Parks: Split Was ‘Right’; Weighs Next Move Over Crosswords, Dog Walks
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.”
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.
Still, Parks held her ground. As change swirled around Gateway,including the company’s move from San Diego’s University City to cheaper digs in Poway,Parks kept her eye on landing small business accounts, something analysts bill as one of the PC industry’s money makers.
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.
But more change was in the offing. In July, Waitt advised analysts that Gateway would undergo an even bigger restructuring to cut costs and boost sales. Parks, along with the rest of the new executive team, dug into the details.
“Ted believed the organization should be as flat as possible,” Parks said. “And I was in complete agreement with him. We all were. It made sense for Gateway.”
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 , overlapping 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.”
At U.S. West, which later was acquired by Qwest, Parks oversaw 3,500 employees in the business and government solutions division. Parks said at U.S. West she got her hands dirty with all elements of running a company,marketing, product development and sales.
Gateway’s new plan didn’t give her any of those duties, she said.
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.”
Still, Parks said the move was hard, particularly leaving a group of people she had come to know well in the past year.
“But you need to look at things from a business perspective,” she said.
While Parks’ employment officially ends Dec. 31, her departure has been quick. She said she is trying to complete several projects started earlier this year. But she said she isn’t going into the office any longer. She communicates with employees via e-mail from home, Parks said.
Gateway officials haven’t hired a replacement for Parks, opting to move her duties to the remaining senior vice presidents that Waitt put in place following Weitzen’s ouster. And Parks’ picture is gone from the management team photos on Gateway’s Web site.
Gateway insists that Parks, one of the last remaining senior vice presidents from the Weitzen era, wasn’t ousted herself. Parks, who says she wanted some time off anyway, also said her departure was an amicable one.
These days, Parks still rolls out of bed before six each morning,except now it’s at five instead of four. After all, when you no longer have to run a Fortune 500 company division, there’s no need to be an early bird.
Instead of her usual early morning phone calls to the East Coast to check on the day’s business, Parks said she does the newspaper crossword puzzle around midmorning,in 15 minutes flat. Instead of a daily briefing with Waitt, she has a daily walk with her two dogs. Parks said she hopes to serve as a volunteer to show children how technology can be beneficial.
For someone who said she was looking for time off, Parks doesn’t plan to be unemployed for long. Immediately following the news that she planned to leave Gateway, executive recruiters kept Parks’ phone ringing off the hook, she said. This month, Park said she has several lunches planned with recruiters so she can start looking for a job in earnest by early next year.
“I’m going to be really focused on getting a job by February,” she said.
Parks said she wants to stay in technology, perhaps even getting back into telecommunications. But her druthers would be to find something locally to avoid what had happened when she worked for Qwest. She spent the week in Denver and the weekends with her husband in OC.
“I spent the time in between working,” Parks said, “and reading architecture magazines.”
Would she consider working for another PC company?
“Probably not,” she said.
