By JIM KEVLIN


Before Jim Baldo was an entrepreneur, he was an “intrapreneur.”
Even though he worked for other people – he rose to vice president, sales, for Raleigh bicycles’ U.S. operations, then for Zippo – he always demonstrated the qualities that held him in good stead when he partnered with his nephew, Jim Johnson (now the county rep from Fly Creek), in developing the Banjo Radio Group.
“Intrapreneurs are free spirits,” Baldo said the other day, seated at a table next to the mural of a hacienda in one of his latest ventures, The Fiesta Mexican restaurant in Oneonta’s Clinton Plaza.
“They create jobs,” he continued. “They create wealth. They treat other people’s businesses as if it were theirs.”
Even when he worked for his dad at Pat’s Cycling, starting at age 11, he wanted to be a salesman and, after graduating from SUNY Oneonta with a general studies degree in 1971, he took an inside sales job with Raleigh in Boston.
Those six months working the phones, he’ll tell you, is the only time in his life a job was actually work. At year’s end, however, he was sprung: His boss, Bill Quigley, called him in, handed him a salesman’s satchel and told him, “Get it filled with what you’ll need.”
His territory: New England, outside Boston’s Route 128 belt, 42 clients in all. Each day, he’d drive out to the farthest point on a route, then work his way back to headquarters. He’d repeat the cycle every three weeks. In between, he’d seek out new business.
Quigley told him, “This isn’t a 9-to-5 job. If you treat it as such, you’ll fail.” Baldo was undeterred. To him, his new responsibilities meant “freedom.”
In a couple of years, he’d built his client list to 60, and was given all of New York State outside the city. He located himself in Syracuse, using I-81 north and south and the Thruway east and west to good effect.
Soon, he was sales manager for the East Coast, based in Secaucus, N.J., then the West Coast.
Julie Rosenthal, who mentored him in Boston, was a salesman all his life, but Baldo wanted more: “I liked the challenge of managing people, of making things grow, making things happen.”
In the early ‘80s, AT&T was pushing 800 numbers, and Baldo and two other sales managers proposed developing an inside sales staff that would call customers between the three-week cycle, serving the account and offering “in-pocket specials” that were only available over the phone.
The proposal called for a dozen hires in California, a dozen in New Jersey and a half-dozen in the Midwest, so it was an expensive commitment. “G-D it,” his old boss Quigley told his protege when he heard about it, “I hope it will work.”
It did, and when Raleigh was sold to Huffy, Baldo was moved to Dayton, Ohio, as vice president for sales.
Dissatisfied with the new company’s way of doing things, the 17-year veteran looked around for another opportunity, and soon found himself in Bradford, Pa., home of the Zippo Manufacturing Co., the cigarette-lighter maker. It was 1988, and Jim found the company was still operating as it had in the 1950s. (Hold that thought.)
Zippo was in 120 countries (there are only 195 in all), and used to summon its sales reps to London annually to strategize on the coming year. Instead, Baldo went out to the sales reps, getting a sense of the individual markets.
He stood on the Great Wall of China, sailed on a Chinese junk in Hong Kong harbor and took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
One coup came in 1992, Zippo’s 60th birthday. Collectors had discovered the lighters were date stamped – a World War II lighter, for instance, would bring $5,000 – and Baldo capitalized on that. The anniversary promotion was huge. RJR/Nabisco alone ordered 3 million units.
When Baldo joined the company, Zippo had just topped $60 million in sales; a decade later, it was grossing $168 million.
Then, “I turned 50.” His first marriage had dissolved; he remarried, and he and wife Jacki were looking for a change. (He has two children, Josh, of West Oneonta, and Jessica; she has two children, Steva, a recent SUNY Albany grad, and middle-schooler Jordan, who helps out in the restaurant.)
About that time, 1998, Baldo got a call from his nephew Jim Johnson – his mom, Marge Johnson of Oneonta, is Baldo’s sister – who had spun off his apprenticeship in magazine ad sales at Cooperstown’s Curpier Co. into his own ad agency.
“Uncle Jim,” said Johnson, a radio aficionado from his high-school days, “let’s buy a radio station.”
Said Baldo, “Jim sent me the information. He sent me the numbers. And it just made sense.”
Again, WKXZ, a 50,000-watt station – one AM, two FM channels – was being operated as if it were the 1950s. The nephew handled operations, automating and streamlining; the uncle handled sales.
Soon, the pair added Oneonta’s WZOZ, then four more stations in Delaware County. Their broadcast footprint expanded into 11 counties, enough to attract national-brand advertisers.
Four years later, the partners sold the operation at the top of the market to The Pilot Group, a national broadcasting chain.
Since, Baldo’s entrepreneurial tendencies have been in full flower. As he and Jacki built a house in Oneonta, they hit it off with their contractor, Rick Guerrero, and soon were partners in a 50-lot housing development on Winney Hill Road; 35 homes have been built there.
The Baldos also bought Clinton Plaza, the commercial shopping center at the west end of Oneonta’s Main Street that had limped along since Urban Renewal of the 1960s, and soon had achieved 100 percent occupancy in the 23 storefronts.
They actively recruited tenants. McLaughlin Shoes, brought in from Norwich, recently moved to smaller quarters, but Baldo reported he’d just closed a deal with an alternative-healing concern to fill that space.
In 2008, again with Guerrero, who had a background in restaurants, Baldo partnered in the venerable Italian Kitchen, which the Avenzato family had turned into a local institution over 35 years.
That same year, he helped his son partner with Elena’s pastries, which moved to Clinton Plaza. And he opened Oneonta’s sole Mexican restaurant.
“Oneonta has been very, very good to me and my family,” he said, eyes flashing, with the kind of force you would expect from an entrepreneur.
There are different strategies to sales, but Jim Baldo comes down on the side of “relationships. We’re ingrained all our lives to say ‘no’ to salespeople.” Relationships overcome that.
And he brings that spirit to the Fiesta: “People who come in here are my friends.” It was a Saturday afternoon, and he named a few couples – regular customers – who he expected to come to dinner that evening.
As for the future, “everything I own is for sale – for the right price.” Perhaps, but you can be pretty sure, whatever the future holds, the former “intrapreneur” will be doing something.