Darwin Deason’s persistence paid off in a big way.
The chairman of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., a company based in Dallas, stands to take home $800 million in cash and stock from the sale of ACS to Xerox Corp.
The windfall marks another chapter in the rags-to-riches story of the 69-year-old Arkansas native who rose from being a mailboy at Gulf Oil to making a fortune in business processing and information technology.
Along the way, Deason acquired wives, yachts, jets, lawsuits and anger-management issues.
In a 2003 D Magazine story entitled Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless, writer Tim Rogers highlights the Deason temper from the get-go with an account of an episode aboard Deason’s 118-foot yacht, the Cartoush II.
“Darwin Deason denies he threatened to kill the chef,” Rogers reports in his second sentence. “Others claim he did.”
“The guy was insubordinate,” explained Deason, who had just divorced his fourth wife. “He wouldn’t do what I told him to do. So I fired him. There were some words, but there weren’t any threats of killing.”
Deason made the money to buy the yacht and a lot of other things through a business career that took off when he started the first ATM network in Texas.
He was CEO and chairman of MTech Corp., a data processing subsidiary of MCorp from 1978 to 1988 when the company was bought by EDS.
Deason took the $9 million he gained from the sale and used it to start ACS.
The company, which now has 74,000 employees worldwide, is a leader in outsourcing, supplying technology and services to industries and to government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
Xerox, which is based in Norwalk, Conn., and has 54,000 employees worldwide, will pay $5.6 billion in cash and stock for ACS. The purchase is the first major acquisition for Ursula M. Burns, who became Xerox’s CEO in July.
In a statement, Burns said that, with ACS, Xerox’s revenue from services would increase to $10 billion from a 2008 figure of $3.5 billion.
Deason had been trying to sell ACS for four years, but previous efforts had proved unsuccessful.
According to The New York Times, tentative deals in 2005 and 2006 broke down.
Then in 2007, the proposed sale of the company to Deason and Cerberus Capital Management LP stalled when the five non-management members of ACS’s board said the price was too low.
Angered, Deason then asked the five directors to step down, which they did, though later they sued ACS for saying they had breached their duties.
Other possible deals fell through as the credit markets dried up, and it took two years for Deason to find another buyer in Xerox.
The deal has sent ACS’s stock price up. The price of Xerox shares dropped, in part because of concern that the company was acquiring too much ACS debt.
If the deal is completed, ACS will operate as an independent unit of Xerox with Lynn R. Blodgett, the CEO of ACS, reporting to Burns.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment