Interview by Joshua Shuart of R. Stephen Shuart, of Stephen Shuart Export Co.
The Reverend R. Stephen Shuart is an Episcopal priest by profession. He is rector of two parishes and serves on the Diocesan Financial Committee and as a rural dean. However, he has spent most of his wage-earning life as owner/operator of Stephen Shuart Export Co., an internationally known photographic business, located in Kane, Pennsylvania. Shuart’s unique entrepreneurial endeavor has been the subject of a televised news feature, and the object of camera collectors’ attention since his company’s inception in the early 1970s

Shuart, Joshua

Shuart, R. Stephen

English

Sacred Heart University: DigitalCommons@SHU

New England Journal ofEntrepreneurshipVolume 6 | Number 1 Article 42003The Value and Impact of Seminary TrainingR. Stephen ShuartStephen Shuart Export Co.Joshua ShuartSacred Heart University, shuartj@sacredheart.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/nejePart of the Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations CommonsThis Interview is brought to you for free and open access by the Jack Welch College of Business at DigitalCommons@SHU. It has been accepted forinclusion in New England Journal of Entrepreneurship by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@SHU. For more information, please contactferribyp@sacredheart.edu, lysobeyb@sacredheart.edu.Recommended CitationShuart, R. Stephen and Shuart, Joshua (2003) "The Value and Impact of Seminary Training," New England Journal of Entrepreneurship:Vol. 6 : No. 1 , Article 4.Available at: https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/neje/vol6/iss1/4T he Reverend R. Stephen Shuart is an Episcopalpriest by profession. He is rector of two parishesand serves on the Diocesan Financial Committeeand as a rural dean. However, he has spent most of hiswage-earning life as owner/operator of Stephen ShuartExport Co., an internationally known photographic business, located in Kane, Pennsylvania. Shuart’s uniqueentrepreneurial endeavor has been the subject of a televised news feature, and the object of camera collec-tors’ attention since his company’s inception in the early1970s.NEJE: Please describe your business for us.Shuart: I deal with photographic mail order. I have soldwhat is termed “photographica”—just about anything thatcan be shipped by USPS, UPS or FedEx. My customersare mostly serious amateur photographers, with a smatter-ing of collectors and those who are nostalgic.Photographers, collectors of photographic history andequipment, books on photography, photographs, libraries,museums, etc. Just about anyone with an interest in photography, but not necessarily photographers.I’d say my customers are probably 50 percent collec-tors, 25 percent professional, and 25 percentnostalgia…such as Korean War Veterans that were photographers, and now want a camera outfit like theyused in the military.Initially, I advertised in Shutterbug (originally ShutterbugAds). I was a “ground-floor” advertiser in the early 1970swhen it was published in a back room. In the beginning themagazine was all classified ads. I was the first full-pagedisplay advertiser (actually two pages).  This was 1977.That in itself changed the nature of my business and themagazine. How I came to be the first display advertiser isa story in itself.NEJE: We’d be glad to hear it.Shuart: Sure. In January 1977 I attended the PMA (PhotoMarketing Association) in Chicago. It was an opportunityfor a lookaround. Although it was all new equipment andthat really wasn’t my interest, I thought it an opportunity todevelop contacts. At the Chicago convention, I met GlennPatch, publisher of Shutterbug. As an aside, Glenn wenton to be very successful in publishing (Computer Shopper,a series of used aviation reselling magazines, databases,etc.). He had worked at Link Aviation in the 1960s and hadearly computer knowledge. He built his own computertypesetters and printing presses. Over a bottle of scotch inthe hotel bar, he convinced me to move from classified todisplay advertising. The end result, the following month, Iran two full-page displays. Within 60 days, I had quadru-pled my business.For a period of 12 to14 years, I staked out the insideback cover of the magazine. People read the magazine inthis fashion: front, inside front cover, flip it over and readinside back pages and work toward the front. So I was ina good position. My customers could find me in the samespot every month.NEJE: So your business grew slowly and solidly. Canyou talk more specifically about how your businessdeveloped?Shuart: Actually, it developed out of necessity. I was a collector. I supported my “habit” by buying and selling. Oneday I decided not to be a collector, and so I went to full-time dealing.My business started when I was in high school. I boughta Leica from a teacher, and sold it a few years later at aprofit. That was about 1959. I did a lot of high school photography. I liked equipment, good equipment. I was toobusy in college to do photography, but picked up on it ingraduate school. It was a good hobby. Later when my wifeand I started