so heres another theory regarding Franz Hanning's retirement.
We have speculated here that it might have just been time. He is 62 years old and has had a career that went from timeshare salesman to running the entire timeshare division at Wyndham Worldwide, Last year gross revenue at WVO was 2 billion dollars, as Steve Holmes said in the 4th quarter earnings call "The fourth reason I'm confident in our future is that we are recharging our Wyndham Vacation Ownership business, which is already an absolute powerhouse. Let me put that into perspective. While the business had some challenges in 2016, gross VOI revenue exceeded $2 billion. That's a first for any developer in the history of the timeshare industry and double the size of our nearest competitor"..
So Franz Hanning is going out on top, and there is no reason to suggest he was forced out for any reason. Perhaps its just time
We also speculated that the $20 million that a former salesman was awarded in a wrongful termination lawsuit and/or the suspensions mess that is still going on, might have been responsible for his early retirement. Lets face it, the suspensions wont cost wyndham any money and 20 million is just 1% of 2 billion.. That cant be the reasonn Franz is leaving (at least I dont think so
But heres something else that could be the answer.
someone asked a question in that earnings call about how the search for Hannings replacement was going and heres the answer (the underlining is mine)
Joseph R. Greff - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Steve, with respect to filling Franz's spot in Vacation Ownership, can you talk about the progress in that search, and then maybe focusing on that search. How important is the new person having public company or public company timeshare experience?
Stephen P. Holmes - Wyndham Worldwide Corp.
And the second part of the question is a interesting way of asking the same question you asked last quarter about the spin, I guess; very, very clever way of doing it. The answer is, it's important that somebody has public company experience, I'm not saying that we're looking for someone necessarily who's been a public company CEO. But certainly as the board has directed me, we want to keep our optionality open. So we want to be able to bring somebody in who is capable of leading an organization, if that's what the board chooses to do. But that's again, not making any more statement than I made last time about how the board is looking at all of its options and will continue to do so
for context heres the question and answer from the 3rd quarter call
Joseph Greff
All right. Then my final follow-up here, and I believe I've asked this before in the past both on conference calls even probably related to you, Steve, given the size of your company now versus when it's [indiscernible], why not here today or sometime today think about spinning out into two or three companies? The evaluation that it's hard for you to grow through inorganic means and M&A and spinning out might allow you to do that, how do you think about those things right due to more real world economic cycle? And that's it for me.
Stephen Holmes
Okay. Well just to show that I'm consistent, Joe I will give you the same answer I gave to when we were speaking privately. It's something that we constantly look at. The board is very active at looking at different opportunities and that is something that we have talked about before and we will probably talk about in the future, but if we had anything to announce, we would announce it today. We are constantly looking for ways to drive more shareholder value and more than that I can't say because the board has to deliberate and we have to all decide what the right thing is for the company
What the guy from JP Morgan was asking is this. Are you looking for a replacement for Hanning that has experience running a stand alone public timeshare company... so that if you spin off the timeshare division, you will have the right guy running it. And the answer, as I read it, was yes, thats exactly what the board has instructed me to do..
so heres my speculation Franz is just a good old boy from Pascagoula Mississippi. (ever wonder why we have a
Margaritaville Vacation Club? Jimmy Buffet is from the same town) who took the timeshare division from a few Fairfield Resorts when he started to a 2 billion dollar company today,, Good job; but to take it public they need someone with experience running a public company
Anyway food for thought.