Plenty of investors walk away when a company starts to sink. Alejandro Betancourt López says he does the opposite, and the Hawkers rescue put that claim to a real test.
When he took the wheel in late 2016, the Spanish eyewear maker was close to folding. His response offers a handful of durable lessons about leading through a genuine crisis rather than merely surviving one.
“I Sink With the Ship”
“I’m the person that, when it goes bad, I sink with the ship. I don’t walk out of the ship,” he said. “But those investments that have gone bad, if you hold them long enough, maybe they come back. But I never leave them alone. So I try to support them all the way.”
That patience colored every call he made at Hawkers. He treated the low point as a phase to work through rather than a signal to cut his losses, and he stayed close to the business the whole way down and back up.
Keep the Strongest, Change the Rest
He still made hard personnel calls. He replaced some directors and employees to align with the company’s growth goals and kept his best performers in place. He brought in Nacho Puig as chief executive for his deep experience branding in the fashion and sports industries.
The thread running through those moves was simple: in a crisis, only strong performers should remain. He trimmed where he had to and doubled down on the people who could actually deliver under pressure, which mattered more than any org-chart tidiness. A crisis, he figured, is no time to carry passengers.
Intuition, Checked Ten Thousand Times
His decisions blend gut feel with a room full of knowledgeable people rather than leaning on data or instinct alone. At Hawkers, that meant empowering managers to kill underperforming ad campaigns quickly and watching return on ad spend like a hawk.
“Don’t leave anything to chance. Drive everybody crazy, drive yourself crazy, look at things 10,000 times, and make sure that you have the goal in sight, and it will happen,” he said. The intensity, in his view, is the price of getting a distressed company back on its feet. He applied the same restraint to pricing. He chose value over a race to the bottom even as competitors slashed prices to hold share, on the theory that a brand worth paying for would outlast a cheap one.