The Instrumental Presentation NCR’s CEO Used As Toilet Paper

It wouldn’t be a good week if there wasn’t another opportunity to guffaw at NCR.

When NCR’s new CEO took over we don’t think he knew – or frankly cared – what he was getting into.

Mike Hayford, NCR CEO: “$10M a year, a fancy new title, and a private jet? Wahoo!”

By our read Hayford was a bean counter who rode the coattails of successful entrepreneurs at Metavante and saw an opportunity to earn an undeserving sum of money while piddling around a struggling hardware business.

Spencer Stuart conducted the CEO search for NCR, and we were privy to the process; in fact the now-CEO at a public restaurant POS company was given an opportunity to take the role but passed for a number of very good reasons.

Instead NCR ended up with a rubber stamp board and a CEO that many would describe as someone who believes himself to be omnipotent.

How’s that been working out for shareholders?

(Hint: it’s been a disaster: NCR has barely eked a 20% return while the DOW, Nasdaq, and S&P are up 131%, 167%, and 305% respectively over the same period of time).

Despite getting their asses handed to them by Toast in the restaurant vertical (and writing off what we’ve heard was $38M into a failed Aloha nextgen build), and doubling down on a loser ATM hardware business, and making bad decision after bad decision, NCR still feels compelled to shell out millions for a CEO to make these blunders.

A quick call with Hayford in 2018 was all that we needed to know that he’d crash the ship, but that didn’t prevent us from giving him an opportunity to understand what he was getting into, and where he could make changes for the better.

But you don’t need to listen to anyone when you’re a deity.

So he didn’t.

Let’s deconstruct what he ignored.

We started off by pointing out the obvious to anyone who’s watched digital transformations: they start slowly then become inevitable. Inertia had taken over and we predicted NCR would lose even more market share, and of course they have.

We then showed Hayford that he was losing accounts across all segments of the market, from SMB to legitimate enterprise accounts like Arby’s. Cloud POS was not some fringe technology anymore even though he dismissed it as such and was more focused on convincing customers to pay a recurring fee for their old, shitty Aloha systems to generate multiple arbitrage as a “SaaS business”.

Classic beancounter move.

Next we categorized Aloha feedback from dozens of conversations with former and existing Aloha customers, employees, third parties, and resellers. The major points of concern were:

• NCR’s disastrous API program, both in terms of stability and costs
• How NCR hosted solutions were not just rubbish, but prevented NCR from building a relevant POS
• Overall NCR support issues which are broader symptoms of the turd that is Aloha POS
• The undeniably lagging state of all things software at NCR
• A broken channel model
• Inability to execute anything related to data
• Aloha enterprise accounts are actively looking for alternative solutions

We shared a version of this presentation with Hayford over three years ago.

Since then Aloha has only committed blunder after blunder and circled the drain just like we predicted it would, sans major changes, in our presentation.

But don’t despair: the magnanimous celestial who ignored all of our forewarnings is still at the helm of NCR. Praise be!

And this is the best possible news for all and any of NCR’s competitors.

Seriously, y’all should send NCR’s board some Christmas presents this year to make sure Hayford stays at NCR as looooong as possible.

Because if he can make $10M a year to run a company into the ground, having him around is the best job insurance you could ever ask for.