our family, my interest peaked in photograph-ic history. As a hobbyist, I did a lot of trading, buying, andselling. I started turning a profit, and it grew into a business. As my family grew, I needed more money, so Idecided to make it a full-time profession. Some of whathappened in the very beginning was simply by chance, likea career-changing experience in Pittsburgh about 25 yearsago. NEJE: And that was…?Shuart: While I was at the PMA, I landed a sales job withAmphoto, the largest photo publisher in the United States(and the world). I called on Pennsylvania stores. My realinterest was to get into stores looking for good used equip-ment. At one Pittsburgh store in July 1977, I was asked bythe buyer to meet with the owner. The owner laid out thathe had been asked to make an appraisal, but couldn’t doit because the woman was the widow of a deceased coun-ty commissioner...and about 50 percent of their sales wentThe Value and Impact of Seminary TrainingR. Stephen ShuartStephen Shuart Export Co.NEJE INTERVIEW 91Shuart and Shuart: The Value and Impact of Seminary TrainingPublished by DigitalCommons@SHU, 2003to the county. It would clearly be a conflict of interest.I made arrangements to meet with this party. At herhome, I came upon room upon room of select equip-ment—from Leicas to sophisticated stereo cinematograph-ic equipment. After six hours of appraising, I handed heran appraisal of $80,000 (resale value based on retail),explaining that she could expect to find someone whomight pay her only about one third to one fifth that value,again somewhat less, but she would need to find the rightperson. You must understand, this stuff could, and some-times does (in similar situations), end up being taken bythe owners to the dump.She asked me if I bought such equipment and I repliedthat if I had the money, I would happily give her $20,000 onthe spot, but that I had just used every cent I had on ahouse down payment and was flat broke. She responded,“Would you give me $1,000 for everything?”  I replied thatI would happily give her $1,000, but I was overwhelmedhaving bought my first house, had five mouths to feed, andreally didn’t know where I’d come up with the cash. Shesaid, “Do you know how to write postdated checks?” Myresponse was that I was pretty expert at that, so I wroteher two $500 checks. Her desire was that I remove every-thing immediately, so the next two days I spent movingeverything.Within a week, I instructed her to cash her checks andwithin six weeks, I had about $20,000 from the sale of theequipment in my checking account. This would serve asmy “working capital.” It was a bonanza and there was nolooking back from that point.NEJE: That’s quite a start. Shuart: Yes, but it began to snowball as I got the hang ofit. In the spring of 1978, another dealer friend, TedBromwell, who had studied law at Yale, but ended up as abuyer for the May Co. (and later in a responsible manage-ment position in Pittsburgh), called my attention to ascheduled federal bankruptcy of a photo supplier inHuntingdon, Pennsylvania. We met there the day beforethe sale to look at the goods. It was clearly a situation of asuccessful business gone sour by bad inventory manage-ment. The merchandise available was all new, so weplanned to bid to $5,000—Ted paying one third and I paying two thirds. He would walk away with three cartonsof new cameras, all of which would fit in the trunk of hisVolkswagen Rabbit. I would spend three days movingthree truckloads of good stuff.There was one hobbyist bidder at the auction and thehammer went down at $3,000. The bank, of course, wasextremely disappointed. Ted and I escaped to the baracross the street to celebrate. This purchase put $10,000into my account within a week. Then I made a sale to myhometown drug store—printing paper, film, and prepaidfilm mailers. Within the month I had cleared over $30,000.It was another bonanza.The owner of the store insisted on immediate removalbut then said that if we would give him a good Polaroidcamera, he would give me two days. It was something thatwe needed to do. With the sale came everything not naileddown in the shop—tools, fixtures, showcases, everything.Having filled the third truckload, I was getting ready towrap it up and pay three workers that I had hired for themove, when he said, “I want those three-ring binders in thebasement out of here.” I then realized that I hadn’t evenbeen in the basement yet! There were about 5,000 three-ring binders, imprinted with the company name, that wereused to bind the catalog that this company sold. It was abuying club, by subscription. So we loaded them in thetruck and off I went. On the way back to my home, Ipassed by State College, Pennsylvania, and thought thatmaybe I could sell some of the binders to the Penn StateUniversity bookstore. They were good quality and when Ioffered to sell 200 cases of 20 binders at $0.25 eachbinder, the buyer jumped on it, had some of his workersoff-load them. In 30 days I received a check for $1,000,and I continued to sell the rest locally. They were all soldwithin the year. This was another turning point that putthousands