New World, Ordered

Jirka Rysavy came to America from Eastern Europe 11 years ago with no money, no understanding of capitalism, little knowledge of English, and no idea what to do next. Today, after bringing order and scale to a once-fragmented industry, he has a $1-billion business

FOUNDER: Jirka Rysavy, Czech immigrant with no business -- or even capitalist -- background, now 41

MARKET ENTERED: Corporate office-products supply. Mature, fragmented industry with thousands of local suppliers

STRATEGY: Acquire independents and consolidate and professionalize operations

RESULT: Pretax profits of $5.2 million on sales of $621 million in fiscal year 1994; estimated sales of $1 billion in 1995. Largest company in industry

The company was for sale, and Jirka Rysavy was there to buy it. But he was not having an easy time.

It wasn't that the executives sitting around a table at Trick & Murray early in 1992 were unreasonably demanding about their company's sale. After all, Trick & Murray sold office supplies -- not the sexiest line of work. As merchants of clipboards and paper clips, the owners didn't expect to see Michael Eisner sweep into the boardroom, trailed by investment bankers bearing spreadsheets and cellular phones.

But neither had they expected someone like Jirka Rysavy (pronounced Yer-ka Ris-a-vee). He was tall, bearded, and as skinny as a scarecrow; his mumbled, halting English often made him difficult to understand. Just eight years earlier he had left his native Czechoslovakia for the United States, following an earlier visit in which he had bummed around the country, sleeping in bus stations and on park benches. It was hard at first to take him seriously. "He was not," says Ted Nark, then Trick & Murray's vice-president of sales, "a Fortune 500 kind of guy."

Nor did he run a Fortune 500 kind of company. At $31.6 million in sales, Rysavy's company, Corporate Express, was not much bigger than Trick & Murray itself, which had sales of about $15 million. "We were pretty skeptical," says Nark. "Corporate Express was by no means a major player in the industry. It all seemed a little improbable."

Not for long, it didn't. Where the Trick & Murray executives saw a marketplace offering only marginal profits, Rysavy saw a major growth opportunity. If Staples had grown large by selling office products to consumers and small companies, he would grow as quickly by becoming the dominant supplier of office products to larger companies. Already his merchandising strategy had revived an earlier acquisition in Denver. He also owned the industry's most powerfully computerized sales-and-inventory-tracking system, developed by a Czech friend, Pavel Bouska. Rysavy promised he would grow Corporate Express to $300 million in three years.

He proved to be wrong. In fact, he had promised too little. Today, three years after acquiring Trick & Murray, Corporate Express expects sales of more than $1 billion, up from $621 million (with a pretax net of $5.2 million) last year. It is the largest company in its industry. Chris Vroom, an analyst with Alex. Brown & Sons, expects Corporate Express, now a publicly owned company, to reach $3 billion in sales by the year 2000.

What Rysavy, who is 41, brought to Trick & Murray were lessons he had taught himself while running a tiny office-supply store in Boulder, Colo. -- a business not unlike millions of retail operations on Main Streets throughout America. But Rysavy never meant to stay small for long. He used that operation as a hothouse for testing ideas that could fix problems not only at his own business but also at dozens of other office-products suppliers around the country that he planned to acquire one day.

Rysavy sold the same staplers and steno pads as everyone else. What was different -- very different -- was that he figured out a far superior way of doing it.

Few paths to the kind of success Corporate Express has achieved are as unlikely as Rysavy's.

On September 21, 1982, Rysavy went to a downtown Prague bus depot to say good-bye to his boyhood chum Bouska, who was headed to West Germany to escape the Communist government that had detained him several times as a dissident. Friends since they enrolled in an experimental mathematics school in Prague at age 11, the two had become increasingly close over the years. Rysavy himself had been investigated three times by the secret police, suspected of dissident activities. He and Bouska had talked frequently about leaving for freedom in the West. Now Bouska was doing it, having managed to secure one of the hard-to-get exit visas that the government granted for travel abroad. In days Bouska would ask for political asylum, then sit in a West German refugee camp for six months, and finally settle into a software-development job in Munich.

Unlike his friend, Rysavy had traveled outside the country, as a hurdler in international track and field events. In 1979 he used his sports connections to secure an exit visa that enabled him to take a six-month trip around the world. Half that time he spent in the United States. Although he spoke almost no English, he worked small jobs to earn a little cash. He lived on $3 a day. "I ate bread," says Rysavy. "I slept outside in parks or in airports or bus stations."

By then it was clear that Rysavy's sneakers took him in directions that few others traveled. He welcomed long stretches of time alone, practicing meditation. In 1982 he lived alone in a shed high in the mountains on the Czech-Polish border, seeing only a few people over the course of nearly a year. "I ran with the bighorn sheep," he says. He spent half of each day in meditation and the other half picking berries and other plants and attending to his basic needs.

"To learn to be alone without being lonely is very important," Rysavy says. "You realize what you're really about and what's there only as a facade. You can rethink all the rules of existence and exercise the choice of taking them as yours or not."

Rysavy left his homeland for good in 1984 after earning a master's degree in engineering. "I hated the system," he says. He did not officially defect, as had Bouska; he simply extended his visa and never returned. Rysavy headed to Boulder, a college town, to the mountains he loved and to a milieu that embraced nonconformists.

In Boulder Rysavy first worked in a print shop for $3.35 an hour. In three months he had saved the $600 he needed to start a company. Living in the mountains had given him a strong interest in the environment, so he began selling recycled paper. His company, Transformational Economy, or Transecon, made $100,000 in pretax profits in its first year. Rysavy invested $30,000 in a new enterprise, this time to satisfy another of his interests -- the strict vegetarian diet he follows. In its first year, he says, his health-food store reached profitability on $2.5 million in sales.