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 Channel Futures

Leadership


Photo: Michael Wright

Janet Schijns Digital Issue Cover

Janet Schijns, Unleashed

  • Written by Kris Blackmon
  • March 11, 2019
Why now is the time for the former Verizon and Office Depot executive to save the telco channel.

… “grow a dependable sticky revenue services-based model over a period of time that sells both services and products.”

Three months after Schijns joined the team­, Office Depot bought IT services provider CompuCom for $1 billion, clearly broadcasting its intention to develop a managed services play. It quickly launched a managed IT-as-a-service program for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), a small business services platform called BizBox and a “genius bar”-type IT repair service called TechZone that sat within many of its retail locations. Schijns’s hire suddenly made a ton of sense, as did her meteoric rise up the Office Depot food chain.

Schijns initially joined as senior vice president to lead Office Depot’s sizeable copy and print division and tech division. Within about six months, the board and Smith promoted her to executive vice president with the initial mandate to “clean up” merchandising functions and develop product and service synergies around those divisions. Not long after, her role expanded to include all services and solutions, including integrating the newly acquired CompuCom teams and the development of sales channels for the company’s managed tech services. Less than two years after her hire, Schijns had risen to executive vice president in charge of services and solutions.

What Schijns brought to the table was an intimate knowledge of a segment of business owners perfectly positioned to help Office Depot roll out those managed services in a hurry: telco agents and masters. For years, agents had watched their dwindling margins with horror as the golden age of one-time sales and upfront commissions quickly faded into history. They needed a managed services move, but the IT channel wasn’t eager to play with agents. Oborn says Telarus had courted managed service providers (MSPs) for years because it was the only inroad to the IT buyer, but it was like pulling teeth to get them to see the benefit to partnering with a telco agent.

Whether or not CompuCom is good for managed service providers is up for debate, but it’s been indisputably great for Office Depot. The company’s retail sales haven’t stopped their decline, but its business solutions division more than makes up for it. Services revenue made up roughly 15 percent of Office Depot’s total 2018 revenue, and with a services gross margin that hovers around 10 percent higher than that of its product sales, business solutions are clearly where the company’s future fortunes lie.

But in its 2018 third-quarter call with investors, CFO and executive vice-president Joseph Lower revealed that CompuCom sales had dropped by four percent, blaming the decline in part on administrative inefficiencies and an unfavorable product mix. On the heels of that call, Office Depot was hit disproportionately hard by the broad market sell-off in December 2018; its stock price plummeted by 34 percent in the first three weeks of the month.

Just days into the new year, the channel learned that Schijns and Office Depot had abruptly parted ways. Both Schijns and Office Depot remain tight-lipped about her departure, so the channel is left to speculate about the abrupt and unexpected move. Details about the split are scant, but it isn’t overreaching to wonder if her list of responsibilities had grown so long it had set her up for failure within a giant public company undergoing a fundamental …

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Tags: Agents MSPs Leadership Strategy

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