New Beginnings

Dear friends,

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Craig Nelson

My name is Craig Nelson and I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ultimate Office. Thanks to you, our valued customers and colleagues, I am proud to announce that as of September Ultimate Office is coming back! Your letters, phone calls and emails have given us the inspiration and motivation to once again provide you with the world’s best solutions to Organize Now. Like many customers who have called and written, you may be wondering what happened and where we’ve been for the past year. Here is my story… as it occurred.

Wall Street Slams Main Street

Our difficulties began in October of 2008. After more than two decades of successfully filling countless workplaces with the best organizing solutions available through our Organize Now catalog, Ultimate Office had to close its doors. We were transforming from a strictly catalog-based business to building a website that everyone was proud of, when the economy began to crumble. For the first time in twenty years we were showing a loss and one of the very same banks that was responsible for our country’s economic plight would not renew our line of credit. Despite $48 billion dollars in available TARP funds, none of the banks would provide Ultimate Office with the funding we needed to continue, despite our years of profitability. Once again, Main Street took it on the chin for the mistakes of Wall Street. I was in tears as I said goodbye to all of the wonderful people that had made my company, and my life, Ultimate.

The Perfect Storm

My months of torment that began in October of 2008 ended for me in July of 2009. I was able to buy back all of the assets of Ultimate Office, sell off our remaining inventory, lease our warehouse and refinance my debt. The Bank was finally out of my life, but I was beaten down from the experience. My heart, soul and mind were in shambles after being spit out from the vortex of an unexpected economic tsunami.

I did not buy back the assets of Ultimate Office with the intention of restarting the business. That chapter of my life was closed. I purchased the inventory full of my creations so that I could dispose of them in short order and deliver the warehouse space to a new tenant. As 42 tractor-trailer loads of unique, proprietary products were hauled away, I was immersed in sadness.

I still had the office portion of my building with the empty cubicles, each of which had the Ultimate Organizers still on the walls and desktops. They were daily reminders of the family of employees that had grown from 4 people in 1990 to 65 just last fall. I could not begin to picture being able to put back together what took so very long to build and was so painful to lose. I saw only the obstacles rather than the opportunities.

Alone in my office, I was surrounded by the past… my products, my memories and cabinets full of BestBuilt Binders, Jotz notebooks, PortaFiles and hundreds of Organize Now catalogs. All had lost their relevance to my current life. While the financial torment and pressure was behind me, the “Dark Days” were just beginning. Those days were a potent mixture of characteristics that had been previously foreign to me. The confidence, excitement and sense of purpose that had fueled my existence had been replaced with aimlessness, doubt, self-pity and a total lack of direction.

“The Box”

While scanning the contents of my cabinets, I saw “The Box”. “The Box” was a PortaFile that I’d labeled “Good-Byes”. It contained hundreds of emails and letters from Ultimate Office customers, manufacturing partners, business associates and friends, all who had taken the time to express their sorrow and sentiments. Most I had briefly skimmed, some had gone unread, and all had gone unanswered. During the time these letters arrived, I was in the fight of my life and I could not focus on their content, let alone reply. For months I had pretended that “The Box” did not exist and that the content was irrelevant because somehow things were going to work out. Well, things had not worked out, and “The Box” was still there, staring at me every day.

July turned into August, September came and went, and still I did not have the courage or the inclination to go through “The Box”. Inventing and designing new products, long trips to meet with manufacturing partners in Europe and the Far East, marketing plans and catalog deadlines were all now absent from my life. These activities of the past were replaced with working around the house and trying to catch bits and pieces in the very busy lives of my four teenage children.

Founder Craig Nelson with son Connor

I was able to go to all of their sporting events during the week, and on the weekends, travel with my wife to see our oldest son Connor play football for Villanova. He is not a particularly gifted athlete where size and speed are concerned, but he has a passion and work ethic rarely found in a 19 year old kid. I’d always wanted to be there for him and now I could, but my mind was in a fog that was dominated by one reoccurring question… what the hell am I going to do now to make a living? 

I was no closer to finding the answer when Thanksgiving arrived. Over the past several months, I had had my fill of friends and family telling me that, “Everything happens for a reason”, or, “Look what happened to General Motors”, or the most often heard line of the time, “You’re a smart guy; you can always start the business again”. While I appreciated the encouragement, I couldn’t find one good reason for what had happened. I didn’t give a damn that so-called bigger and better companies had failed during these “unprecedented economic times”, and in my mind, these people, though well intentioned, didn’t have a clue as to how difficult it was to build a business. A lot of good, and very talented people were the heart and soul of Ultimate Office and they were gone, as were the products, the infrastructure, and the pulse and purpose of all of our lives… our Ultimate Office customers.

A Turning Point

There was one ray of sunshine during these “Dark Days” however. Villanova kept winning week after week, and if they could get by William & Mary, they would play for the National DI AA Championship in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They did win that next week, and as we drove home, my wife was already planning on booking our flights and hotel for the Championship game the following weekend. Airfares and hotel rooms are not popular topics of discussion when there is no income coming in, so I quietly but firmly informed her that we would not be going. We traveled for the next hour or so in silence until we pulled into the garage and she not so quietly informed me that I was crazy and that she was going to Chattanooga with or without me. She went directly upstairs to her computer and booked her trip.

