When I took over outdoor, it employed sixty-two people in two states, and I was on the road four out of five days for years.
I recruited, hired, and trained personnel, made sales calls and collections, and met the principals of all the major accounts. I brought in national business from Ford, Kodak, Seagram’s, the Army and Marines, Alka-Seltzer, Black Velvet, Chevrolet, Corby’s, Delta Airlines, 7-Up, National Distillers, Christian Brothers, Fleischmann, Heublein, Genesee, and Rolling Rock, as well as all the tobacco brands: R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, Lorillard, American Tobacco, and Brown &Williamson. I took local sales up 30 percent, held expenses down, and raised our conversion ratio: the amount carried down to the operating profit line out of each dollar of sales.
My father, who had seen fairly steady operating profit under my management from 1971 to 1975, watched it drop to $250,000 in 1976. He was aware that the increased maintenance expense caused the drop. I had tried to clean up a tragically neglected plant, and since we didn’t have money left over to put into capital improvement, the expense for cosmetic cleanup added to our overhead.
When I took over, there had been little effort to obtain leases from new locations, and certainly none to install new structures at better locations. Why put up new boards when you couldn’t sell the ones that were already there? Adding to other problems, the company had a dearth of sales and promotional material. The maps showing our billboards’ locations were literally hand-drawn, with no attention to scale, and locations were noted along the sketched roads with circles or dots. There was no indication whether the board was illuminated and which way it faced along the road.
Our rate structure was loosely and unprofessionally defined, and barely adhered to as long as a sale could be made.
As I said, one of the first things I did after I was hired was to ride the 3,000 boards that my father owned, spread out in a 25,000-square-mile area. It was a depressing job that took about two months. At that time, my sales manager was a former pilot, and he drove the car like he was flying a plane. I made a point of taking a photo of every board we owned, and he would slow down from cruising at 60 mph to a well-crafted landing alongside the road just long enough for me to snap a picture, and then would effortlessly blend back into traffic again.
After I had pictures of all the boards, most of which were built in the 1940s, I issued instructions to remove the old-fashioned latticework that hid the telephone pole uprights. My second instruction was to paint all the uprights black. If they were black I felt they would fade into the scenery. Artists tell me the predominant color on earth is black. Any time you doubt it, look into the woods, the buildings around you or anything else in your line of sight. Squint your eyes and you will see that most areas surrounding the things that stand out fade to black. It’s the shadow effect, and I knew a lot about that.
At the time I took over the outdoor operation also, few signs carried our Park Outdoor logo. Later the logo IDs became required by New York state law. My photographic portfolio covering every board we owned included instructions pasted under each billboard on what needed to improve its appearance and salability. Showing it to my father and pointing out the poor condition along with the missing logos, I could tell what he was thinking. I give him credit for an ironic sense of humor when he said, “I think that might be a good thing.”
One of the worst problems was flagging paper on neglected boards that hadn’t been sold and couldn’t be sold in the condition they were in. Forty-year-old rusted faces that wouldn’t hold paper were replaced with new faces, brush was trimmed, lights were fixed. All of this was a heavy drain on the bottom line, but the plant was slowly becoming more presentable, even if most of the upgrading was cosmetic.
About this time, I got a hand-written letter from my mother telling me that she had never seen Park Outdoor signs look so bad. Coming back from New York City, between Greene, NY, and Ithaca, she said she didn’t see “one in the bunch that wasn’t peeling.” Her letter gave me insight into my father’s modus operandi. “Get people in my organization who will work…work hard…or you’ll have to make other arrangements” her letter said. “It can be done and is done all up and down the highways with other peoples’ signs,” she wrote. She was not telling me anything new. But the limited number of workers I inherited made only slightly more than minimum wage, and the inventory was so old and rusty it wouldn’t hold the paper. The board faces needed to be replaced, not the men who posted them.
Her letter continued with her advising me to “get a chip on your shoulder with every workman you have and keep it there.” She warned me not to smile or get friendly. Be an “old stone face” and “put on a hard exterior,” which she said would be hard for me to do because I probably wanted them to like me. She said they must “have a fear of losing their job if it is not done well.”
