INSIDE
By Stephen Metzger
Managing Director
Small Vehicle Resource, LLC
[email protected]
www.smallvehicleresource.com
THE GATED
COMMUNITY
What Next for Textron and E-Z-GO?
T My colleague at Small Vehicle Resource (SVR), Marc
Cesare, puts it rather boldly in this way in an e-mail
to me:
Textron’s reorganization efforts
were on the right track, but… “I think it (the management change) implies that if
your business…drags down the company’s quarter-
ly results you [are in trouble]. I think there is more
than a quarter’s worth of problems. They moved
the guy (Scott Ernest) who led their largest business
segment over to take over this business. I think
this means two things. One, they need someone
who is effective to go in and clean up a mess, and
two, the new guy is probably being groomed as a
possible successor for CEO of the entire company.”
he small, task-oriented vehicle
(STOV) industry was rocked last
week by the announcement that
Textron had designated Scott Ernest,
head of the company’s Aviation Di-
vision, to replace Kevin Halloran, as
head of Textron Specialized Vehicles
(TSV). Evidently, the TSV division’s
poor performance over several quar-
ters finally resulted in a top manage-
ment change.
When the TSV division was formed
several years ago, the objective of put-
ting the variety of small, task-oriented
vehicles under a single organizational
umbrella made a lot sense. The idea
of building a horizontal organization
with semi-independent business units,
coordinated at the top with corporate
oversight for planning and strategy,
has been successfully implemented
by many companies. The key to suc-
cess is in the word and in the deed of
implementation. Here is where diffi-
culties arose.
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Marc goes on to compare acquisition strategies of
Polaris and TSV:
“The difference between Polaris and Textron is that
Polaris…acquired the leading brands when they
made acquisitions in this space. Arctic Cat was
really a third tier brand, maybe second tier brand,
not leading in either the recreation segment or
the work segment. The Bad Boy Buggy acquisition
wasn’t great either.”
Slow growth in a maturing industry (as current-
ly defined)
Compounding the implementation issues, as not-