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Misco hires sales vet Brooker to run UK sub

Newbie asked to turn around leaky reseller tanker

Systemax Europe president Simon Taylor has made his first senior hire in the shape of tech sales veteran Tony Brooker - a man he charged with rebuilding UK subsidiary Misco.

Taylor, formerly EMEA senior veep of operations at Insight Enterprises, took over the business in June and at the top of his to-do list was a message from the CEO to lift revenues and turn losses to profits.

The UK accounted $471.9 in revenue during calendar ’14, some 66 per cent of the reseller’s total sales in the region. This was up on the $468.6m reported in the prior year but down on the $491.7m in 2012. It has been repeatedly highlighted as a trouble spot by top brass at US HQ.

Taylor told us Brooker’s role “will be turning around UK sales, obviously recruiting sales people and growing the business”.

A shake-up of the sales floor - including commission plan overhauls and redundancies - under Systemax’s previous boss for Europe, Pim Dale, is self evident in the financials as well as in the senior level headcount.

The writing always seemed on the wall for Dale when his recruits, former UK boss Gary Withington and his sales director-cum second-in-command Richard Logan, exited the building last year.

Brooker - like his new boss - also had various senior roles at Systemax rival Insight Enterprises in a past life. Prior to exit from Insight in October '13, he ran the EMEA sale teams, and will want to stamp his mark on the sales culture and processes at Misco.

He subsequently was a fish out of water during a brief spell at enterprise services-based reseller Logicalis, having come from a background in selling licenses and hardware in huge volumes.

The UK is effectively a series of satellite sales offices, with the lion share of back-office functions across the company’s European country operations centralised to a Shared Service centre in Hungary.

Sue Jones (formerly Keywood), a 26-year company veteran who took over the UK organisation from Withington last autumn, becomes director of operations. ®

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