of dollars in my account. NEJE: What were some of the unique factors thatmade your business different from others in the field?Shuart: My business was unique from others in that I wason the ground floor, that I moved to dealing in Europe inthe late 1970s, and that I was able to find interesting itemsthat people seem to find of interest—items that no oneelse had, like European-published books on photography,and photographic tools. It seemed as though I was a per-son that people looked to see what certain items wereworth. I was being asked to do a lot of professionalappraising.My philosophy has always been simple: I zero in on aproduct that has little or no competition, and then when Iam “‘found out” or others start selling the item, I moveswiftly into something new. Profit is everything. NEJE: You’ve mentioned a couple of times that youwere “on the ground floor.” What does this mean?Shuart: I was basically dealing directly with camera collec-tors. Camera collecting came into its own around 1969. Igot started in the business in 1971, right at the beginning.NEJE: Would you consider yourself a niche marketer?Shuart: Absolutely. Many people have said they scan myads because there they find something interesting orunusual that no one else has.I have always dealt in niche areas. I would pick up onan item, set the price, others would see that I was obvious-ly making a buck, then begin to imitate. Usually, they hadno imagination. There would then be several, the supplywould grow, the price would decline, and then I would 10 NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP2New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, Vol. 6 [2003], No. 1, Art. 4https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/neje/vol6/iss1/4transition into something new and let them beat each otherover the head. Transition is the key to surviving niche marketing. Transition is the key to staying alive in any business.NEJE: You say that “transition” is the key. Were therespecific things that you did yourself to ease the transitions?Shuart: Things change. Buyers change their wants. Othercompetitors come along selling in the same niche. All of asudden there are two to three selling the same item. Thisis the time to bail out and move into something else. It isimportant to know when to make the move…and you better have some new item to market.NEJE: You have an interesting educational back-ground. Can you tell us about that, and how it mighthave influenced your business development?Shuart: I graduated from a New Jersey school and attend-ed a small, liberal arts Lutheran college in Pennsylvania.That was in the early 1960s, just about the time that noone was studying Latin and it was dropped from most highschool curricula. Frankly, the demand for Latin teacherswas nil. I also studied Greek—New Testament Greek—having some interest in the Church. I was still in the studymode and decided to enroll in a seminary, the BerkeleyDivinity School (at Yale). After I spent three years in “theo-logical study,” having married and having our first child, Ineeded a job. So I took the ordination route and landedtwo small churches in Pennsylvania, a place that I hadcome to like from my college experience.Seminary is an interesting experience: a place whereyou learn to live in a community of people. You are intel-lectually challenged and you learn a lot of basic life skills.You also learn some basic business practices, how torelate to people, institution work and life, and many otherthings. Some say it is the cheap M.B.A. What I learned inseminary enhanced my developing business. Education never hinders anything. The skills I acquiredwhile a student there, and while traveling in Europe from1964–1966, cannot be understated. I attribute my successto the good education that I received, plus hard work.NEJE: You sound very busy! How do you balance yourbusiness with your other jobs? Shuart: Time management, which I am not real good at, Iadmit. But I have found that the busier I am, the more pro-ductive I am.As my business grew, balancing my profession as apriest of the Episcopal Church and my hobby-turned-busi-ness was a real task. I was consumed by the demands ofthe church on one hand and a rapid growing business onthe other. At the same time my family grew to five and mychurch income was not what I deemed necessary to raisethem the way I wanted. I decided to go the business route.It was an easy decision, because at this point, I was ableto exceed my entire yearly church salary with a single business transaction, completed over a two- to three-dayperiod. So I went full steam ahead with the business.Nonetheless, I was to return to my church job at a laterdate, being able to balance both professions. More on thatlater.NEJE: To me, it is very interesting that you used yourseminary background to enhance your own business.Shuart: Seminary education was paramount. Besides thetheological education, time is spent in practical matters.When you are graduated, you have the skills to run a business. There are a lot of practical courses, other thanjust New and Old Testament. Much emphasis is