The honest answer to all the questions is pretty much the same. Intrado is owned by private equity. Private equity pays their acquisition's debt down with the cash flow coming from the acquired company. Cash flow not keeping up with the debt payments? Cut costs.
Private equity of this sort (where purchases are leveraged so heavily) is as if we all owned houses that generated cash flows on a monthly basis. We buy the house with 20% down in cash and finance the rest. The monthly loan payment is generated by the house. But if that cash flow from the house starts to become less than the monthly loan payment, we start looking for ways to cut the house expenses.
All that said - it s—s. The incentives for execs of private equity purchased companies are less about making the company successful as they are about ensuring cash flow is strong and expenses are low. That sounds OK. That even sounds like a recipe for a successful company, except it has little to do with the long term sustainability of a healthy company. It's all about paying off that debt so when the day comes to sell private equity's purchase, the pay out is as big as possible. Sometimes that leaves a healthy company in its wake, other times it leaves a shell of a company behind. There are some signs that Intrado is moving into the latter category. Time will tell.