Advanced Educational Products
Rank: No. 9
City: Buffalo, N.Y.
Web site
Chief executive: Scott Meacham
Workers: 30
2008 revenue: $7.8 million
2008 growth rate: 2%
Estimated 2009 growth rate: 2.5%
AEP got its start in 1992 as a home-based side project selling and distributing textbooks, says Meacham, who owns the firm with his business partner Ken Pronti. When the company secured a government contract with the General Services Administration in late 2000, though, the business had to go legit. “We had large trucks pulling up into the driveway of the house,” says Meacham. “We needed to devote ourselves full time to the business.” Now, the company has more than 2 million titles available, and can ship up to 600,000 books anywhere in the world on a day’s notice. AEP specializes in large quantities of books—50,000 copies of Moby Dick for a school, say, or maybe 50,000 unique books for a single institution.
