Steve Hilleard, CEO

Steve Hilleard has been CEO at OPI since January 2000. Originally a founding shareholder when the business was formed in November 1991, he stayed with the company when it was sold in 1997 to Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC, and led a management buyout of the company in August 2006 with co-director Janet Bell.

A former independent dealer, Steve has established OPI as the industry’s most trusted media player, providing insight and connectivity to office supplies executives in more than 100 countries via OPI’s magazines and supplements, online news and groundbreaking industry events. He is also a founding partner at OP Resource, a unique professional services firm for the global office supplies industry with offices in Chicago and London.

Steve is heavily involved with a number of industry charities, including co-chairing the Friends for Hope campaign on behalf of the National Office Products Council for City of Hope, fundraising for cancer research via the UK Climb of Life, and a number of charitable endeavours for the Worshipful Company of Stationers & Newspaper Makers, a City of London livery company founded in 1403.

While Steve has no formal journalism qualification he does have a wealth of experience and quite possibly the biggest address book in the industry. For those reasons – and because he’s the boss – a succession of Editors over the years have let him contribute articles to OPI (although we don’t tell him just how much sub-editing is required by one of our proper journalists before his work is fit for publication).