Peter Pape:
A natural entrepreneur in his elements

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Ex-car salesman Peter Pape knows how to drive the growth of a business.
Pape formed the Riverside Group four years ago, melding four separate post-press firms into a single company. From virtually nowhere the business has come to be the fifth-largest bindery operation in the country.
The Riverside Group last year gained fame locally for doing the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis estate-auction catalog. The auction–handled by the ultra-tony Sotheby’s and bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars for some items–was a phenomenon. The 583-page hard-bound catalog now is a collector’s item, fetching $100 or more for a shrink-wrapped edition.
The Onassis catalog capped a series of high-profile projects for the Riverside Group. Under its belt when it scored the catalog job was “RareAir,” a compilation of photos of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan, and a scattering of more standard but still high-prestige jobs such as Bloomingdale’s bridal-registry book, some two dozen Fortune 500 annual reports and a long-term contract to do finishing work for the monthly run of Wired magazine. Upcoming is a book for the National Basketball Association.
A few years ago, Pape says, his ambition was to capture a few regional accounts. Now he thinks more in national terms.
Pape, a graduate of a two-year business program at Alfred University, is a natural entrepreneur, says Charles Clark, vice president of Hatch-Leonard Markin-Shaw Inc.
Clark, who has no business dealings with any Pape enterprise, nominated Pape for this year’s Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. It was the first such nomination he had made.
He was moved to put Pape into the running, Clark says, after serving with him for several years on the board of the Otetiana Council Inc., Boy Scouts of America.
Pape first impressed him with his dedication, Clark says.
“He puts in time every week, not like some board members.”
Even more impressive were the results Pape achieved for the time he put in, Clark says. Pape was instrumental in raising some $2.5 million to build a Cub Scout camp in Naples, and “very active” in its development.
The business acumen Pape demonstrated in putting together the Riverside Group also impressed Clark.
“He’s something of a visionary and a great manager in terms of developing people,” Clark says. “He’s not somebody who started with an inheritance or something. Everything he’s done, he’s done through his own management skills.”
In addition to being president and owner of the Riverside Group, Pape since 1995 has been majority owner of Riverside Chevrolet-Geo LLC (formerly Tom Paxton Chevrolet Inc.). He has a 70 percent interest in the Scottsville Road dealership, but leaves day-to-day operations to his two minority partners, David Foringer and Dennis Segrue. Still, Pape describes his role in the car-sales firm as active. He meets weekly with Segrue and Foringer.
As he does with Riverside Group managers, Pape tracks what he calls trend reports–various quantitative, but not necessarily financial, measures–through which he keeps tabs on his businesses. To measure performance of the Riverside Group’s human-resources department, for example, Pape tracks a trend line on employee turnover. Similarly, he tracks customer satisfaction.
“You can ask my managers,” he says. “If the trends are good, I’m happy.”
Pape also is a partner in Hot Shots Indoor Beach Volleyball, a business in which he takes a less active role.
The Chevy dealership is a return to roots for Pape, who started his career selling cars.
By the time he was four years out of school and in his mid-20s, Pape had worked for two Rochester dealerships: Mount Read Volkswagen and F.A. Motors.
Pape got into the printing business in 1981 as a salesman for a local die-cutting firm called Monroe Tape Process Inc.
He was doing well as a car salesman, pulling in some $30,000 a year–a sum he thought “was pretty good for a 24-year-old kid.”
Pape says he loved selling cars, but found it frustrating–too much downtime spent waiting for customers to walk in the door.
So, though he knew nothing about the printing business, he left F.A. Motors to take a job for Monroe Tape at roughly half the pay.
The firm at the time had sales of less than $400,000, but Pape saw greater possibilities for it.
By 1984, Monroe Tape was doing $1 million in sales, and Pape–who changed its name to Monroe Paper Finishing Inc. to reflect a wider range of services–was the firm’s owner.
At first, he had to spend some time teaching Pape the basics, says former Monroe Tape owner Anthony Heiner, but the lessons paid off in a lot of new customers and new work.
“Peter is very sales-oriented, and very goal-oriented,” Heiner says.
Pape, he adds, approached the job methodically and by 1983 “was included in virtually every decision relating to the business.”
By that time, it had become clear to Pape and Heiner that Pape had grander plans for Monroe Tape than Heiner himself, and they started to talk about Pape acquiring the business.
Heiner, who now owns Northeast Packaging Corp., says the takeover was friendly. He describes himself as a small-businessman who enjoys starting and building a firm more than running a big operation. Selling out to Pape was a good way to exit a firm that was growing past his comfort level.
