Rosemary Thomas:
Revving up the retail business at Xerox

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Yes,” Rosemary Thomas says, “it’s pretty warm around here.”
A thermostat malfunction has driven the temperature in her office a degree or so higher than comfort level. But the heat to which Thomas refers is more metaphoric.
Named vice president of North American retail operations for Xerox Corp.’s Channels Group last year, she is one of a small group of managers who increasingly find themselves on the hot seat.
In the past Xerox’s retail business played a distant second fiddle to direct sales. But that is changing fast.
When Thomas joined the retail division three-and-a-half years ago, it employed some 50 people companywide. Today, she oversees some 160 staffers.
Market analysts expect the office-copier market to diminish significantly within as few as five years. The reason: Office copying will move from stand-alone, single-function units to networked PCs, a shift that could make today’s copier as obsolete as the carbon paper it replaced.
Instead, copying will be done on a new generation of laser printer-copier hybrids tied into networks.
Assuming that scenario is on the money, Xerox’s problem is not technology. The firm invented the laser printer, and company watchers have widely praised its steady advances into digital technology as surefooted and, so far, highly successful.
But some think the document company could falter in the marketplace.
Consumers of computers and peripherals–whether home users, small offices or corporations–generally do not buy from direct sales organizations such as Xerox’s, says Barry Tepper, senior consultant for CAP Ventures Inc. of Norwell, Mass. Typically, they go to the nearest Staples Inc., OfficeMax or CompUSA outlet where they pull something off the shelf rather than listen to a lengthy sales pitch.
The key to that market, he says, is getting your product on the shelves and persuading the mass-market discounters to support it. And in that arena Hewlett-Packard Co., which controls some 80 percent of the laser-printer market today, will fight to protect its turf.
Xerox’s direct sales force is second to none, Tepper says, but it has yet to prove its retail chops.
While Thomas recognizes the challenge, she shows no hint of doubt that Xerox is up to the task.
A former first-grade teacher who over 12 years worked her way up from Xerox’s clerical-support ranks to corporate management, Thomas does not like to give ground.
A neighbor, Doyle Hill–Johnson & Johnson Clinical Diagnostics group vice president for research and development worldwide, with whom Thomas often discusses management issues–describes her as a social spark plug for the neighborhood whose door is always open and who entertains frequently. At the same time, he says, Thomas gives complete attention to any work problem on her plate.
“I imagine she has little patience with any employee who does not show the same kind of dedication,” Hill says.
Thomas credits her rise at Xerox to “volunteering for any extra work I could think of.” But she also displays a pair of bright red boxing gloves in her office–a gift from her Xerox team members, she says, presented as a testament to her scrappiness.
In the retail arena, she says, Xerox is moving aggressively to extend its reach among the mass-marketers. Indeed, the company recently announced a flurry of marketing agreements with several major chains, including Staples and CompUSA. The announcements were timed to coincide with its rollout of a remanufactured printer-cartridge line geared to HP machines.
Getting product on retail shelves is only half the battle, Thomas concedes.
The future will as much depend on consumers’ acceptance of Xerox, she says. So, in coming months look for co-op advertising in which Xerox will be featured in retailers’ print media, sometimes alongside competitors such as HP.
Xerox advertising traditionally has been slick television spots placed in time slots geared to an upscale corporate-buyer market.
Now, Thomas says, the company must catch the eye of twentysomethings more impressed with the HP brand name than Xerox’s.
“People of my generation say Chevy or Ford, but they say Toyota,” notes Thomas, 49. “It’s a whole new world.”
For Thomas, who until last year held customer service and operations jobs at Xerox, sales and marketing is something of a new world.
She sees service as easier than sales and marketing, Thomas confesses. In customer service, she explains, one need only put oneself in the buyer’s place. Ask yourself what you would want as an owner of the product and proceed from there.
In sales and marketing, there are more angles to figure.
Still, Thomas betrays no serious doubts about mastering new skills. It will not be the first time she has done it.
A Rochester native, Thomas graduated from SUNY College at Geneseo in 1970 with a B.A. degree in education. She chose a teaching career because few other opportunities seemed open to women at the time.
After three years shepherding first-graders in the Canastota Central School District, she realized that teaching was far from her cup of tea.
Thomas returned to Rochester, moved in with her parents and started looking for other work.
She landed a job as a receptionist at Hammer Lithograph Corp., a commercial printer. It now is a roughly $26 million firm, but then was only a $2 million to $3 million shop.
Over several years Thomas moved into general administrative work. She says she learned a lot in her time at the firm.
President James Hammer remembers Thomas as a talented worker who nevertheless did not signal her future rise.
“She really didn’t blossom until she left here,” he says. “She’s really gone quite far at Xerox.
“Looking back I’m not totally surprised. She really had a very positive performance.”
In the early 1980s, Thomas worked as a sales-team coordinator for Sykes Datatronics Inc. The telecommunications firm at one time was regarded as a comer, but it fell into decline.
When she saw the handwriting on the wall, Thomas applied to Xerox. She was offered three jobs and accepted a position as a credit-collections clerk.
She then moved through a series of service and operational jobs, each time seeking greater responsibility.
By 1992 Thomas was operations manager for Xerox’s national maintenance centers. In that post she was part of a team responsible for paring the operation from 12 to four centers and figuring out exactly how they would be used.
The centers were a remnant of an early, not wildly successful stab by Xerox at the PC and peripheral market.
A few years later Thomas was named service manager for the Personal Documents Products Group. The maintenance centers became a key element of the service program she developed for buyers of off-the-shelf Xerox personal copiers.
The program–which gives buyers a choice of overnight replacement, technical help by phone or, in some cases, a home-service call by a Xerox technician–is unmatched by any of Xerox’s copier rivals even today, Thomas boasts.
The program last year won Thomas Xerox’s highest internal honor, the Xerox President’s Award.
Thomas is reluctant to say too much about her ambitions at Xerox, but she clearly intends to ascend beyond the first- rung position in upper management she so recently won.
When she started with the firm, Thomas says, she had no definite notions of what she hoped to achieve.
But she knew one thing: “I sure as hell wasn’t going to stay a billing clerk.”