Kristen: Alright, Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim executive Don Labowsky. Don, thank you for joining us today. How are you?

Don: I’m doing very well. And yourself?

Kristen: Fantastic. What are some things you’ve found and were able to leverage the internal resources in order to make that a smooth transition? I understand that you met all of the timeline goals, all the budget goals and still got this entire transaction done. How is the impact with the internal team and being able to leverage that with your skill set? Because it’s never just one person.

Don: No, no it’s never just one person, and certainly I was just part of a team and I only had the supply chain piece; there were many other pieces to this successful transition. But I think that the big thing is communication; being open and honest with people and setting expectations and setting timelines, and saying this is what needs to be done in this amount of time and let people go do it. And I was very lucky that the team rose to the occasion and did all those things when they needed to be done in the correct order and were able to achieve all the goals that were given to us.

Kristen: Fantastic. What are the attributes of the company? You were really with a great team. What were some of the attributes that you think helped make it so successful?

Don: Well they had a very, very dynamic Chief Operating Officer/ CFO, the person that was in that role was incredibly engaged, incredibly detail-oriented; very, very positive. And they also had a CEO that they had brought in about a year ago who came up with this whole fibbit, had the experience, had been working with several different companies in both markets. And had the courage and strength to really suggest this and get board approval and to move forward with it. So they had a very, very strong visionary and the number two person was a very, very strong operator, and that’s what I think was key to that transition being so successful.

Kristen: Fantastic. I know it went about as well as any transition possibly could go. Looking at some of the others you mentioned you stepped into, what were some of the more challenging ones then, and what you did to turn them around?

Don: One was I was asked to take over as President of a company. It was about a 12 million dollar company, had been bought by a larger company and after the sale they realized that the books were cooked basically, and the owners of the company that was purchased were all fired. And there was roughly 300 customers that had to be informed that they had been overbilled for years, that had been informed that we would make it right and that we would want them to continue their business. So you had a very big challenge going after the customers and saying yes I realized I’m the new guy, I realize the company did not bill you properly, we’re going to make it right, but we’re also going to ask you to keep with us and continue to buy from us, services in this case. And you also had to deal with staff that felt like criminals because all were unwittingly part of this. They did not know what was going on. It was all kind of done by a very small group of people who modified information after it had been sent in by the individuals. So they all kinda felt like they were not worthy and they were part of the conspiracy as one might say. But ultimately what happened is we lost no customers through this process, and the staff was brought around and they eventually figured out that hey we’re not the source of the problem and they stayed on board. We were able to turn it around. That company was then again sold to another company in less than a year.

Kristen: Don I have to say when things are going wrong I want you on my side.

Don: [laughs] Well, I guess I like the adrenaline rush of walking into a firefight, you never know what you’re going to find.

Krsiten: We hear that a lot. We’re looking at CEO’s who are possibly looking to transform their company and make some type of a pipette or they’re in a very challenging situation that needs to be turned around. What are your top 3 pieces of advice for that CEO?

Don: Well first of all I think engage everybody in the solution. No one person even at the top knows what’s going on in all aspects of the business. So you’ve got to engage everybody and you’ve got to focus on solving the problems, not reacting to symptoms. Too many people just focus on the symptoms and really don’t want to find out what the underlined reasons are why certain things are happening. And I think the next point would be to really quantify everything, you’ve got to get away from feelings and gut urges and whatnot and break down the numbers and figure out what can you measure. And if you can’t measure something, figure out then how to measure it especially if it’s important to the business. And if you can’t measure it, then leave it out for a little while, at least for the first round trying to figure out what to do. And the most important thing though is to really take that zero-based budgeting approach. Forget about what you have been doing. What you have been doing got you into trouble somehow. We don’t know how, but somehow something you’re doing got you into trouble. So what would we do if we did business from scratch? How do we start over? And what would we be considered to be important, and what would we not consider to be important, and really look at those critically and leave behind any of those things that you know “we’ve always done it this way” or sometimes people call them sacred cows or protected areas or something. You really can’t have any. When you walk into an urgent situation, you cannot have anybody who’s off-limits or beyond the scope of what the turnaround project is.

Kristen: Don, thank you. It’s difficult when you’re CEO or business owner, you’ve been in your company for so long, you really become myopic. So that outside perspective you offer is tremendous. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, and your experiences, and feel free to join us in the next couple of episodes of Cerius Today, and again Don thank you for all that you’ve shared.

Don: You’re welcome. Thank you for the time.