Pape continued with the course he had run since acquiring the firm–going after every customer he could, upgrading equipment and taking on new types of work.
By 1987, Monroe Paper was pulling in some $2.5 million a year, and Pape was starting to think again about widening his horizons.
Besides a crash course from Heiner, Pape had taken instruction from his older brother, Christopher. Nine years Peter’s senior, Christopher Pape had long worked as a national-account salesman for several printing firms, including Monroe Litho Inc.
The brothers’ idea was to develop a full-range, post-press business, a venture for which there could be a considerable market, but also one that would not be without risks.
The market exists because it pays few printers to make the capital investment to do all post-press operations in-house. Some do binding or other operations, but more complicated jobs have to be sent out.
A single firm able to handle any post-press job could be attractive because it would be less hassle for printers than sending jobs out to two, three or more subcontractors.
On the other hand, post-press is “at the bottom of the food chain,” Peter Pape says. As a subcontractor, a post-press firm sees its margins cut by the printer’s markup, and it handles raw material to which a lot of value has already been added. If something goes wrong–anything from a defect in the run to a missed delivery date–the guy at the end of the line is the one to whom everybody looks to fix the problem.
And while printing is a notoriously labor- and capital-intensive business, post-press is more so, at least on the labor side.
The Riverside Group averages $500,000 a year in capital-equipment purchases, Pape says. Its most recent purchase totaled $1.8 million, and a machine bought two years ago carried a bill of more than $2 million.
Printers face similar capital-spending requirements. But while a $20 million printer might employ 100, the $14 million Riverside Group needs 170 workers.
To make a full-range, post-press firm work, says Christopher Pape, the brothers realized that Peter Pape would need first to acquire the equipment and staff to do the work, and second to widen his market considerably.
A local market, even a printer-rich one such as Rochester’s, does not yield enough post-press work to adequately feed a business large enough to cover all the operations needed to make a full- range firm.
In 1988, Pape started assembling the nucleus of the Riverside Group by acquiring two additional Rochester post- press firms: the Zahrndt’s Inc. bindery and Seneca Book Binding Inc.
At that point, he also hired his brother as executive vice president.
“We were on the phone so much anyway, I felt like I should have been paid to help run the firm,” Christopher Pape says. “Besides, I was getting to a point in my life where a move into management seemed about due.”
The next couple of years were a shakedown for the nascent Riverside Group, Peter Pape says.
To meld the three firms into one, it took not only new equipment purchases but also time to build a one-company culture.
Until then, each of the three firms had been strictly local, competing in the same market. Pape made Rochester into a single territory, and sent his sales force to New York City and Boston in search of new markets. Some who “couldn’t see that it was a whole new world” did not remain with the firm.
Also critical to the venture was limiting the client list to class-A printers, selectivity that still can be hard for his brother to swallow, Christopher Pape says.
“I think Peter finds it hard to say to the small guy who’s been with us from the beginning that we can’t shove everything aside to do his $1,000 job. But you’ve got to do it.”
On the production floor, Peter Pape created a cross-training program so that workers can understand and move among the company’s various operations.
By the early 1990s, the operation had begun to gel. In 1988, the three companies combined had revenues of roughly $5 million. By 1990, the figure had doubled.
The Riverside Group now has a strong presence in the Northeast. Pape sees it as scoring more national business and reaching $20 million or more by 2002.
A new effort Pape hopes will move the company toward that goal is the Riverside Group’s custom-products division. Less an actual division than a sales thrust, it consists of two newly hired salesmen–both from the Rand McNally & Co. publishing house–and a new office in Buffalo.
The goal: to move the Riverside Group from the bottom to the top of the food chain.
On some orders, Pape explains, finishing work makes up 70 percent of the job, while printing itself is really a minor requirement. Compact-disc packaging is one example.
For that type of work, he reasons, why not reverse pre- and post-press roles with the Riverside Group lining up the jobs from what he calls “end users.” The arrangement reverses the client-contractor role between the Riverside Group and printers, and the concept makes some of the firm’s longtime printing partners nervous, Christopher Pape concedes.
“It’s really an education effort more than anything else,” he says.
Since the Riverside Group is most knowledgeable about the complicated work comprising most of the job, it can best direct the operation and achieve the best ultimate results.
The arrangement also boosts the Riverside Group’s margins by shifting the printer’s markup on finishing costs to its own books, a benefit that Christopher Pape acknowledges is one reason they are starting the program.
The new division’s impact still is an unknown. But Peter Pape no doubt is watching its trend reports and before long should have a pretty good idea.