Connor and teammates with championship trophy

OK, I freely admit that she was right and I was wrong, but it simply speaks to my state of mind at the time. I was in a fog, filled with misplaced priorities and self-obsession. I went to Chattanooga and as the clock wound down to zero, I took the 10 foot drop onto the field and found myself in the arms of my son. He had followed his dream, never given up, and was now a part of history as a member of that Villanova Championship team. I watched my son hugging all of his teammates, jumping up and down, and when it was his turn to hold that NCAA Championship trophy, he walked over to me so I could feel it, touch it, and hold it too. He told me what I had told him so many times before: “If you can imagine it, and you are willing to work hard enough for it… anything can happen.”

“The Box” Takes on New Meaning

I returned to the office that Monday morning with those words resonating in my mind. I was ready to finally take on “The Box”. The letters and emails from Ultimate Office customers were emotional, overwhelmingly supportive, and inspirational. Some contained choice words for the banking institutions while many simply offered us their prayers. Several asked, “Where am I going to get all of these really cool products now?” while others described how much they enjoyed watching Ultimate Office grow over the years. There were many that said how much they would miss receiving our catalogs, and seeing what unique new products and exciting ideas we had come up with. The overwhelming majority simply thanked us for making it so easy to organize, said they would miss us, and wished us all well in the future.

There was, however, one hand written letter in “The Box” from a man in a small suburb of Detroit that really struck a chord. He explained that he had been the third generation to run a family business that had marketed and manufactured small components for the automobile industry. They were big fans of Ultimate Office products, which he referred to as “fabulous tools” that they had used to streamline their business. He mentioned the fact that Ultimate Office Reference Organizers were used in all of their administrative offices as well as the factory, and he went into great detail regarding the color coding scheme they had developed for all of their PortaFile Binders, Project Boxes, and Expanding Files. He said that they had put up a “fabulous fight to keep the business going” but in the end they could not survive. The tone of his letter was surprisingly upbeat as he told me he had been working with a small core group of his former employees to reengineer their business. They were working together to make it possible to manufacture different products for alternative industries.

Most importantly, he said his team all had a passion for what they did and the people they did it with. He said of their passion, “While many people are driven by their minds to work hard and succeed, passion is a much higher level, an overdrive that comes from your heart and your soul. You can’t will it, want it or fake it. You simply must have it and use it to obtain your goals and objectives”. He suggested that the people of Ultimate Office must also have had passion for what they did to create all of those unique organizing tools. He encouraged me to call those former employees and reengineer our business. In closing, he suggested that I read My Life and Work an autobiography by Henry Ford.

By the time Christmas had rolled around I’d read that book twice from cover to cover. Henry Ford, the pioneer of the automobile industry and the assembly line had fallen on hard times. Ford had dominated the market by offering one single and affordable mode of transportation. That market had quickly and suddenly dissipated before his very eyes. Competitors had come into the automobile industry and were offering choices and options that Ford’s factory simply was not equipped or set up to do. Henry Ford sent all of his employees home and he completely closed down the Ford Motor Company. For the next eight months, he and his core group of employees reengineered their factory so that they could restart and compete with a new and entirely different business model.

Turning Obstacles into Opportunities

Craig visiting China

On January 4, 2010, I took the advice of two men from Detroit and reached out to two core members of the Ultimate Office family. I told them I wanted to talk to them about the possibilities of redesigning the business model and restarting the company. By February, there were four of us, with a solid direction and a passionate plan to bring back a new and improved Ultimate Office. Together with my top product design assistant, I was off to Europe to share our plan with twelve of our most trusted and loyal manufacturing partners. Armed with the exciting results of these visits, and encouraged by their overwhelming enthusiasm, by April we were a team of six. The plan was beginning to gather momentum and take on steam as a viable business model. From there we were off to China for two weeks with three entirely new patent pending product lines, while the rest of the team continued to work side-by-side with a variety of the very best people in the fields of computers, telecom, marketing, print and web design.

Today, June 22, just eight days shy of seven months from the beginning of our new journey, we are a team of eight and growing. We have been working from early in the mornings, through some nights and on weekends as we look forward to the day that we can unveil the new Ultimate Office. We have a passion for what we are doing and we are in overdrive because we all know that “if we can imagine it… and we are willing to work hard enough for it… anything can happen.”

It’s with that passion and sense of gratitude that I look forward to welcoming back all of our Ultimate Office customers. You will see so many new products as well as improvements to old favorites that we’re going to need another letter to tell you all about them. We hope you’re as excited as we are and we look forward to providing you with an even more Ultimate Office experience that will make it easier than ever to Organize Now!

Thanks and best regards,

Craig W. Nelson

Ultimate Office

About Ultimate Office

Ultimate Office provides innovative organization and storage solutions for your business and home office. Our passion is for taking the ordinary and making it not just extraordinary, but Ultimate.

---

---

Recent Posts

• 01/30/2012 • The Ultimate Classroom
• 01/13/2012 • Organize Now – Our 2012 Catalog is Ready!
• 01/03/2012 • The Desk I Left Behind
• 12/24/2011 •