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Indelible, Inc.
Now that he's decided to take a place at the table of New Haven's leadership, Pilot Pen's Ron Shaw is making a lasting impression. And he's not going home any time soon
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Business New Haven
11/6/1995
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Take 1:
Like so many of his peers at the pinnacle of American commerce, Ronald G. Shaw began his career as a standup comedian, bandying about one-liners before....
No, that's not quite right.
Take 2:
Overcoming the weighty burden of his lowly beginnings slinging take-my-wife jokes before Buddy Hackett audiences at Catskills resorts, Ron Shaw skyrocketed to....
That's not exactly it, either.
Take 3:
Pilot Pen of Corp. America President and CEO Ronald G. Shaw, a savvy and calculating performer, is used to playing to his audience. From an early start as a musician and comedian, Shaw focused his talents in another performing arena - national and international sales - to take a Long Island-based subsidiary of a Japanese manufacturing giant from $1.2 million in 1975 sales to an estimated $112 million this year.
This Shaw has accomplished equal doses of intelligence, luck and chutzpah - never placing a great deal of stock in the accepted conventions of his industry or his surroundings. And he hasn't been shy about going where others feared to tread - whether in using humor to sell pens, or becoming one of the very first Americans to sit on a Japanese board of directors or, finally, bursting into the center of New Haven's good-old-boy corporate leadership, a group previously dominated by tweedy Old Blues with surname-like first names.
And now that he's decided to play the Big Guy role in New Haven - helming the board of a Shubert Performing Arts Center on the financial critical list, as well as assuming title sponsorship of the former Volvo International Tennis Tournament - his corporate success and marketing muscle may have made him an irresistible suitor to the noble but impoverished damsel in distress that New Haven has become.
That's about right.
He's too shrewd to say so but, at age 57, Ron Shaw must be savoring the delicious irony of having half of New Haven standing in line to kiss his ring.
It wasn't always that way.
Indeed, part of what surely has driven him forward along the paths that he has chosen has been the vivid recollection of times when he didn't fit in quite so neatly.
Take the time, for example, when he was eight years old, growing up as Ron Shurowitz in tough, working-class Philadelphia, and was set upon by four toughs who, after hurling a few crude anti-Semitic taunts his way, decided to get physical. Nearly killed him, they did, throwing him face-first in front of an onrushing streetcar. The only thing that saved him, he recalled in remarkably even tones during a 1993 profile on CNN's Pinnacle, was the ice and snow on the ground that made him slide just beyond the trolley's path. Unwilling to trust to luck a second time, his parents soon afterward moved the family to south Florida, a place where young Shaw might fit in better.
He fit well enough into the world of entertaining. At age 17, he began playing piano for a Miami radio show under the stage name Ron Shaw. Three years later he became a comedian “by accident” and performed up and down the East Coast using material “stolen,” he acknowledges, from such Borscht Belt gods as Henny Youngman and Milton Berle.
What didn't fit, for Shaw, was the lifestyle and unpredictable income of a performer. When his wife Phyllis became pregnant with the first of their three children, Shaw decided that the time was nigh for him to get a real job.
So in 1961 he went to work as a retail salesman for Bic Pen in Miami. From the start, it was an agreeable fit. “He quickly demonstrated that his performing skills had equipped him to become a supersalesman,” Shaw's biography actually says. He moved up quickly, to zone manager for southern Florida, then management posts in Atlanta and Chicago, and finally to Bic corporate headquarters in Milford as national sales manager. At age 30, he was the youngest person to hold that position in the writing-instruments industry.
He fit in. But then, suddenly, he didn't. Bic's chairman decided to give his oldest child Shaw's job, and for the first and (presumably) last time in his life, Shaw was fired.
His next job was one with an identical title to his last position at Bic - though on a very different scale. With nine employees operating out of a 5,000-square-foot rented warehouse in Long Island City, N.Y., Pilot Pen registered barely a blip on the writing-instruments radar screen, with about $1.2 million in sales the year Shaw joined, and remarkable mainly for the sea of red ink such puny volume generated.
“I told my mother and father I was going to work for Pilot Pen,” Shaw recalls. “They said, 'Who?'”
Nevertheless, the company had two important assets. Pilot had introduced a pen with thin plastic point which it had marketed mainly to draftsmen and engineers. The other asset was Shaw himself, who saw the mass-market potential of the heretofore “well-kept secret” and set about telling the world about the 59-cent Pilot Razor Point Pen, which became a signal success in the industry and a textbook example of product repositioning.
