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Natural Born Leaders
By: Tama Swan, Associate Editor
Issue: 2010jan
PPAI’s Distinguished Service Award is presented annually to select PPAI members who consistently contribute their skills and expertise toward the betterment of the Association through either volunteer service or leadership. This year, the award goes to two men, Christopher Duffy, MAS, and Mike Burns, CAS, each with strong reputations as professionals, leaders and visionaries.
Christopher Duffy, MAS
A trendspotter, unafraid of taking risks and always looking for the next big thing.
If one were to list major trends in the promotions industry during the past 20 years, chances are Christopher Duffy, MAS, was there, in the midst of the action and driving its progress. Never one to shy away from hard work, Duffy says he’s always looking for something to build and keeping his eye out for the next big thing. Once he finds it, this 2010 PPAI Distinguished Service Award winner makes it his mission to share his experiences with the industry’s masses, lending his time as a speaker, committee member and teacher.
“I’m not sure if anybody trains for this business,” Duffy says of the promotions industry. He didn’t, choosing instead to begin his career in the international sports field after earning a master’s degree in sports management from the University of Maryland. During this time he worked for a nonprofit student athlete association, locating lodgings and securing opportunities for international youth athletes inbound to the U.S.
When budget cuts brought his tenure there to a close, the nonprofit’s director gave Duffy a lead on a job at a promotional products distributor. The now-defunct Wearhouse, Inc., a direct-mail cataloguer specializing in screen-printed t-shirts and products such as pens and foam can coolers, hired Duffy as a product salesman.
Scaling The Ladder
“About four months in they asked me to run the promotional products side,” recalls Duffy. “I was learning about sourcing, artwork and working with the customers. I had a team of people who worked for me that did the order management.”
A year later, Wearhouse, Inc. decided to shift gears and become an apparel supplier as well, and it looked to Duffy to head up the new endeavor. “They asked me to run that division as well, so now I’m talking with distributors about their t-shirt needs and running two divisions for the company,” he says.
Duffy finished graduate school at age 26, began working for Wearhouse at age 28 and was managing two divisions—or 25 percent of the company’s $8 million annual revenue—by age 29. Meanwhile he was serving as a board member for Chesapeake Promotional Products Association (CPPA).
“I had always told my wife I want to get a job and make a difference,” Duffy says. “I wanted to do something cool.”
Riding The Wave
After five years, Duffy left Wearhouse and relocated to New Jersey in 1993. He joined Avenel, New Jersey-based supplier Vantage (UPIC: vantage) as a salesman just as the tech boom began to bubble. “We rode this wave of corporate casual. People couldn’t get enough shirts,” he explains. “No one wanted to wear suits anymore. Everything was jeans, khakis and golf shirts. It was a great time to be in the business, and a great time to be in apparel.”
Indeed, Duffy says Vantage earned approximately $18 million the year he was hired and peaked at $91 million five years later. “Vantage was a leader in the industry,” he says. “It had the nicer fabrics and silhouettes.”
And, Duffy adds, it had his mentor and Vantage President Ira Neaman, who was considered a visionary in the industry and fostered an entrepreneurial environment within Vantage. “There was no organizational chart; everybody just took on a task because it needed to be done,” says Duffy, recalling the day he suggested that Vantage develop a website. “I said to Ira, ‘I think we need a website, everybody has one.’ He said, ‘Okay. Go for it.’” This empowered Duffy to teach himself to write HTML code and to develop a website from scratch.
Working at a small, but quickly growing, company with an entrepreneurial attitude gave Duffy a primer in more than just internet technology; he learned product development, forecasting, branding, market analysis and more. “We took things that interested us most or needed to be done and ran with them. In that kind of environment the opportunities are exponentially higher,” he says.
In turn, Duffy took the knowledge he was accumulating at Vantage and put it to good use as a volunteer for the industry. He served on the UPIC Task Force for PPAI’s Technology Committee from 1998 to 2001, e-Promo Standards Alliance Task Force (ePSA) in 1999 and the Sm@rt Art Task Force in 2002. He was also vice chairman of ePSA in 2001 and served on the Promotional Apparel Advisory Council from 2001 to 2004.
In between these commitments, Duffy also found time to volunteer for his regional association, Specialty Advertising Association of Greater New York (SAAGNY), to earn his MAS designation in 2002 and to garner enough speaking engagements to win PPAI’s Distinguished Speaker Award in 2001.
