Exertis IT has parted ways with almost an entire layer of top execs following the closure of its sale to AURELIUS, IT Channel Oxygen understands.
According to multiple sources, five of the distributor’s leadership team left the business last week, with staff informed this week.
This includes COO Michael Sudlow, Chief Commercial Officer Phillip Turner and Chief People and Inclusion Officer Jo Lawrence (three of the four most senior execs in the business under CEO Tim Griffin – see here).
While declining to confirm the news, an Exertis IT spokesperson acknowledged that some “proposed changes to the business” were announced today (see full statement, bottom).
Exertis UK | Business & Consumer will now both come under the remit of Jon Sutherland (who was previously MD of just the consumer business), they said.
Germany-headquartered private equity house AURELIUS announced it had closed its acquisition of Exertis IT on 3 November, having agreed to acquire the £2bn-revenue distributor from DCC for an enterprise value of around £100m in July.
At the time the deal was announced, Exertis IT CEO Tim Griffin argued that its new owner can “give us the attention we deserve”.
But according to multiple sources, Exertis IT has been up against it in recent months after credit insurers moved to temporarily withdraw cover into the Basingstoke-based distributor.
This made some form of restructuring under the new owner inevitable, the sources said.
“If you think of the business and vendors they’ve lost, and the challenges they’ve been having over the last three months, I don’t think it was a sustainable business [in its current form],” one source said.
Even before recent events, Exertis has endured a bumpy few years, with Griffin himself last November acknowledging he was driving a programme of ‘get well to get big’. It ranked fourth in IT Channel Oxygen’s recent 50 Must-Know Distributors and Marketplaces.
DCC Group has not exited distribution altogether (not yet, at least) – it this week renamed its remaining $3.6bn-revenue DCC Technology business ‘Nexora’, which it hopes to sell next year.
AURELIUS did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
In a statement to IT Channel Oxygen, an Exertis spokesperson said:
Today, some proposed changes to Exertis UK | Business & Consumer and Exertis Supplies businesses were announced. Jon Sutherland has been appointed as Managing Director of Exertis UK | Business & Consumer to take the business forward under new owners, AURELIUS, who bring two decades of experience owning and transforming dozens of companies and helping them perform better under their ownership. Sutherland believes there is an opportunity to change structurally and transform into a more agile and specialist distributor that can more efficiently and effectively serve customers’ needs.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
