Net Gains
Smart Business, March 2001
by Thomas Claburn
With nearly $9 billion in annual sales and some 50,000 employees worldwide, Staples, the No. 2 office supply superstore, is hardly a company you'd expect to suffer from dot-com envy. Dot-coms, after all, are dying on the vine.
Nevertheless, J.B. Lyon, VP of business services at Staples.com, is transforming his pencil-pushing firm into a one-stop shop for business services and supplies, online or otherwise. And he sees profit by the fourth quarter of this year. "When we started the office superstore industry 14 years ago," he says, "the concept was to aggregate all these different products into one location, buy on a larger scale, and then pass on the savings to the small-business customer. That's the same philosophy we're taking with business services where we're aggregating all these services into one place."
But with Staples.com now offering legal, marketing, staffing, logistics, and technology services, quality assurance has become an even bigger issue: Unlike cheap envelopes, shoddy legal advice can sink a company. But Lyon says Staples.com can meet the challenge: "We do the homework for our customers. We do all the due diligence. We look at the service. We look at the management team. We do mystery shopping. We do usability analysis. We do all that up front." The upside? Small businesses save time and money.
For example, Lyon says, doing direct mail marketing used to take weeks for small shops. "Now we have a service that you can literally go to the site and design a direct mail piece in 30 minutes. They'll send it out for you within three days." Fortunately for direct mail recipients, Staples also sells shredders.