Telling the world about the product was easy for a person of Shaw's gifts: An early print ad showed a woman reclining on a psychiatrist's couch beneath a headline that read, “Is it sick to love a pen?” Equally critical, however, was the fervor with which Shaw attacked the problem of building a national distribution network practically from the ground up.
His rise within Pilot was meteoric. Within a year he was promoted to vice president of marketing. Three years later he was executive vice president. A year after that, in 1979, he was named a director of the U.S. corporation. He became president in 1986 and CEO in 1993.
The year before that the young sales star who couldn't fit in at Bic made national headlines by becoming only the sixth American executive named to a Japanese board when he was elected a director of the parent Pilot Corp., where he fit in in every way but one - he speaks no Japanese. He was re-elected in 1994.
“The assignment they gave me when I started” with Pilot, says Shaw, “was to build them a $10 million company. And we might be a $10 million company today, if not for the Pilot Razor Point.” With the Pilot Razor Point, he has to date fulfilled his original mandate just about 11 times over.
Saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's/And his hair was perfect.
- Warren Zevon
Ron Shaw is no werewolf, but his hair is perfect. Perfect in that low-altitude, Ron Petrie kind of 1950s way, a couple of decades before blow-drying just sent everything flying out of control.
Not only because no hair is out of place on his head does Shaw leave little to chance. His double-breasted suits are impeccably tailored, his black brogans spit-shined, his monogrammed French cuffs and gleaming gold cufflinks convey a sense of dash and daring virtually unseen in the dusty corridors where New Haven's dowdy élite eats its oatmeal.
There are successful people who seem unable to decide whether to bask in or shun the spotlight of celebrity, and Shaw may be one of those. He has been the willing object of lavish media attention in recent years, and recently brought himself to act as Pilot's pitchman on a flight of TV spots, a la Lee Iacocca, despite concerns for the security of himself and his family. “There are a lot of crazy people out there,” he allows.
Yet he almost reflexively deflects praise for his singular role in Pilot's rise. “A lot of it, frankly, is luck,” he says, citing the marketing mileage the company got after Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin inked the historic agreement recognizing the Palestinian Liberation Organization with a Pilot.
And, oh yes, the pens themselves. “You couldn't do it without a superior product,” Shaw says. “If I left this company tomorrow, I would tell you that Pilot Pen makes the finest writing instruments in the world.”
Shaw says he had been asked to chair the Shubert's board by then-chairman Cheever Tyler and executive director (now president) Caroline Werth in the past, but had always demurred, in part because his demanding travel schedule took him away from Connecticut (including 40 trips to Japan) for long stretches. “Cheever was right down the street,” he says. “If something came up, Cheever could say, 'I'll be right over.'”
With Tyler stepping down a year ago, however, someone had to do it, and Shaw stepped into the breech. Unpropitiously, the community jewel to which Shaw had been handed the keys found itself suddenly - as board members portray it - in an all-but-untenable financial situation. Costs to stage Broadway shows were on, as board member Philetus H. Holt puts it, “a rocket to the moon.”
The hottest shows, extravaganzas such as Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and Showboat, could not squeeze into the dimensions of the 80-year-old facility at any price. And the theater's management didn't believe ticket prices (already hovering in the $50 range for the Broadway series) could be ratcheted higher without audience defection.
Thus Shaw found himself in the hot seat virtually the moment he took charge, telling an audience of reporters assembled on the Shubert stage that the theater was unlikely to survive without some form of public assistance to effect urgent repairs and improvements, broader and deeper corporate support and, above all, a new 2,800-seat facility (which might house New Haven Symphony Orchestra concerts as well) to be competitive with venues such as Hartford's Bushnell Memorial.
That new theater, all acknowledge, is years away. In the meantime, it is Shaw who must weather the storm, assisted by the savvy Werth and new board members such as University of New Haven President Lawrence J. DeNardis and former Robert Henry's proprietress Jo McKenzie, who is influential in state Republican affairs. But despite the immediate visibility it brought him in town, the Shubert chairmanship, says one board member, is “a very jealous mistress. [One's] ego is at stake. No one wants to be the captain of a sinking ship.”
In his new role, even Shaw admits he is a very different flavor of the month than the hail-fellow-well-met Tyler, a former Wiggin & Dana partner who founded and now heads the non-profit Partnership for Connecticut's Cities.
