Turnaround Success

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Lakewood Instruments was a 47-year-old company in a slow decline in 2019. Revenue had decreased steadily by a total of 45% over a six-year span. One owner/partner was retiring, and the other partner hired me to turn the company around. My job was to change the trajectory of the firm, restore market position and set the course for longer term gains. The owner is vertically integrated in this market, and he wants to operate the company as opposed to selling it outright in the future.

The market is mature, with established technology for process control. There are at least six significant capable competitors all of which are larger, better capitalized and have changed the area of competition from traditional process control to information management around that process control. Lakewood was at the forefront of those changes 10-15 years earlier, but the company had abandoned product development and was therefore shrinking by about 15-25% per year in revenue. Fortunately, there was good profit margin on the remaining sales, but the trend was very significant. I was hired at the end of 2019 to change the course of the company.

Actions

My approach had several elements:

· Defined value proposition. I changed the persona of our company from being reactive to customer requests to being very responsive and focused on customer needs and opportunities. The mindset needed to change from focusing on product features & benefits to an attitude of service. 

· From a pricing perspective, we shifted from a pattern of margin retreat (matching every perceived price reduction) to articulating our product offering’s value and holding our price. There were very destructive channel-to-market discounts that had to be addressed without risking the business overall. 

· Market perception – I created a new website incorporating an updated information presentation as well as calls to action to promote engagement from website visitors. I also began a program of regular outbound educational information about Lakewood to leads and contacts, which has served to keep users engaged. Coupled with our content marketing program (blogs with educational content) we are improving our SEO and user engagement.

· I created and implemented a sales process and installed CRM to keep the team on track and document useful KPI’s for the sales and marketing program. These benchmarks help us organize our work as well as give data for our progress.

· Lakewood had gone eight years since its last new product introduction – a challenge in the electronics industry. We introduced several minor products in the first year, and during my second year we launched a major new product. This was done using outside contractors as well as internal support staff to define the product attributes, technology path and create that product’s user experience. So far the market has reacted very positively to this launch.

· I selected and retained an outside marketing agency to assist with SEO and Email marketing programs, creating workflows for lead nurturing to help the customer journey from awareness to RFQ, and this is yielding positive results within the first 3-6 months.

Results

· After the first six months, revenue stabilized despite the pandemic beginning in that time frame. From that point forward, growth has increased to a 20-25% annual rate. 

· The new product introduced is built on a platform that will allow continued new development of additional products. This solves the problem of only offering electronics products that could not be modified since they were so old that new code could not be compiled for those aged processors.

· Market position has increased as evidenced by growth across a wide spectrum of customers, rather than being driven by a small number of large wins.