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Pete Guelli helped bring Bills camp to Rochester. Now he’s the team’s chief operating officer

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Pete Guelli helped bring Bills camp to Rochester. Now he’s the team’s chief operating officer

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Pete Guelli remembers a much quieter time in his business career, when he was sequestered in a small office in Pittsford Plaza, back when we all wondered if the year 2000 would end the world as we knew it.

A graduate of Aquinas High School and SUNY Brockport, then having worked for 10 years for a Rochester-based marketing and consulting firm, the Walworth native had just been hired by the Buffalo Bills for the newly created position of senior director of Rochester operations.

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“I was there by myself,” Guelli said the other day as the Bills practiced at St. John Fisher University, a place that brings back 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 awesome, and I didn’t realize how awesome it was at the time.”

These were quieter days, to be sure, for a man whose rise over the past quarter-century has been as spectacular as the Y2K “scare” was in its ridiculous fraudulence.

From Thomas Aquinas to the Buffalo Bills: Pete Guelli’s Journey

Guelli’s journey has taken him 11 years with the Bills, another decade as chief operating officer of Michael Jordan’s NBA franchise in Charlotte, the last five years as chief business officer of the New York Giants, and now coming full circle with a return home when Terry Pegula hired him in March to be chief operating officer of the Bills and Buffalo Sabres.

“I never considered working in sports,” said Guelli, a political science major from Brockport. “So it wasn’t really in my plans. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.”

As a child, Guelli was originally a Miami Dolphins fan, mainly because they were so good in the 1970s and he liked the color of their uniforms. But as he grew older, he realized his error in judgment and since most of his friends at Penfield were Bills fans, his allegiance changed.

At Aquinas, he played baseball, football, basketball and even boxed. His time there “was a formative experience for me. It was a great school. I think you learn a lot in that kind of environment and I think some of the biggest life lessons I learned happened in high school.”

After leaving Brockport, Guelli took a job at a “sort of specialized consulting firm” called Giltspur and worked with companies like Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, Xerox and several others, including, later, the NHL and NFL. That led to a conversation in 1998 with the Bills and Guelli asking if they needed advice on upcoming marketing projects.

“We did a couple of small-scale projects, and then, before I knew it, they offered me a job because they were moving the camp from Fredonia to here,” Guelli said. “They needed someone who knew the market and could come in and start this process seamlessly. That’s how it all started.”

How Pete Guelli Helped Bring Buffalo Bills Training Camp to St. John Fisher

As he started from scratch in his hometown, trying to cultivate and consolidate the Rochester market in order to expand the Bills’ regional fan base and exploit its corporate sponsorship opportunities, former team executive and St. John Fisher graduate Russ Brandon, who hired Guelli, told him that relocating training camp in time for the summer of 2000 had to be a key priority because it 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 quickly took the lead because they were going through a capital improvement process,” Guelli said. “And they ostensibly said, ‘Hey, we can build it with your input.’”

“It was a game changer because we were able to bring the football teams together and say, ‘This is what we want the fields to look like, this is what we want the stadium to look like, this is what we want the locker room and the weight room to look like.’ That’s why we ultimately chose Fisher.”

Twenty-five years later, the camp is still at Fisher because general manager Brandon Beane and coach Sean McDermott want it to be, and Guelli, who was hired to stabilize the top of the Bills and Sabres’ organization after several volatile years, said of his return: “It’s surreal. That’s a good way to describe it. Driving down the Thruway and then coming onto campus and seeing the facility, it all comes flooding back. And that’s what’s really gratifying, to see that it’s stood the test of time.”

“Bringing an NFL team to their home market and being a part of it, and having them stay here in Rochester, is critically important to our business model — always has been and always will be. And I don’t think you can do that without being physically there. To me, having an NFL training camp in your hometown is exciting enough, but the fact that it’s so important to our business makes it even more exciting.”

When Guelli left the Bills after the 2009 season, they were in the midst of their horrific 17-year playoff drought, but that wasn’t the reason he left. He got a call from a headhunter to see if he was interested in switching sports and working 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, you can’t get any bigger than that; and now Terry and his family. MJ is obviously different, he’s his own brand.”

“It teaches you a lot about the level of obligation to behave the right way in all circumstances because everything you do is bigger than the team, because you’re doing it for MJ, so you take a lot of pride in wanting to defend him. He was courteous, caring, intelligent, fair, everything you would want an owner to be and you know, that’s Michael Jordan.”

Guelli was asked to share a favorite memory from his time with Jordan, and unsurprisingly, he pointed to the occasional moments he would play golf with the Basketball Hall of Famer and the single-digit stick that usually had big stakes on the line when he played.

“He signed my paycheck, so he knew what my limitations were,” Guelli said with a laugh. “Let’s just say he’s tough to play golf with. He’s very competitive, he’s very good, and you can play your best and at some point he’ll shake you up and turn the tables. That’s happened a few times. He’s just a competitive guy no matter what he does and that’s why I loved working for him.”

Guelli joined the Giants in 2019 and spent five years reshaping the business model and operations of one of the NFL’s storied franchises. Living near New York 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 marketing, and his youngest son Grayson is studying law at Notre Dame. Now that Guelli and his wife Patty, a Buffalo native, have left the nest, it made sense for them to return to Orchard Park.

“The reactivation was the easy part,” Guelli said. “We know the market, we lived in Orchard Park when we were here before. This is the first time my wife has found the geography and the opportunities that work for her. It was nice to be able to bring her back to where she has 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 are very few things that would have made me leave New York, but I don’t think there’s anything that would make me leave Buffalo.”

So, is this the job that will lead him to retirement? That’s a long way off, but he hopes to stay with the Bills until the end, especially at a time when the new stadium is under construction, the downtown arena is undergoing needed upgrades and Guelli is trying to attract big events to Buffalo, like the 2028 NFL Draft.

“There’s a lot to consider when you’re looking at opportunities,” Guelli said. “Owner engagement is the number one factor; you have to have this incredibly engaged group. You look at the brand, you look at the market, and when I looked at all those factors, I knew it was the right decision.”

“To come home and be a part of something as ambitious as what they’re building right now in Orchard Park with the new stadium, the opportunity with the Sabres and hopefully being a catalyst for the turnaround of that property, and then doing 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. It’s an exciting thing.”

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