When Scott Howe joined Acxiom Corp. in 2011 as president and CEO, he was signing up for a turnaround. After the company's fiscal-year earnings release in May, Howe expressed his excitement that the company had finally "turned a corner" and started to see growth again.
Now he wants to ensure the growth will include re-engaging with former Acxiom employees, many of whom were laid off over the years. He plans to create an Acxiom alumni program within the current quarter.
At its peak around 2007, about 2,700 people worked for the company in Arkansas, where it was founded in 1969. In 2013 that number hovered around 2,250. It recently sold its 12-story tower in Little Rock to consolidate most Arkansan employees in Conway, where it now has about 1,500 employees in the state.
"A lot of the tactics and strategies around the turnaround, they are done," Howe said. "We can put a check mark next to them. They're behind us. We've taken our medicine. We've gotten smaller by divesting, and we're starting to grow."
As a data broker and distributor, Acxiom helps marketers advertise and target potential customers through digital marketing technology and data-management and -collection services.
Howe highlighted the addition of 120 employees in fiscal 2017 and profit growth he hasn't seen since he arrived.
"This is a great example of transforming a company that had lagged for almost a decade into something that is growing nicely," he said. "We have a future that is brighter than our past."
The company's market capitalization has risen from about $900 million to $2 billion during his tenure.
"There was a lot of turnaround stuff around modernizing, investing and downsizing to divest ourselves of assets we didn't feel fit with the company," he said. "And now that's done. We're starting to see the payoff for that."
Acxiom sold its IT outsourcing business for $190 million in 2015 and its email services business, Acxiom Impact, for $22 million last year.
Brett Huff, an analyst at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock, said the strategy to shrink Acxiom made sense, considering that the company had acquired some businesses that didn't fit with its strategy and weren't "producing the kind of returns that we think that investors would've thought was appropriate."
"I do think they had to pick some assets that they needed to divest," he said. "By and large, I think they chose correctly."
After years of shrinking, Acxiom alumni in Arkansas have a "wide range" of opinions of the company," Howe said.
"If you went to interview 50 alumni ... you would hear people say, 'I think that was a really important step in my career.' And you would hear people say, 'I hate that company. They laid me off 10 years ago, and I'm still mad about it.' And that's not OK," he said.
While Acxiom has done some outreach with single events and things like scholarships, "It can't be one-off. It's got to be a program. I want to get to where, within the quarter, we are in a position to say, 'Here is our alumni program, and this is what it entails,'" Howe said.
Employees were asked for suggestions, and Howe plans to pool them into programming that would include alumni and current employees, from social gatherings, speakers on campus and training to community service.
The Conway campus is Acxiom's largest, and the company is Conway's largest employer.
"Our reputation and the pride that our Conway associates have in the company is, in part, driven by how they are perceived and how the relationships they have persevere or don't over time," he said.
"From a cultural and a community perspective, it's the right thing to do," Howe said of reconnecting with past employees.
"If you look at Acxiom alumni and what they've gone on to do, they've done amazing things," he said. "We want to have business relationships with those people after they leave Acxiom. They will become our future partners, clients and advisers."
Jerry Jones, Acxiom's chief ethics and legal officer and a native Arkansan, said Howe is focused on the idea.
"We want people to have a good view of our company, and we want to provide a forum for people to see their friends," he said. "People who may be upset with Acxiom still like a lot of the people who work at Acxiom, so we are going to give everybody the opportunity to get together."
Business on 06/09/2017