PPB January 2020

marketing for Gill Studios, Inc. But first Gerlach had to fulfill a childhood dream—to play pro basketball. After graduating from Kansas State in 1976, he was recruited by the Atlanta Hawks and played through the pre- season. When the team let him go, he moved to Lugano, Switzerland, where he played pro ball for a year for the European league. “It was a great education for a kid from Kansas to learn other cultures and that people are the same wherever you go in this world,” he says. “They may have a different culture and language, but you can relate to them.” He was one of two Americans on the team that traveled to play all over Switzerland and Europe. His time there also taught him the importance of teamwork. “All of my accomplishments in life have been because I was a part of a good team. I learned that you are a lot stronger when you have a good group of people with you,” he says. “One person can’t do everything a team can do.” Learning the importance of diversity and teamwork at an early age helped set him up for success in the decades and careers that followed. Gerlach returned to the U.S. and played through the pre-season with the San Antonio Spurs before a back injury forced him to leave the sport. Back in Kansas, he considered his options and remembered learning about promotional products in college during a presentation by guest speaker John Crofoot from distributor Western Associates, Inc. Gerlach’s family was friends with the Gilman family, owner of Gill Studios, so, after a meeting with then-company president Mark Gilman, Gerlach joined the company. The job was interesting and challenging but after four years he was ready for another turn in the road. With a brother in the oil business, he moved to Boston and then Chicago in the early 1980s to work for Koch Industries, an oil and gas company. But Gerlach soon missed the promo industry. “The oil business was not personal,” he remembers. “It was all about dollars and cents.” Enter George Matteson, Jr., CAS, (then head of supplier Gemaco Playing Cards in Independence, Missouri, and a 2002 Hall of Fame inductee) who recruited him back to the industry a year later as head of his company’s sales and marketing department. But Gerlach came full circle four years later when Gilman invited him to return to Gill Studios to launch the supplier’s new marketing department. Gerlach was charged with building the company’s first website, producing its annual catalog and developing a formal process for evaluating and introducing new products—all new initiatives for the Shawnee Mission, Kansas-based company. He credits his many successes there to his team—one he built from three people to eight. “It was not a real big team but a really good team,” he says, recalling the building of his team as one of his proudest accomplishments. “We were pushing the limits of where the company wanted to go—collegiate licensing, the website, social media, distributor promotions. I think Mark trusted me, but I got some pushback from others. Yet, we had to continue to evolve. You don’t need leadership if you don’t want to change. It’s easy to manage the status quo, but because change was necessary, that’s where the leadership comes in.” Some of the highlights of his time at Gill Studios were the lessons he learned from Gilman about true customer service (“You don’t worry about one order, you worry about lifelong relationships,” Gilman told him) and the lifelong friendship he built with Paul Lage, MAS, who nominated Gerlach for this Hall of Fame induction. He hired Lage and they worked together for about four years; Lage left and later returned to Gill as president. “He helped me learn how to deal with people,” Gerlach says. “We helped each other and built good teams.” In 2018, Gerlach retired after 35 years at Gill to focus full time on a new passion: serving as mayor of Overland Park, Kansas. His love of volunteering (from 1984 to 2017 he served on PPAI’s board of directors and on many committees, task forces and work groups, including as president of Young Executives of Specialty Advertising Association) led him to serve on the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce where he joined the City and State Affairs committee. Within a year he was asked to chair the committee and began attending City Council meetings. Then he was asked to run for the City Gerlach with his PPAI board class: (from left) Eric Ekstrand, MAS+; Larry Stadtmiller, MAS; Janelle Nevins and Mike Burns, CAS. PPAI’s Top Awards | FEATURE | JANUARY 2020 | 33