Q&A: Resolution: One of the great companies in recording history

Vermont Business Magazine, Feb 01, 2003

William Schubart, 58, is the CEO and chairman of Resolution, Inc, of South Burlington, Vermont's fifth largest technology firm.

A nearly life-long Vermonter, Schubart has been active in the Vermont business world since the 1960s. One of the founders of the legendary Philo Records, Schubart is a man of broad interests in music, art, literature, technology and the business world The walls of Schubart's Gregory Drive office are lined with some remarkable photos, including an eight-year-old Schubart with Ed Sullivan, signed portraits of some of the 20th century's most outstanding composers and musicians, and personal photos of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, whom be mentioned happened to be his great aunt and great uncle.

Schubart has an extremely gracious and easy-going manner, and the conversation that follows was often punctuated with laughter. He lives with his wife Katherine in Hinesburg. Schubart said be has four children and two step children, including Anna 14, Steve 16, Phoebe 28, Guy 30, Peter 36, an attorney in Burlington, and Billy 38.

Robert Smith, interviewed Schubart in his South Burlington office on a cold January morning that also featured some serious icing on Interstate 89 that resulted in several accidents, which is briefly referred to during the interview.

VBM: The first thing I'm interested in is some background on you and your company, Resolution. How did you come to be here in Vermont, and what is it that your company does?

Schubart: I always have to start out with the confession that I was not born in Vermont. I have, however, lived here since 1947.

VBM: Which has got to be pretty close to all your life.

Schubart: Yes, but not close enough. I was born in 1945, grew up in Morrisville, went away when I was 14 to Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and got some education there over four years, then I went to college and finished at the University of Vermont with a degree in Romance languages. I taught for a couple of years, and then bought an old barn in North Ferrisburgh with my brother. We fixed it up into a recording studio, added a record company, Philo Records. We ran that for about 10 years, and that was a real roller coaster.

VBM: Who did you have recording with the company?

Schubart: Well, we had a lot of artists that, and this is actually quite flattering, probably about 70 percent of what we recorded is still in release. We recorded the Boys of the Lough, Dave Van Ronk, Mary McCaslin, Rosalie Sorrels, Utah Phillips, Kilimanjaro, a large number of groups that are still very popular.

VBM: I remember seeing Rosalie Sorrels and Utah Philips in a concert around that time, in the late 60s or early 70s.

Schubart: Yes. Nanci Griffin started on Philo, and Christine Lavin. It was great fun. I would hardly call it a business, but it was fun. We sold it to Rounder Records in Boston in 1981, and started Resolution. We wanted a real business.

VBM: One where you could actually make a living and that sort of thing?

Schubart: Yeah. Send your kids to school and pay taxes and drive a vehicle and do all those things that grownups do. So we started Resolution, and when we really looked around, we realized that we really didn't have any expertise in film or video, so we looked around for people who did and found Jim Taylor and Brian Doubleday, who owned Bluejay Films at the time. We merged the two companies and went out for a limited private stock offering here in Vermont - with kind of a little roadshow - and got about $100,000 worth of local investment. We negotiated a lease to get ourselves in business, and with what amounted to probably $300,000 to $400,000 worth of initial capitalization, we started Resolution.

VBM: That was in 1981?

Schubert: Yes, but we really opened our doors for business in 1982. The business itself is very hard to characterize. When people ask what does Resolution do, I clutch because it is an organization that is most prominently noted for the changes it has made with the market. And given what's happened in commerce in the last year, the market is just changing at a staggering rate.

We really started off as a film and audio production company. Then we began doing audio cassette duplication. We actually became, in a very short period of time, the largest real time audio duplicator in North America. We were serving Ford, General Motors, Delco, Bose and Time-Life. We sold that division to the Bose Corporation in 1985 and we reinvested all that in the emerging video duplication business.

The video duplication still does define Resolution pretty much today, but with the attenuation of VHS duplication and the rise of DVD, it became a situation where the tail really began to wag the dog, by which I mean that all of the ancillary services that we built around video duplication, like consumer fulfillment, wholesale distribution, customer database management, order management through a call center, commerce management and EDI - electronic data interchange all of those things began to become the core business.