Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and how stuff works. Sometimes a company just
can't catch a break, particularly if everything they make is breakable.
What might seem crystal clear one day could be cloudy
the next. But rather than fall into a great depression,
(00:25):
maybe it's possible to bubble up your troubles and make
the best out of them. This is anchor Hawking on
Business on the Brink. Everybody. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm
Arial Casting, and today's episode is about anchor hawking, which
(00:46):
I did not even know was a thing, but it
was a request, right, It was from Kimberly Bostick. Yeah.
An anchor hawking is not like, hey, folks, come see
this great anchor over here on stage two. It's gonna
do a performance for you. Extra x stra extra. It's
actually a glass company. And I'll say, going into this,
I was like, oh, okay, it's it's a glass company.
(01:08):
It will be a little niche thing. Maybe we'll find
one or two little points we can talk about. They've
had a whole bunch of brink moments. Yeah. As it
turns out, the entire history of this company, you could
argue was a series of brink moments, and there were
more than a few occasions where with just a little
extra the company could have fizzled out of business. Yeah yeah,
(01:32):
and yet they keep going. So we're gonna go ahead
and get started. Yes, So the story of Anchor Hawking
actually begins with an older company, a company that existed
before that, and that was the Lancaster Carbon Company. I
got all excited because I was thinking, like Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
and I was thinking, it's gonna be about Amish. It's Lancaster, Ohio.
(01:54):
Not that that's not exciting Ohio people, Yes it is.
I just didn't know that that was a thing, and
all I read about this, well, did you know, Um,
I'm going to put a little fun fact in here. Okay,
did you know what the nickname of the Lancaster Carbon
Company was? What's that the black Cat because of all
the carbon that would line the walls, right. Yes, they
called their facility the black Cat because it was it
(02:16):
was just coded in this because because of course, when
you're making carbon or glass or anything like that, you're
involving furnaces giving up a lot of smoke. So, uh,
I don't know, a whole lot about the Lancaster Carbon Company.
It's an older company that dated from the nineteenth century,
but I don't know exactly when it was founded. It's
one of those where I could not find any records
(02:39):
about it. It's just it was just too small and
too old for me to find. All I know is
when it ended, which was that the company was in
financial difficulty and it essentially went into receivership, meaning it
was essentially under the control of somebody else after going
through the bankruptcy process US. And so then you get
(03:02):
a guy named Isaac J. Collins who got together with
precisely six of his friends six. Wow. Every single source
I saw it was always like Isaac J. Collins and
six friends got together and they pulled their cash and
they bought the Lancaster Carbon Company for the princely sum
(03:24):
of eight thousand dollars. Yeah. In in case you guys
are curious, that's about two hundred and thirty thousand dollars
in today's money. Yes, yes, adjusting for inflation, it's nearly
a quarter of a million dollars of a million. But
here's the thing is that that still wasn't quite enough
to get things up and running. That was enough to
take it out of receivership, but they needed more for
(03:46):
actual startup costs. So they turned to an investor named
eb Good, who I think could play a guitar just
like it was ringing a bell. I think it sounds
like a Charles Dickens character. That's very similar. Yeah, And
he ended up contributing another seventeen thousand dollars, so more
than twice what that initial investment was, almost half a
(04:08):
million in today's money. Yes, so now we're looking at
maybe like three quarters of a million dollars almost for
the full startup cost here. And that's when they formed
the Hawking Glass Company, and it was named the Hawking
Glass Company because it was near the Hawking River. Yeah,
which again I before I read this, I just thought, wow,
(04:30):
it's it's like that. I guess we can't call ourselves
anchor Sellings. We're calling ourselves anchor Hawking. Well, they'll go
through a bunch of name changes. But before that, in
their first year of operation, the company produced and sold
