WBE Spotlight: Janice Migliore, PALCO 

When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, Janice Migliore, Chairman and CEO of PALCO, a Tier I supplier and nationally certified Women’s Business Enterprise by WBENC and a Woman Owned Small Business by the SBA, had already been experiencing the impact on their reverse logistics operations in Penang, Malaysia and The Netherlands. The company was seeing a surge in demand for their services from clients across the U.S. and globally. This was due in part to competitors in China being unavailable and PALCO was ready to step in and repair, recycle, reintegrate telecommunications and data equipment for Fortune 500 and government clients.

 

“We had a customer in Maryland that shut down their facility to transfer all of their circuit board recycling work to PALCO including shipping their proprietary equipment to our headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama,” says Migliore. “The additional work required that we hire six new employees who were trained on the new equipment and processes. We’ve also been able to pursue new opportunities on the installation side with data centers in Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta.”

 

The influx of contracts resulted in an unexpected increase of revenue and customers in 2020-2021 for the 36 year old company. Additionally, PALCO has helped telecommunications clients achieve significant cost savings by outsourcing their inventory management and order fulfillment. For example, PALCO helped reduce operating expenses for a client by $1.5 million annually. This strategic move helped streamline operations to improve inventory efficiencies and shipping time, allowing the customer to pursue additional sales and revenue opportunities in broader geographies. As a result, PALCO has experienced 63.6% revenue growth in their Value Added Reseller segment from 2019 to 2020.

 

PALCO was strategically positioned to manage this growth by expanding operations around the globe to better serve international customers in Venlo, The Netherlands in 2011 and Penang, Malaysia, Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas in 2014. In 2017, PALCO purchased a 200,000 square foot building in Huntsville to expand its logistics and repair operations and increased tech talent. PALCO employees are available 24/7 to customers globally and the company leads the industry in reverse logistics and returns supply chain management.  

 

“No one could have predicted the pandemic and what matters is how a leader responds to rapidly changing conditions,” says Migliore. “We were extremely fortunate to have the right team and capabilities in place at the right time to meet the needs of our customers and respond to opportunities in the market.”