Work Is the Course of Busy PC Supplier : Success: Co-founder of mail order firm seldom takes time off. She even honeymooned at a company dinner.
Even when she takes time off, Patricia Gallup produces.
As co-founder and chief executive of one of the nation’s largest technology mail-order companies, PC Connection, Gallup dislikes down time. When she finally eased up and did a little Irish folk dancing five years ago, she met the man she would marry.
But wedding vows this summer didn’t dampen Gallup’s enthusiasm for work. She and her husband honeymooned at a company dinner in Ohio.
“I work all the time. That’s a sacrifice. I’m not complaining, but you have to make choices, and that is the choice I made,” she said. “I don’t like to have a lot of free time.”
Even PC Connection’s foundation was laid when Gallup was supposed to be taking it easy.
In 1982, she met David Hall while hiking the Appalachian Trail. She joined his family’s audio business in Marlow. They anticipated the personal computer boom and soon started selling software and eventually hardware.
They did not want to move from rural Marlow, population 655, but they knew the town, a two-hour drive from Boston, could not support a computer store. So Gallup and Hall opened a mail-order company to sell other people’s products.
They invested $8,000, took out a 2-by-3-inch advertisement in a computer magazine called Byte, and waited. The telephone started ringing three days later and hasn’t stopped.
Sales blossomed from $233,000 in 1982 to $300 million today. PC Connection takes orders as late as 3 a.m. for delivery by noon.
“We wanted to offer the convenience of a computer store that was just around the corner to everybody in the United States,” Gallup said.
The company is one of New Hampshire’s largest private employers with 750 workers.
Gallup and Hall each own half of PC Connection. She would not discuss their net worth but noted that distributors receive marginal profit on computers and software. She said the company reinvests extra revenue.
But money is not why Gallup is in the business. She relishes participating in a technology that will make workers more productive and “change the way people think and do business.”
The daughter of a union organizer, Gallup does not like corporate hierarchy and knew the names of all her employees until the payroll topped 450. PC Connection built homes during the 1980s real estate boom and sold them to its workers at cost. The company donates 1% of its profits to local charities, such as baseball teams and the United Way, and it gave the Marlow area money for an ambulance.
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Gallup measures her words. She hesitates about discussing her personal life, and when asked about it, speaks in terms of her company--of waking at 3 a.m. with ideas that keep her up, and of being unable to remember the last time she spent a whole week not working or thinking about it.
She said she does not regret working so much or that she didn’t marry until this summer at age 41. The newlyweds honeymooned sea kayaking in Maine and then flew to a company dinner in Wilmington, Ohio, where the company has a shipping operation that relies on Airborne Express.
Duty and responsibility long have been with Gallup. As a child, she baby-sat to help with family expenses. She worked for three years after high school to earn money to attend the University of Connecticut, where she studied anthropology.
There, she worked full time as a waitress, campus secretary and nurse’s aide. She and other students later started a company that surveyed archeological sites. In addition to doing the books, Gallup did site work.
What she learned on the job and in class helped her with her own business.
“Anthropology is the study of man, so it is quite appropriate for business,” she said. “And I think I learned a lot about what makes people tick and how they learn to use tools.”
