Happy Anniversary to Us!

Thirty-five years. If you asked me 36 years ago if I would co-own and manage a business this long I would have said you were nuts. After all, I was just 25, when Neal (who was a decrepit 28) and I cofounded ADC with a whopping $35,000 in start-up capital. My share was my life’s savings. I gave us six months before we ran out of funds. I guess I’m still waiting for that to happen. 

I can remember much of it like it was yesterday. We rented a dilapidated 700-square-foot storefront in Copiague, New York. Today our plant lunch room is bigger. We started with 31 items: a selection of leather and nylon EMT holsters and the instruments that go in them.  Today our catalog includes more than 3,400 products. About a dozen of the original items remain in our product line.

Like today, those 31 products were globally sourced and inspected and assembled in our New York facility. I was the lone assembler, warehouseman, and shipping clerk. Neal typed the packing lists and invoices with a Smith Corona typewriter. He did the books. Or book. Early on we would process a whopping five or six orders, then with nothing left to do, take a mid-afternoon nap.

When we began we sold direct to the EMT world. It was 11 years before the internet so we did it with a mail order catalog and by placing ads in the leading EMS magazines. Within six months we were the market leader. Unfortunately, we greatly overestimated the market size for holsters. And though our business plan didn’t include selling through authorized dealers, before long a number of them reached out to see if we would consider selling our products wholesale. We said yes, and that was the beginning of the ADC you know (and hopefully love) today.

Over the last 35 years we’ve achieved many milestones. Here are some of my personal favorites:

There’s been a lot of blood, sweat, tears and laughs (and some really bad hair) along the way.  A special thank you to our staff, our vendor partners, our resellers, and our customers, for making it all possible.