Paul Yater serves as the Chief information Officer (CIO) and Head of Human resources at 84 Lumber – A $4B privately held, national building materials supplier with 250+ locations in the US and 5,700+ associates. Prior to these last 3 years with 84 Lumber, Yater led IT as the CIO of General Nutrition Centers (GNC) for 4 years. Before that, he spent nearly 9 years in various IT leadership roles of progressive responsibility at Dick’s Sporting Goods. He was a part of helping Dick’s grow from $1B in sales and 125 stores to over $6B and 600 stores during his tenure. He also spent time at Heinz North America, IBM and Deutsch Bank.
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Marc Snyderman: Hi everybody, this is Mark Snyderman and welcome to The Think Factory podcast! I am your host for today and I am super excited to have an old friend, an old Dickinsonian alumni, Paul Yater, on the podcast. He is the Chief Information Officer and the Head of HR for 84 Lumber — two mighty big titles for one person.
So we’re excited to talk about that journey. We promise we won’t talk too much about days of Dickinson; I can’t remember most of them anyway. [laughter]
Paul Yater: Thanks, Marc. Appreciate it. Looking forward to catching up and thanks for the opportunity.
Marc Snyderman: So why don’t you talk a little bit about, you know, your journey? I always feel like I had a strange journey because I’m kind of a, I was a lawyer and then became a business guy. And I kind of, at one point was chief, was chief operating officer in general counsel. So it’s kind of interesting. How did, how did that kind of play out? Because most of your career was in chief, was CIO kind of IT side, right?
Paul Yater: So I don’t even have a technology degree, right? We’re liberal arts guys. But, you know, I did some programming in high school, but, you know, got into consulting early on in my career. And that sort of led me down the technology track and eventually worked my way up to number two at a couple of places and got a CIO role and then came here for, to 84 Lumber.
And it was really about IT transformation. You know, come in, build a team, put together a strategy, figure out how to leverage technology and get the technology in the hands of our people and our associates to serve our customers better. And about a, about a year and a half into that, we had turned over the HR role. I report directly to the chief operating officer and I could see sort of the strain and the stress that that, that vacancy was putting on him.
And I’m like, “Hey, look, we need you focused on, you know, helping the mothership and running the organization. You know, if you’re, if you’re willing to take a chance on me, I’ll, I’ll take a shot at it. Like, let me try this HR thing.”
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