about twenty thousand dollars in glassware, which I did not
adjust for inflation. But that's a whole lot of money. Yes, Uh,
But they needed more money to scale it production. So
(04:51):
Collins got another five thousand dollars of investment from a
guy named Thomas Fulton, Yes, who became the secretary treasurer
for the company. Yes. Now, unfortunately, and and this is
a problem with a lot of factory jobs. In this time,
Hawking was known to have rough working conditions and poor
wages for its employees. They were underpaid, even high level
(05:11):
employees at that time comparatively. And additionally, this was kind
of a fun fact, I guess kind of the founders
were not fans of unions employees being able to band
together and demand better working conditions. And yeah, so much
so that when there was a glass workers strike in
(05:32):
nineteen eleven, Fulton hired scabbers from the Glass Bottle Blowing
Association or the g b b A to take up
the work. So he was just like, I'm going to
hire scabbers because these unions are dumb. Now, I will
say they did improve conditions in the nine thirties when
we got the National Industrial Recovery Act and later the
(05:53):
Wagner Act under f DR, and Hawking said, yeah, well
follow all of these regulations. So things got better at
that time. Once it became the law then suddenly they
were totally on board. Uh, there was a there was
a little bit of a setback in nineteen twenty four. Um. Yeah,
fire burned down the factory. Not surprising when you're dealing
(06:17):
with molten glass. Yeah, as it turns out, First of all,
things were a lot more flammable back then. Yeah, and
we don't talk about it a lot. A lot of
factories had fires at various points yea of history of
this company. Yeah, So at that point that meant that
the fifty people who would normally work in that factory
(06:37):
had no factory to work in holiday. Yeah. But but
they actually were able to rebound from that. The company
had made enough money so that they were able to
reinvest that money and build out new factories, and they
also had enough to go and acquire a couple of
other glassmaking companies. But then we get the Great Depression, which,
as we know, was hard for so many companies. It
(06:59):
wasn't so great it as it turns out, it's a
really terrible depression, but it wasn't that bad for Hawking Glass.
That's that's true because they were able to mostly just
by coincidence they had happened to not by coincidence, but
but good timing. They had just developed a an approach
(07:19):
that would end up dramatically speeding up the process of glassblowing.
And by speeding it up, they also meant that it
was more efficient, thus therefore less costly. So ultimately, what
that translates into is that they could sell glassware for
less money than they had and still make a profit,
which is great because everybody had less money. Yes, so
(07:41):
they could end up selling like two tumblers for a nickel,
for example, and still make a profit off of that. Charlie,
if I could have two tumblers for nickel, I would
build a fort out of tumblers. I'll tumble for you
different tumbler. Oh right, got it. So that managed to
allow them to afloat during the Great Depression. They were
(08:02):
actually still able to sell to the average consumers out
there because they were able to price their products at
a very competitive level. Yeah. Yeah, And in Hawking Glass
merged with a company called Anchor Cap and Closure Corporation
and they became the Anchor Hawking Glass Corporation. Yeah, so
(08:24):
Anchor Cap Enclosure, that name probably gives you a hint.
It was sort of a bottle cap. Yeah, yeah, so
if you're ever a fallout fan, this is where they
made the money, apparently, because it's all in bottle caps. Okay,
that's enough of a tangent there. So then we get
up to, uh, the fifties and sixties, and we're rushing
through this because as dramatic as these stories are, where
(08:47):
things like the Great Depression or a fire could have
wiped them out, it's not the biggest brink moment. Yeah,
we're not even close yet. So in the fifties and sixties,
Anchor Hawking Glass Corporation would expand. Uh, they also not
just grew as a company. They started to diversify in
the sort of stuff that they made, and they also
made more acquisitions. They opened up more factories, They actually
(09:08):
created R and D facilities. They acquired a mold too
form glass. Yeah, not white mold on a bread. No not.
