Berry Restructures to Facilitate New Business Model

The Berry Co. (formerly Berry and Local Insight Media) has unveiled a revamped organization and business model aimed at greater efficiency and support of a new “client–focused” strategy, the company announced last week.

As a result, the company is slimming down, closing offices in Hudson and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and consolidating operations in North Carolina. It is also moving some 90 production positions to the Dominican Republic. Denver will remain the company’s corporate headquarters, while the Dayton, Ohio, office will see substantial change as jobs are cut in some areas and added in others.

All in all, the restructuring will affect about 320 jobs, according to the company. The Dayton Business Journal is reporting that 140 jobs will be eliminated in Dayton, with 50 new jobs in Internet sales created there later this year.

All this is designed to set up the company for a shift from its traditional print-focused sales model to one focused on selling a wide array of traditional and digital media products. Berry outlined this new strategy on its third-quarter earnings call in November.

On that call, Berry CEO Scott Pomeroy summed up the new approach this way, “Our plan is to deploy a flexible, scalable approach in offering our multiplatform solution set to meet a range of advertiser requirements.” At the heart of this is a commitment to “fully trackable results.”

To enable this transition, Berry spent much of 2009 converting about 150 different publishing systems and applications onto a single platform from 3L Systems Group. That conversion is expected to kick in early this year.

Pomeroy also said part of the company’s plan for 2010 would be to “optimize costs” and focus on keeping or building on its sales and marketing core, while cutting costs elsewhere in the organization. Last week’s announcement seems to be the fulfillment of that promise.