Last November, Canpar Transport commemorated its 25th year in business. Twenty-five years is an important milestone for any growing company. It’s time enough to have cycled through two ups and two downs, and probably to have made some big management changes. It’s time enough to lose your focus, darned near lose your company, and find it all again.

Twelve years ago, at the start of his tenure as Canpar’s president, John Cyopeck wasn’t sure his company would last 25 days, let alone 25 years. Back then, Canpar was part of Canadian Pacific’s trucking group, where there was enough red ink to paint the walls and dye the carpets. With deregulation bringing new competition to Canada, CP decided Canpar should be fixed up or sold off. In 1990, Cyopeck was brought in to determine which route to take.

His decision to revitalize the company was made, in retrospect, without enough due diligence. Good thing, too.

“If I had known how poorly we were doing — in every aspect of the business — I might have backed away,” Cyopeck recalls. “We had a bad on-time record, we gave up 5% of our revenues to damage claims, and our pricing was out of whack with our costs. In the fall of 1990, we were within two weeks of closing the doors. That would have put 1800 people on the street.”

Being unemployed is a miserable prospect, especially for a guy who’s always worked, ever since he was 14. But to Cyopeck, a guy who doesn’t like to lose, the thought of failure was worse than being out of a job. He persuaded CP to give the company more time. Then he went to work.

In tough times, seldom is being an effective leader so important — and so difficult. “When we were on the brink, there were so many negative things going on it was hard to focus on the positives,” he says. “So my top guys and I sat down, really looked at our costs, and decided on what we could do best: ground parcel. Not air. Not overnight. Ground parcels, business to business.”

That sense of purpose made other decisions easier. They’re strategies any company leader can use:

1. Fire your customers. How much does each account really contribute to your bottom line? “I don’t see anything wrong with going to a customer and saying, ‘You know what? You’re fired. We can’t afford to keeping hauling your freight,’ ” Cyopeck says. “We reduced our top-line revenue by about $30 million. And we were better for it, because it was costing us a lot more than $30 million to keep that business.” At the same time, Cyopeck says he no longer gets the competitive yips about passing on business that’s out of Canpar’s scope. “When I get a call from someone who says they absolutely have to get a package there by 9 a.m., I tell him to call FedEx. We don’t do that.”

2. Open your books. If employees understand the business and its finances, they can better understand their impact on the company’s bottom line. “The more you tell them, the more they’ll be able to make good choices,” Cyopeck explains. “Don’t just bring out the bad numbers when it’s convenient. When the company is going good, show them what’s going on with the operating profit — you’re upgrading the fleet, building facilities, investing in technology, investing in training. They’ll appreciate it.”

3. Be accountable. “In 1990, we ran an advertisement that basically said, ‘Hey, we know we haven’t done a good job, but we’re trying to improve, and if you have a problem, you can call me direct.’ I got calls like you couldn’t imagine,” Cyopeck says. Many were from customers who had already talked to a front-line manager — they wanted to change a pick-up time, for example — and felt ignored. “So I’d call the local manager, who’d tell me, ‘No problem, we’ll change it.’ What’s wrong with this picture? It’s a sad statement when our people will do things for me, but not for our customers.”

Cyopeck says he learned a lot from the experience. “I realized that our local managers needed to know they can make decisions,” he says. “They have brains. They know what they have to do. And if they make the wrong choice, so what? If they learn from it, and not keep making the same mistake over and over, they’ll be better managers. Some of the people who were deadwood back then, the minute they felt like they could show leadership, they jumped up to the table. Others, we learned quickly, really were deadwood. Most left on their own.”

Cyopeck is 57, and talks easily about positioning the company beyond his time there. “I’ve got a Grade 10 education, and I wouldn’t make the short-list if I was applying for this job today,” he says. “What got us through the tough times was a solid understanding of our balance sheets and pure common sense. We decided what wanted to be. We haven’t forgotten it. And we’re still here.”