How he puts flesh on the bones of a corporation's history - archivist Bruce Weindruch's company, The History Factory, helps companies preserve their history

Nation's Business, March, 1991 by Desiree French

How He Puts Flesh On the Bones Of A Corporation's History

As a youngster growing up in Rock Island, Ill., Bruce Weindruch had no desire to become an entrepreneur, even though his grandfather had built a successful chain of grocery stores. Weindruch wanted an academic career.

But a course in business history at Grinnell College, in Iowa, where he majored in American civilization, helped change his mind. A few years later, while Weindruch was developing outreach programs for schools at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, he decided to parlay his love for business history into a business venture.

Fascinated by the photographs, memos, old annual reports, and other memorabilia that lie buried in corporate basements, warehouses, and file rooms, Weindruch set out in 1979 to help companies dig up, preserve, and actually use their historical documents. He maintained that when a company was aware of its history, that awareness could help it plan for the future, sharpen its corporate image, establish advertising themes, and learn from the past.

Today his firm, The History Factory, in Washington, D.C., counts among its clients Fleet/Norstar Financial Group, the Boeing Co., Sara Lee Corp., and the Fireman's Fund Insurance Corp.

"There's usually a memory jogger, some upcoming event, that causes them to come to us," says Weindruch, 37. "It could be a merger, a divestiture, a move, a new product, or an anniversary."

The History Factory collects and organizes historical information for about 60 companies, nonprofit organizations, and trade groups, storing it in state-of-the-art archive rooms, and indexing it in a computerized database. Customers use the files in strategic planning, public relations, research and development, litigation, and brand management.

Take Fleet/Norstar, which was created by the merger of two banks in 1988. The History Factory's employees scoured thousands of bank documents and uncovered a common thread that linked what appeared to be two distinct banks, one from Providence, R.I., and the other from Albany, N.Y. They found an old photograph of an 18th-century portrait of a Fleet merchant-banking apprentice, and further research showed that the apprentice eventually left Fleet to found the bank that became Norstar--something that neither company was aware of. Suddenly, the merger seemed to make even more sense.

"The traditional archivist," Weindruch says, "used to arrange the information as it came in. We take these materials and make them relevant to the organizational structure of a company today. What differentiates us from other historians is that we're business people."

Because The History Factory also creates corporate museum installations and video productions, Weindruch thinks its annual sales can grow from the current $2 million to as much as $30 million.

"The better I run companies' archives, the more products I can sell them," he says. "That's our objective. If we can't make this stuff useful to them, they're not going to preserve it."

The History Factory now charges clients $40,000 to $70,000 to create a corporate archive, which typically consists of about 5,000 files. Videos cost from $20,000 to $150,000, and museum installations from $185,000 to $200,000.

So far, Weindruch, The History Factory's sole owner, has his field pretty much to himself. He says The History Factory really competes only with independent consultants and archivists.

"Right now," he says, "I'm doing what Professor Joseph Frazier Wall, who interested me in business history at Grinnell College, did for Andrew Carnegie. He wrote a book about Carnegie that made him come to life. That's what I'm doing for companies."