You might say that Florence LaDue (born Grace Maud Bensel in 1883) had a difficult childhood. Her mother died from childbirth, and her father, who was a criminal lawyer and later a judge, could not care for her, so he sent her to live with her grandparents, who worked on a Sioux reservation in Minnesota.
In those early days of her life, Florence could be seen alongside her Sioux brothers and sisters riding horses bareback, swimming in the creeks, marveling at the stars, and basically learning the ways of the Sioux.
Her father feared she was becoming too much of a tomboy, and took her back at age twelve to attend school. Although later in life she stressed the importance of education for women, at age seventeen she ran away from home and school to join a Wild West show, where she performed roping stunts and tricks that she had learned on the reserve.
While roping upside down on a horse in Chicago in 1905, she caught the eye of itinerant cowboy Guy Weadick. They soon become a couple, performing for audiences across North America and Europe. They even had a stint on Broadway in Wyoming Days and did the vaudeville circuits and Wild West shows alongside Will Rogers. LaDue performed solo, but also with her husband.
Less than five feet tall, she could lasso five galloping horses at one time and retired undefeated as World Champion Lady Fancy Roper after performing for thirty-one years! Accounts of those who knew her said she would often say, “Look your best, do your best, and be your best.” As tough a competitor as she was, she was elegant and ladylike and always wore a dress or skirt unless she was on horseback.
But Florence knew more than just trick roping. She learned the business of the business she was in. Her husband, Guy, was credited with starting the Calgary Stampede in 1912, but history tells us that she was the businesswoman behind the Calgary Stampede, which today is an annual rodeo, exhibition, and festival. This ten-day event held every July in Calgary, Canada, attracts over 1 million visitors annually. Guy and Florence came to Alberta from the United States to not only start the Calgary Stampede, but also to instill their values, creativity, and eye for talent. Because of her childhood experience on a Sioux reservation, she insisted when they started the Stampede that the First Nations people should be an active part of the exhibition.
As I was writing this chapter of the book, I could only admire what I have learned about Florence. Her tenacity for learning the business she was in inspired me, as I believe it is so important for each of us to get down to the nuts and bolts of how to run a sound, ethical, and profitable business.
Florence was a talented athlete, businesswoman, wife, partner, and cowgirl. When she died in 1951, Guy placed these simple words on her gravestone: “A Real Partner.”
After dental school my husband and I returned to Austin, where he joined an established orthodontic practice. I had wanted to be in a bigger city because I thought moving to Austin was probably a career disaster for me. Back in 1982, Austin was a sleepy, laid-back university town. But I quickly got a job at a local advertising agency—The William Lacy Company. The agency was founded by an early Austin advertising pioneer—Bill Lacy. Bill had a nice big office, with a huge ficus tree in the corner that had two leaves on it—because he chain-smoked all the time, filling the room with a cloud of smoke that left that poor ficus tree barely clinging to life.
In those days, Bill ran the entire company on several yellow pads. He had a pad for expenses and a pad for income. After a few weeks with the company, I went in and asked him to teach me the basics of agency finances. He was thrilled, because no one had ever shown any interest before. He would point out key ratios to watch, profitability targets, people costs, and the all-important process of getting paid—collections. When he saw that I was catching on, he got so excited—sometimes he would have two or even three cigarettes going at the same time. I’m not kidding.
Bill called me his beehive girl because I was always involved in everything, networking and buzzing around. I remember him calling me into his office one day saying that Texas American Bank had a last-minute project and I was going to have to run like a spotted ape to get it done. I did.
The agency was full of characters. The production manager was an old Army drill sergeant. I’ll never forget that when you went into his production room, the carpet actually stuck to your feet because of years and years of spray mount residue on the floor. The biggest innovation of the day was slide shows. We had a guy who produced multi-projector slide shows where images moved and slides appeared in sync with the music. We watched his shows and thought we had seen it all.
Soon after I went to work for The William Lacy Company, one of the partners in the firm, Lee Gaddis, told me he would introduce me to my first account, so we drove out to the Texas Hill Country and I met Murry Burnham, founder of the famous Burnham Brothers Coyote Calls. His store was full of archery equipment, traps, knives, and gun safes. But Murry’s real claim to fame was his homemade coyote calls. He was shrewd enough to have become the most famous coyote caller in the country, a fact that he promoted prominently in his annual print catalog. Coyote callers all over the world waited with bated breath each fall for the catalog to arrive in the mail. My job was to update the last year’s catalog with new products and get it printed. Some of the products were pretty strange, especially something called “Buck Magnet.” I read the label and the main ingredient was doe urine!
