From Reseller to Global Services Provider – What Six Years of Transformation Taught Me About Leadership
Written by Bob Bailkoski, CEO, Logicalis
Transforming a global business is rarely a straight line. The real test of leadership is knowing what to preserve, what to change, and how to bring your people and customers with you along the way.
When I became CEO of Logicalis in January 2020, I had a clear idea of where the business needed to go. Within weeks, the world had changed. Offices closed, customers’ priorities were rewritten overnight, and our people were suddenly working from kitchen tables across over 25 countries.
The pandemic was an immediate lesson in something I have come to understand much more deeply over the past six years: leadership isn’t about having a perfect plan. It’s about knowing when to stick to your convictions, when to change course and when to accept that what looked right on paper isn’t working in practice.
Since 2020, we’ve been transforming Logicalis from its traditional roots as a technology reseller into a more solutions-led organisation. At the same time, we’ve navigated extraordinary external change, from the pandemic and global economic uncertainty to rapid developments in cloud, cyber security, and more recently, AI.
When I look back, the things I’m proudest of aren’t individual decisions or moments. They’re the areas where we’ve managed to turn a global organisation with very different regional businesses into something greater than the sum of its parts. Whether that’s changing our revenue mix, delivering against ambitious sustainability goals or getting teams across the world to build common propositions together, the real achievement has been proving what we can accomplish when we operate as one business.
Transformation is about choices
When you lead an established global organisation, transformation is rarely about starting again. There are things already working exceptionally well: talented people, loyal customers, strong partnerships and decades of expertise. The challenge is deciding what needs to change without losing what made the organisation successful in the first place.
For us, that meant looking honestly at our business model. We needed to build greater scale and profitability around our services proposition and become more consistent in how we operated globally. But we also needed to protect the relationships and specialist knowledge that our customers valued.
That tension is important. Transformation can become an exercise in chasing efficiency. You standardise, simplify and look for economies of scale. All of those things matter, but if you lose sight of the customer or your people in pursuit of the numbers, you’ve missed the point.
Financial performance tells you where your strategy is delivering commercially. It doesn’t tell you the whole story. It’s why I’ve increasingly come to look at customer loyalty and employee engagement alongside financial performance when assessing whether we’re moving in the right direction. For me, strong customer satisfaction and employee engagement aren’t softer measures of success. They’re leading indicators of whether change is sustainable.
Be committed to the destination, not the route
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is the importance of being able to change your mind. That may sound counterintuitive, given that CEOs are expected to be decisive. And we should be. Businesses can’t move forward if their leaders are endlessly questioning every decision. But decisiveness and stubbornness are very different things.
Coming from a finance background, I’ve always been comfortable with data, structure, and accountability. Earlier in my career, I probably placed greater weight on finding the decision that made the most sense on paper. Becoming a CEO reinforced that businesses don’t operate on spreadsheets. They operate through people.
A change can make complete strategic and financial sense and still fail if people don’t understand why you’re making it, don’t believe in where you’re going, or haven’t been given the opportunity to come with you.
There have been moments during our transformation where we’ve needed to pause, listen, and adjust our approach. I’ve learned not to see that as a failure of strategy but instead exactly what good execution requires.
I’ve also learned that there is no prize for persisting with a decision simply because you were the person who made it. When the facts change, leaders need to be confident enough to say, based on what we know now, we’re going to do this differently. As a result of our deliberate decision to aim at a single goal, to build more predictable, recurring services revenue we’ve been able to grow that element to become a much bigger part of our business.
Sometimes the best decision is the one you don’t make
Transformation creates opportunities, but leadership also requires discipline about which opportunities you pursue. There are always potential investments, acquisitions, or new innovations that appear attractive. The temptation, particularly when you’re trying to accelerate change, is to equate action with progress. I’ve learned to slow down, to speed up.
If an opportunity isn’t fundamentally right for the business, adding more time, money, or management attention doesn’t make it right. Being prepared to stop, even when you’ve already invested significant effort, is difficult. But protecting the long-term health of the business matters more than proving an earlier decision was correct. Agility isn’t about changing direction constantly. It’s about knowing what you’re prepared to change and what you’re not prepared to compromise.
Leadership isn’t about getting everything right
Six years into this journey, I am proud of the business we’re building. But I’m equally conscious that transformation is never finished. Technology certainly doesn’t stand still, and neither can we. I’m proud of the numbers that we’ve achieved, but I’m probably prouder of what sits behind them. Logicalis hasn’t become successful by making every part of the organisation identical. We’ve become stronger by finding ways to harness what our people know across different markets and put that collective expertise to work.
What has changed most for me is perhaps my definition of good leadership. I once through experience would make decision-making easier. In reality, the decisions get bigger, the variables become more complex, and the consequences reach further. Experience doesn’t give you certainty, but it does give you greater confidence in dealing with uncertainty. It teaches you to ask better questions, surround yourself with people who will challenge your assumptions, and distinguish between a setback that requires perseverance and evidence that indicates a change of direction is needed.
Transformation is often presented retrospectively as a straight line: a company set a strategy, executed it and achieved an outcome. It’s actually a lot messier than that, which I think is worth acknowledging. The job of a CEO isn’t to make every decision perfectly, but to create an environment and organisation which is capable of learning, adapting and continuing to move forward when things don’t go to plan.
