Surviving Gateway Exec Leaves in All-or-Nothing Deal
Computers: Restructuring Left Parks With Duties That Overlapped Waitt’s
BY ANDREW SIMONS
Special to the Business Journal
LAKE FOREST , For Sue Parks, the decision to leave Gateway Inc. was an all-or-nothing deal.
In the past year, Parks had turned around Gateway Business, the Lake Forest-based arm of the beleaguered computer maker. In the process, Parks became one of the brightest stars at Poway-based Gateway. And as Gateway reinvented itself, Parks found herself running most of the company.
At Gateway, Parks said she finally had found a job , unlike her past post at Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc. , that kept her at home near her husband and two dogs in Laguna Niguel.
“I really enjoyed my time at Gateway,” said Parks, who is stepping down as the company’s vice president of sales at month’s end.
But in the computer industry, things don’t stay the same for long. The turning point at Gateway came when Ted Waitt, the company’s cigarette-smoking, pony-tailed founder, ousted chief executive Jefferey Weitzen in January and retook the company’s helm.
Just a year earlier, Waitt had tapped Weitzen as his successor. Weitzen had hired Parks a few months before his own ouster. So when Waitt began to replace all of Weitzen’s lieutenants, there was reason for concern.
“I really enjoyed working with Jeff and the former team,” Parks said. “I had only met Ted a few times before he took over. And those were only brief conversations.”
Executives Fired
A day after Waitt retook the helm, he took a hatchet to Gateway’s executive ranks, firing longtime chief financial officer John Todd , a favorite among Wall Street analysts , as well as senior vice president Cliff Holtz and others.
Parks, in the middle of a massive turnaround of Gateway’s money-losing operation selling computers to businesses, was untouched.
But the fact that Waitt kept Parks didn’t squelch fears within her division. Insiders at Gateway Business worried that Waitt, a consumer marketing whiz, would return the company’s focus to the one he had founded the company on , sales to consumers.
Even analysts questioned whether Gateway, with its new back-to-basics attitude, would pursue the business market with the same gusto as it had in the past.
“At a minimum it will be de-emphasized,” Peter Labe, an analyst with Buckingham Research Group, said earlier this year.
Change came to Gateway Business in May, when Waitt combined the unit with consumer sales. Parks was put in charge of the new U.S. markets division.
Global Division Abolished
Then in August, Waitt decided to pull Gateway out of global markets to focus on the U.S. Many saw the move as a sensible one ,Gateway’s cow-box motif and down-home image didn’t have the same cachet abroad.
But the move had the effect of putting Parks , head of U.S. operations , in charge of the entire company. The result: an overlap in duties with Waitt.
“After we went through our restructuring, we eliminated our international operation,” Gateway spokeswoman Donna Kather said. “And Sue was in charge of U.S. markets, which was the whole company. Ted was in charge of the whole company. We wanted to eliminate redundancy in critical areas. So we assigned ownership of those duties to other areas.”
As a part of the plan, the Lake Forest business unit would remain as one with the consumer division. Each member of Waitt’s executive team then would be responsible for a single element, such as sales, marketing and research.
Parks was tapped to oversee marketing and sales. Some of her other previous duties were distributed to other managers. She said she would have made the same move if she were in Waitt’s shoes.
But the job Waitt gave to Parks wasn’t what she had in mind when she joined Gateway, she said.
“What I really enjoy is when I run the division,” she said. “What I am not inclined to do is head a division with one functional area like marketing. I love the opportunity to work with all parts.”
In the two months following Gateway’s restructuring announcement, Parks said she had several talks with Waitt about career paths inside the company and how Gateway’s plans fit into Parks’ future.
“It made sense for me to step aside,” she said. “It was very much a right decision.”
Simons is a reporter for the Orange County Business Journal.