Perhaps his seemingly boundless energy was driven by excitement for his career. “Being on that wave there’s a kind of euphoria,” Duffy says of Vantage’s heyday. “You don’t know it at the time, but it feels like you’re part of something.”
Starting Over
After 10 years with Vantage, Duffy began to look for what he calls “his next big thing.” While perusing the Specialty Advertising Association of California (SAAC) show in 2003, he ran into Chuck and Maribeth Sandford, CAS, owners of Bag Makers, Inc. (UPIC: BAGMAKRS), whom Duffy had befriended at a PPAI President’s Forum three years earlier. “I told them I was looking for something I could build again or to be a part of another big growth curve,” Duffy recalls.
The Sandfords wished him luck that day at the show, but Maribeth called him the following day and offered him a job with Bag Makers. “We want to go to the next level,” Maribeth told Duffy. “We could create something.” Shortly after, Duffy accepted a position as vice president of marketing, where he remains today.
“I thought the world of Chuck and Maribeth. And it was solid from the top, the people seemed nice and I thought it was an untapped opportunity. Plus I was excited about a new category—bags. I knew the industry very well, but I didn’t know bags. That wave was just swelling,” Duffy says.
Duffy’s prediction that bags were the next big thing was spot on. Bags catapulted to the No. 3 product category in 2007, four years after he joined Bag Makers. More astounding is that bags had only been considered a product category since 1999.
Once in Chicago, Duffy hit the ground running. He worked to streamline Bag Makers’ marketing messages and brand identity and also to create a marketing department, which didn’t exist before he arrived. “That was a massive undertaking of coordinating everything, getting all 120 people on the same page,” says Duffy, who believes a company’s marketing arms extend into each segment of its operations, especially customer service.
“Christopher has made a huge impact on our company’s branding,” says Maribeth Sandford, CAS. “In addition to having excellent organizational skills and being methodical in solving problems, Christopher’s ability to lead with enthusiasm has led our team to many awards.” She also commends Duffy for unselfishly offering his time and unwavering devotion in his volunteer work for the industry.
“They [Chuck and Maribeth] are awesome because they give me lots of autonomy. They just let me run. And I like that. Every idea I come up with I run by them, of course. But they trust me,” Duffy says.
Looking Ahead
Duffy sees social media as his next big wave. “I want to do more research before I just jump into it. I want to do it right,” he says. “I’ve never lost the opinion that you build your business in this industry on your relationships. Social media is just another avenue for building a relationship.” He says he’s also exploring the green movement, which is particularly important in the bag market, and looking at ways in which Bag Makers can educate distributors about its products.
However, Duffy doesn’t think about work all the time. He started out in the sports industry and is still a self-proclaimed sports guy. He runs, rides bikes in the summer and coaches his son’s soccer team. He’s also a Tae Kwon Do enthusiast, earning a black belt two years ago. “It’s a whole body activity,” he says of the ancient art.
He’s also still quite active as an industry volunteer, serving as a PPAI ADvocate, a board member of Specialty Advertising Counselors of the Delaware Valley (SACDV) and a speaker at The PPAI Expo for 12 consecutive years.
“The real motivation is I like it. It’s fun,” Duffy says of his volunteer efforts. “I don’t like to sit around, and I like being around people. Being part of something and making a difference.”
Mike Burns, CAS
A shrewd businessman with a knack for market analysis that he freely shares with the industry.
One could say Mike Burns, CAS, came late to the party. His grandfather and two uncles started Akron, Ohio-based supplier Quikey Manufacturing Co., Inc. (UPIC: QUIKEY) more than 50 years ago, but other than summer jobs during his youth, Burns says he never considered it as a career.
The University of Notre Dame graduate took his marketing degree and signed on with IBM in what turned out to be a 20-year stint with the company. While there he worked primarily in sales, marketing, management and client relationships. He also gained tremendous knowledge in the areas of license patents, copyrights and trademarks.
“Finding techniques and solutions to problems has always been fascinating to me,” Burns says. Indeed, spend just a few minutes with this PPAI Distinguished Service Award winner and it is apparent that Burns is a shrewd professional with a keen ability for analyzing situations.
New Opportunities
With his career at IBM humming steadily, Burns received word that his uncle, who had run Quikey for 40 years, was retiring. Eventually it was decided that Burns and his brother would rejoin their cousin, who was already working for the firm, in Ohio and together the trio would manage the family business.
