Thread regarding CDW layoffs

@et
Exactly plus all the other areas where they use this same idea.
What really brought things down is that the CDW way currently...isn't the same CDW way that led to years of repeated growth.
Comes down to leadership and they're failed thought process.
All the new made up C level and VP and senior VP titles. Just handing out $ to people who don't add value in the trenches. When did a customer thank a VP or C level for the daily wins that help customers in thier daily roles and tasks.
Since these people are in the inner circles...when failure happens, they get shifted to other hidden roles with similar titles and $. Quick to get rid of US based AR, Credit, and CR contacts as well as sales and support roles but some of these top people fail and stay as long as they support the views of thier bosses (yes people). Collect the $ as the company regresses without a care of the longterm outcome.

@er The new Senior titles add people because they don't understand the business process so rather than rolling up the sleeves and getting down and dirty in the machine, they hire more people which then gum up the works. This creates a downward spiral. Exactly how the CRM rollout worked. Sirius had excellent systems but rather than bringing CDW into those, CDW had to do it their way and look where we are.

@ek
It's not that the VAR model is outdated... leadership just stripped the "value added" part from the acronym.
Instead of having AM's focus on customers, we have to comb over commissions, do AR functions as invoices aren't getting sent and then new orders get held up, oh...let's rip relationships again to re-org because the stock is tanking.
Too many middlemen outside of the AM/customer and the backbone that supports the AM/customer. What do all these other people do with various director and VP titles. So.many redundant people adding no value and then they had to add senior titles to some roles since hired so many useless roles.

I've been "talking" to ChatGPT about this and it has really good insight. basically it's saying that the VAR model is being devalued. A VAR isn't worth what it used to be.

@ay I think it is important to include CDW's failure to keep up with the changing times in respect to not transitioning their aging homegrown systems to Salesforce, ServiceNow and other cloud/ SAAS systems ,to start, earlier in the mid 2010's. As well as, transitioning from primarily hardware sales to services sales as their primary focus. These transitions are hard to do all at the same time while playing catch-up in an industry that's passing you by. My hope is that once CDW systems are fully implemented that more focus will be put onto services sales which ties into hardware, saas, cloud, support and maintenance sales. Call me a dreamer but it is possible if driven by the right people and focus.

@ax
Just because PE owns large chunks of CDW's outstanding shares...doesn't mean a PUBLICLY traded company can't be taken private or sold off. Just means PE thought CDW was a good place to park thier $ as CDW maintained steady growth and increased dividends for years. Now the trend is 2 years of missed quarterly earnings, more debt, and billions lost because of the failed Sirius acquisition.
Having powerful PE owning large chunks actually can push action.
Probably best thing for CDW the turnaround can only happen by getting the existing incompetent leaders out of the way. When they are making millions of $ every year regardless of thier continued failures...why would they leave voluntarily.
Pretty hypocritical if you ask anyone as at the same time they are failing at the top...they hold their front line salespeople accountable if they miss goal for 6 months.

CDW is already owned by private equity. Not sure why people don't understand that.
CDW Corporation (US:CDW) has 799 institutional owners and shareholders that have filed 13D/G or 13F forms with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). These institutions hold a total of 140,984,617 shares. Largest shareholders include Vanguard Group Inc, BlackRock, Inc., Vanguard Capital Management Llc, Vanguard Portfolio Management Llc, State Street Corp, Harris Associates L P, Boston Partners, Geode Capital Management, Llc, Jpmorgan Chase & Co, and Invesco Ltd. .

I can confirm that PEs were evaluating CDW for purchase at the end of last year and beginning of Q1. I don’t know if anything is still on the table as it’s been several months and nothing obviously transpired publicly. There’s a good chance that they took a look under the covers and realized that this isn’t an investment worth taking on.

@a8 for our customer base & once you fire all the inept senior execs - you could have a viable business to grow. CDW grew too fast with no depth of industry experience and relies too much on the home-grown people who have hung out for decades not delivering to current market strategies. Simply by showing up for decades isn't the same as having expertise across the industry. Wrong people to grow the business and thinking it's still the 1990's. And we have no strategy, we have strategy ppt's and cutesy marketing slogans but no defined or measurable plans, budgets or even common sense to know what to do next.

@OP
$1 billion share buyback today.
Less cash reserves and more debt.
This at least is better than them buying up other companies and botching the merger.

Why would anybody buy an anchor? CDW has no compelling value proposition. AI will distrupt CDW even further. We do have a deep sales team but selling commodity. The historical “trust your CDW AM to help guide technical purchases”value prop has been replaced with ask Chat/claude/gemini/grok and get a better answer instantly with no pressure to buy. Couple with laughable executive decisions and CDW is on its way to become the next Harvard business case in failing to adapt and evolve. Sad really, lots of good people left and really bright minds that are hopefully actively looking. Death spiral has started, zoom out and you’ll see it

With our stock where it is, somebody certainly could buy us on the cheap.