This whole thing was timed terribly. All management needed to do was wait 60-90 days, and all the Sirius people waiting for stock to vest would have emptied out. By January 1, they would have had more departures than people they laid off. They would not have needed a layoff, they would not have been paying severance, and the company would have been financially better off. But maybe they are considering that and that is why this layoff was not heavier, who knows.
It is funny to me to see the finger-pointing between former employees of Sirius and pre-acquisition CDW employees. Neither of them woke up in the 4th quarter of 2021 and said I hope CDW acquires Sirius. CDW Leadership was in the market and would have spent $2.5B buying something. As many have pointed out correctly, the lack of integration is a big problem. But it is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the two companies needed more in common. Their target markets were different; they sold differently, priced things differently, compensated their employees differently, and worked differently. Neither was wrong or right, just completely different approaches. Sirius reacted to situations more nimbly, able to push through decisions quickly with low overhead and quick reaction to both the customer and internal decision making. You could get the decision maker on the phone and a decision made on virtually anything in a day. There were very few people at Sirius who didn’t interact on a daily basis with a customer and those who didn’t were well aware of what was going on with the customers. CDW is a heavy process-driven machine; it moves slowly and changes even more slowly. There are tons of people who don’t interact with our customers. They are running around protecting a process or an approval or their territory. It is not unusual, it is typical in a company this big. This frustrated Sirius Folks as anyone can rightly imagine. And for a legacy CDW person here came the brash aggressive Sirius people who had experience bulldozing things to make the sale and it rubbed CDW folks the wrong way as you might expect. The problem is that management did not see it or if they did see it they didn’t react well. They chose to ignore it and the problem festered.
Had CDW Leadership really taken time to understand Sirius they would have operated it as a separate entity (for real, not the fake separate entity that we must all deal with because of the failure to integrate the companies). They could have even moved some in-market enterprise sellers to Sirius. They could have taken the time to understand the difference and decide what they wanted. Sirius would have continued it’s growth trajectory and they could have made an informed decision about integration. Instead they hurried through half an integration, then hit the brakes and that is where it sits today.
The sad part is the position CDW will be left in on January 1, 2025. There will be a mass exodus from the Sirius side in the next few months. The top performers in Sirius will be gone (many are already), and the ones left behind are the ones CDW could have easily hired away because they fit the CDW model better. So a wasted 2.5 billion dollars and a sad situation for those on both sides that got laid off because CDW management could not execute. There are no winners in this situation.
So don’t blame your former Sirius co-workers and legacy Sirius don’t blame your CDW co-workers. It is not the fault of any of us.