“We were initially hesitant to do it, but we saw a tremendous amount of change coming in the industry,” Burns recalls. “We studied it for a while and decided that first of all it was a great industry, a solid company and a lot of change was coming. It looked like the right thing to do.”
Yet the decision was more involved than it sounds. Burns and his brother spent one year studying the industry and evaluating whether or not the decision to leave their respective careers and start anew at Quikey was sound. “We made calls on distributors, went to a tradeshow and analyzed our products and other products in the industry. We put in a little bit of due diligence trying to understand what it was all about,” Burns explains.
And despite the positive outcome, Burns says the final decision came with some ambivalence. “It wasn’t like we were taking on a massive risk, it was a good company. But when you change your career at that point in life it’s not easy, and it was to something we’d never even contemplated before,” he says.
A Second Career
In 1993 Burns began the transition from Columbus, Ohio, where he was working at the time, to Akron. He waited to move his family, however, in order to give his oldest daughter the opportunity to finish her senior year in high school, and chose instead to commute the 125 miles to Akron.
Two brothers and a cousin attempting to tri-manage a family empire may sound like a volatile mix, but Burns says their different areas of expertise fit together perfectly. “We have complementary skills,” Burns says. “My brother is more finance and operations, and I’m more a marketing- and sales-type person. My cousin, who has been in the business his whole life, has manufacturing strength. So it’s a nice team.”
Burns says it didn’t take long before he and his brother were “well dipped” in the industry. “It’s a very personal kind of industry,” he says. “It’s very collegial, and people were very generous in helping me get my feet grounded.”
Three or four years after starting at Quikey, Burns joined the Ohio Promotional Products Association (OPPA), eventually working up to president of the association. He also helped with the formation of the Regional Association Council (RAC) and served on its board from 1998-2001.
“It was not a comfy thing to do. We work very hard,” Burns says. “We’re pretty lean, we don’t have layers of middle management and departments and stuff. My cousin, brother and I are heavily involved. To take the time to go to regional association meetings and to get involved with the national association is always a tradeoff. But I came to feel pretty quickly that this industry is quite a bit different than the ones I had been exposed to.”
In his previous career, Burns worked mainly with public companies for which financial data was readily available. He says that volunteering helped him run his business better if only because it gave him access to the private companies with which he was competing. “One of the things that took me a couple of years to get my head around was the question: Who am I competing with? We had direct competitors, but it was very hard to understand how we were doing against them and what we were bringing to the table.”
Then Burns had an epiphany. “I realized we’re really not competing,” he says. “At the end of the day, my competitors are not the competitors that make the same products I make. The primary competitor for a mug company isn’t another mug company, it’s everybody else at that price point that a client could select to host their advertising or message. This is so different than most other product lines in our economy.”
This realization introduced Burns to a huge array of competitors he had never considered, but it also led him to the notion that potential uses for his products were limitless.
Keen analysis like this made Burns many fans in the industry. “Mike, in my opinion, is what the award is all about,” says Bruce Felber, MAS, of Twinsburg, Ohio-based Felber and Felber Marketing (UPIC: felber) and fellow OPPA board member. “He has always been there as a leader with his insight and intelligence on all industry matters. He has always seen the big picture.
“When OPPA went through some tough times, Mike was the leader that helped bring us from a low state to the powerhouse regional OPPA is today,” Felber says. “His leadership helped us focus on what was needed, and he was there at every turn giving of himself and his company. Some of the best times were at regional events together where his humor and professionalism blends so well.”
The Road Ahead
Along with retooling Quikey several times through the years and serving his regional association, Burns also served on the PPAI Board of Directors from 2003 to 2007. During his time on the board, he contributed to 10 different committees and won the PPAI Leadership Award for the Strategic Planning Committee in 2005. He also participated in the BOCA and Asian manufacturing task forces.
“I had a very different experience base than a lot of other people. Everybody on these boards brings a wealth of experience, but it’s very specific. Mine was different,” says the former IBM executive.
One might say Burns seeks out different experiences. Shortly after this interview, he embarked on a motorcycle trip in Colorado. He says going on long rides gives him time to think about business strategies and market trends. The empty nester and grandfather also enjoys hunting, fishing and hiking on his travels, and says he currently has no plans to retire.
“The more you can offer the more you can learn,” Burns says. “No one has an entire answer or even a sufficient perspective to really understand all the opportunities or all the needs. And that is particularly true these last few years. I mean the whole landscape is shifting on us. It’s an absolutely fascinating time right now.”
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