WiseBizCounsel:
Shaping Trends, Driving Success
5 After 5
5 after 5 is an interview forum for aspirational business leaders to showcase insights on their road to driving success in their business.
​Kevin Obern
Managing Director
Office Max New Zealand
1. Tell us about your business and your role. What are some of your current challenges?
I am the Managing Director of OfficeMax New Zealand.
Digital transformation has enabled the OfficeMax business to transition from being a stationery products provider to a broad supplier of workplace solutions for businesses and educational institutions. Now we are less about the ‘Office’ and more about the ‘Max’, partnering with our customers to make their workplaces work better.
Some of our current challenges relate to sales growth, the weak New Zealand dollar driving product costs up, a tight economy, our relevance in a changing market, sustainability, attracting a younger workforce and managing substantial amounts of data.
2. How do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors?
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Our scale and capability are key factors, for example we range tens of thousands of products - from first aid to furniture, and everything in between.
Our in-house learning and development programme combined with our modern technology stack enables us to deliver a world class customer experience, providing value through insightful and tailored solutions to workplace challenges.
Also, we demonstrate leadership in our industry in sustainability, for example we’ve made significant improvements in our carbon footprint (since 2019 we have saved 69% of our Scope 1 and 2 CO2 emissions).
3. What are some of the learnings from scaling your business up / or down?
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So many things in this space! It is important to pivot to respond to new and changing customer needs. Change can be hard and requires great planning, communication and selling the vision to key stakeholders.
I have learned that taking people on the journey is crucial (people hate having things “done to them”!). If you paint the right picture, change can be something that people get excited about, for example in 2020 we introduced market-leading sales enablement technology which could have been daunting to our team, however they quickly realised they had the opportunity to develop and learn valuable new digital skills.
Change is necessary to drive productivity, efficiency and retain relevance in the market, enable growth and be future fit!
4. Business disruption is rife. How do you anticipate and manage it so you remain relevant, resilient and profitable?
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Either be a disruptor or be disrupted. Having great data and insights to be able to spot changes and trends early is a good part of the answer.
Over recent years we have seen product demand growing/shrinking, customer requirements changing, supply chain issues developing, and sectors of the economy growing/shrinking. Our secret to navigating this is to leverage great insights which enables us to be dynamic and responsive enough remain relevant and resilient.
Resilience also comes from having a broad and deep mix of customers across New Zealand. Profitability comes from optimising the business by adopting continuous improvement, growing revenue and margin faster than costs along with making every positive change that drives profitability.
5. Balancing work and life poses a challenge for most of us. How do you achieve this?
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I am great at giving advice to others but sometimes not so good at following my own advice! For me, living at least 30 minutes travel from the office is helpful – the wind up and down at the beginning and end of the day is important, often with my choice of music to help. Having space, ideally an activity between work and home is also helpful e.g. a walk, the gym, some breathing exercises. Being thankful and grateful on those car journeys is also something I try to do – celebrating the simple things and the important things like family, friends, the sunny days, the one good thing that happened today.
I am also trying to be more disciplined with my “always on” phone now – it is hard to escape the bombardment of information and I try to put my phone somewhere and not pick it up for long periods.