Shopping at Ollie's Bargain Outlet is like a treasure hunt, says CEO, chairman, president and cofounder Mark Butler. “This is the insulating factor that I tell all the investors: It’s virtually impossible to duplicate my shopping experience online.”
hirty minutes from Harrisburg is a small strip of land in the middle of the Susquehanna River. It is roughly 470 acres, a diminutive place with a disproportionate amount of infamy. a relief valve at the nuclear power plant there on Three Mile Island malfunctioned
It also put a chill on real estate projects in the area—bad news for a young Mark Butler, who was a manager at a small chain of lumber stores owned by a local man named Mort Bernstein. No one wanted to build “next to a nuclear reactor that almost blew up,” Butler recalls. The broader U.S. economy didn’t help. In the early ’80s, the country was in its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Around 1981, Bernstein closed the stores.
Bernstein suggested bringing in Ollie Rosenberg, a local commercial real estate investor. In the end, Rosenberg would contribute several things. He arranged a $300,000 loan from the local Cumberland County National Bank and would also lend his name and appearance to their new business. Put frankly, he looked a lot like Albert Einstein, and a caricature of Rosenberg became the company logo. On July 29, 1982, the first Ollie’s opened in Mechanicsburg, just across the Susquehanna from Harrisburg.
But Butler wanted to. And he got his opportunity when Bernstein, ill with heart disease and cancer, turned over the CEO role to him in 2003 and looked for a way to cash out. That year Dollar Tree and SKM, a small private equity firm in Stamford, Connecticut, acquired 70% of Ollie’s, valuing it at roughly $65 million. “We were trying to find situations where we thought we could triple our money,” says David Oddi, then a SKM partner.
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