Michael Feuer: specialty discounter of the year

Discount Store News, Sept 15, 1997

SHAKER HEIGHTS, OHIO -- As a child, OfficeMax chairman and ceo Michael Feure always took his own ball and bat to the neighborhood baseball game. That way he got to decide when the game was over and how it would be played. "I've always had this thing about doing things my way," Feuer said.

This "thing" way led this year's Specialty Discounter of the Year SPARC recipient to found the OfficeMax chain nearly a decade ago. When Feuer left behind a comfortable senior vice president position at Fabri-Centers of America to found OfficeMax in April 1988 with just $20,000 of his own money, it was a gamble. The office product superstore concept was still unproven in the late 1980s, and Feuer faced the challenge of competing with Office Depot and Staples, which had been founded two years earlier.

"I'm having more fun now than I did when we first started the company," Feuer told DSN. During his 17 years with FabriCenters, he got used to someone else making coffee and putting the Wall Street Journal on his desk every morning. "The biggest shock when I founded OfficeMax was I had to make the coffee, I couldn't afford the paper, and I had to fix the toilets," Feuer said.

Plumbing skills aside, Feuer got to leave his mark on retailing by making all the decisions regarding the growth of a red-hot retailing concept. Last year, OfficeMax became the fourth company in U.S. business history to exceed $3 billion in sales in less than nine years, Feuer said. By the end of the current fiscal year in January 1998, analysts estimate OfficeMax will be operating more than 700 stores producing annual sales of approximately $4 billion.

Staples and Office Depot may have had a two-year head start, but OfficeMax has closed the gap quickly. Today, the chain is opening more new stores than either of its chief competitors and aggressively expanding growing businesses such as CopyMax, FurnitureMax and its answer to electronic retailing, QuadMax.

The chain owes much to its success to Feuer's decisiveness and his belief in always having a plan "A" and a plan "B." For example, within 10 days of last September's merger announcement by Staples and Office Depot, Feuer and the Officemax team were in high gear. The decision had been made to accelerate the store opening schedule in the event the merger should be consummated. OfficeMax opened 16 more stores than the 80 that were originally planned for 1996. This year, close to 150 stores will be opened, compared to the 100 that were planned before the merger was announced. "Wisdom is the ability to discover alternatives," Feuer said.

The merger didn't go through, but Feuer learned valuable lessons about the OfficeMax team and what is needed to grow his business. "One of the toughest jobs of any ceo of a company is knowing what people can and can't do," Feuer said. "You've got to make sure you've got the right people at the right time."

Looking back on the success at OfficeMax during the past nine years, the fact that many promises were made and kept is what makes Feuer proudest. Today, Feuer is promising to "serve our customers, build significant value for our shareholders and provide growth opportunities for our associates." It's the OfficeMax mission statement, penned by Feuer himself.