They weren't into penicillin, no, no, I mean, I mean
maybe if they got to cut or something. Um. And
then by the end of the sixties they had expanded
so much that they became the Anchor Hawking Company. They
(09:30):
removed glass from the name of their company because they
felt that that was too limiting. Then made people think, oh,
like the glass company, So they just took that out
of their name because they were also doing other things yeah,
like bottling, yeah, peanut butter jars, yeah, beer bottles, and
enclosures and glass table where they were making millions of
(09:51):
dollars in sales and profits. Now, the thing is up
until this point, Anchor Hawking was kind of getting a
reputation for being conservative. They had never acquired any yet
by this point, which is kind of impressive considering they've
had some fires and stuff. They were they were able
to be profitable enough early enough that they were able
to pay off those initial investments without having it just
(10:11):
continue to loom over the head of the company. Yes,
but it was decided that Anchor Hockey needed some new
life breathed into it, so they got an outsider to
be their CEO, John Gushman, and he was the one
who took the glass out of the name. Around this time,
they were at their peak. They had about five thousand
employees in their headquarters alone, and they were Lancaster, Ohio's
(10:32):
largest employer at the time. And under Gushman, there was
a bunch of turnover and managers and they acquired nine
companies so things seem to be going okay, yeah, I mean,
what could possibly go wrong? Well, we'll tell you the
first We're gonna take a quick break now, Ariel, you
(10:56):
did the classic cliffhanger before ache back there, and I'm
going to be honest with you. I haven't read this
next note, so I honestly don't know where things are going.
I want to hear. Okay. So, by the end of
the seventies, Achor Hawking had expanded into plastics, lighting, cabinet tree,
and stoneware. While so well outside of just glass yes, uh,
(11:17):
they had also acquired thirty five million dollars in long
term debt from the purchase of the Cabinet Tree Company,
which also did window hardware. Gotcha, So by acquiring this company,
they had to take out loans in order to make
that acquisition. For now they have this debt, which I
don't understand why they're saying, oh, well, the company has
never been in debt. We should take some debt on
(11:37):
to get some companies like that'll help us grow. It
seems counterintuitive, but they tried it. Around the same time,
though they were facing downward turn in sales rises in costs,
there were some price control issues, and then they had
a ten week union strike. Wow. Okay, so it's like
everything that could go wrong pretty much went wrong all
(11:59):
at once. Yes, so they knew that they had to
start making some changes to bring those profits back up
before they fell too far to salvage. Now, I'm guessing
that part of that just meant they needed to kind
of shed some of these these businesses they had been acquiring. Yes,
they did. In nineteen seventy eight, they started investing themselves
of some of their previous acquisitions, although they were still
(12:21):
making some like they bought the Shenango China Company in
nineteen seventy nine. But they're acquired lighting company. Since we
said they were into lighting that burnt down. I mean again,
you know, stuff is flammable, although in the in the
in the late seventies less so than it wasn't the third. Yes, Yes,
they sold their Stoneware acquisition, they sold some other stuff,
(12:42):
and then they replaced Gushman, so the outside CEO was
now truly back on the outside. Yeah. Well, he decided
to take on some debt right at the decline of things,
so I'm sure that didn't help his position in the company.
They replaced him with a man named Jay Ray topper
Jay Ray. You can call me Ja or you can
(13:03):
call me Ray. Well, by the early nineteen eighties, they
were doing all right as far as their sales were concerned,
but they were still losing money overall, and they were
not profitable. So at that point they looked to see
what else they can shed and how they can, you know,
manage this business to return to profitability. And part of
(13:24):
that was selling a glass container division for three million
dollars to Wesray Corporation. At least it was worth three
million dollars, but wes Ray didn't pay three They only
paid sixty eight million, and Acri Hockey didn't even get
all that. Yeah yeah, so yikes uh. And part of
(13:47):
this was because you were starting to see how plastic
was becoming so cheap and so easy to produce and
it could be turned out so fast that it was
becoming a major old native to glass containers. So for
a lot of stuff out there, there were companies who
were switching from glass to plastic. Not for everything obviously,
(14:07):
you know, if you want to go out and get pickles,
they tend to be in glass jars, not plastic ones.
