Even for Money Guys, It's About the Operations

It can be easy to the think of the money guys as doing deals and paying attention to the income, but not the operations. At today's Convergence 2.0 conference, run by The Deal, Josh Steiner, managing principal of private equity firm Quadrangle, disabused the audience of that notion when talking about how they handled Maxim after buying Dennis Publishing. Quadrangle brought in Kent Brownridge, a former top honcho at Wenner media who helped run Rolling Stone, and Dan Rosensweig, who had been COO of Yahoo! for the digital side to help bring "new skills and perspective" for an audience that moves freely between print and online, Steiner said. Brownridge helped renegotiate printing contracts. Anyone in the biz knows that those contracts can mean the difference between operating profit or loss.

"With all due respect to former management, they had a great run of it, and they were no longer doing the basic things with respect to blocking and tackling perspective," Steiner said, referring – for those of you who may not know American football – to the basics of playing the game.

No comments: