Albert J. Speh Jr. has been bucking business trends for more than 45 years. While many companies are laying off workers, his Downers Grove-based May & Speh Inc. is enjoying unprecedented growth.
“Nineteen ninety-three was by far our best year in history,” says Speh, chairman and co-founder of May & Speh, well known in the computer industry for its innovations in what is called outsourcing.
Just as the electric company sells power, May & Speh sells computer time and the newest programming updates to companies such as Sears, Ward’s, AT&T and other Fortune 500 clients.
The company’s most aggressive growth area at present is its direct marketing division. By pinpointing customer buying habits, May & Speh helps clients “mail smarter,” says Speh, who has enjoyed a front-row seat throughout the data processing industry’s explosive growth.
Indeed, he and co-founder Roland May, who retired 25 years ago, came up with the idea for selling tabulating services to Chicago businesses in 1947, before the computer age.
The idea was slow to catch on in corporate America, but today outsourcing and computerized direct marketing are favorite buzz words for the 1990s as cost-conscious corporations discover it doesn’t make sense to invest millions in high-tech hardware that is out of date almost as soon as it’s out of the package.
Instead they rent the talent and technology from companies such as May & Speh and Ross Perot’s former company, EDS Corp.
In its data center, May & Speh operates the Hitachi GX8420, the most muscular mainframe computer available to the industry. It’s capable of 168 million calculations per second without error, doubling the capability from a year ago.
“I remember our first computer, which we bought 40 years ago. It took three to four seconds to multiply A times B and made mistakes,” Speh says with a note of wistfulness.
He is sitting behind a handsome rosewood desk in his restful, forest green office, with a plant-filled atrium at one end. The plaques on the wall tell of a distinguished career.
One announces his 1993 induction into Chicago’s Fenwick High School Hall of Fame, where he joined other notable alums such as Sears’ chairman Edward A. Brennan, Ward’s chairman Bernard F. Brennan and Notre Dame Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Lattner.
Another plaque names Speh the 1993 winner of Loyola University’s Damen Award for service to the community and the university. Again he was in impressive company: investment banker William McCormick Blair, Borg-Warner’s James Bere, Material Service Corp.’s Henry Crown and Chicago attorney Albert Jenner Jr. were among past recipients.
With thinning white hair and conservative dark suit, Al Speh appears the quintessential corporate patriarch. Only the wild floral tie, straight off the drawing board for a tropical fruit punch can, reveals the man behind the well-tailored image.
The Spehs have three children, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren (with one more on the way), but Claire says her husband, 74, has no plans to retire. He’s in the office by 7 a.m. at the latest and seldom leaves for their Oak Brook home before 4 p.m.
His son Lawrence of Naperville, who has been president for the past year, now runs the day-to-day operation of the company. Speh gives his son full credit for the company’s recent growth. “He’s restructuring it into a modern company, with a good management team,” says Speh, admitting that technical know-how in the computer industry passed him by years ago.
“My granddaughter knows more about computers today than I do,” he says with an impish grin, pulling a dimestore calculator from his top desk drawer to show his personal data processing tool of choice. “This is what I use. I’ve had it for 20 years.”
On the other hand, he surrounds himself with high-tech experts and knows how to ask the right questions.
“The techy people who have worked for my dad over the years know they have more knowledge about the bits and bytes of the business, but they also know he’s going to ask the hard questions that are going to get the right answer. They know they are not going to be able to buffalo him,” says Lawrence Speh.
Al Speh frequently joins Larry and other May & Speh executives for meetings with major customers. “They know I’ve been around for 46 years. It’s the stability that they feel about our company by my presence,” Al Speh says.
He has long been known as an innovator in the data processing industry, although he attended only a few night school classes after high school. In the mid-l950s, May & Speh installed the Chicago area’s first electronic computer, a massive Univac File Computer, and has always operated the most advanced technology.
“That’s been our policy-to get the newest and the latest computer equipment. That’s how we attract the best people in the programming systems areas. Fellows and gals want to work on the latest piece of hardware,” says Speh, recounting his early years in the industry.
During World War II, Speh ran the IBM punch card operation in Atlanta for the Army, keeping track of the personnel records for half a million stateside troops from seven southern states. He was a tireless worker. “In 1944, I took only two days off,” he said.
Returning to Chicago after the war, he turned his boundless energy loose on dreaming up a sure-fire business success idea. A child of the Depression, Speh knew the value of hard work. “If you wanted to go to the movies, you had to scrub the back porch to get the dime,” Speh recalls of his childhood. His father had designed the terra cotta work on the Wrigley Building and golden dome of the Garfield Park Conservatory, but hard times halted construction in Chicago in the early 1930s, and the senior Speh was out of work for seven years. So after the war, Al Speh Jr. was going to have to make it on his own.