But for stuff like peanut butter, which had been you know,
an old mainstay of the Anchor Hawking Company. Well that
was going into plastic now. Yeah, So this company, this
this offshoot glass container company got purchased by Vitro s
A went bankrupt in and was bought by with Zada
(14:29):
Investment Partners. It still had Anchor Hawking in its name,
and I think it's still around, but the notes kind
of trailed off after that, right, and it and it
didn't have any actual connection to the older Anchor Hawking
Company at that point apart from that name. Yes, And
now we get to our old we get to the
beginning of the real break. Yeah, and we get to
(14:49):
the entrance of our old old friend who we love
talking about, Carl icon High. Yes, the activist investor who
has you used his enormous wealth to influence companies across
multiple industries frequently to the point of essentially controlling what
(15:10):
they did from that point, and he tried to do
that here. He had gotten six percent of the Anchor
Hawking Company, yeah, which was cash rich at that time
from the sale of their their divisions. Yeah, and they
were undervalued because of the lack of sales. And he
(15:32):
saw the chance to take advantage of them, he did
what is called green mailing them. Oh, I interesting, I
don't think I've ever heard the term green mailing. Well,
I've read it at least once. Jonathan, Well, he uh,
in return for these big investments, he was saying, you
(15:52):
know what, I deserve a seat on your board of
directors because I'm I'm a major investor in the company,
and the company wanted to not do that. Yeah, and
he said, cool, you gotta buy my shares back at
like a premium price. Yeah. So this is one of
those cases where, uh, it's almost like a hostile takeover, right,
(16:14):
where where investors come in and they take enough shares
of a company to have you know, like if it's
common stock, they can have voting control of the company.
And if they do that with enough shares, then they
can determine what the company does, no matter what the
board of directors wants it to do. Um. So in
this case, you know, Icon didn't have that much uh shares,
(16:38):
and he couldn't really influence enough other investors to do it,
but he had enough for him to be a pain
in the butt. Yes, So that didn't help because they
did buy those shares back because they wanted to keep
their independency from him. They had to lay off six
hundred and fifty people after closing one of their major
glassware plants in Lancaster. Yeah, so not a good sign. Yep.
(17:00):
Then in February of seven, uh, they had to Well,
there was a long battle for control of of Anchor Hawking, right, Yes,
what the New York Times calls a five month long
takeover battle. That's it's crazy to think that this is
over a company that is primarily known for making glasswear. Yeah,
(17:22):
so it is. It's just ridiculous. But the person who
was trying to take over Anchor Hawking was the Newell Company, right,
who also had similar type products housewares and such, and
sold it similar locations as Anchor Hawking. And they bought
the Anchor Hawking Company for three hundred and thirty eight
point two million dollars in a leverage, hostile takeover. So
(17:43):
exactly what we were talking about a second ago. They've
got enough control of shares to say, all right, we
agreed to this acquisition. Yes, they had started buying shares
in Acre Hawking in preparation to take the company over
in the summer of eighty six. So it took, like
you said, about half a year of just acquiring shares
to get to the point where they could do this,
And once they had enough stake in the company, they
offered to buy the company at thirty four dollars to share,
(18:05):
and the board of Anchor Hawking said, no, yeah, there's
too many conditions attached to this, We're not comfortable with it.
So they revised their offer in January seven, and Anchor
Hawking agreed. Gotcha. So at this point you had a
couple of different options that were presented to the shareholders
(18:26):
in an effort to make this attractive for them to say, yes,
we were totally on board, which, by the way, the
first of was the revised offer. They went over the
CEO of Anchor Hawking's head board members to say, hey,
we want to buy you, and the board agreed. Right.
So one of the options they had was that shareholders
would receive sixteen dollars a share and a sixteen dollar
(18:49):
principal amount of subordinated debentures, which are not the same thing.
Is subordinated debentures? Yeah, which I kept wanting to type
when I was writing these notes. Yeah, but so what
is subordinated debt. Well, when you have a company and
you have subordinated debt, that's essentially debt that you pay
off last. Right, like you have you have various loans
and debt that you have to pay, you're obligated to
(19:11):
pay that back. Subordinated debt is the lowest priority stuff,
and so before you pay off your subordinated debt, you
have to pay off everything else. So the sixteen dollars
per share plus sixteen dollars for the subordinated debentures, that's
essentially saying, once the company has paid off all its
(19:32):
other debt, then the money that's left over will be
at least some of it will be paid out in
the sixteen dollar debentures. So that was option one. So
if you if you want to cash out, you gotta wait. Yes, yeah,
you have to wait, and you have to hope that
there's enough money in this deal to pay off all
the outstanding debt. Then option two was shareholders would receive
(19:53):
one share of the holding company's convertible stock with an
annual dividend of around two dollars a share and a
liquidation price of thirty two dollars per share, and then
that could be converted to common stock at a premium.
