BY MICHAEL POWER
SANJA CANCAR-TODOROVIC ON NETWORKING, CAREER DEVELOPMENT, PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND MORE Few people who pursue careers in procurement or supply chain complain that the work is boring. For Sanja Cancar-Todorovic, who is leading the enterprise procurement, outsourcing and vendor management team at Home Capital Group Inc., not only are no two days the same but the work is never dull. “Although I plan my days and there are reoccurring meetings and cadence of different stuff that I have to do on a daily basis, you really can’t pinpoint and say, ‘this is exactly what I’m going to do on this day, and this is how it’s going to happen,’” says Cancar-Todorovic, who describes herself as always looking for a new challenge in her role. And like many others, Cancar-Todorovic didn’t set out for a career in the field. In 2008, she was working in risk management at Bell Enterprise, now called Bell Business Markets, which at the time was forming a vendor delivery team responsible for responding to RFQs. Cancar-Todorovic found herself recruited onto that team. 10 JUNE 2021
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“A leader at that time recognized that this would be something I’d be good at,” she says. “I joined the team, and the rest is history. Which is why I say, no one dreams about this job. You fall into it, and you love it.” While her career in procurement began in 2008, her stint at Bell Enterprise started in 2000 while she was still a student at Toronto’s York University. She began with a part-time, entry level position in the company’s contact centre, which deals with customer support. Her time there was great training for later leadership roles, she says, since the environment is high stress, high turnover and monotonous. Leading a team in such an environment means thinking outside the box to ensure you’re coaching people to do their best, while also motivating them to minimize turnover. Shortly after graduating, Cancar-Todorovic moved to Bell’s corporate security team, which focused on broadcast security and governance. At the time, around 2003, Bell acquired ExpressVu, now known as Bell TV. When the
JUMPING INTO PROCUREMENT Not long after Cancar-Todorovic joined Bell Enterprise’s vendor management team, Telus offered her a procurement position. She accepted, working in that position for five years, until 2015, before another opportunity opened in the Telus outsourcing world. Specifically, Cancar-Todorovic focused on outsourcing the customer experience through the company’s contact centres. The role represented a shift, as the contact centres are the “bread and butter” of telecommunications companies, she says. The service must be impeccable, so that customers don’t know if they’re speaking with a representative based overseas or the city in which they live. The position proved fun, since it was a challenge she had never faced before. She worked in the role for three years until another opportunity arose. SUPPLY PROFESSIONAL
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MIKE FORD PHOTOGRAPHY
ALWAYS LEADING
company was looking to ensure the new acquisition was Canada Labour Code compliant, the company’s corporate security leader asked Cancar-Todorovic if she was up for the challenge. Cancar-Todorovic jumped at the chance, and she now credits the role as allowing her to move into sourcing. The person who brought her to the vendor management team realized that if she could get the government aligned with what the company was doing, she would be adept at negotiating with large companies. At the time, Cancar-Todorovic was still a new graduate, having fast-tracked a four-year program and graduated with honours in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, consisting of a double major in law and political science. She had always been interested in a law career and York University, with its affiliation with Osgoode Law School, seemed the logical choice after graduation. And yet, her new director on Bell’s corporate security team suggested an alternative. An eMBA was like the Swiss army knife of degrees, he told her, since it could be used in multiple ways and locations. A law degree would provide only niche opportunities. “That kind of did the trick for me,” Cancar-Todorovic says. “Also, Bell had this tuition reimbursement program where they supported the development of their employees, obviously as long as it makes sense. You can’t go to cooking school and expect Bell to pay for it. But for graduate programs they were more than happy to pitch in.” In 2006, Cancar-Todorovic completed a double degree – an executive Master of Business Administration and a Master of Management at Landsbridge University, a school that has since been absorbed into the University of New Brunswick.
