Bill Schaberg
Editor’s Note: In early December we received an email from Bill Schaberg, inquiring about the year of the St. Louis IRgA convention. That email led to a casual conversation with Schaberg – who is a winner of the Bukovsky Award, IRgA’s highest honor – about his career. We thought other IRgA members would enjoy the conversation. The transcript below is edited for length and clarity.
Our family’s company was formed in 1946 when dad (William P. Schaberg) got home from the war, and it was called Copy Company in Norwalk, Connecticut. I joined the company in 1969; I was the fifth employee. I had graduated from Fairfield U in ’66, and I was in the Air Force for a couple of years from ’67 to ’69.
We had the first CAD plotter in New England, as I remember. In 1988 or ’89 the Southeast Regional Reprographics Association
William P. Schaberg
asked me to come to a convention and tell people about CAD plotting because nobody knew what the hell they were doing. That was my very first stand up in front of people, and honest to God, I did not sleep a single wink the night before. I was so terrified!
In 1989 we changed the name to Reprographics Plus, and somewhere around that point I became the majority stockholder. Actually, in 1989 a lot of stuff happened. We joined ReproCAD (a precursor to today’s RMX Network) because we wanted the cheap discount they had negotiated on the Versatec plotter. It was a $95,000 machine, and those guys were buyng it for 70 or 72 grand. It cost five grand to get into ReproCAD, so it was a no-brainer – give these guys five grand and save 20 grand!
We also had the first Océ 9800, in August 1995. There were four of them installed that day. The first installs in the United States of America. And because I was on the East coast, they always claimed I was the first one installed.
The 9800 was a big, big deal. Océ had flown a group of people to the Netherlands to premiere that machine, and I was one of those people, even though I just had this little shop. I looked at that damn thing in operation for less than five minutes and went and sat down. I said, “Tell me what it costs. We need one of those.” I didn’t have any questions beyond that, to tell you the truth.
We priced the 9800 prints the same as bluelines, which was shocking to a number of people. We were told we couldn’t make any money doing that, but we actually did make quite a bit of money doing that, and we gave up bluelines shortly after that.
By that time I had become very involved in ReproCAD, and I eventually became president.
One of the things I did was I got Mohan and Suri, the guys who put ARC together, to join ReproCAD. And what they basically did was cherrypick most of our great members, and bought 'em out. We sold Reprographics Plus to ARC in 1996. And then Mohan and Suri wanted to leave ReproCAD and they wanted me to come with them and do for them what I'd been doing for that group. So I became one of ARC’s four vice presidents.
I stayed with them until they went public in 2003.
We were also involved with the IRgA, and my dad was on the board for some years. I remember we went to the IRgA convention in St. Louis [in 1989], and this guy flies in from France. He's got a whole bunch of questions about how we do business in the United States of America. He's the managing director for a company just outside of Paris, called DEBS organization. So Jean Pierre and I spent the afternoon together. He had a whole boatload of questions, but there was a bunch of 'em I couldn't answer accurately without numbers and things out of different magazines. Anyhow, I went home and I made a whole box full of stuff for him.
So when my future wife Sara and I went to Paris the next time, he met us at the airport and took us to the hotel. The guy who owned the company liked flying helicopters. So Jean Pierre and his right-hand woman and the boss flew us in a helicopter outside of Paris to some 12th century monastery that had been turned into a restaurant to lunch. I mean, this guy couldn't have done enough for us.
Later, when those of us in ReproCAD bought color plotters to do large-format color, I organized a meeting and Jean Pierre said, “Can I come over and sit in on that meeting?” I said it was OK with me, and he came over and took all sorts of notes and went back and started going large-format color copying in Paris.
We have been good friends ever since. His daughter even came and stayed with us for two summers. We’ve stayed in touch about all kinds of stuff.