After spending most of his career as a consultant, treating the corporate ailments of others, Alan C. Stanford is practicing medicine on his own company.
Since taking charge of a shaky Broadway & Seymour Inc. last year, Mr. Stanford and his team have shed "noncore" divisions and focused on a handful of business lines - most notably, call centers and branch automation.
The result: Broadway & Seymour is bouncing back. The Charlotte, N.C., company earned $2.2 million in the second quarter - after losses in the previous two quarters - and analysts expect further improvement in the months ahead.
"There is still a lot of uncertainty, and there is a big challenge ahead of them," said Dimitri Triantafyllides, an analyst at Interstate-Johnson Lane, in Charlotte. But, he added, "Broadway & Seymour is going in the right direction."
He and other observers squarely credit the 55-year-old Mr. Stanford, who joined as president last year and became chief executive this May. Previously, he had done consulting work - in the 1970s at Data Sciences Inc., which he founded, and in recent years at Ernst & Young.
From the day he arrived at Broadway & Seymour, Mr. Stanford has been preaching focus.
The company had been many things in its 15-year life: a systems integrator, a contract programmer, a provider of core-processing software for community banks. Although this breadth of experience was part of the company's appeal to many bankers, it also was its fundamental weakness, Mr. Stanford said.
By the early 1990s, he said, the company had lost its vision, which hurt its ability to compete.
"Broadway & Seymour has had a focus problem throughout its history," he said. "We've decided to pare it down and zero in on a few things that we can do well. This is the year for that transformation."
The first step in this makeover has been selling off the businesses considered noncore.
Since early last year, Broadway & Seymour has divested five units, including its trademark asset management and community bank software businesses.
These moves, combined with the departure of some its top executives, has left the company with a cloudy image, some experts said.
"What's left? Who's left? The management is clearly competent, but I hardly know who Broadway & Seymour is anymore," said M. Arthur Gillis, a Dallas-based bank technology consultant.
Its next step, Mr. Gillis said, should be communicating the new focus to the market.
Mr. Stanford is already engaged in that effort. Whistle-stopping around the country over the last few months, he has dropped in on customers and investors to outline the company's business plans.
During a recent visit to American Banker, he said call-center technology will play an important role in the company's future.
Call centers have become a red-hot topic among bankers. Many see the telephone as the best device to help reduce customer reliance on branches and increase cross-selling in the short term.
Mr. Stanford said surveys of bankers, which suggest call centers will be an area of heavy investment even as PC-based banking takes hold, played a role in Broadway & Seymour's decision to focus on them.
The company also retains a focus on branch automation and software that gives bank representatives more complete customer profiles and helps them make sales decisions.
In addition, it still sells check image-processing software and has a few management products related to nonbanks.
With the new outlook, the company is "no longer in an acquisition mode," Mr. Stanford said. "We have grown through acquisition in the past, but we now have an operational focus rather than an acquisitions focus."
In addition, the changes have left Broadway & Seymour aiming its sales efforts at banks with at least $5 billion in assets. Before, community banks were its core clients.
All this bodes well for the company's future, analysts say. But not everyone is happy.
One investor is pressing the company for measures that will have more immediate impact on its stock price.
Okabena Partnership K, a Minneapolis-based investment company that owns 5.03% in outstanding shares, said the company is still not focused enough - even after its recent divestitures.
Mr. Stanford seems unfazed by the criticisms. Though the company's stock price dropped to as low as $9.75 this summer, it has rebounded and steadily risen - to $13.25 at the end of last week.
"We are not making decisions in order to have a quarterly impact in 1996," he said. "The people who are buying us are doing so for 1997 and beyond," he said.
"We've cleaned up the mission statement, and now we're putting it to work."
Steven Marjanovic contributed to this article