So what does that mean. Well, dividends a payout. So
if you have a stock that pays with dividends, then
(20:15):
on a regular basis, you get a payout whatever that
payout is rated for that particular stock. This is determined
by the company's board of directors, and in the United
States at least, there's no one rule about how frequently
these are paid out. Some companies pay out them out quarterly,
so you'll get one fourth of the amount four times
(20:35):
a year. Some do it semi annually, some do it annually.
You know, it all depends on the company. Anyway, it
means that every year you would get this two dollars
and a little bit more paid out as a dividend.
Not very much per share, but if you have a
lot of shares, it adds up and it's meant to
be a way to uh encourage people to reinvest in
the company, right to buy. They take their dividend and
(20:57):
then they use that to buy more shares in the company.
Me there are certain companies that became famous for their
dividends and that was like the reason to own stock
ge for a very long time. That was the type
of company they were UM and then common stock is
the type of stock where if you own common stock,
you have a vote on company matters. Right, A share
(21:20):
represents like a vote, So if there are lots and
lots and lots of shares out there, it doesn't amount
too much. But if you own thousands of shares, then
you have a lot of voting power. Um. That's in
contrast to preferred stock, where it's a share in the company,
but you don't have any voting rights. But they also
had a third option they did so what was option three? Well,
(21:42):
if Anchor Hockey Company shareholders didn't like those options, they
could choose to defer paying taxes as long as they
held onto their shares in the new company. Yeah. So
really what this was was telling shareholders, Hey, we want
you guys to believe in this and too, you know,
hold on of these shares. Uh. You know, obviously like
(22:04):
and attracting shareholders is great because it means new investments
coming into the company. You don't have to raise as
much money then because you have influx of of cash
coming in. So this was all part of the plan
to try and keep the company stable during this transition. Yes,
and they renamed the company Anchor Hawking specialty glass classes
back in the name glasses, back in the name Well,
(22:25):
it's apropos uh. And the head of Newell, Daniel Ferguson,
became the head of Anchor Hawking, right. And then the
first thing he starts to do is look at the
profitability sheets, right for all the different facilities, Like he
wasted no time. Yeah. Essentially it's like, hey, if you're
not if you're not in the black, you're gone. Yeah,
(22:46):
we're gonna We're gonna kick you to the curb. And
then for the plants that we're doing well, he would
look at reinvesting in the plants right to improve their operations,
which is good. And so he started looking at the
different stuff that Anchor Hawking was making and decided to
(23:06):
sort of organize the company around the types of products
the different places were specializing in. Right, so you would
have a specific division for one type of product versus another. Yeah,
and then he fired a whole bunch of executives and
employees at the hq UH within weeks of this merger's approval,
(23:27):
and he moved the headquarters to Illinois and all of
the manufacturing to Lancaster. And this drop sales some for
Anchor Hawking, So they were they were selling fewer products, yes,
but the savings that they had made made up for that. Yeah.
So this is one of those reasons that we see
companies doing downsizing, right. It's one of those things about
cutting costs. Sometimes it's absolutely necessary. There are times where
(23:51):
a company really does have too many employees. Right. More
frequently we see companies that probably don't have too many employees,
but they want to make that that quarterly goal. And
an easy way of doing quote unquote easy way of
doing it is to cut down on overhead. They have
more expendable employees than they have expendable cash. Yeah, not
(24:13):
to say that those employees that laid off are expendable. No,
there were air quotes around those words. You couldn't see it. Yeah,
I tried to make them audible. But so what what
happens now? Well, by Anchor hawkings various divisions, we're contributing
over four hundred million dollars into Newell's two billion dollars
of sales, with glass Worth specifically making up a hundred
(24:35):
and fifty million of that. Okay, so Newell's doing like
two billion dollars in business and four million of that
is from Anchor Hawking. Yeah. So again things seem to
be going pretty well. But you know what, we're not
done brinking yet. We aren't. We'll we'll tell you what
happens next right after this break. Okay, So ninety four
(25:03):
we were talking about how Anchor Hawking was making up
about four billion dollars of the overall two billion dollars
in sales that Newell was doing. Just a few years later, though,
Newell was looking at the possibility of kind of shedding
Anchor Hawking and getting rid of it entirely. Yes. In
two thousand one, they were trying to sell Anchor Hawking
(25:26):
to a company called Libby Glass. I heard some reports
that Anchor Hawking might have been underperforming, but mainly this
was because Newell had made a really poorly thought out acquisition.
