Business Direct Weekly
March 6, 2003
By Steve Raphael
Larry Eiler has been to San Francisco dozens of time, but he has never hopped in his car and motored to nearby Howell.
Probably the biggest critic today of Eiler's travel plans would be Eiler himself, he learned the hard way that not only is the grass not always greener on the other side, sometimes it can turn brown awfully fast.
Eiler is chairman of 18 year-old-Eiler Communications in Ann Arbor. For most of those years the company's client base was composed of high tech companies, 80 percent at its peak, with at least half based in the Silicon Valley.
The company maintained an office in San Francisco with eight employees. Larry and his wife Sandy also owned a private home in the Bay Area, an extra bonus since it made it easy to visit two of their daughters living there.
Eiler Communications cruised along for many years, chalking up lots of revenue by jawing with the media, investors and analysts about its high-flying dot-com companies.
Life was good.
Then one day it all went boom. "We got hit in the fourth quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2001," Eiler said. "Overall, 2000 was a fantastic year. In 2001 the wheels fell off and the chassis broke away. We lost money,"
When the dot.com balloon burst, the clients went away in droves. "They close their doors and they don't pay you" said Eiler, estimating that he lost 14 dot-com clients who owed him a total dollar value in the high six figures.
The Eilers were no strangers to adversity. In the early 1980s Sandy, a registered nurse, was diagnosed with breast cancer. They fought and won that battle, culminating with a book Larry wrote about coping with his ill wife. Sandy became an activist for breast cancer awareness.
This time, the Eilers hired a "change agent" who analyzed the company from top to bottom.
"Our business got broken in 2002," Eiler said. "We decided we will fix it or it will break us."
The consultant gave the Eilers an earful. He told the Eilers "we didn't know how to fire or hire our people, or how to manage," Eiler said. Added Sandy: "We have seven children and we treated our employees like our family -- with lots of leeway. We didn't set expectations or measure people's job performances."
But the consultant also pointed out some unappreciated company strengths.
"We were good at getting business, working with clients and developing programs," Larry Eiler said. The company was especially solid in performing traditional media relations work, notably strategic planning, crisis communications and internal relations, though it never did much of that for its high tech clients.
To borrow a dot-com favorite, "paradigm shift" time kicked in. Today Larry Eiler oversees a new and different Eiler Communications. The San Francisco office is closed and no more than 20 percent of company clients are in the high tech sector, with manufacturing, health care and service pulling a much bigger load. The company employs eight people.
Clients include the Ann Arbor operations of Pfizer Inc., Charter One Mortgage Corp, a Richmond, Va.-based mortgage unit of Charter One Bank N.A.
In recent weeks, Eiler said the firm has won five of six clients that were pitched and it is in discussions with eight more.
Eiler Communications now has half the clients and half the employees but a whole new attitude.
"We were always big, but not any more profitable because of it," Eiler said. "Being big doesn't make you profitable, it makes you big. You can lose your focus when you grow and get too big. I don't want higher revenues; I want profits, good clients and a lot of fun."
By the way, two of Eiler's newest clients -- Electric Apparatus Co., an electric motors manufacturer, and a property management company, Midwest Management - are located in none other than Howell.
Consequently, Eiler finds himself visiting Howell often and loving it. "San Francisco is a great place for fun, but it's bad for business."
# # #