How To Shrink Down A Company in Four Years.

After a few sales jobs elsewhere, four years ago I worked for a local media company with some missions in my head: Help to make digital transformation and to rejuvenate the company's employees. Why? Because the company had been counting only on magazines ad for 20 years for its main revenue, and it urgently needs an alternative revenue in the near future; and there were also loads of free work-load employees that can be make more efficient.

The first mission began by setting up a news portal back then. It took a year for the conventional media company to brainstorm, done countless meetings, revisions, developments, until the portal ready to be launched. Initially it was the company's hope to begin a digital transformation. But apparently it turned out not sell able enough because the traffic still considered too small. Responded to it we're trying to make other digital products through internal FGD. After several months of brainstorming, we still can't find a breakthrough digital product that can be the real turn around for the company. Finally we decide to recruit a digital-experienced person to help us making the digital transformation worked. We even use a headhunter to go look for the suitable candidate. After several interviews, finally we hired a guy from a digital agency to be our Digital Manager. With a lot of spirits to help us out, he managed to increase the news portal traffic but apparently still can't be consistent enough. And also the sales team was not use to sell digital media. They just use to sell magazine ads for so many years. Now they have to sell digital media with some data to convince their clients. It turned out not so easy task to do, up until now.

The second mission seemed going along with the declining print media revenue trend. It happened merely because there are a lot of clients' behavioral changing. They did a lot of cut budget to advertise on us too. So with the problem coming along, the mission also got started. We start to reorganize the organization structure slow but sure, followed by consistently releasing employees one by one. The result is harsh: cutting down half of company's products, followed by releasing half of the company's employees from 250 people four years ago. It was exhausting also for the company since we have to face some legal lawsuits by the resistant employees. Operational expenses cut down to half too, so basically we've shrink the company's scale.

Seemed like my initial missions have completed. Really? But this is the bad part: unfortunately the revenues still declining, up until now. We need to make a bounce for the company, totally reinventing the business model to start making new revenue stream, and making the company grow again.