Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Revenues going like this intentionally. You're the fourth CEO. At this point, how do you get the team on board with these crazy decisions you're making when there are three other people came in here and tried to turn this thing around and didn't? I think from a leadership standpoint, the real puzzle in that first year was gaining trust from everybody that mattered. BMA was our bank. It’s kind of a lost cause, we had to replace them. They just weren't going to buy it. But Whitney invested—that was the key—and we kept them with us all the way through. The leadership team took time. You had to deliver sort of an outcome, but here's what we did. Six weeks in, we redid the plan, took profits down. The plan was millions of dollars. They didn't have a prayer to hit that. We took profit down, but it was a profit plan. They hadn't made a bonus in four years. We went after cash flow. That was shrinking the mix. We had our plan that year and people got a bonus. We hit the plan that we'd sent nine months earlier. I spent really eight weeks intensively looking at it, but I think we knew what we're seeing. We generated $10 million of cash that first nine months. That's how much we shrunk the balance sheet with focus. Here was the key, though. You have to do Horizon 1, Horizon 2, Horizon 3. You've got to solve it all. I had 10 things to do. The board said, oh, my God, you're crazy. Pick four. No, you don't understand. We had to get the Adrenaline right because that shoe was critical for us. We had to refine that shoe in 2001 for 2002, and we got it right. The fourth Adrenalin was an incredibly balanced shoe, had a multi-density stability technology in it, super balanced. ASICS started to not deliver, and we ran. We air-freighted 1 color, 18 months cycles. It saved the company. We had to finish that shoe in 2001 to deliver on 2002. You guys are like a semiconductor company.…

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