“We closed Friday, September 12, that morning. And Lehman went under that weekend. We truly believe that if we hadn’t closed on September 12, the crisis in the credit market would have prevented us from selling The Weather Channel that Monday — or anytime soon after that.”

Blevins advised students to take time to network and build teamwork skills. Putting your nose to the grindstone, she says, won’t be enough to make it to the top. “You’ve got to work hard, but you’ve also got to talk to people.” It is crucial, she says, to go to “meetings, lunches, the water cooler” to meet people and to allow others to know and “remember you as a person.”

Recalling the event months later, Landmark Media Enterprises executive vice president and chief financial officer Terry Blevins (ACCT ’83, MACCT ’85) still marvels at her company’s good fortune — sealing the deal on one of its most lucrative assets with NBC Universal and private-equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year. The sale price was not disclosed by the parties, but various media have reported it to be $3.5 billion.

Although Lehman was Landmark’s investment banker for the sale of its other properties, it was not involved in the Weather Channel sale (handled by JPMorgan Chase). Lehman’s failure rippled through the global financial system, though, worsening the crisis in confidence and contributing to the freezing of credit markets and to the deepening of the recession worldwide.

The close call reminded Blevins that, despite her professional aversion to mid-month closings, “it’s better to close the deal when you can rather than delay — credit falls through, people change their minds, other things come up for sale — you’ve got to do it at the time that you can. We were able to sell The Weather Channel, but we were unable to sell many of our remaining properties.”

The credit crunch forced Landmark to shelve its sale plans for its remaining assets: several newspapers, including its flagship newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot; TV stations in Las Vegas and Nashville; a marketing services company; and a data center service company.

A native of Dale City, Va., Blevins has worked in various roles at the privately held Norfolk, Va.-based media company, formerly known as Landmark Communications, since 1990. She began her career at textile manufacturer Springs Industries in South Carolina, moved to a West Virginia plastics company for four years, and worked briefly at GE Plastics in Massachusetts after it acquired her West Virginia employer. She joined Landmark at a cable company it owned. When it was sold to a Denver company, Blevins declined a job offer to move west, accepting the controller position at the Pilot instead.

Supportive and ethical management

She has stayed with the Batten family-owned Landmark, she says, due in part to a supportive management that has offered her opportunities to work and gain experience in areas other than accounting — she served as general manager of The Flagship, Landmark’s newspaper for naval personnel, and later moved to Atlanta to be vice president of finance and ad operations of The Weather Channel Interactive, which operates weather.com.

The company’s strong internal controls, “moral structure,” and “very high level of ethics” were other reasons to stay, she says, ascribing these aspects of the company’s culture to retired chairman and CEO Frank Batten Sr., who died in September 2009. Batten Sr. championed the highly controversial desegregation of schools in Virginia during the 1950s when he was the Pilot’s publisher.

Blevins reports to Frank Batten Jr., who succeeded his father in 1998. Describing him as “a man of few words,” Blevins says she has learned from him what she calls the “Batten Basics”: keep it simple, focus on the key facts and ideas, don’t worry about things you cannot control.

Selling the Weather Channel

She kept these dictums in mind when she helped lead the “huge endeavor” of disposing of Landmark’s business units, starting with The Weather Channel in December 2007, within the company’s nine-month target period.

Blevins guided a range of activities that included managing the marketing of the company to investment banks and prospective buyers, the creation and execution of the management presentations and finally, the transition of Landmark systems and processes to those of the buyers.

Readying to sell

Her first major task, she recalls, was to work with other senior executives to write the Weather Channel’s “discussion memorandum” — an in-depth description of the company to be sent to prospective buyers for bids. Preparing it required “a different way of thinking” about the company, she says.

“We were one of the last independent cable channels. We had to turn our minds around and think from the standpoint of our prospective buyers — much larger companies with many more media properties — and how they would view and operate The Weather Channel.”

With the first round of bidding received, the process moved on to New York, where Blevins and other senior executives made presentations every day to select bidders and answered questions in sessions that lasted several hours. “It was a tough week!”

Virtual data room

Blevins also helped set up a virtual data room, which gave the next round of shortlisted buyers online access to detailed corporate records — from accounting and financial to management, technology, and marketing. “The nice thing about the data room is you can see who’s looking, so it helped gauge the interest of the buyers — what they were looking at, and were they still even looking. It gives you a quick snapshot of what’s happening with prospective buyers.”

Post-sale structure

The sale preparations came with a few surprises. “Like everybody else, Landmark did not expect what happened last year to the credit market, housing, ad sales…we’re in classified real estate, employment, and automotive, so that really impacted us. The length of this recession was something that we didn’t expect through this process.”

The need to create a new, post-sale payroll and benefits structure for The Weather Channel sale was another unforeseen development. While Blevins thought at first that Weather Channel employees would move into the buyer’s system, it turned out that a new one had to be created — “all new benefits, health insurance, dental insurance, 401K…” Tasked with coordinating the effort to create the new benefits structure, Blevins worked with teams from Landmark, The Weather Channel, and the buyer. “We were successful, hit all our deadlines…so when Sept. 13 rolled around, they were ready to go.”

Working nights and weekends

But perhaps the biggest surprise, Blevins notes, was the effort required to produce individual audited financial statements — three years worth — for The Weather Channel and each of the other 10 Landmark companies on the market. (“We had always done our audits on a consolidated basis.”) Now, on top of responding to buyers’ enquiries, she and other senior executives had to get ready to answer questions from auditors.

What became very evident was that “when you’re trying to complete an audit and trying to sell your company, the level of scrutiny increases,” Blevins says. “You could tell that they were digging deeper,” she says of the audit firms Landmark hired. “We worked almost every single weekend and most nights, we didn’t get home until 8 or 9 at night. It was a very intense process for seven to eight months.”

There was little time for nostalgia or looking back on the seven years she had worked at The Weather Channel Interactive, where Blevins had responsibility for financial analysis, budgeting, forecasting, internal controls, and accounting and also oversaw the business analytics and advertising sales support groups.

Expecting and adapting to “black swans”

Blevins, who lives in Virginia Beach with her husband and three children, visited campus last spring as a Wachovia Distinguished Speaker. She advised students to expect unusual and career-changing developments in their lives—smaller-scale versions of the improbable and large-impact events that author Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “black swans.”

Discussing the black swans she has experienced in her career, Blevins described how such developments as the eclipse of the U.S. textile industry by Chinese manufacturers, the debut of Apple’s Mac and the rise of the personal computer industry, and a series of corporate acquisitions and dispositions shaped her graduate education decisions and redirected her professional path from time to time, requiring her to adjust, again and again, to job loss and relocation.

More recently, after being promoted to CFO at Landmark, Blevins had envisaged eventually retiring from the company in that position. With the company’s decision to sell all its holdings, Blevins says she found herself pondering, once again, the possibility of being out of a job. The recession has stalled those sale plans for now, but Blevins is prepared for change and uncertainty.

“As you go through your career, your business, and your personal life, you have to expect the black swan. You have to react to it, and adapt to it.”