Who did who did they buy? They bought rubber Maid,
And they bought rubber Maid at a time when the
brand was really struggling. Uh, it was kind of suffering
(25:46):
from the Walmart effect. And not only did they buy
it at a time when it was struggling, Uh, they
very likely overpaid for it. Yes, and then so now
you've got this this bad investment. You've made paid too
much for a bad investment. You've got a couple of options, right.
One is that you you spin it off, you sell
(26:06):
it off at a loss, and you eat the cost
of that, which no one really wants to do. Another
possibility is, well, if we really focus on this business,
maybe we can turn it around. But if we want
to really focus on it, we may have to get
rid of some other stuff in our company in order
to devote the attention we need to. Yeah, I mean,
part of the problem is that even the rubber Maid
(26:27):
and Nah, we're both focusing on homewears to a degree,
just the sizes of the different corporations didn't match up
in the marketing strategy and all that. Uh, this this
week called this merger. The merger from how it was
kind of a little bit insane. I had to I
tried to really condense what happened there. But yeah, it's
(26:49):
it merits a story all by itself. Yes, yes, but
Newell tried to, as we said, sell off some divisions
to keep rubber made. Uh. Newell stock values drop in
two years following the acquisition, and rubber Maid stock drop
annual had to write off five million dollars in losses
as goodwill, So selling off Anchor Hawking wouldn't just be
(27:16):
because they need to focus on rubber Mate, but literally
because they needed to cover some of this. Yes, uh,
they sold him off as a or they were trying
to sell him off as a debt finance buyout. The
federal government, though, said no, Libby can't buy Anchor Hawking.
It was too too close to the Libby's business, I assume,
(27:36):
so it's sort of like an anti competitive thing possibly.
So instead they were bought by a division of Cerberus
Capital Management called Global Home Products, along with several other
divisions of Newell. I just want to say that Cerberus
Capital Management sounds awfully ominous to me. It really does
just the game with three headed dogs and stuff, you know.
(27:56):
All right. So, so the thing though, was that Cerberus
actually had a reputation for turning companies around. They did,
they did. Sadly, though, this time they didn't do so
well on that front because a few short years later,
in two thousand six, Anchor Hawking and Global Home Products
filed for Chapter eleven protection. So the company known for
(28:18):
swooping in and rescuing other companies suddenly needed at least
this part of it needed rescuing itself. Yes, so Anchor
Hawking isn't gone. They're not out of the game yet.
They were sold to Monomoy Capital Partners, which is a
much smaller investment company, for seventy five million dollars in
cash and twenty million in liabilities. And at this time,
(28:43):
Anchor Hawking was making revenues around two million dollars and
they were still a leading name in glassware right, but
despite that, they were starting to have some pretty stiff competition,
largely from glassware that was being imported from other countries
that was much cheaper. Yeah. For a long time that
(29:05):
wasn't an issue because glassware is fragile and so you
don't really want to ship it overseas. But times change. Uh.
The goal that Monumoy had was to make Anchor Hawking
a standalone and they did for a while until they
acquired the Oneita Group in two thousand eleven. If you
don't know one Needa, they're mostly known for doing like silverware. Yeah,
(29:26):
And in two thousand twelve they merged Anchor Hawking with
the one need A Group to create Everywhere Global and
then that same year they had four million dollars in losses,
and then the following year or in everything got better, right,
everything was much better. No, in two thousand thirteen they
suffered seventeen million dollars in losses. Yes. I looked at
(29:48):
the end of the year report for Everywhere Global. It
was not a happy report. No. They became a publicly
traded company in two thousand thirteen after a bunch of
financial and regulatory issues. Uh. But most of the company
was still owned by Monomoy, so when everything went poorly,
their debt quickly exceeded their credit limits. So then you
(30:10):
get when the manufacturing plant would actually go through a
temporary shutdown, right, Yes, after what was called a quote
unquote dismal first quarter. I mean after a year where
you've lost almost twenty million dollars. I wonder what their
definition of dismal is eight million dollars for one quarter. Yes,
(30:30):
their goal in the shutdown was to to reduce inventory
and improve liquidity and open up in a month or so.
