ABOUT JIM:
Jim Rohrlack attended St. Patrick High School in Chicago-the oldest all boys Catholic High School in the United States and remains very active in the St. Patrick community today where he is a mentor to students in the school's incubator program. This allows Jim to help create and innovate products and actually help bring them to market.
St. Patrick is where Jim launched his journalism and sales career. Where he wrote articles for local papers for St. Patrick High School. When people got to know him, they saw that he had the gift of gab and asked if he wanted to sell newspaper subscriptions. Some 30+-years later, he is still in the publishing industry and has had the pleasure of serving clients of all types in print, digital, radio/tv and billboard signage.
Beginning in the newspaper industry, Jim learned all the aspects of the publishing process from print and mail to running a subscription sales department to how to build revenue and make publisher's profitable at the Chicago Suburban Times.
He worked his way up through classified advertising sales for three years and was promoted to display advertising sales.
With a dream to become a Baseball play-by-play announcer, Jim interned in 1994 with the Geneva, IL-based, Kane County Cougars in their operations department.
After attending the 1994 baseball winter meetings in Atlanta, Jim was hired on to become the play-by-play announcer for the Yuma Desert Dawgs. To do that, he was asked to sell all forms of advertising. He managed a sales team of five who sold billboard, day of game program and radio advertising for the Golden State League of Professional Baseball.
In 1997, Jim moved back to Chicago and worked as a free-lance reporter for the Chicago Tribune and several other local papers, which he did until 2006.
In 1998 Jim was hired on full-time by North Palm Beach, FL based-LC Clark Publishing as an Account Executive for it's flagship publication, Draperies and Window Coverings where he started with an account base of 45 clients and took it to 150 by 2001. Jim became the National Sales Manager for D&WC and In this role he created and developed special sections for the interior design and textile industry within the publication. Sales grew by 75% while the housing boom was reaching it's heights.
Adding to those duties, he also was an account manager for Interiors & Sources, which was a trade publication with a circulation of over 50,000 that served the contract interiors market- featuring clients such as Steel Case and HON.
In 2003, Jim was promoted to Associate Publisher of D&WC and oversaw all print and mail instructions and did the road-map for the title. In addition Jim managed several domestic and international accounts such as Spartanburg, SC based-ADO, China based, Ta-Chen and Cotati CA based, Redi-Shade. By the end of his run in 2010, his territory had grown from $200,000 per year to over 1-million in sales.
In 2005, Jim began work on another LC Clark publication, American Football Monthly. It is a publication that was near and dear to the ownership's heart and they had Jim calling on clients such as Gatorade, Reebok and the National Dairy Association.
In 2010, Jim began work on AAA publications with a circulation of over 18-million with one in every four US households receiving a AAA publication. Advertisers include Weather-Tech and My Pillow in a territory that continues to thrive.
Jim is married to his wife, Amy of over 10-years and has one son, Henry. He lives on the far Northwest side of the Chicago in Edison Park.
Jim is a voracious reader of current events, US history, and economics. He's an avid Cubs, Blackhawks and Purdue fan, a team he adopted upon meeting his wife in 2006 as she is a 1994 Purdue grad.
You can contact him anytime at (847) 809-6931.