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The offices at the top of the building 18400 Von Karman Ave. in Irvine are lush, with modern sculpture adorning intricately carved tables. marble paneling and quotations in gilded letters on the walls.
They are the end of an era for the National Education Corp.
In the past year. CEO and president Sam Yau, 47. has taken the education products company from a loser choking on its high costs to a leaner, more efficient company that is showing encouraging signs of a turnaround.
He's also moving the Irvine HQ to a smaller and less ornate suite of offices in the Data General Building on Main and Jamboree.
When Yau came to NEC about a year ago, he was looking for a new opportunity. He'd just taken AdvaCare Inc., a $75 million medical practice management company in Dallas. from near bankruptcy to profitability in 15 months, and then sold it to Medaphis Inc., in Atlanta, for $96.5 million.
He started with NEC as a consultant in March, and by May, he made his recommendations. "I realized that the company had a tremendous amount of assets, but it did not go anywhere because of mismanagement," he said.
NEC revenue had actually been increasing since 1992, and totaled almost $242 million in 1994. However, due to excessive operating costs and losses from discontinued operations, the company posted a $64 million loss that year.
"We had a general vision that we needed to get the company more involved in technology." said NEC's chairman David Jones. What the company needed was someone to come up with the right steps to implement that vision. "We were very convinced that (Yau) was the right man."
NEC's business was made up of four different education-related subsidiaries. One of those, the National Education Centers, was already in the process of being divested when Yau came on board. The Centers subsidiary was comprised of 33 vocational schools. David Moore, the subsidiary's CEO, and four of his officers, banded together to form Santa Ana-based Corinthian Schools Inc. and bought 16 of the schools. The others were sold or closed.
The remaining three subsidiaries are Steck-Vaughn Publishing Corp., of which NEC owns 83%, an Austin, Texas, company that publishes supplemental educational materials; ICS Learning Systems,...