All this advice clearly echoed my father’s thinking in his conversations with my mother, and whether she was aware of being manipulated or not, it added to my burden. Particularly coming at the same time both my father and Babcock said my first job was to prevent the two outdoor divisions that served this area from being unionized. My mother’s meant-to-be-helpful advice was to “keep my distance, get out after I have had my few words, and let them know they would have to tow the mark,” or I would be the one who would be blamed. But I was getting the blame already, and I knew that counter to my mother’s advice, I had to work with the men to persuade them to vote against unionization.
My mother insisted that they must fear and respect me, but fear would drive them to unionize. I had to substitute the word “trust” for “fear,” so I could begin to build a team and establish mutual respect. I also had to get some capital-improvement money so our products could be posted and sold.
The Scranton plant, consisting of roughly 1,000 12'-x-24' poster billboards and many large 14'-x-48' painted bulletins, had already been unionized by a branch of the AFL-CIO. The Teamsters out of Buffalo were trying to unionize the Binghamton and Utica operations. How could I prevent this, since it was obvious the employees held no trust in management? There was no leadership and little professionalism among the workers, with low wages and no benefits. Plato said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” So while the union was spreading its propaganda in preparation for a vote, I sat down and talked to each employee, one-on-one. And I learned about the battle each was fighting and began to win their trust. They began to realize I intended to bring in a new way of doing business and a caring management that they and their families could count on in the future. Where my father welcomed turnover because it kept wages and salaries low, I wanted to build a loyal, well-cared-for cadre of employees.
This approach succeeded. When the vote was taken in each of the two operations, the unions were rejected. Now I had my hands full trying to convince my father that we had to set up a system of scheduled reviews and raises.
But though unionization failed in Utica and Binghamton, I was left with a union in the Scranton division. It had been in place for some time and was a subsidiary of the AFL-CIO. In 1973, a union contract was coming up for renewal, and by my father’s standards the wage and benefit demands were excessive. After a period of negotiation and attempts to settle, the workers went on strike.
We brought in our billposters from Binghamton, Elmira, and Utica to keep the contracts posted on time and assigned our managers and sales personnel to patrol the boards to protect our billposters from threats by striking workers. The strikers followed them around with balloons filled with paint and weapons, including machetes and guns they would occasionally fire off into the air.
During this perilous time, we interviewed replacement workers at a motel that served as our headquarters during the strike. As people were hired, they were trained by experienced billposters from our other divisions.
As time passed, strikers realized they were getting no pay or benefits from their union, so they voted to disband. When some of them decided to come back to work, we made a point of not firing the new workers we had hired and trained. We had promised them full-time employment when they were recruited, and we did not go back on our word. In the meantime, a number of our former employees had found other jobs, so between the new and returning employees, we ended up with a balanced and motivated workforce in Scranton. Things were looking up.
Then I had the first and one of my last management mishaps in Scranton. The general manager I inherited decided to retire. He urged me to replace him with a much younger employee he had hired in sales.
My father had a flair for sales contests, especially in outdoor, since the operation wasn’t spread all over the country as his other holdings were. Pops thought sales contests got the juices flowing.
Keep in mind that the majority of our business was national, so to give local a boost, the prize was a briefcase full of money to the person who brought in the most local sales. The briefcase was full, all right, but with crumpled, brand-new dollar bills packed in so tight that they would fly out and hit you in the face when the case was opened. The bills amounted to only $400 or $500.
The contest lasted a month. After three weeks, one contract after another flooded in from my newly appointed general manager in Scranton. They were long-term contracts for large painted bulletins advertising various resorts in the Poconos. They were dutifully processed by bookkeeping and the tally for the Scranton manager kept growing. When the contest ended, he won the briefcase hands down. It wasn’t until then that we realized that the locations for these contracts didn’t exist, or the locations were where zoning would prevent the construction of new units.