It's funny because you would think that just to improve
liquidity in glassware, you just turned the temperature up, Jonathan,
I'm sorry. Uh. They said the losses were due to
a drop in sales. I'm just moving on now. You
can tell I'm not the one who did these notes
(30:50):
because I'm the one making terrible jokes. No, please, please,
it's it's an equal share on the terrible jokes Jonathan again.
Everywhere said that the losses were due to a dropping
sales to food service companies and also how utility costs.
I also want to mention that everywhere in this case
is every W A R E where, like every table where,
(31:10):
because when we say everywhere, we mean the company everywhere,
not that it's not every hair, not that it was
happening every Yes. Uh, their loss was so large that quarter,
and I guess overall that they ended up going into
breach of contract on a two and fifty million dollar
credit agreement. Yeah, the stock for Everywhere dropped all the
(31:32):
way down to since a share, which is not great.
When you dropped down below a dollar, you get delisted. Yes,
they sought to fix the breach and make their creditors
happy and negotiate an extension, but by April of two fifteen,
the Everywhere group entered bankruptcy, the second bankruptcy for Anchor
Hawking with they At the time, they said they had
(31:53):
assets of somewhere between a hundred and fifty million dollars.
That's a pretty wide range, yes, and like abilities of
somewhere between five million and one million dollars. Okay, well
that's a bigger range. And their plan was for a
prepackaged bankruptcy which would give their lenders control of the
company once they exited in two to three months. Now,
at this point, the CEO of Everywhere was a guy
(32:16):
named Sam Solomon, and he said the company wasn't about
making product, it was about making money. One. I'm pretty
sure that the workers that the companies weren't super happy
about that too. They weren't making enough money to cover
the costs, so they weren't doing such great business either way. Yeah. Well,
regardless of the lenders decided to be nice and help
(32:38):
with this bankruptcy. They restructured their debt and the Everywhere
group left bankruptcy in June of that same year. So
are we through with all the brink moments? Now? Um?
There any other brink moments I need to worry about.
You brought me on a glass roller coaster. I did
(32:59):
bring you on a last roller coaster. There are no
more brick moments, but there there's still some movement in
the company. Let's let's talk about what's happened post bankruptcy emergence. Well,
first of all, they the company really started focusing on
reducing their debts something and has actually very vigorously sought
(33:20):
this goal. In two thousand and sixteen, they brought in
former Procter and Gamble executive Patrick Lockwood Taylor, and he
thought that a lot of the losses that Anchor Hawking
was experiencing, not just because of all these hostile takeovers
and poor management decisions, was due to the brand losing
its meaning through all of these changes, and so he
really wanted to put new emphasis on quality products and
(33:41):
making them affordable and really bringing back what Anchor Hawking
was known for. And I guess the one Needed group
as well. He really wanted to play up community importance
and all that. But you know, the factory workers, I mean,
they're obviously not happy through all of this turmoil. Their
(34:02):
wages are being cut, their benefits are being cut, people
are getting laid off. In two thou fourteen when the
shutdown happened, Therefore, one K Contributions got next and I
don't know if they're back now, but they at least
weren't back for a good while. So this whole time,
while people are trying to move paper around to keep
the company going, the people who are actually responsible for
(34:22):
making the products are suffering the most. Yes. Yes. And
the factories of course are going into some amount of
disrepair because there's all of this focus elsewhere. Again, like
I said, I don't know if conditions have improved. I
certainly hope so. Factory work is not. It's so needed,
but it is not easy. No, it is not the
glamorous work. No. In two thousand seventeen, the company changed
(34:44):
their name from Everywhere Global to the One Need a
Group in an effort to emphasize our long standing leadership
in the dining and food preparation industry. But they also
started outsourcing their customer service to Emphasis in India, which
of course cut more jobs and more costs. Got you,
so bring us up to date. What's going on over
(35:05):
the last couple of years. Well, in two thousand eighteen,
after they got a fifty million dollar capital investment in
Fusion from one of their largest stockholders, Center Lane Partners,
they brought back in Mark Ichorn, who we didn't really
talk about, but he was Anchor Hawking CEO from ninety
nine in that era of Newell's ownership before they tried
to sell off again. And he was also everywhere as
(35:27):
president from two thousand four to two thousand twelve. So
here's a guy who's been part of this company in
two separate stints, coming back again, coming back again. So
I wonder if he just kind of kept getting ousted
whenever the acquisitions happened. And then it's entirely possible. We've
seen that sort of stuff happened in other companies before,
but yeah, I don't think I've ever seen it happened
(35:48):
twice in the same company. But yeah. In two thousand,
Groups sold a large portion of their food service division
to Crown Brands in an effort to focus more on
selling their glassware and focus on Anchor Hawking, and they
also opened a showroom at forty one Madisine in New York.
