Westcon-Comstor CEO Reveals 5 Priorities for Growth
Westcon-Comstor's CEO talks resilience in today’s challenging market, and the distributor’s plans for flexible working.
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The distributor has 3,100 employees globally. Last year, over three days, it moved 2,800 to work remotely. But that business continuity plan had always been in place, said Westcon-Comstor CEO David Grant.
“There were very few of our employees who had desktops; everyone’s got a laptop,” said Grant. “Our business continuity plan is, if there’s a problem with the office, stay at home and work. When it was about people working from home and closed offices, it was easy for us to put that plan into execution. Employees were relieved that we acted responsibly, and they didn’t feel under any pressure to come into the office.”
But what’s the plan now, as companies plan to bring employees back to the office? While Grant can’t yet share the details, he said flexibility will be crucial.
“In terms of being a more attractive employer, that flexibility can be important for us to get a better balance for our employees.”
Grant said flexible working will be crucial for enabling women to continue their careers.
“Female employees are often also a primary care giver or maybe caring for the elderly. Having more flexibility means they can have a better balance. Five days a week in the office doesn’t give them any flexibility.
“People have helped us support our customers and deliver great results. You can’t say to them, ‘Thank you very much, but can you come back in the office five days a week?’”
He also said it was important to ensure employees aren’t working too many hours from home.
“As an employer, it’s not great, because it will burn people out, and it causes resentment. Our volume and demand have gone up hugely. [But if employees] are just working another four hours a day, that’s not good for them, or us in the long term. Getting back in the office, you find out whether or not the increase in productivity is just because they’ve been doing nothing other than working.”
The past couple of months have seen some horror stories emerge regarding a lack of tolerance for diversity in distribution.
Grant, however, said Westcon-Comstor is “driving hard” diversity and inclusion initiatives within the company.
“We have a whole series of training around compliance, and around diversity and inclusion,” he said. “A number of our customers demand that we have that curriculum as part of our of our internal framework.”
The distributor has also launched an initiative called One Westcon, which tells the stories of different people across the business. This spans subjects from mental health to the menopause.
“I have lots of anxieties about making sure that we are inclusive. But we worked really hard to make sure that it’s genuinely embedded in the business. We don’t want to just be ticking the boxes,” said Grant.
Elsewhere, the company is focusing on sustainability. As part of that, it is working with sustainability ratings provider EcoVadis – and its efforts are paying off.
“We’ve reduced our power consumption in our logistics centres by 27% in the last 12 months,” said Grant. This has been achieved by the intelligent use of lighting, heating and air conditioning. It has also recorded an 18% reduction in CO2 emissions – and a real cost reduction of 13%.
“There’s a direct link between your sustainability strategy and business benefits,” said Grant. “If you needed to prove that it’s a genuine commercial requirement, that’s it.”
Alongside automation and areas like recycling pallets, Westcon-Comstor has made “a very significant investment” in Cisco’s refresh program.
“Partners take equipment out of their estate, we bring it back in-house, we refurbish it, and they reuse it. There’s a great opportunity for us to do more – especially now with the semiconductor shortage as well.”
Speaking of which …
The European channel has faced some specific challenges over the past year.
“If you just think about the European or UK economy, you’ve had the pandemic, you’ve had Brexit and now we’ve got the semiconductor shortage.”
Westcon-Comstor has negotiated this by holding buffer stock and building in lead time.
“When a lot of organisations were thinking, ‘We’re going to de-risk the business and run things down,’ we invested in more inventory. We put $30 million into the UK in the last 12 months,” said Grant. “We put more inventory into the UK, so we don’t need to get inventory into the UK from Europe.”
The CEO said this wasn’t just down to a surge in demand, but to insulate against Brexit.
“The demand for solutions was the same because we’re still in the pandemic. But the big anxiety was that [partners] wouldn’t be able to get the equipment in.
“I think we significantly reduced the impact on our partners with Brexit, and now with the semiconductor shortage,” said Grant.
More people returning to physical workplaces in some capacity will drive a tech refresh said Grant.
“There’s going to be a refresh of some of the infrastructure that didn’t get refreshed last year,” he said.
“Plus, the security demands of having somebody come into your office, who spent a week working from home, or from Starbucks. It used to be just one or two of these, but now it could be a lot of your employees. And now they inside your traditional firewalls and perimeters. That will drive cybersecurity spend.
“So there is no doubt that shift is just driving different types of technology, sales opportunities and refresh cycles.”
More people returning to physical workplaces in some capacity will drive a tech refresh said Grant.
“There’s going to be a refresh of some of the infrastructure that didn’t get refreshed last year,” he said.
“Plus, the security demands of having somebody come into your office, who spent a week working from home, or from Starbucks. It used to be just one or two of these, but now it could be a lot of your employees. And now they inside your traditional firewalls and perimeters. That will drive cybersecurity spend.
“So there is no doubt that shift is just driving different types of technology, sales opportunities and refresh cycles.”
Distribution faces some strong headwinds, and firms are charting different courses to navigate their route forward.
Despite the challenges, distributor Westcon-Comstor (Westcon International) increased its revenues last year by 4.6%, to $2.6 billion.
David Grant, CEO, Westcon-Comstor, says the company’s growth is down to making the business as simple as possible.
Westcon-Comstor’s David Grant
“We put a huge amount of focus also into automation and efficiency as well as resilience. The advantage of that is that we’ve managed to grow sales without increasing costs,” he said.
But the key, he said, is “focusing on the customers, vendors, partners. If we get that right, the rest of it should look after itself. I know that might sound simplistic, but it is pretty much the case.”
Grant said supporting the channel during the pandemic has been paramount “so that channel didn’t feel like they were abandoned in any way, shape or form. We overcommunicated in some cases to make sure that knew we were here, and how they can get hold of us. We also stayed connected with our employees, providing updates all the time on where we were what we were thinking.”
In the slideshow above, Grant delves into the company’s plans for flexible working, sustainability, diversity. He also talks about the impact of the semiconductor chip shortage and Brexit on the business.
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