed above, had to change corporate focus to providing distribution support services, rather than actual distribution itself. But the non-compete is over, and, in retrospect, the law of unintended consequences reared its head and actually put me in a better position than I was a year ago.
[industry info]
What we all do is simple: we deliver telephone directories. There are 500,000,000 printed in the US every year (up from 420,000,000 in 1996), and every single one of those has to be delivered somehow. It is an industry dominated by two large players, one or two mid-sized companies, and a number of smaller mom-n-pop operations. The two big guys go after each other in the large public utility market (your BellSouths, your SBC's) while most of the other players go after the smaller utilities and independent publishers (whom account for ~200 million of the 500 million books printed).
[/industry info]
So much for the industry rundown, here's what's happened:
CRG, the second company that was formed from defecting employees, was founded by two gentlemen who are not, to put it kindly, either entreprenuerial or leadership driven. It was an ill-managed company that suffered from a number of things, including corporate focus, attention to detail, and a proper work ethic among the top management. Essentially, what happened was this: they had one client that was 80% of their business and supplied them with very nice operating margins. Unfortunately, this client got bought out by another company whom has some bad relations with the President of CRG, J. As soon as 80% client could, they got out of the contract, leaving CRG gasping for air and $$$. 'Twas a classic textbook case of a corporation that put too many of its eggs in one basket.
You'd think that losing 80% of your revenue would light a torch under somebody's ass... but it didn't. J and T literally just sat on their butts, waiting for the phone to ring. They made no calls. They went on no presentations (except for 1 that I was instrumental in setting up - I believe the phrase used was "If you didn't have JohnT on your team, we wouldn't be talking to you right now, but we have such a comfort level with him and his ability to get the job done that we are glad to talk to you.") They did nothing for over a year, while their corporation was slowly dying. Hell, T even loaned the corporation $70,000 just for the ability to sit on their asses another 8 months.
[aside]
I have a database of all the publishers and their directories, including distribution counts, publishing dates, etc. that I extracted from a PDF document last January. This information is unique and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has it outside the trade organization where I lifted it from. I do know my parents company never had this info, and none of the other distribution companies do either. I offered this info to CRG last February... and they weren't interested. Not because it was too high a price... they just weren't interested. They didn't even bother to ask how much I wanted to sell the data.
[/aside]
Anyway, in spite of (or because of) the events that have transpired over the past year, I wanted to get back into distribution as soon as I was legally able. While a non-compete prevents one from working in an industry for a specific period of time, it cannot be used to prevent a person from planning their actions for when the agreement is over. I could arrange financing, meet and talk to like-minded, interested people, select a corporate name, fill out a bunch of paperwork, etc., just as long as nothing officially happens until after the end of the agreement (August 30th, 2003 in my case).
(To be Continued - I don't want this post to be too long.
)
God, I quit my job... left the family biz... and I'm so happy I could just scream!
Ten Days that Shook My World
and
All The Lies That Are My Life, or, JohnT vs. his Parents
You don't have to read the above to understand the following, but it provides some interesting and (maybe) entertaining background.
(names will not be provided to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent).
OK, the first thing you need to understand is this: my parents company was really, really screwed up managerially-wise. The number of people who left the company to form competitors total 7, and include:
M, part owner (hell, he owned 40% of my parents company and just walked away) who left around 1990 to form his own company (and they are doing very well, with a couple of lucrative Sprint and Yellow Book contracts).
J, T, and H whom left together in 1998 to form their company, CRG.
R, who left in 2000 and is doing very well volume-wise, though his biggest client is one of those that expects you to cut your margins to the bone.
Yours truly was going to start a distribution company, but because of events described in the last thread listed above, had to change corporate focus to providing distribution support services, rather than actual distribution itself. But the non-compete is over, and, in retrospect, the law of unintended consequences reared its head and actually put me in a better position than I was a year ago.
[industry info]
What we all do is simple: we deliver telephone directories. There are 500,000,000 printed in the US every year (up from 420,000,000 in 1996), and every single one of those has to be delivered somehow. It is an industry dominated by two large players, one or two mid-sized companies, and a number of smaller mom-n-pop operations. The two big guys go after each other in the large public utility market (your BellSouths, your SBC's) while most of the other players go after the smaller utilities and independent publishers (whom account for ~200 million of the 500 million books printed).
[/industry info]
So much for the industry rundown, here's what's happened:
CRG, the second company that was formed from defecting employees, was founded by two gentlemen who are not, to put it kindly, either entreprenuerial or leadership driven. It was an ill-managed company that suffered from a number of things, including corporate focus, attention to detail, and a proper work ethic among the top management. Essentially, what happened was this: they had one client that was 80% of their business and supplied them with very nice operating margins. Unfortunately, this client got bought out by another company whom has some bad relations with the President of CRG, J. As soon as 80% client could, they got out of the contract, leaving CRG gasping for air and $$$. 'Twas a classic textbook case of a corporation that put too many of its eggs in one basket.
You'd think that losing 80% of your revenue would light a torch under somebody's ass... but it didn't. J and T literally just sat on their butts, waiting for the phone to ring. They made no calls. They went on no presentations (except for 1 that I was instrumental in setting up - I believe the phrase used was "If you didn't have JohnT on your team, we wouldn't be talking to you right now, but we have such a comfort level with him and his ability to get the job done that we are glad to talk to you.") They did nothing for over a year, while their corporation was slowly dying. Hell, T even loaned the corporation $70,000 just for the ability to sit on their asses another 8 months.
[aside]
I have a database of all the publishers and their directories, including distribution counts, publishing dates, etc. that I extracted from a PDF document last January. This information is unique and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has it outside the trade organization where I lifted it from. I do know my parents company never had this info, and none of the other distribution companies do either. I offered this info to CRG last February... and they weren't interested. Not because it was too high a price... they just weren't interested. They didn't even bother to ask how much I wanted to sell the data.
[/aside]
Anyway, in spite of (or because of) the events that have transpired over the past year, I wanted to get back into distribution as soon as I was legally able. While a non-compete prevents one from working in an industry for a specific period of time, it cannot be used to prevent a person from planning their actions for when the agreement is over. I could arrange financing, meet and talk to like-minded, interested people, select a corporate name, fill out a bunch of paperwork, etc., just as long as nothing officially happens until after the end of the agreement (August 30th, 2003 in my case).
(To be Continued - I don't want this post to be too long.
)
More! 
ACK!
or like 
, but to me he was 
at the switch - did he not even know the bylaws to his very own company?
Now turn the company around John!
Comment