Terry Lee, co-founder of the former Bell Sports, and Tim Mayhew, a managing director of Fenway Consulting Partners, which owns a majority of Easton-Bell Sports, are taking over the company's helm after the resignation or dismissal of two more top executives of the group. Lee, a 63-year-old board member and former chief executive of the group, has assumed the role of executive chairman and CEO. Mayhew is going to work with him as president and chief operating officer.
The latest management shake-up, which has become effective immediately, follows the resignation of Easton-Bell's former CEO, Paul Harrington, and of Donna L. Flood, president of Giro/Easton Cycling, who recently acted also as chief operating officer of the group. Harrington and Flood, who had both previously worked at Reebok, joined the group in 2008 and 2009, respectively.
Two executives of the group, Greg Shapleigh and Jessica Klodnicki, have now been promoted executive vice presidents. Shapleigh will take over Flood's role as general manager of Giro/Easton Cycling, while Klonicki will run the group's Bell/Blackburn division, which had been headed up by Steve Bigelow until last summer.
Bigelow left in June 2012, and he was followed the next month by Bernie Doering, senior vice president of the group's Action Sports division, which previously comprised both divisions. They were not replaced, and Flood took over some of their functions. Other officials in charge of product development and marketing have left the company in the last few months. Last November, it was the turn of Paul Stratta, an industry veteran who had set up a few months earlier a European office for the group at Rolle, close to the highway linking Geneva with Lausanne. His position has been taken over on an interim basis by Stratta's former deputy, Cyril Pliquet.
Observers have been wondering whether some of the recent departures of top managers may have been related to plans by Fenway to cash out of the company or to sell its cycling operations. Lee is the former official of Wilson Sporting Goods who bought Bell with a partner in 1984, and then merged it with Blackburn and Giro in the 1990s. Lee served as chairman and CEO between 1989 and 1999. Under him, the company went public in 1992. Fenway bought majority control of the company in 2004 and later merged it with parts of the former Riddell and Eastonto form the Easton-Bell Sports group in its present shape.
