Shari Francis serves as Manager of Vendor Development for Office Depot, a position in which she is focused on adding new diverse vendors and certified historically underutilized businesses (HUB) to the Company's retail and catalog assortments. Shari considers her most important responsibility to be to give vendors the opportunity to substantially grow their businesses by adding Office Depot to their customer base. She has been instrumental in devising a formula for Office Depot that addresses vendor diversity, supplier diversity and tier one reseller relationships. Shari laments that she cannot accommodate every business because of time constraints but is consistently working to create a more efficient process.

Shari was responsible for implementing Office Depot's signature Matchmaker program at the Company's annual Success Strategies for Businesswomen Conference, which added significant value to the event. Through the matchmaker program, female professionals and businesswomen from across the country were invited to network with each other and have the opportunity to present their innovative ideas. The program has already assisted Office Depot in identifying and adding new HUB-made products to its products assortment, including women-owned KleenSlate Concepts and minority-owned Hess Advanced Technologies.

Shari joined Office Depot in 2001 as Coordinator of Vendor Diversity. She is a board member of the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the treasurer of the Women's Business Development Center (WBDC) - Florida as well as a member of the Institute for Supply Management's minorities and women business development group.

If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke. - Brendan Francis