40 years of DAI

70
of Party jobs overseas. As long as this was the
case, real authority remained concentrated at
the top of the firm.
By the time of the CEO transition in 1999,
however, more authority had been devolved to
the operating groups, and their leaders all had
the title of Vice President. These were timely
changes, reflecting the lateral diversification
of DAI’s practice areas through the addition of
small and microenterprise, banking, public sector
management, and post-conflict stabilization
to its traditional portfolio of agriculture-related
services. Barclay gave his full support to the increasingly
powerful group leaders, including Jim
Boomgard in finance and enterprise development,
Michael Morfit in governance, Ed Stains
in environment and water, and Max Goldensohn
in agriculture. “We had the flexibility and independence
and trust of Tony to get on with it,”
said Boomgard. “He didn’t try to run the groups
himself.”
In the previous year, DAI revenues had reached
$69 million, and they rose by another $8 million
in 1999. But not for the first time, rapid growth
proved to be just as perilous as a slowdown.
For one thing, DAI’s coherence as one company
seemed to slip as the groups gained traction
and revenues continued to climb. Some old-line
employees grew discontented, convinced that
the larger company left little room for creativity
in their work. But these problems were more nuanced,
and less threatening, than the prospect
of a financial meltdown.
In hindsight, the problem seems very clear:
not only were the old habits of a smaller, more
informal company hard to break, but DAI’s
financial controls and accounting system seriously
lagged the growth in revenue. A cascading
series of staff departures in the finance
office compounded that problem in 1999,
resulting in a 100 percent turnover rate in this,
then, underappreciated yet critical part of the
company. The Congo project and SWIFT task
orders included large amounts of grant funds
that generated no profit for DAI, but in any given
month put heavy demands on available cash.
Much of DAI’s institutional memory vanished
with those staff, and before long expenses
weren’t being tracked, bank accounts weren’t
being reconciled, invoices were going in late,
and DAI faced long delays in getting paid. By
January 2000, the resulting cash drain had put
DAI out of compliance with the covenants on its
credit agreement. SunTrust Bank proved patient
and confident that management would right the
ship, but the first half of the new year was full of
tension and worry.
DAI hired a new Chief Financial Officer, Pamela
Little, a veteran of several turnarounds, to stop
the bleeding. Little had Barclay’s backing, and
the Board’s, to do whatever that took, and she
applied an authoritarian “I make the rules” style
while putting in countless long hours with her
newly hired staff to fix the problems. Audited
statements for 1999 did not appear until October
2000, and it was only in November that
current-year results were available, showing