HATTIE: Starting a business is tough, but growing it quickly is the exception, especially when the company is on life support.

Meet Bill Antle, the turnaround doctor, who took a company with only six months to live and brought it back to life. And it is not just getting by now, it is sprinting its way into new markets and achieving huge profits. Oak Industries manufactures components, mainly for the cable television and telecommunications industries.

We went to Waltham, just north of Boston, to find out how one person took a near-dead business and breathed life back into it.

BILL ANTLE (Oak Industries): The first thing we had to do is we took a look at our businesses, and the thing that dictated whether we kept the business or sold it or cut it back was really trying to understand what its position was in its market. And the businesses that we sold were businesses--I mean, everything was losing money so it wasn't as if we'd just sold the money-losers and stuff. But the businesses we sold were businesses that had a very poor strategic position or the underlying dynamics in the industry were going against them.

HATTIE: Can you give me an example of a poor strategic position for one of the companies that you sold?

BILL: One of the original companies that Oak had was a company that made the cable box decoders, the things that you have--unfortunately, you don't have an Oak box on the top of your TV set these days. But Oak had 60 percent of that market in the early '80s. Due to some product problems and the introduction of General Instruments and Scientific Atlanta's products, that market share went down to 6 percent. So we had a business that was--although it's $30 million in sales, it had 6 percent of the market that was dominated by people that were billion-dollar companies, and I have this underlying view of the world, which is you can't cost-reduce your way out of a strategic problem.

We had to take a lot of cost out of all our operations, and we basically did that through consolidating. The people that were there, as good as they were, had been inculturated by 10 years of operating losses, and to some extent.

HATTIE: They were used to losing. And if you have a team of losers--not that they were losers, but they were used to losing.

BILL: That's right. And, therefore, the question is how do you all of a sudden--and I don't--and I like to think that I can lead by example, but I just figured it was just too much to do, to do that and that we needed people that came from a different set of experiences.

HATTIE: So you went from having 47 in the corporate office in San Diego to

BILL: To 21 here, and only one of the 47 made the transition. And in the other--out of the top 120 people in the divisions, we only have about seven or eight that were left after the first two years.

HATTIE: And how did you go about getting the people that you have right now?

BILL: Basically, we made a lot of search firms rich. What we tried to do is to create--bring people on--good people on that were very entrepreneurial, that viewed this as a start-up. It just was a start-up that had a little bit of substance to it. Not good substance, but it had--you could at least say you had some sales. And we were very lucky about being able to pull people out of jobs in which they were, you know, a very, very good team.

HATTIE: But they were stuck. They felt they were in a rut, and they could come here and things would be more exciting.

BILL: I think they--I'm not sure they were in a rut--but I think they came here believing that it was a real entrepreneurial opportunity. Our management team has about 10 percent to 11 percent of the equity in the company, and that's probably--you know, that was enough to make a difference. If the company were successful, people would feel that financially it would be very rewarding for them.

HATTIE: One of the reasons for your success is you have allowed the short-term decisions to be made at the plants, at the other locations, and you all here at corporate are investing your time in long-term thinking.

BILL: That's where we can best use our resources and our minds. Our intellectual capital here is better spent because it's not like trying to deal with a customer's need today. We're trying to guess where the cust--who the customers are gonna be and what are their needs gonna be two years from now.

HATTIE: Bill Antle's Sliver of Genius? His ability to put together a team of people committed to growth and allow them to invest their time in long-range thinking.

"CEOs of fast growing companies say the most important qualities needed by a business leader are creativity, perseverance, and above all, the ability to take risks."

-BusinessWeek

HATTIE: Jeff Slutksy is owner of Streetfighter Marketing. He's written books about how to market, promote, increase sales without spending a lot of money. In fact, his philosophy, the Streetfighter philosophy, is: Don't outspend your competition, outthink them. He does believe that direct mail can work and will work if you have a creative tactic to avoid being thrown in the trash.

JEFF SLUTSKY (Marketing Consultant): Direct mail is an important tool of the street fighter, but 99 percent of most junk mail ends up in the garbage, so what can you do? One of my favorite techniques with direct mail is to use something that they won't throw away right away, like a picture postcard.

This is what happened. There's this one printer in a small town outside of Cleveland, went to a convention for printers in Las Vegas. While she's in Las Vegas, buys 400 picture postcards of Las Vegas, brings them back to her little shop in that small town. On the reverse side of the picture postcard, puts `Don't gamble when you need good quality printing. Bring this postcard in for a 10 percent discount.'

Then she looks in the small phone book for the business listings, so she got all the businesses that off the top of her head didn't look like they were her customers, highlighted them, had her kids after school hand address the postcards, mailed them at the postcard rate. All 400 went out to potentially new customers. One hundred were redeemed.

That's a 25 percent--unheard of in direct mail. Why? When you get a picture postcard from somebody from Las Vegas, what are you going to do? You're going to find out, `Well, who do I know that's in Las Vegas and how much money did they win?' So you look it over, and `Don't gamble when you need a printer.'

This an easy thing that can be adapted. If you go to Orlando, buy 1,000 picture postcards: `Don't Mickey Mouse around when you need good quality,' whatever you sell. You know, `Don't get Goofy.' It's amazing. There's a lot of applications for this. Think about it a little bit, and then do some street fighting of your own.

HATTIE: Finally, this thought from novelist Thomas Wolfe: `It's not the death of the dying that's terrible, but the death of the living.'