Harvey & Associates, Inc.
President & CEO - 1994-2006

For the last 11 years I've owned and operated a marketing company that specializes in introducing nifty new products into the consumer market, primarily through channels of retail distribution. Our most notable successes have been the launch of the first prepaid phone card program that made use of credit card readers to activate cards. Those programs in Wal-Mart and SAM's Clubs account for over $1.5 billion in sales per year. We've also hit some home runs with electronic gift cards - we were the first and biggest with those, too - and with prescription benefit discount cards. These days we're in the business of making multimedia presentations for law firms and other entities that need to present complex information in a concise and controlled manner.

Arrow Distributing Company
President & CEO 1992-1994

In 1992 Lieberman Enterprises sold it's assets to Handleman Company and closed it's doors. At the tender age of 40 I figured I was ready to be a President and CEO, and so when Arrow Distributing called I jumped at the chance. Arrow was at the time a strong regional distributor of music and video to mass merchants. When I got there we installed a state-of-the-art whiz bang computer system to manage store inventories for our clients, and we picked up many of the regional mass merchandiser accounts, store chains like Caldor, Phar-Mor Drug, Ames, Revco, all of whom have since been acquired or disappeared via bankruptcy.

Arrow has become a strong one-stop distributor to independent stores (through ATM Distributing) and the dominant supplier of music and video to the college bookstore market. Both these diversification strategies were originated during my term there, and it makes me happy to see the company survive where so many have not, and prosper by knowing what it does well and doing it well.

Lieberman Enterprises
Executive Vice President, Merchandising 1990 - 1992

Lieberman Enterprises was founded back in the fifties as an outgrowth of the Lieberman family business servicing jukeboxes. During the 1970's and 1980's there were three main places to go to get mass distribution of your records in the United States into the mass merchant chains. Lieberman was one of them. Lieberman was the biggest and most important music and video supplier to Wal-Mart during it's phenomenal growth and sold to just about everybody else in the retail business as well. We pioneered the sale of high-end computer software into mass merchants in addition to supplying music and video. Right before we decided to sell we shipped a $16 million p[rogram into Wal-Mart.

My job involved running all three main merchandise areas - music, video, and computer software, as well as advertising and inventory management for over 2000 stores scattered among a variety of brand name retailer chains. It kept me hopping.

Lieberman was sold by the Lieberman family back in the late 80's to LIVE Entertainment, which had the dubious distinction of being run by Jose Menendez, the unfortunate victim of a patricide by his two sons. I joined the company after that event when it was being managed by Wayne Patterson and Devendra Mishra.

Target Stores, Inc.
Director, Music & Movies 1986 - 1990

I joined Target Stores as a Senior Buyer in 1986, just as compact discs were becoming a mainstream mass merchandise item and video was being made available for sale as well as rental. Target was then a strong regional merchant in the process of acquiring the Gemco Stores in California and a portion of the Gold Circle Stores in the midwest, in addition to continuing to build stores in its core markets. We were the first non-specialty retail chain to buy direct from the music and video companies suppliers and integrate a service merchandiser program to operate our departments the way outside vendors did. Our business nearly tripled during my time there, and our profits grew even faster than that.

There were a lot of great moments and accomplishments, but those that stand out are being the first chain to put a hit movie on the cover of a Sunday circular ad (E.T. - we sold over 300,000!), becoming the largest seller of country music in America, and leading all Target divisions in sales and profit increases for several years in a row. Why did I leave?!?!

Wherehouse Entertainment, Inc.
Assistant Vice President 1984 - 1985

In 1984 Wherehouse Entertainment was named one of the top 100 growth companies in America, and it was on a roller coaster ride. I joined the company in January, 1985 to run the emerging Computer Software category for my friend Jim Lara, who was the Senior VP of Merchandising. Distribution of computer software was in it's early stages, and Wherehouse and Egghead Discount Software were duking it out in California for preeminence in the field. We both ran full page ads every Saturday and tried to beat other to a pulp to offer the latest titles at the lowest prices.

Wherehouse was also pioneering the notion of video rental done with automated inventory control and tapes in live boxes on open display, a concept later adopted by Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. The company was acquired by Roy Disney's Shamrock Investments in 1987 or so, and has changed hands a number of times since then.

Pickwick Distribution Companies
Director, Merchandising 1980 - 1984

I moved to Minneapolis in 1980 to become the Manager of National Buying for Pickwick International, which was a division of the venerable American Can Company (itself one of the 30 stocks that comprised the Dow Jones Industrial Average back then). The place was big, powerful, and totally out of control. We had 432 Musicland Sam Goody Stores, about 3,000 mass merchant accounts whose departments we supplied and serviced, and our own Pickwick Records label, which had hundreds of reissues and budget compilations. We had over 20 warehouses scattered from coast to coast, and the only way we knew what was selling was by means of tear off tags that were collected by stores, sent in to headquarters and run through an OCR reader. We were one of the world's largest users of 8 1/2 x 11 computer printouts. I received about 6 feet of reports every week when I first got there.

A few months after I got there, we split the company up into retail and distribution divisions. I was the one who had to spend very little money and yet persuade the record companies to give us money for advertising for our accounts and to let us send back overstocks that had accumulated during the late 70's. Pickwick had bought 1,000,000 of the Kiss solo albums, for example. I did that.

In 1983 we started a Computer Software Division by means of a joint venture with Softsel. I was appointed to run it at the tender age of 31. I managed to get myself thrown out of the office of the Senior Electronics Buyer at Kmart on my very first sales call, taking the fall for a failure of one our partners to properly supply a D&B number so they could get paid on time.

Record Bar Stores
Buyer, Store Manager 1978 - 1980