My journey with Atea Sverige began in 2005 when Atea acquired Martinsson, where I was CEO. As CEO of Atea Sweden, I was introduced to a new business area – “high volume”.
Atea was the leading reseller in selling high volumes of PCs to both enterprise and public sector customers.
A key driver of Atea’s success was its ability to add value to the hardware on an industrial scale through Atea Logistics.
Because of Atea’s significant volume (and revenue…) to vendors, I became part of the HP EMEA Advisory Board.
During one crucial meeting, top HP executives walked in with a clear message: “We can’t afford to keep losing market share to Dell. Our go-to-market strategy is too expensive”.
The landscape before Dell’s rise was simpler. Vendors sold to distributors, who sold to resellers, who sold to end users. Everyone seemed content… until Dell disrupted the status quo with its direct-to-customer model and quickly achieved global success.
This marked the beginning of a challenging period in which everyone in the industry had to sharpen their strategies to emerge as winners.
Shortly afterwards, I recall a meeting with a senior HP manager from the Nordics. He came to me with the following message: “We need to move to a more direct approach… (= take your biggest customers from you…)”. I asked him: “What is Atea’s role in this shift?” His suggestion was: “Perhaps you could rent us space in your warehouse for our computers. What would that cost?” The suggested price per pallet was shockingly low.
That conversation marked one of the lowest points in my business career. It was at this point that I understood that Atea needed to step up and be much clearer about our own value proposition to our customers.
Stay tuned for next week’s update, where I will tell you how we created a winning way out of that difficult situation.
hashtag#leadership hashtag#Strategy hashtag#Changemanagement
Picture from a kickoff where we created a human Atea-logo. A mighty experience of belonging!
One of my all time low experiences…
