CRN: Guy, what's your background?
Freeland: My background is in finance. I came up through Coopers & Lybrand and worked on all manner of things in the Sydney and London office. I spent 10 to 12 years at Coopers. That was at the beginning of the 90s. I was working in finance roles in distribution companies, predominantly around electrical products and components.
In 1999 I sold the Sonar electronic components distribution business to Hagemeyer [former owner of Tech Pacific]. I met Graham Pickles [Hagemeyer boss] during the completion of the sale and a few months afterwards I ended up as CFO for the Tech Pacific group working out of the Sydney office.
When David Arnott left the company in 2001 when Shailendra [Gupta] was appointed, he moved to Singapore and I was not far behind. So we effectively relocated the Tech Pacific Group head office to Singapore and Shailendra and I had run it since Ingram came along.
The culture [at Tech Pacific] was that the finance guy was 2IC to the MD and Shailendra and I ran the business side by side for four years in that way. I was engaged in all commercial aspects of the business from the finance side and all the other issues that distributors have the cope with. I'd been in countless business review meetings on all manner of vendors in all countries in the region so I think I have a pretty good understanding of how the model works and what the success factors are.
CRN: Why did you decide to take this job?
Freeland: I wanted to return to Australia and that’s what exactly would have happened if the IPO path had been completed. We had board members already appointed in anticipation of the IPO completing. At the time, that was what I was looking to do. The board would have been Sydney-based -- Shailendra would have been based in Singapore and I would have been Sydney-based. It didn't work out that way. I took the Ingram [CFO] role and moved back to Sydney. Frankly I was missing the commercial input.
Culturally Ingram ran a plain vanilla finance, functional role and I was missing the contact with the business, to be honest. We were aware that Kerry [Baillie] wanted to retire, so Shailendra and Alain Monie [who heads Ingram in Asia-Pacific] formed a view that I would be the best person to take over the role.
Gupta: I felt confident that Guy is more a commercial man than finance man, and he knew exactly what makes this work. Frankly speaking, there is no better candidate than Guy for this position.
CRN: Kerry [Baillie] and Steve Rust were always good at sales and marketing. How important is this to this company moving forward? Because of your finance background, is it fair to say that you're going to keep a tight rein on all things financial?
Freeland: Frankly, you know what margins distributors run at. You can't run a successful distribution business and be there tomorrow to service customers if you're not disciplined about what you do. Even in Kerry's time, we needed to be disciplined.These days yes we'll be disciplined but will we walk away from the sales and marketing focus of this company? Not at all. In fact, whilst the top position is changing we need to understand that this position is the only one that's changing and the rest of the organisation is all there fully charged. They're pretty much the same team from Tech Pac days. We have a fantastic team and sales and marketing is still the focus for this company.
Gupta: Frankly speaking, Guy was picked up for this position, not because of his finance background but primarily because of his strong commercial acumen and understanding [of] business models and understanding of vendor and customer expectations. What we don't need is a finance person doing the job. This is a job about continuously meeting vendors and customers and that's where we are confident he will add value.
There has been speculation in the media and particularly one of our specific competitors who has done some wishful thinking that maybe there are problems. I am quite amused to look at those comments, because essentially the organisation has [exceeded] our expectations in terms of the timeframe and ease of integration. In fact, over the last two months we have been delivering volumes higher than the combined volumes of the two companies [Tech Pacific and Ingram] last year.
CRN: Some of your competitors have commented that because Steve Rust and Kerry Baillie left so quickly after the merger it would have a 'destablising' effect on the business. How do you respond to those comments?
Freeland: What I'm finding personally comforting stepping into a role is that... senior managers are engaging with me really well.
People are sad to see Kerry go, but the management team is falling behind me very nicely and there's absolutely no evidence of instability at all. I don't think strategically anybody in six to 12 months time is going to notice a major strategy shift from what has been historically an entrepreneurial approach to the marketplace to something that's driven by a bean counter. That's not going to happen. Having said that, discipline is required to make sure that everything happens in the backend to support activities in the front end. But that needs to be there regardless of who runs the company. The IT industry is littered with poorly executed integrations and as a distributor we've been on the receiving end of vendor integrations that have been difficult and caused issues in the channel.
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