Frew left and sold his shares in the company but four remaining directors with minor shareholdings – Walters, Verykios, Andrew Blunden (CFO) and Terry Kelso (national sales manager) – were contracted to stay on for a further two years. Kelso didn’t stay long and Walters picked up her responsibilities in a new role as director of sales and operations.
“It was something I always wanted to do because I was doing a lot of the selling at TNT. That got me out and about among the customers and vendors,” he said. “The US [parent company] left us alone pretty much to start with but over a period of time started to get their fingers in the pie, which was holding up some of our quick decision making.
“It got to the stage where hiring a $40,000 person required approval from New York. At the end of the day it was manageable but that was the major difference between LAN Systems pre- and post-sale.”
A tap on the shoulder
Walters’ earn out period at LAN Systems ended in April 2002. The company was still growing, although at a much slower rate, and he remembers it as a tough time in the industry as everybody struggled to readjust after the tech bubble had burst. He was then tapped on the shoulder by a headhunter looking to fill a position at Tech Pacific. His initial response wasn’t favourable but a couple of meetings that followed eventually changed his mind.
“My initial response was to laugh and I kept saying ‘no’ because Tech Pac was doing it pretty tough at the time because of problems with its warehouse management system, minimum order values and other things that were going on,” Walters recalled. “As a competitor at LAN Systems, especially with regard to Cisco business, we were rubbing our hands together thinking the more they [Tech Pac] made a mess of it, the better off we were.
“Two things pulled me over. The first was a visit to Melbourne where I went to see three or four different customers, including Mark Kalmus at Southern Cross Computer Systems, and he was telling me about this wonderful visit he’d had from the new Tech Pacific managing director, Kerry Baillie. I remember being quite put out because I was there to talk about LAN Systems and all Mark wanted to talk about was one of our competitors. So that made me think.
“About a week later, [Cisco CEO] John Chambers was out and Cisco had an executive briefing lunch where I was sitting on the same table as Kerry. That was the first time we’d met and I liked the style of the guy. The next morning the headhunter rang again and arranged for us to have a chat about the job.”
