Desktop billboards
Some people call it “tchotchke,” others, “free stuff.” But Bob Lederer calls all those business giveaways ”“ everything from imprinted pens to logoed key chains to mugs emblazoned with a company name ”“ a multimillion-dollar business. “Last year we ended up with $47 million” in revenues, said Lederer, chairman of the family-owned Prime Resources Corp. in Bridgeport, which he founded 29 years ago.
Back then, his company was growing so quickly that it made the Inc Magazine list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in America three years in a row, he said. Since then, he and his company have racked up more than 100 different industry awards and honors ”“ including Ernst & Young”™s Master Entrepreneur Award for the metro New York region in 2001, and his induction into the Promotional Products Association International Hall of Fame earlier this year ”“ the industry”™s highest honor. The awards, he said, “are kind of boring to everybody but me.”
What isn”™t boring is how Lederer built one of the largest promotional products companies in the country and one of Bridgeport”™s largest employers, starting out in a 225-square-foot office over a Greenwich restaurant in 1979. He and a partner began the company in the fall of that year, but six weeks into the business the partner sickened, nearly died and backed out of the partnership. “I was left on my own and was a little nervous,” Lederer said. “Everybody told me I was a great salesman, but I didn”™t know anything about the financial side of the business.”
He had been in the promotional business for 16 years before starting Prime Resources, joining a manufacturer and supplier of promotional products in New York City in 1963 as a salesman. “It was a very small company at the time, maybe $1 million in sales, and I had the responsibility to motivate distributors throughout the country to handle our line,” he said.
He was able to build a stable of distributors for the company”™s line of key chains, money clips, wallets and imprinted products like sports hats to the point where he became president in 1978. The next year, the company was acquired by Consolidated Foods, but the result of the sale “wasn”™t what I hoped it would be,” he said. “I always wanted to be in my own business.”
A suit and wingtips
Lederer grew up in Manhattan, graduated from the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1955 and from Bucknell University in 1959, where he had joined ROTC. “A lot of us did that,” he said of ROTC. “It was a great way to avoid becoming an enlisted man in the Army when you were drafted.” After serving his six months active duty in 1960, he moved back home and began looking for a job in sales. “I think I had heard that the road to success starts with sales,” he said.
His first job in sales was anything but a success. “I absolutely hated it,” he said. He was living in New York and commuting to Dover, N.J., “calling on construction supervisors and superintendents in the field at construction sites, selling stones for paving ”“ in my Brooks Brothers suit and wingtips.” Nothing, he said, “could be more mundane or perfunctory than selling stones.” He stayed on the job “one year longer than I should have,” then joined Underwood and Olivetti in New York in his “first real job.”
That was another sales position, but even that proved disappointing in the long run, financially at least. “It took quite a lot of creativity because IBM was the undisputed king of electric typewriters, and how do you sell against IBM when they have 80 percent of the market?” He was quickly promoted, with the promise of a retroactive raise after a year in the job, which is where the disappointment came in. The retroactive raise turned out to be $50 a month, “so I said, ”˜Sayonara,”™ and went on to my next job.”
That was with the promotional products company in New York, where he remained for 16 years before starting Prime Resources.
Expensive real estate
“I like to say that advertising specialties is the only form of advertising where people say ”˜Thank you,”™” Lederer said of the promotional products business. Not only that, but that little bit of advertising can last for years. “Yesterday”™s newspaper is yesterday”™s newspaper, but that pen or paper holder will be saved and saved and saved,” he said. “If you look at anybody”™s desk, you”™ll see some kind of promotional product ”“ a pen, a frame. That”™s expensive real estate to be able to buy, yet people do it every day.”
That”™s one reason why there are so many companies like Lederer”™s around ”“ some 2,500 of them. “We”™re one of them,” he said. Last year Prime Resources was No. 29 on the Promotional Products Association International list of the Top 40 promotional products companies, selling its $10 million inventory of more than 600 items through a countrywide network of distributors. “We sell through the same distributors as everyone else does,” he said. “They”™re our sales force.”
Lederer warehouses the inventory he makes and buys in about 175,000 square feet of owned or rented buildings in Bridgeport. He quickly outgrew that original 225-square-foot office in Greenwich and moved to 1,100 square feet in Stamford, then into an entire building in Stamford, a 15,000-square-foot former factory. “We stayed there until 1990, when we bought 50,000 square feet in Bridgeport,” he said. “We had wanted to stay in Stamford, but the building that was offered to us was fairly expensive, while in Bridgeport the building was half the price. The biggest thing was our ability to get factory workers. Stamford is a white-color town, but we”™re able to get plenty of factory workers in Bridgeport.”
His company employs about 450 people in Bridgeport, “one of the top two or three employers in the city,” Lederer said. “When we first moved in, the mayor invited us to his office. We had maybe 100 or 150 employees at the time. He said he wanted to meet us because everybody was moving out of Bridgeport, and he wanted to see what kind of company moves in.”
A good life
Lederer is at an age when many Connecticut residents retire and move south, which is almost what he did. He moved south but kept on working. “I”™m here because of your weather,” he said. “My wife and I have been going away for a week or two every year to get away from the cold, so we said why not get a place in Florida.”
“I”™m a bit of a workaholic, so I combined business and comfort. We have a pool with a granite bench, and I can work in the pool with a laptop and a portable phone.” One of the couple”™s two sons, Jeff, is executive vice president stuck in Bridgeport, “and all they want is answers, and I can do that on the phone or on a computer,” he said. “We moved down here in 1998, and we spend six months and a few days here, then live in Greenwich for 5 ½ months. It”™s a good life.”