Seventy Years Strong

Written by: Rick Chernick with Christopher Dean,

Norman Chernick was a renaissance man. He was a fighter… a child of the Great Depression, a soldier in Africa and Europe during WWII, and an attorney after the war. But my father also had a passion for photography. In 1953, he parleyed that fighting spirit and love of photography into an 800-square-foot camera store originally located at 101 South Washington Street in downtown Green Bay. My dad chased a dream, took a leap of faith, and Camera Corner was born.

In 1967, as a freshman at Green Bay East, I became employee number 4 and each day after school I’d run, like some Green Bay version of Forrest Gump, to get to work by 3:30 PM. Dad was a great teacher and business mentor, and I fell in love with all of it.

As I write this, Camera Corner is celebrating 70 years of business and my own son, Ryan, is now approaching 30 years with the company. From humble beginnings we’ve grown to more than 160 employees and, in this time, we’ve seen the rise and fall of iconic brands like RCA, Polaroid, and Kodak. We’ve seen amazing products made obsolete by even more incredible ones, and the digital transformations we’ve navigated are almost unimaginable. One more quick story, and then a piece of advice for the future.

In the late 70s, my dad attended an audiovisual trade show where two shaggylooking California dudes in a non-descript booth were showing off a garage-built computer in a wooden box. Dad wasn’t impressed. “I’ve seen 100 like you come and go,” he said to Apple Co-Founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and with that we passed on the opportunity to become one of Apple’s first U.S. resellers. But, there’s an important footnote the story, and it’s a perfect illustration of why timing and evolution are so important. In 1979, Camera Corner wasn’t quite ready for Apple, and Apple had a ways to go, too. A few years later, when Camera Corner Connecting Point (CCCP) had very successfully moved into the personal computer space, we became an Apple-authorized education reseller, and we’ve proudly built upon our Apple relationship each day since. The bottom line is that if you take the time to understand your customers’ needs, carefully choose your technology partners, and then consistently deliver easier, faster, better solutions, you’re going to have success. And that’s a good start, but it takes more. Had CCCP not expanded our expertise beyond cameras and film, beyond projectors and slides, beyond floppy disks, and dot matrix printers – had we not evolved our business model to align with the technologies that connect people to information, to our schools, our jobs and to each other -- we’d not be here to celebrate our 70-year anniversary.

Looking forward, I can tell you that the challenges around cyber security are unequivocally the most instrumental, impactful, and significant our community and nation have ever faced. Particularly since the onset of the pandemic, CCCP is receiving an unprecedented volume of calls asking for help. Because there is such a stigma and so much embarrassment surrounding these attacks, many more of these incidents go unreported. Tragically, these local and regional cyber-attacks are causing dangerous downtime and many thousands of dollars in recovery costs for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Worst of all, more than half of all SMBs impacted by a cyber-attack fold within six months of the attack.

So much has changed in our industry since 1953, but as we face this time of unprecedented cyber security need together, Camera Corner Connecting Point’s cyber security services are the most important and comprehensive we’ve ever offered, and the value and protection these services provide has never been greater. Our imperative to protect and empower our customers by securely and responsibly leveraging technology has never wavered, and it never will. We appreciate the trust our customers place in us, and we will never stop working to earn and deserve that trust every day.

If you’d like to know more about how CCCP’s cyber security services can benefit your business, reach out anytime —we’re friendly, we’re local, and we’re here to help protect what we’ve all worked so hard to build! https://www.cccp.com/