Richard Hearn

Business

2009 End of Year Communcation: 12/16/2009

October 14, 2010

Crown Team,

I want to start this email by wishing you and your family a Happy Holiday.  As we enter into the Holiday season, it is a time to reflect on the past year and a time to think about the future.  In that light, I’d like to give you my thoughts on the same here at Crown.

2009.  Wow.  Where do I start?!?  While the world at large has definitely been in turmoil, we have been going through our own transformation.  We’ve gone through a year of tightening, refining and renewed focus on our clients.  We’ve lost some friends and good co-workers in the process, and had to step up each of our own efforts to help get through a knot hole.  It is clear now that we’ve started making the transition back in the growth direction, but a prolonged period of skepticism, worry and questioning has definitely taken its toll.  Encouraging signs that we’ve begun the hike back upwards include major wins at LexisNexis (the first phase of a $1m project), several POC wins that kick off major initiatives (Pearson, PWC, and others), a resurgence of WaM business in XOM, STM, and most recently a verbal win with STEricsson for our largest ($2.0m) and longest (5 year commitment) engagement in Crown history.  It seems the world is gearing up to spend in 2010.  I too have the tendency to question these as blips because of the difficult times and dose of reality we’ve had in 2009.

2010.  I can’t predict what 2010 will bring, we both know that.  What I can tell you though is that we now have a company that is prepared for whatever 2010 will bring.  Even if the more recent wins and resurgence of opportunities are merely short bursts, we now have a company that will survive and thrive.  We can hit singles and win the game, a place that we haven’t been in a long time.  What truly excites me about 2010 is that hitting the anticipated doubles and triples will propel us towards some major growth and opportunity for us all to develop personally, professionally, and as a team.  With triples and some home runs currently being closed, I expect we will have a very positive year in 2010.  While the path has taken some prolonging turns, our mission has not.  We are committed as a group to build a $50m company in the next 3 years that is relevant.  The $50m and 3 years is only important in so much as it is directional and a way to keep score.  It is also important to understand that it is not a destination, but merely a point to shoot for along the way.  Relevant.  Relevant is something we all hope for ourselves, and something that we hope to be a part of building.  Relevant means something that moves the needle and has an impact on our clients in their attainment of their goals.  Relevant includes building something that we believe will be transformative.  Relevant means industry defining and disruptive.  We’ve already started our trek towards being relevant by focusing on a disruptive model of hybrid software and services.  We’re starting to take that a step further now in outsourcing and bundling software and services into a turnkey solution for our customers (STEricsson).  Relevant is a gauge we’ll use in determining where we invest in the future and how we guide the business.

Crown’s executive team has spent the better part of the last 4 months focusing on our plans for 2010.  We locked ourselves in a room over the last 2 days to present, challenge and better those plans to the point that we believe we have realistic, rational and achievable goals, strategies for achieving those goals, improvement priorities and action plans.  I will be scheduling a Crown Town Hall for January for you to hear those plans from each of the business leaders.  Please look for the invite.  Afterwards, each of the business leaders will be scheduling in person meetings to review them in more detail with you.

Thank You.  I’d like to finish this communication by thanking you for your commitment, sacrifices, efforts and achievements.  They have in no small part been a large contributor to strengthening our company.

I guarantee I missed someone that deserves recognition as much as the shout-outs above.  I also know that these aren’t the only or even the most defining contributions you’ve given to the company.  For that, I apologize in advance.  I also want to take this opportunity to put more than words behind my thanks.  You will be receiving a holiday gift from Crown over the coming days as a small token of appreciation, an Amazon Kindle.  Amazon’s next generation Kindle is a disrupting technology that I personally believe will transform the book industry.  We thought it was the perfect gift as we seek to build a transformational and disrupting business in our own industry.  Please reach out to Michelle Brahm to let her know how you want it sent to you.

I want to wrap this communication up by asking you to believe.  Believe in the positive signs.  Believe in the company you’ve helped to build.  Believe in the learning process we’ve gone through together as a company which will help us to be much stronger.  Believe in your team here at Crown.   And, most importantly, believe in yourself.    I leave you with one quote.  A quote that is defining for me as a person and for how I think about your efforts at Crown.  This quote is stenciled on the ceiling in my home office.  It was given as part of a larger speech to the world by Teddy Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris France in 1910, a year after he left the Presidential office after serving 2 terms which are widely recognized as one of the most transformative periods in American history.  Teddy was speaking about “Citizenship in a Republic”.  I like the quote because it is defining of the type of person it takes to build something truly great.

_“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat”.
_
Here’s to Triumph of High Achievement!  Happy Holiday.

Richard, Mark and the entire Executive Team.