All About It

By Terry Tush

When Spears School of Business entrepreneurship students walked into their Dilemmas and Debates class on a Tuesday afternoon in February, they received more of a lesson than they expected. Randall White had been invited to share how he’d overseen the growth of Tulsa-based Educational Development Corp. (EDC) from a small company struggling to keep its doors open to being named the top-performing publicly traded company in Oklahoma in 2016.

What you see is what you get with the outspoken White, and many students were shocked when the 75-year-old began sharing his story, which includes getting fired when he was 40 years old, taking control of EDC when it was losing nearly $1 million a year, and having the fortitude to tell Amazon to take a hike in 2012 as the internet website was growing into a multi-billion-dollar sensation.

White’s success is inspiring to Oklahoma State University students as well as anyone who knows a feel-good story when they see one.

“I just think good things happen to me,” says White, who grew up in Keystone, Okla. (“That was before they built the Keystone Dam. My original house is now 60 feet under water,” he says.).

“I’m very fortunate, and I’m very thankful and appreciative that a little skinny kid from Keystone, Oklahoma [could] wind up recently being named the top-performing company in Oklahoma, and the fastest-growing company in the publishing industry.” The Oklahoma honor came from the 2016 Oklahoma Inc. ranking of the top public companies in the state.

But it hasn’t been easy. With four job offers in hand after graduating from OSU with an accounting degree in 1963 (see sidebar, Page 73), White accepted a job with Mid-America Pipeline (MAPCO) in Tulsa. After a short foray into owning and running a freight business, he was named the chief financial officer at Nicor Drilling during the oil boom of the 1980s. When a new president took over, White saw the writing on the wall, but he was still shocked to be fired.

“After about a week or two you get up in the morning and you shave and you break out into a sweat, and you think, I’m 40 years old, I’ve got two children, and I don’t have a job,” White says. “I probably have an ego about the size of Dallas and half of Fort Worth, so it didn’t really make me question myself.”

But it did make him seriously consider his future. That led him to apply for the controller job with Educational Development Corp., where he was told that he was overqualified and would be paid only half of what he was making at Nicor. With few options, he accepted the position.

“Getting fired was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me,” he says.

EDC, a small publishing company that sells children’s books, was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy — losing $5 million in five years on $6 million revenue, White says — when the chief executive officer was ousted, and White took over in 1986. “It was about like being named captain of the Titanic, because we were sinking fast, he says.”

It was a rough start. Early in his tenure he called all 22 employees together on a Friday afternoon to tell them there wasn’t enough money to make payroll.

“I said, ‘Here’s the plan: We have some money, and I know some of you have written checks on your checks. So for those who have done that, come up and get your check. If some of you can wait until Monday, we’ll probably have more money coming in. And then all the managers and officers, we’ll get ours last.’ Well, I got ready to get out of the way for people to bolt and run over me on the way to the door, and nobody flinched. I’m very proud of that. So Monday, money came in and it never happened again,” White says. “That was the start of it.”

White oversaw EDC’s growth over the years to 77 employees and a stock-market valuation of $18 million in 2012 before making one of the most daring moves of his career. Amazon was purchasing EDC’s books from a distributor and offering them online for a substantial discount. While this was nice for readers, it created issues with other retailers carrying EDC’s titles and irritated the company’s large network of independent sales agents who sold its books from their homes.

“We were shooting ourselves in the foot,” White said in a story published on the front of the New York Times Business section (“Daring to Cut Off Amazon,” April 15, 2012, okla.st/2tybwGZ).

So the small publisher from Tulsa pulled nearly 1,800 children’s books away from Amazon.

It was a bold move, but one that White looks back on now with great pride. EDC’s sales were about $35 million in 2015, nearly doubled to $65 million a year ago, and in the most recent fiscal year that finished in February increased to $106 million. White says he expects this year’s sales to be $150 million to $200 million.

The company he took over 31 years ago has 220 employees in its Tulsa building and 27,000 independent sales agents around the world selling the popular Usborne and Kane Miller lines of children’s books.

“The company has totally changed in two years,” he says. “The building, technology, capital, personnel have all changed to meet the volume of business.”

In January 2016, EDC moved into a new 40-acre complex with 414,000 square feet of office/warehouse space, which it purchased from the Hilti Corp. Hilti leases back 187,000 square feet from EDC.

“So we have 227,000 square feet in this building and 100,000 over [in our original building], and it’s full. We’ve got 20 million books in inventory,” White says. EDC sells to book stores, museums and toy shops, but its fastest-growing division is direct sales. Nearly 27,000 people — mostly mothers looking to add discretionary income to the family household — sell from their homes to parents, schools and libraries.

But White is far from satisfied, even at the age of 75.

“It’s a fun place to work. We have fun every day,” he says, pointing out that his mother worked in the EDC office until three days before she died at the age of 95.

“I was at the bowl game in Arizona with OSU [in 2015] and my brother called me Sunday morning and said she got up to put her shoes on. He said, ‘Where you going, Mom?’ She said, ‘I’ve got to go to work.’ He said, ‘No, it’s Sunday.’ So she lay back down, and an hour later she died. She worked every day until she was 95. It’s that type of company. I’m very proud of that.”

But it wasn’t fun last fall, the busiest selling season for EDC. The company was inundated with book orders, and at one time had more than 125,000 orders to ship. They were struggling to get 8,000 orders out the door in a day, and customers were not happy when told that their books would not be delivered by Christmas.

“It was a pretty ugly time for us,” White says. “I take the worst [phone calls], the very worst ones. What you do when the person calls and is cursing and screaming at you because they didn’t get your product, I’m happy about that. Are you kidding me? How many people care that much about what we’re selling that they will call and scream at you because they didn’t get it?

“So I talked to them, let them rant and agree with them, and after a while I say, ‘You love these things so much. Do you know we have a program that allows you to sell them yourself?’ Before I get off the phone, I sign them up to be a sales consultant. That’s the quality of product that we sell. Our books are the best in the world.”

And that’s the goal that keeps White coming to the office every day.

“Last year we were named the top-performing company [in Oklahoma], and I’d like to do that next year and maybe the next year too,” he says. “It’s pretty fun to be number one in anything.”