Aquinas' Pete Guelli '83 Appointed COO of Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres

Pete Guelli remembers a much quieter time in is his career as a business executive, back in the days he spent sequestered in a small office at Pittsford Plaza right around the time we were all wondering if Y2K was going to end the world as we knew it.

 

Having graduated from Aquinas High School and SUNY Brockport, then working 10 years for a Rochester-based marketing and consulting firm, the native of Walworth had just been hired by the Buffalo Bills for the newly created position of senior manager of Rochester operations.

 

“I was there by myself,” Guelli said the other day while the Bills were practicing at St. John Fisher University, a place that holds fond memories for the 59-year-old. Smiling at the memory of a simpler time, he said, “I’d like to go back to that office. It was great, and I didn’t realize how great it was at the time.”

 

Those were quieter days to be sure for a man whose rise over the past quarter century was as spectacular as the Y2K “scare” was in its ridiculous fraudulency.

 

Guelli’s is a journey that led him to work 11 years for the Bills, another decade as chief operating officer for the Michael Jordan-owned Charlotte NBA franchise, the past five years as chief business officer for the New York Giants, and now coming full circle with a return back home as Terry Pegula hired him in March to be chief operating officer of both the Bills and Buffalo Sabres.

 

“I never anticipated working in sports,” said Guelli, who majored in political science at Brockport. “So it wasn’t really even on the radar. I didn’t honestly know what I wanted to do.”

 

As a kid, Guelli was originally a Miami Dolphins’ fan, mainly because they were very good in the 1970s and he liked the color of their uniforms. But as he grew up, he came to realize his error in judgment and with most of his pals in Penfield being Bills fans, his allegiance changed.

 

At Aquinas he played baseball, football, some basketball and he even boxed. His time there “Was definitely a foundational experience for me. It was a great school. I think you just learn a lot in those kinds of environments and I think some of the greatest life lessons I’ve learned were in high school.”

 

Coming out of Brockport, Guelli took a job for “kind of a boutique consulting firm” named Giltspur and he worked with companies like Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, Xerox, and several others, including, eventually, the NHL and the NFL. That led to a conversation in 1998 with the Bills and Guelli asking if they needed any consulting on upcoming marketing projects.

 

“We did some small scale projects, and then the next thing I know they offered me a job because they were moving camp from Fredonia to here,” Guelli said. “They needed somebody that knew the market and that could come in and kind of seamlessly start that process. So that’s how it all began.”  

 

As he was starting from square one in his hometown, trying to cultivate and solidify the Rochester market in order to expand the Bills’ regional fan base and tap into its corporate sponsorship opportunities, former team executive and St. John Fisher grad Russ Brandon, who hired Guelli, told him the relocation of training camp in time for the summer of 2000 needed to be a key priority because that would be so important to the regionalization strategy.

 

“We weren’t sure what it was going to look like so we started talking to a number of potential locations and Fisher jumped up the ladder very quickly because they were going through a capital improvement process,” Guelli said. “And ostensibly they said, ‘Hey, we can build it with your input.’

 

“That was a game changer because you could get football operations to the table and say, ‘Hey, this is what we need the fields to look like, this is what we want the stadium to look like, this is what we’d like the locker room and the weight room to look like.’ That’s why we eventually decided on Fisher.”

 

Twenty-five years later, camp remains at Fisher because general manager Brandon Beane and coach Sean McDermott want it there and Guelli, who was hired to stabilize the top of the organizational chart for the Bills and Sabres following several years of volatility, said of being back, “It’s surreal. That’s a good way to describe it. Driving down the Thruway and then rolling onto campus and seeing the setup, it all comes flooding back. And that’s what’s really gratifying is seeing that it stood the test of time.

 

“To bring an NFL team to your home market and be part of that, and to have it still be here in Rochester is critically important to our business model - always has been, always will be. And I don’t think you can make it work unless you’re physically here. For me, having an NFL training camp in your hometown is exciting to begin with, but because it’s so important to our business makes it even that much more.”

 

When Guelli left the Bills after the 2009 season, they were in the middle of their horrible 17-year playoff drought, though that wasn’t the reason why he moved on. He got a call from a head hunter to see if he had any interest in switching sports and going to work for Jordan’s NBA franchise. Um, he did.

 

“I’ve worked for some incredible owners,” Guelli said. “Ralph Wilson, one of the founding fathers of the AFL; John Mara and Steve Tisch in New York, can’t get much bigger than that; and now Terry and his family. MJ is obviously different, he’s his own brand.

 

“That teaches you a lot with the level of obligation to handle yourself the right way in every circumstance because everything you do is bigger than even the team because you’re doing it for MJ, so a lot of pride that you want to be an advocate for him. He was gracious, considerate, smart, fair, everything you would want an owner to be and you know, he’s Michael Jordan.”

 

Guelli was asked to share a favorite memory of his time with Jordan, and not surprisingly, he pointed to the occasional times he played golf with the Basketball Hall of Famer and single-digit stick who usually had some hefty stakes on the line when he played.

 

“He signed my paycheck so he knew what my limits were,” Guelli said with a laugh. “Let’s just say he’s tough to golf with. He’s very competitive, he’s very good, and you can be playing your best and at some point, he will rattle you and turn the game around. So that happened on a couple of occasions. He’s just a competitive guy, doesn’t matter what he’s doing and that’s why I loved working for him.”

 

Guelli moved on to the Giants in 2019 and spent five years remodeling the business model and operations one of the NFL’s legacy franchises. Living near New York City was obviously exciting, but the opportunity to return home to the comfort and slower pace of western New York was too tempting to pass up.

 

His two children are grown. Gunnar is in Los Angeles working for the Chargers in the marketing department, and his younger son Grayson is in law school at Notre Dame. Now that Guelli and his Buffalo native wife Patty are empty nesters, it made sense that they return to Orchard Park.

 

“Reactivating was the easy part,” Guelli said. “We know the market, we lived in Orchard Park when we were here before. It’s the first time for my wife that geography and opportunity aligned for her. It was nice to be able to bring her back where she’s got a network and a lot of friends and she grew up a Bills fan so she couldn’t be more excited to be back. There were very few things that could have pulled me out of New York, but I don’t think there’s anything that could pull me out of Buffalo.”

 

So, is this the job that will take him into retirement? That’s still a little ways away, but he hopes to be with the Bills for the duration, especially at a time when the new stadium is being built, the downtown arena is getting necessary upgrades, and Guelli is trying to attract big events to Buffalo such as the 2028 NFL Draft.

 

“There’s a lot of things when you’re looking at opportunities,” Guelli said. “Ownership commitment is number one; you’ve got to have this incredibly committed group. You look at the brand, you look at the market, and when I looked at all those factors, I knew this was the right move.

 

“To come home and be a part of something as aspirational as what they’re building in Orchard Park right now with the new stadium, the opportunity with the Sabres and hopefully being a catalyst for the turnaround for that property, and then do it all for Terry and his family. I don’t think an owner can be more committed to a market than Terry Pegula is in Buffalo. That’s an exciting thing.”

 

-- Article by Sal Maiorana