NCR Takes 39 Months to Execute Basic Business Model Change, Board Apparently Milking Company to Zero

As 2021 comes to a close we get to watch the coaching carousel in college football play out.

Coaches are typically given three seasons to show improvement. If it doesn’t happen by then, it ain’t gonna happen. The exception seems to be Scott Frost of Nebraska, but this isn’t a sports periodical.

We’ve posted a few prior articles discussing the disaster that is NCR.

They can’t seem to get anything right, from strategy, to execution, to, unsurprisingly, results.

It’s why they’ve missed every. single. revenue line item they put in their own guidance for Q3 2021.

Some readers – mostly NCR subscribers, if you can believe it – said we’re too hard on NCR, and our position isn’t justified.

ORLY?

Now that we’ve got a nice history of communication with NCR out in the open, let’s paint a pretty direct line of ineptitude.

Per this article of ours, we gave omnipotent Mike Hayford, CEO of NCR, a free consulting report on the shit show that is Aloha, and what he could do immediately to fix the problems. This is the kind of report that a big 4 consulting company would compile for about $1M, if you’re curious.

We sent this to Hayford in August of 2018.

On December 1, 2021, at Bank of America’s conference, NCR presented their current state of affairs.

The below image is all you need to know.

39 months after we told Hayford what to do, and as his competitors ate his lunch, he and his band of prodigal geniuses have figured it out:

Outstanding.

This is the mark of a true winner: executing a business model change in a blistering 39 months.

Well, it might not be a winner move in college sports where you get the hook in 36 months, but when you’re making a paltry $10M a year and cruising the skies in private luxury, it’s totally acceptable.

Except over the last year, when you actually make $28M for this kind of performance.

NCR’s shareholders must be ecstatic with NCR’s board of directors and their hiring decisions.

But NCR’s board makes considerable scratch to do nothing.

Why rock the boat when all you have to do is show up four times a year, glad hand, and brag about being on a public board?

Even activists we’ve talked with have written off NCR as beyond salvage.

But that hasn’t prevented the board and top management from giving themselves pay raises while running the company into the ground.

Another quarterly miss?

Nice!

Let’s give ourselves a bonus.

Likely convo in NCR board room

There’s just nothing left of the company: the biggest part of NCR’s business is on a collision course with Amazon, who’s licensing their automated checkout technology to retailers.

And even though Mike Hayford made 345x as much as Jeff Bezos made in Amazon salary in 2020, we’re still going to give the software and innovation edge to Amazon.

It’s really close, but Amazon might be a tad better.

Just a tad, though.

It would seem that Hayford is being heavily incentivized to sell the company. As one of our faithful hedge fund readers pointed out, look how much charity compensation Hayford is racking up if there’s a change in control:

And if we look across IT benchmarks for companies with median worker pay on par with NCR, Harford is really, really over compensated.

Like look at this versus PAR’s CEO.

Now let’s look at stock performance of NCR, PAR, and the S&P 500.

Except NCR’s performance is so abysmal relative to PAR you need to adjust the Y-axis to show how disastrous it is.

So let’s do that and just show NCR vs the S&P 500.

If you put a dollar into NCR five years ago you’d have lost money while the market would have paid you two dollars and PAR would have paid you nine.

For a few hundred thousand dollars we can find a teenager who can run NCR better than Mike Hayford.

We’re not kidding.

At least Scott Frost’s salary went down with his shit performance. Maybe he should try his hand at being a public CEO instead. Apparently nobody bothers to ask hard questions, and management can bleed a company to death without concern for criminal reprisals. Where does a loser college coach sign up?