Nowadays, the film camera is a relic of a time gone by. A world where each roll of film had a limited number of pictures—and you didn’t know what they looked like until you had them developed and printed—sounds antiquated and old-fashioned. And it would be easy to relegate the Kodak brand to the scrap heap of once major companies that are now forgotten, like Pan Am World Airways and Blockbuster.

But Kodak still exists, and it’s actually a pretty active company. It’s not just their brand licensing; the trademark yellow and red K adorns all sorts of apparel and other lifestyle merchandise in foreign countries, and brought in about $4 million in the first quarter of this year. Kodak’s high-quality film and printing is still its top-grossing business, but it’s also pivoting into new areas that use its core competencies. The Kodak of today and the future, CEO Jim Continenza told me, is a B2B company specializing in chemicals, materials handling and manufacturing. In May, Kodak announced it was working on a new $20 million plant in Rochester, New York making chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry.

“That’s a hard transition for people to accept,” he said. “You don’t get to go on the race cars, all those great things don’t happen. You focus clearly on your business. We had to focus on our customer, our capabilities, and then our profitability, which was way out of whack.”

In today’s Forbes CEO newsletter, we’re focusing on Kodak and how the company reinvented itself from the inside out. Most companies will never have to make as sharp of a pivot as Kodak, but the company, under Continenza’s leadership, is an example of how it’s possible to make a turnaround with the right mindset and a willingness to focus on what’s central to a company’s function.

Kodak, which retained its close ties to Rochester, continued to innovate in photography and film for more than a century. Current CEO Continenza said that for decades, Kodak had more than 80% of market share in this area—and became not only complacently comfortable, but created insular and ingrained cultural issues. 

Meanwhile, in the 1990s, digital photography began to take over. Kodak was integral in early digital photography research and development, but did not make a hard pivot until it was too late. As revenues plummeted, the company tried different strategies—purchasing chemical companies, leaning into digital camera manufacturing and investing in the home printer market—but the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2012.

“The board asked me to step in and I felt responsible,” he said. “Also, I was there too when it went down. ….I’m not exempt from it because I sit on the board and go, ‘Not my fault.’ At that point, you have an accountability to the shareholders that trust you.” 

Continenza also said he wanted to make sure Kodak wasn’t letting down its employees purely based on poor management choices by past and present leadership. Those employees, he said, were counting on Kodak for their whole livelihoods—while executives in leadership would be less likely to face financial turmoil based on things going wrong with the company.

Of course, there’s more nuance than that. But the major issue was clear to Continenza on his first day on the job. He spoke to more than 1,000 Kodak employees in the company’s theater and asked them to tell him what Kodak did. Nobody could answer. And as Continenza dove deeper into the company, he discovered something that Kodak was good at doing: making products nobody wanted.

But Kodak also started branching out its chemical business for uses beyond coating film and photo paper or development. The same institutional knowledge now goes toward making coatings for EV and other batteries. And the soon-to-come pharmaceutical plant, which is expected to be operating later this year, will make FDA-regulated diagnostic test reagents. Continenza said he found that pharmaceuticals, an area Kodak first got into a few years ago, is a place that the company has expertise—but can also create a U.S. source for these critical chemicals. (The impetus, he said, was supply chain issues in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, not the tariff threats of today.)

Aside from finding areas where Kodak can succeed, Continenza has focused on paying down the company’s debt and obtaining more appropriate financing to go with the company’s restructuring.

Continenza said his top corporate value as he’s tried to reinvent Kodak is having the courage to compete—and try to win.

“You have two choices,” he said. “You can turn around and try to survive for 12 years until you run out of money, because you’re afraid if you spend money, you’ll die sooner. Or you invest that money. You may die sooner, but you know the outcome? At least you have a fighting chance of surviving. I always take the latter.”

Kodak’s leadership, however, is much less sacrosanct. Continenza said at the beginning, he changed out about 80% of the leadership in order to focus on the right priorities. A few of the long-timers made it, but some did not. 

Of those that are still around, Continenza said they deal with one another personally. Quarterly business reviews are done with the actual leaders, not their assistants. “Your level doesn’t determine if you’re in those meetings or in the room. Your function does,” he said. 

Continenza said Kodak is a public company that acts like a family business. Nowadays, everyone from every level is welcome to make suggestions—and disagree, he said. There are no longer arbitrary divisions in which people say that different functions aren’t their job or concern. Continenza said he also gives people the space they need to do their jobs—and doesn’t come down on them when they fail.

“It’ll look like an advanced materials and chemical company that’s also in the print business,” he said.

Kodak will also continue to pay down its debt, Continenza said. To do that, he expects to continue growing everywhere, but especially in pharmaceutical chemicals. Since Kodak is starting to get in that area, he said, they should take full advantage of the investment and the facilities it’s building.

The bottom line, Continenza said, is that Kodak continues to be around.

“Three years ago when a person [who had] been in the company almost 50 years, says, ‘Jim, when I leave, I’ve got to leave my knowledge to somebody, and I have no one to leave it to,’ that was my best day at work ever in the film group, because no one’s ever said that to me,” Continenza said. “They didn’t think they had a future. Now they’re the ones who are retiring, are now training the ones who have come in.”

Making money in business is great, but business itself is about so much more. It’s all about creating value for customers, and here are some ways to determine how to do that.