OPINION
50 YEARS OF
independence Recessions, evolving competition, technology causing product redundancies, not to mention a global pandemic, have all marked the past 50 years at Guernsey. Through it all, this dealer has always promoted one characteristic – independence
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n 4 May 1971, David Guernsey created what is now simply known as Guernsey, a Dulles, Virginia-based independent dealer. At the age of 23, with savings of $234 and a confidence-inspiring loan of $1,300 from a local bank, Guernsey operated as a one-man band for the first two years of its life selling and servicing typewriters, the forerunners of the computer keyboard. Wind forward 50 years and the company is currently a $100 million+ workplace supplier with a workforce of 240 and locations in several states on the East Coast of the US. The man behind the company has had an immeasurable impact on not just the US, but the global business supplies space, internationally most notably with his involvement in dealer group consortium BPGI. In a recent celebratory OPI Talk podcast, Guernsey talked about the past 50 years at the helm. He charted the milestones, the highs and the lows, and of course alluded to the future of this progressive dealership that’s been a beacon of light for the independent dealer community (IDC) and a perennial and welcome fountain of knowledge for the OPI editorial and events team. Some of his thoughts are summarised below.
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Economic strife Most of the milestones of the past 50 years have been economic in nature, quite frankly. I’ve been through many economic downturns and they’re all difficult, particularly for small businesses. In the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President, we had double-digit inflation and double-digit prime (bank base) rates. It was an awful business climate and we had a very hard time growing our revenue base. The financial crisis of 2007/2008 and what followed was another period and about as difficult as anything I could have ever imagined. A lot of my peers decided to close their businesses back then because they didn’t want to go through it yet again, another few years down the track. The birth of BPGI It all began when the power channel entered the fray in the late 1980s and very early 1990s – the
David Guernsey, CEO, Guernsey
big public companies like Staples, Office Depot and OfficeMax. It was a real shock to the industry. Not only were they huge – some of the private entities were big too – but they seemingly had limitless capital to put into their businesses. We had never seen anything quite like it. There was panic in the industry and a huge amount of concern, especially when other players – the large contract stationers like Corporate Express and US Office Products – also turned up and were making acquisitions left, right and centre.
[BPGI] was a real sea change in terms of how the IDC worked together. We made tremendous strides Again, it became a question of staying in business or selling it. Guernsey opted to stay and so did many others. But we really needed to band together. At the time, about six different dealer groups existed in the US, all of them essentially doing the same thing and buying from the same manufacturers. So the initial idea was for BPGI to knit together all the groups in the US. A couple of groups in Canada became interested so we morphed into a North American entity. Then I got a call from Hugh Sear at Officeteam in the UK and they joined. This was followed by interest from New Zealand and Australia. All of those groups combined became BPGI. We brought together all that buying power and sat down with the manufacturers. We said we would make buying commitments almost across
Left: David Guernsey on holiday in Africa in 1995 Below: Guernsey’s sales team in the early 1980s