The Jolly Boy Confetti Co. was his first entrepreneurial adventure. With his partner, Rollie May, he came up with the idea of recycling data processing punch cards by shredding them into confetti. That company floundered after one month when a prospective client pointed out that the sharp edges of the card could put out someone’s eye.
But Al Speh was not so easily deterred. “He’s a hard worker and a hard player and never gives up,” Rollie May said in a phone interview from his Arizona home. He and Speh have remained good friends and golf buddies since May’s retirement in 1968.
The young entrepreneurs opened May & Speh, a data processing service center, on Nov. 16, 1947, borrowing the $3,000 in startup money from Speh’s brother-in-law and paying it back in two years. Speh is proud of the fact the company still has its first client, Sears Roebuck and Co. (both Speh and May had formerly worked for Sears in the tabulation department, where they first met).
Sears’ chairman Edward Brennan gives Speh the credit for the long-running partnership between their companies. “The only way a person can start a business and build it into an extraordinary success is to be very responsive to the customer. Al Speh is a man of great integrity and a true entrepreneur. He has been a pioneer in the data processing industry,” Brennan says.
Others agree. According to Henry Hoke, publisher emeritus for Direct Marketing Magazine, “May & Speh has been an innovator in helping companies build and maintain their customer files.”
Speh also gets credit from competitors for his approach to business. “I’ve always found Al to be a very straightforward, honest businessman,” said James D. McQuaid, president of Metromail Corp. of Lombard, which compiles information for the direct marketing industry. “He has been a very good influence on younger people in the industry-showing them how you can compete effectively and still be fair.
“May & Speh as a company is best known for its history of doing what they say they’re going to do. The management there is someone you can count on, particularly Al. He’s brought consistencey to the company over 40 some years.”
While setting the pace in technical expertise, Speh and Rollie May hung on to somewhat old-fashioned business values.
“Instead of going out and financing big deals for buying equipment, we kind of did it the mom and pop way,” recalls May. “We paid for things as we went along, in good times and bad.” They missed some opportunities to expand, “but that kind of thing backfires on companies, too. People get so far in debt. That was never a problem for us,” May says.
According to Speh, his company never borrowed money until building its current corporate headquarters overlooking I-88 in Downers Grove. Nor did they try to cultivate political influence to build business.
“Rollie May and I were happy with what we were making. We didn’t have a desire to become a big organization,” Speh says. “In the early days we had 62 employees, and 60 of us bowled together on Friday night.”
Last year May & Speh sales topped $40 million, up 30 percent from the year before, but Speh still knows most of his 250-plus employees by name.
Print room manager Kenneth Bartecki has worked for Speh for 36 years. “I guess that says it all,” Bartecki says . “Al Speh is kind and generous and a hard worker. When you do a good job, he’ll tell you. He lets you know you’re important to the company.”
When another veteran employee, Eddie Ciaciuri, died last year, he had worked for Speh for 47 years. Ciaciuri never learned how to drive a car and didn’t want to move from the old Chicago neighborhood when May & Speh relocated to Oak Brook in 1972 (and to Downers Grove in 1988), so Speh sent a car for him every day during his last years with the company. “I told him, `You’re not going to quit until I quit,’ ” Speh says.
Such fierce loyalty to his employees was also part of the package when Speh and May decided to sell their company in 1968 to Computing and Software Inc. “We felt we needed more technical help,” Speh says. Two years later May retired to Arizona, but Speh stayed on to manage the company, keeping all the employees. “That was part of the agreement when we sold,” Speh says.
System Development Corp. acquired May & Speh in 1972, but Speh and his employees continued to run the company. “When I worked for other companies, I had 11 different bosses in 10 years. They’d send in an accountant to watch the beans. The value of the stock was all they were interested in,” Speh says.
Finally, he decided enough was enough and bought back the company in 1978. “When Rollie and I had owned the company, someone would come up with a good idea,” he says. “We’d have a cup of coffee, talk about it and decide to do it.”
Working for other companies, “you’d have to come up with a 500-page report and a five-year forecast. By the time the decision was made six or eight months later, we were no longer enthusiastic about the idea,” Speh says.
He has always known that May & Speh could have been an EDS or a Ross Perot. “But we wouldn’t have had such an enjoyable working relationship with our employees or with our clients. I have been satisfied,” Speh says.
“I only wish I were 20 years younger because the growth of this company in the next few years is going to be fun to watch.”
