mr keyes obviously is a big fan of the quantitative approach
New Boss Aims to Apply Some 7-Eleven Tactics to Blockbuster
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By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: July 17, 2007
If Blockbuster is a company in desperate need of a script doctor, the man it has chosen for the task — James W. Keyes, the former chief executive of 7-Eleven — could perhaps be described as a master of rewrite.
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Brian Harkin for The New York Times
James W. Keyes of Blockbuster must meet competition from Netflix, video-on-demand services and TiVo.
At 7-Eleven, he built smaller stores at a time when other chains were building bigger ones. While competitors were still letting distributors choose which beer and potato chip varieties they should stock, he moved to an automated system that made such decisions internally and store-by-store.
The moves paid off. When Mr. Keyes, 52, left 7-Eleven three years ago, he had overseen 36 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. In 1990, the company was in bankruptcy; in 2004, his last full year at the helm, it posted a profit of $106 million.
Blockbuster, by contrast, has posted losses in 9 of the last 10 years, has closed hundreds of stores, and has had customers siphoned off by Netflix. The previous chief executive, John Antioco, resigned after a protracted dispute with the board over salary.
Although Mr. Keyes just took the top post at Blockbuster this month and has yet to articulate a full strategy, he said in an interview that a few of his tried-and-true strategies might work well at the video rental chain: tailoring the product line to each store, relying heavily on data and automation, and reducing the size of the retail footprint.
“The trend in the convenience-store world was we were building larger and larger stores, but the bigger they were, the less convenient they were,” Mr. Keyes said in a telephone interview from Blockbuster’s headquarters in Dallas. “But we ended up generating
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS
REPRINTS
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By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: July 17, 2007
If Blockbuster is a company in desperate need of a script doctor, the man it has chosen for the task — James W. Keyes, the former chief executive of 7-Eleven — could perhaps be described as a master of rewrite.
Enlarge This Image
Brian Harkin for The New York Times
James W. Keyes of Blockbuster must meet competition from Netflix, video-on-demand services and TiVo.
At 7-Eleven, he built smaller stores at a time when other chains were building bigger ones. While competitors were still letting distributors choose which beer and potato chip varieties they should stock, he moved to an automated system that made such decisions internally and store-by-store.
The moves paid off. When Mr. Keyes, 52, left 7-Eleven three years ago, he had overseen 36 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. In 1990, the company was in bankruptcy; in 2004, his last full year at the helm, it posted a profit of $106 million.
Blockbuster, by contrast, has posted losses in 9 of the last 10 years, has closed hundreds of stores, and has had customers siphoned off by Netflix. The previous chief executive, John Antioco, resigned after a protracted dispute with the board over salary.
Although Mr. Keyes just took the top post at Blockbuster this month and has yet to articulate a full strategy, he said in an interview that a few of his tried-and-true strategies might work well at the video rental chain: tailoring the product line to each store, relying heavily on data and automation, and reducing the size of the retail footprint.
“The trend in the convenience-store world was we were building larger and larger stores, but the bigger they were, the less convenient they were,” Mr. Keyes said in a telephone interview from Blockbuster’s headquarters in Dallas. “But we ended up generating