For one thing, he's a corporate guy, not a lawyer. Says a founding and present Shubert board member, New Haven businesswoman Lindy Lee Gold, who originally nominated Shaw for the Shubert board: “Certainly he comes from a different school. Most people from the corporate world who take on board presidencies - particularly CEOs - are very frustrated with process. They're decision-makers, they like to see bottom lines, and they like to have action plans. 'Process' is one of their least favorite words. But I think Ron has evolved into appreciating some of what process does, and has learned to get along with a very diverse group of people.”
There are other differences, too. Although Shaw and his wife, Phyllis, still live in the same Woodbridge house they purchased when he was still with Bic and in which they raised their three children, until now he had never stepped onto the community playing field heretofore dominated by a very small group, a group that includes lawyers like Tyler, C. Newton Schenck and Richard Bell, as well as bankers like F. Patrick McFadden and Richard Nelson. Dyed-in-the-wool New Haven guys who have chaired every board in town and who speak the same language.
“They all seem to fit a certain ethnic profile,” observes one Shaw associate. “And now here is this guy who is different in background, different in style, different in every way that you can possibly imagine, who's come onto the scene. I'm sure they look at him quizzically.
“But they can't argue with success, and business-wise, he's probably been a greater success than most of his peers. He came up the hard way. This is not landed gentry.”
Shubert board member Phil Holt of the New Haven consulting firm Holt, Wexler & Farnam is one of Cheever Tyler's best friends. Yet he says he has no problem projecting Shaw into the group that preceded him.
“I think Ron is an example of the community's being open to [new] people,” Holt says. “You don't get invited to be Pat McFadden or Cheever Tyler or Newt Schenck - or Ron Shaw. You work your butt off: You're ready to stand up and be counted when the need is for someone to give incredible efforts, and you're prepared to devote time and commitment and brainpower and all that stuff. That's how those guys got in that club.
“He certainly has convinced me of his commitment to New Haven, and his love of the theater.”
“I've tried to address the problems [at the Shubert] the way I would address the problems here,” Shaw explains, “looking at it through the eyes of a businessman.” What those eyes saw was repugnant enough to the businessman in him that, after six months, he seriously considered stepping down, but decided that the blow to his reputation and that of Pilot Pen would be greater than he wished to bear. Through any set of eyes, he acknowledges, “It hasn't been an easy year.”
If taking the tiller of the Shubert confirmed Ron Shaw's status as a New Haven player to be reckoned with, buying the title sponsorship of Connecticut's glitziest event seems certain to certify him as something he never was in show biz - a star.
Dating nearly back to the then-Volvo International's arrival in New Haven from Vermont, Shaw had made it clear to Jewel Productions CEO James Westhall, who owns the event, his interest in Pilot's assuming the above-the-title sponsor slot. But, even growing as it was, it could never match the dollars the Swedish auto-maker had invested in the event since its beginnings at the Mt. Washington Hotel in New Hampshire.
But when Volvo, as the culmination of its withdrawal from the men's ATP tour (of which it had been an umbrella sponsor a decade ago), decided to step aside from the last American vestige of what had been the “Volvo tour,” talks between Shaw and Westhall took a more serious turn. A pact estimated at slightly higher than $1 million per year was announced at the conclusion of this year's tourney. Next August, the Pilot Pen International will take center court at the Connecticut Tennis Center in Westville. For his investment, Shaw calculates that “We will easily get $9 million to $10 million a year” in media attention.
Of Shaw's negotiating style, Westhall says: “He's very laid-back, but very businesslike. I think he respects me, and I respect him. I thought it was a very easy discussion. He's always wanted to do it. We nearly did [a tennis tournament] together a couple of years ago out in Hawaii, but we just couldn't put it together.”
This isn't Pilot Pen's first foray into professional tennis. Up until 1993, the company sponsored a Pilot Pen Open at Yale during August, which most recently functioned as a “feeder” to the main event the following week. And in the mid-1980s, Pilot sponsored a tour event in California for three years.
Asked how he has kept score all these years, Shaw points to “the satisfaction of doing what other people said couldn't be done” - taking Pilot Pen from laughable obscurity to a household name. As well, he acknowledges, “Being an American, I guess keeping score by dollars is part of it. My wife and I both came from families that absolutely had no money at all.”
He tells a story: Shortly after his first son was born 35 years ago, Shaw used to go to construction sites after hours to round up empty soda bottles. For the two-cent deposit. To buy baby food. “Coming from that experience,” he says, “I guess you couldn't help but measure some of your success by dollars.”
By now, the chances are good that Ron Shaw is never going back there again.
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