spent oninterpersonal relationships. You need to know how to talkto people, and deal with them. People have a lot of problems, and you become a skilled problem solver. It isvery helpful in the business.I spent two weeks in Washington, D.C. in 1976, testingto see what my church interest was and whether to moveinto the business world full-time. It was there I learned thatmuch of what I had learned was transferable into anotherprofession.When I was hired by Amphoto to sell books, I asked thepresident why he was hiring me? He said, “If you can sellsomething as abstract as the church, you can sell books!”NEJE: How do you advertise, and has that changedwith new technology?Shuart: Rapidly changing and new technology and theadvent of the Internet have drastically changed the man-ner in which I now do business. As I mentioned earlier“transitioning” is the key to survival and/or growth in anybusiness. I spent about 15 to 20 percent of my gross salesin advertising during the good years, then at the advent ofthe Internet, I was beginning to spend upwards of 50 per-cent of my gross. Something was wrong. The Internet hadtaken the lack of supply to an abundance of supply, pricesdropped, demand dropped, and the world economychanged. The foreign buyer was no longer there. It was anew game, it was time for a transition.I advertised aggressively in several trade journals(mostly Shutterbug). When newspaper advertisingbecame ineffective about 3 to 4 years ago, I switched toInternet site and auctions.  NEJE: Why are you located in Kane, Pennsylvania?Shuart: A mail-order business can be run from anywhere.I was already living here. My kids were in school, and theschools were good. It was a safe place. I like rural. I couldhunt and fish. It was the ideal for me. Housing was cheap.In terms of location, I can reach the following places in mycar: New York, 5.5 hours; Toronto, 3.5 hours; Buffalo, 2 hours; Cleveland, 3 hours; Pittsburgh, 2.5 hours;NEJE INTERVIEW 113Shuart and Shuart: The Value and Impact of Seminary TrainingPublished by DigitalCommons@SHU, 2003Chicago, 9 hours; D.C., 5 hours; and Boston, 9 hours.The quality of life was the best, isn’t that a good reason?NEJE: Sure. What you would consider to be the mostinteresting thing you have experienced during yourbusiness career?Shuart: When I took my business to Europe in late 1978,I was clearly on the ground floor. There was no otherAmerican doing what I was doing. Inflation was at a recordhigh. People wanted to get rid of cash, and they wantedhard goods. The American dollar was at its weakestagainst the German mark and all European currencies.The trick is simple: get paid high prices in foreign curren-cies, convert to bagloads of U.S. dollars. I carried all thegoods as baggage. I took a friend or relative with me.There were always four bags of goods, and two carry-onbags of clothes. Each trip was five to six days, and allgoods were sold. And while I was there, I picked up inter-esting European equipment, which I brought back andresold stateside. I also bought European collector books,which were duty-free. Most stuff passed duty-free inEurope and in the United States.NEJE: You’ve mentioned you have an internationalreputation.Shuart: I spent five years in Europe selling until otherdealers got the idea. By that time, the monetary situationchanged. It really wasn’t that profitable anymore. Maybejust enough to support a European vacation. The nichewas disappearing and it was time to make a transition.I was back to the mail-order business full-time, with allmy European contacts. Now I was able to deal with mynew contacts at a distance. No more travel, more UPS andFedEx. It worked.NEJE: Earlier, you said that you were able to “return”to the church. What is the current status of all of yourcareer ventures?Shuart: In 1989, we experienced a bit of a “camera reces-sion.” I was still being carried by the diocesan medicalplan, but there was a substantial spike in the cost and Iwas paying for it out of pocket. About this time the localcure was vacant and they were looking for an interim. Iapproached the congregation with the idea that I wouldwork for a year while they did a search. I was paid in tax-free housing allowance and medical. The medicalstretched over a two-year period, as they would keep meon as an assistant the second year. That seemed to solvemy current slowdown in business. In a year they called a new rector, who stayed for threeyears. Then I seized the opportunity for a full-time (reallyonly part-time at 15 hours per week) position. That was in1993. This solved my medical insurance problems, andgave me tax-free housing. It is all quite legal, and, oh yes,the pension!—J.S.(Editor’s Note: Since this interview, Father Shuart beganserving an additional parish, 30 miles down theroad…part-time, of course!)12 NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP4New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, Vol. 6 [2003], No. 1, Art. 4https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/neje/vol6/iss1/4

The Value and Impact of Seminary Training

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