During the five years I was assigned to Park Broadcasting, the outdoor division had been run by two managers hired as professionals in the industry, one from the mid-to-late seventies and the other in the early eighties. As I said, my father installed these managers thinking our inventory would be easier to sell and far more profitable, since the billboards had been fixed up. Under new management, my father expected to see the bottom line improve dramatically. It went up and down under the management styles of my replacements, but posting a loss of $275,000 at the end of the six years, left him no choice but to bring me back to try to turn it around a second time.
As the two who most closely supervised and worked with these managers, Babcock and Feldman recall the first general manager had a practice of parking his briefcase outside his front door when he arrived home at 5:15 pM. He was also a believer in not having dinner or socializing with the managers when overnighting at one of the field offices. I am not saying his method of management was wrong. It might have been suitable in many companies. But it wasn’t suitable for Park Outdoor. He was also a firm chain-of-command manager, never taking time to meet or talk to any of the employees reporting to the managers in the field. Once, a field office manager invited a female employee to meet with him behind closed doors to show her pornographic material. When she complained about this to the general manager in Ithaca, he accepted the field manager’s denial, never talking to the employee, who quit.
Crucial was his refusal to react when competition moved into our markets. He was apparently not worried when brand-new competitive boards started springing up in Scranton, making our boards look shamefully outdated, and when cigarette businesses started to appear on those boards, he sloughed it off. He also made little effort to bring in national business, since his New York City agency sales trips consisted of flying out of Ithaca early and arriving back at 5:30 the same evening. Questioned on how he could possibly make the many necessary contacts needed at the many agencies in New York, his reply was, “You can’t expect to influence their buying decision, anyway, so why waste the time and money?” During his tenure, tobacco advertisers voluntarily removed themselves from TV, creating a huge influx of tobacco advertising into outdoor. But as large national cigarette and liquor advertisers pulled their accounts from Park in Scranton, he resigned to take a position with another outdoor company in 1979.
When I came back to outdoor, I also learned the manager passed over an incredible opportunity for a productive addition to our business. My father was given the chance to buy from three different plant operators their separate ownership of billboards in a major metropolitan area in New York State and to put the combined operation under our outdoor advertising roof. I can’t imagine it was because it would have meant more work for him without a corresponding salary increase, but he convinced my father and Johnnie not to do it. An Indiana outdoor company bought the three companies at a bargain price and eventually sold the entire major market for what was probably a handsome profit to another outdoor company.
A second manager Pops brought in from another outdoor company also had a reputation of being an industry professional. He overturned each division’s autonomy, believing management should be centralized in Ithaca with specialists under his management experienced in sales, leasing, and operations. General and sales managers at the branch level were unnecessary, since the home office would do the planning and decision-making for the field operations. He opted to have people in Ithaca traveling to the various markets, which at that time were spread out over half of New York State and a good part of northern Pennsylvania. As a result, by the time I returned, he had either dismissed or put so much pressure on our former general managers, they all left.
This manager also made a deal with a large tobacco company to get its business on our billboards posted on key locations in all of the Park markets by switching Lorillard, our biggest single advertiser ($600,000 per year), to less desirable locations far removed from metro areas. When the market rep from Lorillard came in to inspect his company’s showings, he was incredulous. He requested a meeting with the general manager, who refused to meet with him, saying he had “worked out all the changes” with the rep’s boss in New York City. When the Lorillard rep told him he was canceling the rest of his inspections and would recommend that all Lorillard contracts be cancelled in our markets, the manager told him to “Do whatever you want, but I have no time to meet with you.”
The following weekend, certified letters came in canceling all of the contracts with a 60-day notice. Dave Feldman said my father opened the letters over the weekend and at the staff meeting on Monday passed them on to the manager. He glanced at them and flipped them aside, saying, “This man is just a checker and I have it all worked out with his boss.” Pops then asked Dave Feldman, “What do you think, Dave?” Feldman replied, “I think that in sixty days we will no longer have six hundred thousand dollars of annual billing with Lorillard.” Feldman said that was the beginning of the end for this manager.
This was followed shortly by a visit from an R.J. Reynolds rep, who after asking for the general manager and being told he was traveling, then asked for Dave Feldman. After remarking that he could tell from our basement location what my father thought of his outdoor division, he promptly informed Dave Feldman that he was sending recommendations to Winston-Salem that all R.J. Reynolds business in Binghamton, Utica, Elmira, Ithaca, Auburn and western New York be cancelled. He told Dave it was necessary because of the condition of the boards and their remote locations. With this, we lost another $300,000–$400,000 in annual billings.
The end for this manager followed a new New York State Department of Transportation law requiring that metal plates with license numbers be affixed to all billboards on federal and interstate highways. For Park Outdoor, that meant roughly 75 percent of our signs. The manager reported periodically on his progress in installing the licenses, saying he had personally checked out a number of the markets. He reported in late summer 1981 in a weekly manager’s meeting that the project was complete, and all license plates were on display.
Feldman said my father and his CFO looked at him quizzically.
After the meeting, the CFO called Feldman up to his office and asked him what he thought. His answer was, “I would be surprised if not more than a handful of plates, if any, had been installed.” Feldman then volunteered to go out and physically spot-check each market and report back. When he got to the western New York market of Dunkirk, Jamestown and Olean, he noticed that not a single plate had been installed. In fact, they were all lying neatly in boxes in the garage in our Jamestown office, still unopened.
Coincidentally, a registered letter arrived at the Jamestown office that morning from the Buffalo regional office of the DOT, pointing out that a spot inspection by one of their real estate people noted that none of Park’s plates were on display. The letter asked for an explanation to keep the billboards from being declared illegal and subject to removal.
Feldman drove to the Buffalo office, met with the DOT regional director and explained that due to extensive turnover in Jamestown, we were behind in getting the plates installed. He asked for time to get them up. They granted us an additional sixty days. After spot-checking Utica, Rome, Auburn, Ithaca, Elmira and Binghamton, Feldman reported back to Babcock and Park that some were still not up, and the manager was fired.
To make matters worse, Feldman was asked to make sure the manager removed only personal articles from his office. Feldman was to drive the manager home in a company car, remove his personal belongings from the car, and return the car to headquarters. The manager’s parting comment to Feldman, who had some trepidation driving him home, was, “I have no hard feeling toward you because you were just doing your job, but Park Outdoor is still in the dark ages and will always be that way.”
He still insisted that he had an “understanding” with the Lorillard media director regarding changing locations, but he did not elaborate why or what sort of deal he had made. The upshot, Feldman recalled, was that “after going through two professional outdoor managers the outdoor division had little if any cigarette business, strong competition with new inventory in Scranton, no managers, and ineffective local sales executives.”
Given the forward movement everywhere else in the Park empire, problems with outdoor were the last things my father wanted to be concerned about. But it wasn’t going to be too long before the problem was to be dumped back into my lap.