The manager already had the prize money, and other things began to pop up that didn’t look right. We received late-payment notices on a car phone that had not been approved, and calls began coming in from production companies wanting to know where to send the manager’s money. He had set up trade agreements with our advertisers and kickback arrangements with our suppliers.
This person was also smart enough to have an inside track: my secretary, who, unknown to me, he had been dating. So the morning Dave and I set out for Scranton to fire him, he was tipped off and waiting. I thought he was mighty casual about it after we took away the keys to his company car and called him a taxi. He said he already had a friend waiting for him, picked up his briefcase and headed for the door. But before he got out, I told him to open the briefcase. It contained copies of all our leases and sales contracts, and we confiscated everything from the briefcase that belonged to the company. Apparently he had no long-term hard feelings because ten years later he called me and asked if I wanted to get into business with him on taxicab signs.
During the first years that I ran the outdoor division, annual sales averaged $1,700,000 and operating profit ranged from $400,000 to the low of $250,000 I mentioned earlier in 1975 because of the continuing and accelerated cost of maintenance and repairs. The task was not easy. The fortune cookie I opened in a Chinese restaurant in Ithaca in 1975 reading, “Nothing seems impossible to you,” hardly buoyed my spirits. You will note I quote a number of these sayings in this book, but before you think I put a lot of weight on them, it’s not that. I have lunch in Chinese restaurants a lot to keep the weight off of me, and the cookies are free with the meal. Sometimes the fortunes are fun and appropriately on target, but the timing was poor on this one.
Even a vacation was hard to take. In mid-December 1975, for example, I received a note from my father saying, “Since you are in New York today and won’t be back until Friday, and I’ll be away on Friday, I want to tell you I am rather concerned about you taking vacations just before Christmas and just before the New Year.
“As you know, in the broadcast and newspaper business we have to work every day of the year and we have a general policy of minimizing vacations around key holidays because if the management group does it, then the rest of the employees feel it’s all right and they will want to do it, too,” he wrote.
This prompted me to take a look at the vacation days I had taken since I joined the company in 1971, keeping in mind that I had three weeks of vacation each year at the previous agencies I had worked with. To my chagrin, I found that I had averaged a little over one week of vacation a year for the past four years.
So I wrote back to my father that I had taken only five days so far in 1975 and had hoped to take the remaining two days before the end of the year, only two weeks away. I pointed out that after checking the calendars for the rest of the executives in Ithaca, they all had managed to get in two weeks each year, with the head of newspapers taking two straight weeks in September and October in addition to a trip he took to Europe earlier in the year.
Truth be told, my father didn’t like employees taking vacation, even the minimal two weeks he afforded them. He never referred to days taken as vacation, and when a person took any of it, he referred to that daring soul as “being on holiday.”
Unbeknownst to me, the stage was being set for my move into another arena. As the outdoor cleanup process continued, Pops thought it would be a good idea if I also began to get more involved in the community. Although I had my hands full, I didn’t disagree. In 1973, I was appointed chairman of the public relations committee of the United Way of Tompkins County.
In this capacity I worked with the campaign chairman, Paul Miller II, who was Gannett’s publisher of the Ithaca Journal at the time. He was the son of the late Paul Miller, former president and CEO of the Gannett Corporation for twenty-one years and president and chairman of the Associated Press for fourteen, who was also my father’s good friend. It was interesting that his son and I also became good friends, and it was through him that I also met and had dinner with another son of a powerful father, Steve Forbes. At any rate, Paul II and I borrowed, with permission, parts of the “Let’s Make Tomorrow” campaign theme I used at Kincaid for First Union in North Carolina, and it was equally successful in Ithaca.
I also joined the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce and in that capacity found myself with a daunting task. As a member of its public relations committee in 1975, I was named bid chairman and publicity director, heading the project of bringing the Junior Olympics to Ithaca. We were successful, and with the help of Cornell University and Ithaca College, Ithaca hosted the Junior Olympics the following year, for which I was given the Chamber of Commerce’s Project of the Year Award.