25 Jul BCD’S Burgess retires from 44-year IT industry career
Jeff Burgess, Chief Executive Officer and BCD Founder Jeff Burgess has officially announced his retirement following his 66th birthday – after 44 years of working at the IT company.
Burgess began his computer career back in 1979 after landing a warehouse job at Tek-Aids Industries, an IT computer distributor that carried brands such as Altos, Wyse, and Okidata. Within months, he was moved to the sales desk, and within six years was named Vice President of Sales.
After leaving the company years later, he went to Elek-Tek, the Chicago mega-retailer, helping kickstart their corporate sales division. Burgess was responsible for Elek-Tek’s gaining a single-tier distribution agreement with Unisys Corporation, in order to sell their Goldstar OEM personal computers directly to Unisys’ mainframe customers. After Elek-Tek, Burgess moved to Hartford Computer Group (Inverness, IL) and, worked closely with IBM, leading the team helping to land the $200M State Farm account for Hartford, along with multi-million-dollar accounts with General Electric and many of the GE Capital companies.
After twenty years of working for others, Burgess opened Burgess Computer Decisions, Inc. (BCD) in 1999 as an IT Value Added Distributor, working directly with Ingram Micro and Tech Data as inventory providers, blind-shipping goods directly to his customers. Burgess leaves BCD as the worldwide leader in purpose-built video surveillance storage systems with over 175,000 recorders of all shapes and sizes capturing video in 91 countries and countless vertical markets.
BCD captured many industry awards and recognition during Burgess’ tenure, being named among Inc. Magazine’s Top 5000 companies five times, Computer Reseller News’ Solution Provider 500 six times, including CRN’s Fast Growth 150 three consecutive years, Crain’s Chicago Business Largest Privately Held Companies four times and what Burgess was most proud of, being named a combined ten times from Chicago’s Best & Brightest Companies, Best & Brightest Companies in the Nation, and Best Places to Work in Illinois.
“I leave having tremendous respect for all those team members committed to our purpose, and knowing we all mutually made a positive difference in people’s lives, both inside and outside the organization,” said Burgess.