Two helps strengthen I guess their growth that they're experiencing
now and kind of to establish themselves in the minds
(36:11):
of consumers again. I'll have to drop by there next
time I'm in New York. I go there fairly frequently now,
so you know, there's it's kind of hard. Like we
often like to sum up our episodes with lessons, this
one's a little tricky just because, uh, there were so
many things that happened within the entire history of this company,
(36:32):
and so many times, like, there were so many different threats,
some external, some internal, that this company experienced throughout its
entire history. I guess, you know, the first thing we
can say is, if you're working in a highly flammable media,
make your factories fireproof as best you can. But I mean, also,
a lot of this was just hostile takeover, so you
can try to fight it. But yeah, it's uh, I mean,
(36:56):
a lot of this is from that culture of the
eighties where the hostile takeover was like a a prime
methodology for getting control of a company, and since those days,
the practice has largely fallen out of favor. It's not
that it can never happen again, but there were a
(37:18):
lot of high profile hostile takeovers that ended very poorly
for lots of people. So it's not something you see
nearly as frequently as you did in the eighties now.
But you know, it's not surprising to have a bunch
of bankruptcies when you have three corporate owners in fifteen years. Yeah. Yeah,
and and again it's we should also mention this in
(37:39):
no way was a reflection on the quality of the products. Yeah.
The the issue with the company was not their products
or even failing to Yeah, they were, they were adapting
to the market. They were, but it was often because
whatever parent company had control of them at the time
was dealing with issues not directly to Anchor Hawking and
(38:01):
then having to leverage Anchor Hawking in order to deal
with those issues. Yeah. Now, I wonder if things would
have turned out differently had they not fought Carl Icon
on his original move to take over the company. It's
hard to say. I mean, you know, there's it's impossible
unless we were able to travel to some sort of
parallel universe. And uh, I got other plans for this
weekend too, But I want to end this episode with
(38:23):
one fun fact. In the nineteen fifties, Anchor Hawking helped
sponsor the late night show Broadway Open House on NBC.
So in a lot of the articles I read, they're
actually credited with helping with the invention of late night television. Interesting. Yeah, yeah,
one of these days we'll have to do like an
episode about some of the earliest sponsors of things like
(38:45):
radio and TV because those were companies that if it
weren't for those companies, we never would have had radio
and television programming. It was only because of their money
that we were able to even get that stuff. But
that's a topic for a differ for an episode. We've
got a lot of plans for some interesting ideas for
upcoming episodes, but we also continue to get amazing suggestions
(39:08):
from you guys and keep it up because if it
weren't for that suggestion, I probably never would have learned
anything about anchor hawking, and it was a fascinating story. Yeah,
I agree. If you have suggestions, you can email us
at feedback at the Brink podcast dot show yep, and
you can visit our website that's the Brink podcast dot Show.
You're going to find an archive of all of our
(39:28):
past episodes there. You also find information about us. Yeah. Also,
if you like the show, tell your friends about it,
give us a good review on iTunes or whatever catching
app you use. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Now, word
of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to
spread the love and get more more listeners, and the
more listeners we get, the more suggestions we get, and frankly,
(39:51):
the easier my job, so you know, from a selfish
point of view, do it anyhow, Until next time, I'm
Ariel Austin and I'm Jonathan Strickland. Business on the Brink
is a production of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I
(40:12):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.