Ollie’s CEO Mark Butler remembered for business acumen, varied passions, and dedication to local causes

The chain has built its growth by sticking to its original game plan: buying up brand name merchandise from manufacturers who find themselves with excess inventory.

• Charles Thompson/PennLive
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  Thompson has covered state government for The Patriot since 1999. Prior to that, he had covered various Cumberland County municipalities and school districts. Thompson lives in Carlisle with his wife, Beth, and their two children.

(Harrisburg) — Mark Butler, who took a local retail legend and built it into a national chain that for years has been bucking all brick-and-mortar department store trend lines, died Sunday while travelling in California for a Thanksgiving vacation with family and friends. He was 61.

Butler was best-known for his success as CEO, chairman, president and co-founder of Ollie’s Bargain Outlets, the 345-store, Harrisburg-based chain that – either because or in spite of rejecting online sales – has doubled its sales volumes over the past five years.

The chain has built that growth by sticking to its original game plan: buying up brand name merchandise from manufacturers – whether beauty supplies, toys or patio furniture – who find themselves with excess inventory in something traditional retailers don’t want any more.

Ollie’s buyers typically close those deals for pennies on the dollar, and then pass on the savings to its customers.

It is a treasure-hunt model that Butler said uniquely lends itself to an in-person shopping experiences with store inventories that lean toward, as he told a profiler from Forbes Magazine earlier this year, “whatever we can get our hands on.”

The chain was successful from its 1982 inception in Hampden Township.

But it was after Butler became CEO in 2003 and outside investors acquired a majority interest in the chain, that growth became a primary goal. In the 16 years since, Ollie’s store count has grown from 27 to 345, and annual sales have crossed the $1 billion mark.

That’s the businessman’s story that Wall Street knows so well.

But there was so much more to Butler, like his:

• Love for the University of Maryland that resulted recently in a $5 million gift toward renovations of the Terps’ Cole Field House. Maryland showed Butler some love right back this year, dedicating the new turtle-shaped tunnel through which Maryland’s football team passes to take the field for its home football games in his name.
• Charitable efforts including chairmanship of the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, an organization dedicated to improving educational, nutritional and civic opportunities for at-risk kids across the country; in 2012, Butler establishing his own Mark L. Butler Foundation to help underprivileged children in this region.
• Participation with longtime friend and noted slot machine developer Joe Kaminkow as investors in the Broadway musical, “The Addams Family.”
• Stewardship of the Harrisburg Senators baseball club, a passion that his friends say Butler undertook not just to be the owner of a sports team, but because he sees it as a way to make Harrisburg “a better, happier and hopefully more productive community.

“That (role) was very important to him, and he was very proud of it,” said Steve Salem, the executive director of the Ripken Foundation.

“God has a way of sending certain people to do certain things, and we just praise him for sending Mark Butler to us,” said Yvonne Hollins, the newly-retired executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Harrisburg, which received a new playing field several years ago through Butler’s connections with the Ripken Foundation.

Mark Butler was the youngest of three children to Stephen and Carmen Butler. The family moved here from the Wilkes-Barre area in the 1960s, buying a house on Mill Street in South Middleton Township, just outside the small Cumberland County town of Mount Holly Springs.

By all appearances, the Butler children grew up in a pretty typical middle-class life: Mark’s father was an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, working out of Harrisburg; his Mom worked at the old Woolco department store at the now-defunct MJ Mall, until it closed.

Mark attended Saint Patrick Catholic School in Carlisle and then enrolled at Trinity High School in Camp Hill, where he graduated in 1976.

He did not go to college, a point he liked to emphasize in speeches or other public appearances later in life.

That wasn’t so much denigration of college training, said Tim Fatzinger, president of the United Way of the Capital Region and one of those who heard Butler’s thoughts on the topic recently, as it was simply an affirmation that there are many pathways to success in life.

The important thing, Fatzinger said Butler emphasized in his remarks, is that people be willing to mentor younger colleagues and associates they are working with, and give them opportunities to grow in their jobs.

Butler found his mentor, he let everyone know, in Morton Bernstein.

“I kid around that I went to the University of MGB – Mort G. Bernstein,” Butler told PennLive in a 2017 interview highlighting Ollie’s surge to the $1 billion mark in sales.

Butler first met the man who would become his “business father” and “merchandising mentor” as a kid fresh out of Trinity High School. He took a $2.20-an-hour job with a new lumber company Bernstein was launching in the late 1970s.

The stars didn’t align for the lumber start-up.

Sky-high interest rates, economic stagnation and then the nuclear scare at Three Mile Island had few people building homes in central Pennsylvania. Bernstein’s lumber yard was doomed, but a trip to New England would turn his fortunes around.

There, as Butler tells it, Bernstein encountered a discount retail chain called Building 19. Its retail premise was seemingly simple: Purchase close-out, name brand merchandise at the lowest possible price, then sell it with a modest mark up to price-conscious customers who crave deals and deep discounts.

It was also Building 19 that coined the catchy phrase, “Good Stuff Cheap.”

Bernstein, backed financially by local commercial real estate investor Ollie Rosenberg, who also became the cartoon face of the franchise, swung a deal with the company to bring both its business model and its catchy phrase to the Harrisburg area.

And on July 29, 1982, Butler was the fresh faced 20-something behind the register when the inaugural Ollie’s on the Carlisle Pike in Hampden Township rang up its first sale.

“We were rocking from Day One,” Butler told PennLive.

While Butler always was insistent on sharing credit for Ollie’s success, his friends on Monday didn’t want Butler’s humility to shadow his own business acumen: “Mark read a lot; he learned a lot, and he was a smart as any Harvard MBA I ever met, and much more successful than many of them,” said Kaminkow.

“Mark built a successful and enduring retail concept, assembled an incredible team, created thousands of jobs and delivered millions of bargains to our customers while delivering exceptional shareholder value along the way,” Ollie’s board member Richard Zannino said in the firm’s news release announcing its chairman’s death.

Several of Butler’s friends reached Monday noted Butler could have relocated anywhere as his chain and its customers took on a more national profile.

Sure, there were condos in New York City and Ocean City, Md. But Butler never left his Harrisburg-area roots, choosing to raise his three children outside Carlisle and eventually becoming majority owner of the Harrisburg Senators.

As former business partner Michael Reinsdorf, who brought Butler into the ownership of the Senators when Reinsdorf took a controlling interest in the team in 2007, put it: “He was Harrisburg. That’s who he was.”

Reinsdorf also noted the irony in the fact that Butler himself was still reeling from the death of Gregg Mace, the longtime ABC27 news sportscaster, entering this Thanksgiving weekend.

It was just about 10 days ago, Reinsdorf said, that he received a text from Butler – who succeeded Reinsdorf as majority owner of the Class AA Eastern League franchise here in 2015 – bemoaning Mace’s death.

Both men had to know this wasn’t something that was going to be top of mind for Reinsdorf, now the chief operating officer and president of the National Basketball Association’s Chicago Bulls. But his friend, Butler, thought he should know.

“’He was such a good dude,’” Butler’s message went, Reinsdorf said.

“And that’s the empathy that Mark had for people… Even though he’s a business legend with what he created at Ollie’s, he never bought into the thought that he was any better than someone else just because of that success.”

 

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