I worked a lot of “little” lobs before I left college. I worked at Six Flags and Wendy’s and TG&Y. I worked at convenience stores like Magic Market and did brief stints at a number of other, typical jobs. I entered the corporate world in 1984 and since then I have worked at three major “widget” companies and one smaller company that did injection molding. I am now in my 17th year with my current employer. They are a fine American company with fine products. We sell our product (coatings) to other companies who apply it on all kinds of wonderful products which then get sold to consumers. My job is to help our customers understand and utilize our products and to make sure their final customer is happy as well.
This has nothing to do with the company I work for or the companies that are my customers. I have been fortunate to have been involved with many customers since 1984, working with 3 different suppliers to a wide variety of industrial companies making a wide variety of widgets. Those customers have ranged from General Motors and Chrysler to the very smallest of Mom and Pop type operations. Many are household names and their products are ones that you no doubt have in your household right now.
One shift I have noticed over the years is a general shift in priority toward satisfying shareholders and an emphasis on profitability and stock price and quarterly reports. I am a fan of Larry Kudlow and Jim Cramer and Ben Stein and Jonathon Hoenig and Charles Payne. I am a capitalist and I think free market capitalism is the driving force for prosperity in any society.
And so it is troubling to me that I keep noticing the same patterns, and have seen them more prevalent over the last few years. What am I talking about? I see an emphasis on making quarterly “numbers”. I see a preoccupation with share price and analysts opinions. Salaries and benefits are tied to stock performance and ROI. You may ask yourself what is wrong with this? It is a fair question.
Think for a moment about a multi millionaire who owns a company that his father started. Perhaps they are in a small or medium sized town. The company has done well and has always done well. The owner is not so concerned with his own salary or earnings; he is doing fine. He is more concerned that the company that his father started prospers and, more importantly, that he carries on the vision and passion that his father had when he founded the company. He wants to treat his employees well. He wants to treat his customers well. He wants to create a good product that he can be proud of. He wants to be a good steward of the environment, as he lives in the community where the factory is. In short, his concern is with the company and its reputation and health.
On the other hand, most companies are owned not by an owner but by shareholders. There is nothing wrong with shareholders; I am one and it is likely you are too. We own a little slice of that company and therefore we want it to prosper and do well so that we, too, will profit. Most of us are shareholders through our 401k or other retirement accounts. Even if we hold individual stocks it is unlikely we have voted our shares or influenced any company decisions. We are mostly good people but we own the company as a collective, and as a collective our motive is purely profit.
There is nothing wrong with profit. Profit is what motivates the entrepreneur to start a business and satisfy a need that we have as a society. Profit is a great motivator. But if we return to the privately owned and managed single proprietorship for a moment; it is only one motivation.
I have seen quarter after quarter where company after company does some pretty strange (but legal) things with sales. They invariably do whatever they can to “pull sales up” into the quarter to “make the numbers”. Everyone jokes about how all they are doing is robbing sales from the next quarter but it keeps happening every time. I have to remember with many customers that they cannot run any trials toward the end of the month because they need to “make the monthly numbers” for production or productivity. Those monthly numbers would not be as important to someone who owned the company outright, but to analysts and shareholders, they mean a great deal.
Most of us own stocks, but we mostly own them in the form of mutual funds. We find it convenient to diversify by owning a preset mix of stocks that is pre-diversified, and the thinking is done by people with the time to analyse which stocks are winners and which to avoid. We sign up for an investment plan and then put it on autopilot and let it go, hoping for a good return. We are told that stock pickers and market timers actually lag in overall performance, and so we rely on dollar cost averaging and diversification and asset allocation. Or we listen to Mad Money and make specific stock picks and try to stay on top of it until our work or family get in the way.
The money managers end up making the decisions and therefore companies worry an inordinate amount about the quarterly report and whether it will curry favor with the fund managers and analysts and so we pull out all the stops for the quarterly numbers.
I once had a customer, a great American brand with a great product, shut down a profitably assembly plant in the heart of America. I knew the plant was making money and it was fairly new and producing a good product. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with their president one evening and asked him about the closing. It seems that their company was a division of another company who rated all of their holdings using a formula called NRONTA, which means Net Return On Net Tangible Assets. They were profitable but had too many “net tangible assets” and the only way out for them was to close a plant and consolidate production. This was stupid on its face but not when you consider investors and their need for higher profits.
If all investors owned individual stocks and they all went to shareholder meetings and voted, things might be different. The system might reflect the net wisdom of all of those shareholders and their views on the future of those individual companies. But that is not the case. We, collectively, own most of these companies but the reality is that these decisions are made by a very small group of people who have no loyalty to the company or the employees or the community. Their loyalty is to maximize quarterly profit and they will drop a company in a heartbeat for a short term poor performance in favor of the latest hot commodity.
The guy who starts a company from scratch and retains full ownership does not worry about quarterly reports (report to who?) and he cares about the employees and customers and the community and, yes, profitability but he usually has a much longer term agenda and is typically not going anywhere. The CEO of XYC Corp will probably be elsewhere in a few years when all of the fallout from short-sighted policies comes to bear.
Let me repeat, I am a fan of free market capitalism. I am a fan of profits and competition and I love to see people getting wealthy from investing in high quality American companies. But the system has been skewed, and the resulting decisions are not good for the free market economy I love so much. We are a short attention span, what have you done for me lately, uninvolved bunch of owners, and that is not good for competitiveness in the long run.
I am not sure what the answer is in the long run. It may be individuals voting their shares. It may be a shift from mutual funds to individual stocks. It may mean investors paying more attention to details or analysts having a longer time frame. I don’t know what the answer is, but the first step is recognizing you have a problem.
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