Change Agent

John Uczekaj, COO, The NORDAM Group

John Uczekaj spent nine months debating a move from a top job at Honeywell Aerospace Electronics Systems, to chief operating officer of The NORDAM Group, a diverse manufacturer and MRO company. The move didn't just mean uprooting his family from Phoenix to NORDAM's headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but also fitting in at a large yet entrepreneurial family-owned company. It's been almost a year and a half since Uczekaj made the move to Tulsa. He has helped NORDAM refocus on what it does best and guided a highly motivated workforce in learning how to grow the company.

AM: Why did you take the job at NORDAM?

Uczekaj: It's been my strongest desire to have the opportunity to run a company. My entire experience is in public companies. NORDAM is highly respected as an entrepreneurial private company and it was going though some difficulties. I saw it as a tremendous challenge, being able to turn the company around and position it for the next upturn. This is quite a cyclical business. Ray Siegfried [the late founder of NORDAM], I knew him professionally and always admired what he was able to do with NORDAM. It was an additional challenge to take it to the next level.

AM: What have you been trying to accomplish?

Uczekaj: Ray's dream was to take it to a billion-dollar company. [CEO] Ken Lackey started to do that. He established a board of directors, brought in professional managers and leadership to make it a more process-driven company. But you need some governance like you have at large, publicly traded companies. More standardized processes. All the things that you find at a much larger company had not been formally in place at NORDAM. I walked into a company that had that vision but hadn't gone through the stages systematically. It was very exciting, with my background at Honeywell and Six Sigma experience, it created almost a clean-sheet process for me to use my experiences to help Ken implement this vision.

AM: Were you well received at NORDAM?

Uczekaj: I found the reception better than fantastic. What Ray had created here with his entrepreneurial vision was a culture of learning, of wanting to do better. They saw me as an additional step to help NORDAM and accepted me with open arms. There was probably a decent dose of skepticism. They were concerned that I might burden them with a lot of bureaucracy. It took a fair amount of communication to help them understand why we're doing things.

AM: Can you give an example of an important change that you made?

Uczekaj: We went directly to a weekly cash call. Every week we would look at our cash, profit, revenue, cash flow, our inventories, backlog, on a weekly basis. This was a huge change for them. It forced accountability on a daily basis. The systems were outdated, and it created a fair amount of stress, and some people said they were unable to get the information on a day-to-day basis. I told them, "it doesn't matter if it's hard to get the data, you've got to find it somehow, and the only way to grow and improve the numbers is by anticipation. I'll get you the system, in the meantime you have to get the information." It created a culture of accountability. You can't say, "I missed my numbers because a supplier missed a deadline." We had some very aggressive meetings, almost confrontational. I was demanding data and there were no excuses acceptable. If they couldn't tell me, I said, "get the best data you can and we'll make a business judgment."

AM: Did it work?

Uczekaj: We're starting to see results. Better profitability. Better cash flow. We're also able to capitalize on opportunities that in the past we wouldn't have noticed or missed or didn't get done. It's improved considerably and showing up in the bottom line. We will top $450 million [2005], up from last year at around $380 million. Next year [2006], we're looking to top the $500-million mark. More importantly, between 2004 and 2005, we will have doubled profit and we will grow that again next year by 60 percent.

AM: What is the strategy to drive that growth?

Uczekaj: NORDAM was a conglomerate of many things, siloed away from each other. Now we're making decisions between divisions on where the investments should go. Most notably, our MRO business is where we have done the most amount of focus. For next-generation aircraft, we're looking for partners to provide us the ability to do repairs. The Boeing 777 and 737NG and Airbus A340 are at the age where they're going to start needing repairs for the things that we repair.