Phil Corcoran & Chuck Wolande

You'd think that after spending 25 years together building one of the nation's largest corporate solution providers, Phil Corcoran and Chuck Wolande would want their own offices. Not so.

The co-founders of Comark, a $1.6 billion solution provider and distributor at its peak, shared the same four walls from the time they founded the company in 1977 until its sale to Insight Enterprises in 2002 for about $150 million. In fact, Corcoran and Wolande still share an office as vice chairmen for Insight.

"Their desks are 6 feet away from each other," said Insight CEO Tim Crown. "They really are yin and yang."

If there's Chuck, there's Phil. If there's Phil, there's Chuck. It's been that way since 1977, when Corcoran convinced Wolande over a few beers to help him launch a company called Communications Marketing (shortened to Comark in 1981) to sell Memorex tapes. They have been inseparable ever since and, along the way, have served in several roles, including reseller, distributor, mail-order company, systems integrator and solution provider. Anything the channel had to offer, they tried.

"Think about that. They sat in the same office, working through all the trials and tribulations of this industry and how it changes on a daily basis. They had the staying power, the momentum and the complementary personalities to last two-and-a-half decades," said Dan Vertrees, vice president and general manager of enterprise partners for the Americas at Hewlett-Packard.

Yet Corcoran and Wolande are so different. Corcoran is the "good cop," the talkative, compassionate salesman who's called on to smooth out conflicts. Wolande plays the "bad cop," the stickler for details who tries to push the company to its full potential. But those differences have helped Corcoran and Wolande make sharper decisions, partners and colleagues say.

"One would go into a two-hour meeting, and when he came out, he could give a 15-second blurb and the other guy would know exactly what went on the whole two hours. They know each other that well," Crown said.

Wolande was known for working late and on weekends, examining financials down to an order-by-order basis. Employees would arrive in the morning to find Post-It Notes on their desks with questions or complaints from Wolande about why something was or wasn't done. Some mornings the sales floor could look like it snowed yellow squares overnight.

"When I'd get there the next morning, I could almost trace where he went through putting notes on the desk," Corcoran said. "I knew what I had to do that day. I had to go through and fix people up," he said. His task was to assuage any hurt feelings and assure employees that Wolande wasn't mad at them personally.

With Corcoran cultivating relationships and Wolande watching the books, Comark's revenue mushroomed through the 1980s and early 1990s, when IT budgets seemingly had no ceiling. Insight even considered buying Comark about that time, Crown said. Though they couldn't reach a deal then, Crown always kept Comark in the back of his mind. "In the corporate space specifically, they had a value-added model with their integration center and advanced lab. In the last 18 months, their value-add has been introduced into our business. Their legacy is our blueprint going forward."

Corcoran and Wolande, both 49, met at St. Mary's College in Winona, Minn. Corcoran finished his degree at Southern Illinois, but the two remained good friends. After graduation, Corcoran became a salesman at Memorex and Wolande an engineer at Jefferson Electric.

Unhappy with working for someone else, Corcoran formulated a plan to start his own company. The first person he called was Wolande. The two met at Butch McGuire's, a Chicago watering hole, to discuss the proposal. "By the second beer, he agreed it was a good idea," Corcoran said.

That meeting spawned Comark. "Our job was purchasing Memorex, selling it and paying it back before the bill was due. We had no credit, and that's how we had to do it," Corcoran said.

The two rented a tiny office because they couldn't find a bigger place within their small budget. "Finally, our landlord said, 'I have something.' It was an area where they kept supplies. They had all of these carpets in the back. He gave us a deal, and we had a 1,200-square-foot office piled with rugs," Wolande said. "That was our first office experience. It was fun. We worked hard. We worked late."

They went to work wearing jeans and held contests to see who could make the most sales. If a lead was generated, they put on their best $149 suits and hit the road to pay a visit. "Early on we'd say, 'This is Comark,' and they'd say, 'Kmart?' And we'd say, 'No, Comark,' " Wolande said.

And of course, there were the adjoining desks. "The one good thing about that was we could hear each other on the phone. We'd know by osmosis what was going on," Wolande said. "We had a divide-and-conquer strategy. I said, 'I handle operations, you handle sales.' But we'd fill in for each other on any project because we were pretty familiar with what the other was doing."

Comark soon added other media suppliers such as 3M and Verbatim, but the business saw its first big boost in 1982 when it became authorized to sell HP printers and peripherals. "That opened our eyes," Wolande said. IBM also introduced the PC in that time frame, and Comark started selling peripherals for it. Sales went from $1 million to $10 million in four years.

Another milestone was when Comark became authorized by Epson, which emerged as its biggest vendor partner for several years. "We started purchasing boatloads of printers and had to find ways to sell them," Wolande said. Instead of trying one route to market, Comark threw its hat into every ring: mail order, distribution and the public sector. "We tried to hit them all," Wolande said.

Another shrewd gamble was when Comark talked IBM into giving it "C" channel pricing as a business partner. "That was scary for us. We had to commit to selling 5,000 PCs a year and open a retail location to qualify," Corcoran said. "We only had one location and were in an industrial park, but we made that our retail location." The results? "We sold 5,001,by the skin of our teeth," he said.

With IBM in the fold, it was easier for Comark to sign Compaq, HP, Toshiba and other PC vendors in the early 1990s. "Not only was our vendor line improving, but also we started improving the quality of the services and breaking in with large customers," Corcoran said.

"We looked for opportunities,people unhappy with other resellers or an opportunity in Ohio or wherever," Wolande said.

To expand its reach, Comark interviewed for field-sales staff that already had contacts in their local markets. "We were able to bring people into our fold. That really helped us expand," Wolande said. "Some big customers wanted to see that we had size and scope."

In the late 1990s, PC makers such as Dell, Gateway and HP began courting enterprise clients to buy direct. Comark combatted vendors' direct-sales moves by building a lab to assemble and configure PCs and solutions. "Our customers would ask Compaq, 'Can you do the same things as Comark? Can you hold my inventory? Can you customize downloads?' " Corcoran said. "[Compaq replied] 'Not really, but we can give you a better price.' A lot of times that didn't work."

But the IT distribution landscape was changing. Corcoran and Wolande said the decision to sell Comark was their most difficult one. "We were still growing, but not at the rate we used to. We looked to see how customers could survive in the direct market," Corcoran said. "We liked the way [Insight's] model treated people. Their working environment was as close to ours as anyone we talked to. We did not want our people go through a big change."

And Comark's sale certainly didn't have Corcoran and Wolande entertaining talk of retirement. They currently each own 25 percent of HD Ready, a video production company that films concerts of rock legends for high-definition TV. "It's been a fun adventure for us," Corcoran said. "It's a lot different. There are no more soft dollars, but there are no more two-point margins either."

 Published for the Week Of December 15, 2003