Player Roster While President Jim Tompkins watches the "Top Accounts" reports like a hawk, Chairman Jim Davis charges up the troops—or tends to his collection of sports cars.Insiders
Jim Davis, Chairman and CEO
Davis bought New Balance for $100,000 in 1972—on the day of the Boston
Marathon. At the time, the company made 30 pairs of running shoes a day. The
former electronics salesman and his wife, Anne, now executive vice president
of administration at New Balance, remain the sole owners of New Balance today.
Davis spends less time running these days, as he tends to his collection of
sports cars.
Jim Tompkins, President and COO
A former product and sales manager, he keeps the troops marching. Tompkins initiated
the creation of weekly Top Account reports as a baton to keep New Balance's
sales force in step. He even leads a New Balance team annually in the International
Nijmegen Four Days March, the world's largest walking event.
The 21-year New Balance veteran makes sure enough New Balance shoes are in stock
around the world. In addition to forecasting demand, his team creates statistical
models that determine the distribution of sizes made for each style of shoe.
Mescon can run five kilometers in 26 minutes, 16 seconds.
Elaine Ritchie, Director of Information Services
Ritchie made sure that New Balance's hardware, software and communications network
was up to the task of handing out forecasting templates to sales reps; taking
filled-out forms back; and rolling them up into useful reports and analyses.
Ritchie manages New Balance's 40-person information technology staff.
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Teresa Holland, Sales Planning Manager
Mescon's implementer. Holland took a rag-tag set of forecasting reports, from
computer printouts to Excel sheets to handwritten notes, and turned it into
a single template-driven system that sales representatives could live with.
Then she personally made sure they were trained properly, so the system got
adopted. Now she is spearheading the deployment of the new system in Europe
and Africa. To think: she joined New Balance to cut down on professional travel.
Partners
Phillip Sandstrom, CFO and Chief Systems Architect, SRC Software
As the director of consulting services, Sandstrom had an early hand in the New
Balance project—one of SRC's first to provide sales planning. One of SRC's
founders, Sandstrom was a management consultant for Arthur Young in the early
1980s, and is an expert in system design.
John Stoll, Consultant, SRC Software
Stoll is the primary consultant working on New Balance's deployments of SRC
products; helping Holland and her counterparts in finance get up to speed on
new features in the software as they become available. His primary focus: Help
New Balance plan its budget and smooth out spikes in its cash flow.
Stephen Reiff, Chief Technology Officer, SRC Software
Also an SRC founder, Reiff oversaw creation of the software's current architecture
in 1996. He is chief architect of the Web components of SRC's planning systems—including
the Web check-out function that cut the pain from New Balance's data distribution.
Matthew Serra, CEO, Foot Locker Inc.
Serra makes sure the nation's biggest athletic-shoe retailer and New Balance
are operating in simpatico—unlike Foot Locker's recent history with Nike.
One telltale sign: Foot Locker was one of the first retailers to share sales
data with New Balance and agree to have shoes sent to stores automatically,
based on what the data said.
