Nickoll Appointed Co-CEO for Foothill

John F. Nickoll, 50, president and chief operating officer of Foothill Group Inc., will now be sharing the title of chief executive with Chairman Don L. Gevirtz, 56, with the creation of the post of co-chief executive, the company said Friday.

Nickoll and Gevirtz co-founded the Century City-based commercial finance company in 1969 and guided it to prominence in the 1970s through a strategy of lending money at high interest rates to high-risk companies.

That strategy began to fray, however, with the downturn in the energy industry, leaving Foothill with a pile of bad loans in the Texas oil fields.

The company lost $13 million, or $1.74 a share, on revenue of $50 million in 1983 and had to set aside $21 million to provide for loan losses.

Things have turned around since then. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, the company reported net income of $3 million on sales of $46 million, and the provision for loan losses has shrunk to about $3.5 million.

J. Richard Fredericks, an analyst with Montgomery Securities in San Francisco, said that he expects operating earnings for 1984 to come in at about 55 cents to 65 cents a share and could top $1.10 a share in the first quarter of 1985.

Nickoll said in an interview that there is “no significance” to his sharing the chief executive’s spot with Gevirtz.

“I guess you could say it gives me a little more visibility,” he said. “But we’ve been running the thing as partners for a long time.”

Analyst Fredericks agreed. “The two of them have run the company since its inception and acting as co-CEOs for some period of time,” he said. “The title goes with the reality.”