Murry always had a wild look in his eye and sometimes he just disappeared for days. I guess he was calling coyotes.
I was horrified by the whole thing. I was even more horrified when I learned that Murry kept a collection of live rattlesnakes in the storefront window. I was a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Texas, and here I was hawking doe urine to hillbillies. But I pulled my cowgirl boots on and we got ’er done! Guess what Murry’s son was named? Hunter, of course.
I had some other less colorful clients and I learned how to work with them all. I learned that it was critical to build trust at the highest levels of clients’ organizations as was possible. It takes time, but if you can build real trust, it can last for a lifetime. When I could build relationships at the upper-management levels, then our direct clients that we worked with on a day-to-day basis could relax a bit because they were not ultimately responsible for our success or failure.
By this time, I had hit my stride at the agency and was really learning to be a player in the advertising business. Doyle Fellers, president of the firm, taught me how to make ideas—how to brainstorm. Doyle was a talented presenter and spoke professionally all over the country. His favorite problem-solving technique was what he called “Brown Paper Sessions.” He would cover the conference room walls with butcher paper, almost from floor to ceiling, using every available surface. He would invite clients in and we would help them define their goals, find market opportunities, and solve problems for their companies. Doyle could have been a great snake oil salesman, because he was fearless. He’d walk into the room—with maybe twenty people attending—stare at the blank walls, and say, “This is going to be so much fun!” He would start to ask questions, probe, write, and laugh. People loved it.
Doyle could read the crowd. When he would uncover an idea that our firm could help execute, he would probe for how much support it had. If he found that the leadership was interested in a topic, he’d walk away and come back to it later and set it up to be their idea. Doyle taught me to smell opportunity—something I can still do to this day.
I quickly learned how to be an active player. I used my Myers-Briggs training and would chime in to pull ideas out of the introverts and try to throttle back the extroverts. I would take an idea and present it from a thinking perspective, and then again from an intuitive perspective. It forced people to step out of their comfort zone and think about different perspectives. Every idea was written down, acknowledged, valued.
What was so special about his approach was that the participants were almost all from our client’s organization—people who worked together every day. But they typically worked in silos, in their own departments. No one had ever asked for their opinions before. They had never had an opportunity to brainstorm, to collaborate and talk openly about problems and opportunities. They never thought much about the big picture. They riffed off of each other’s ideas and left laughing, energized, and thinking that Doyle was brilliant. We would come out of those sessions with tons of work and bigger budgets. When it was done the room looked like the workshop in the movie A Beautiful Mind. We would always go have cocktails afterward and do a postmortem.
I worked my network and developed a few opportunities with some of the people I had known at Baylor in Dallas. A few of my connections had become managers at smaller regional hospitals and they needed marketing help. We did some wonderful campaigns and I hit it off with the marketing people, the physicians, and management teams. Before long I had five hospital accounts—in mid-market Texas: Abilene, Midland, Gonzales, Sherman, and Temple.
When I married my first husband I was young, naïve, in love, and I did not think it through. But after my daughter, Rebecca, was born, it was clear we had conflicting agendas. He adamantly opposed my pursuing and continuing my business career. I was adamantly dedicated to having a successful career and family. This was one of those times when you confront your principles and learn how committed you are to them. I will not bore you with the details, but we decided to divorce and go our separate ways. So, for all of you single moms out there, I have walked in your shoes.
I learned so much during my first years in the advertising business. I proved that I could help produce great work. My experiences in art school, with The Richards Group, with Baylor Medical Center and my Leadership Dynamics buddies gave me the insight and tools I needed to define problems and then guide creative teams to wonderful solutions. This is where I found my passion for the business. It all suddenly came together for me. This was when I fell in love with the advertising business. Nothing was more exciting than to see smart people working as a team and do work that none of us could have accomplished individually. I loved the creative process and still do to this day.
Along the way, I ended up in a relationship with Lee Gaddis, one of the partners at the agency. We had been good friends and enjoyed working together for years. But one day, something clicked, and before long, we were married. It is an interesting relationship because you could not find two people who are more different. I am an extrovert; he is an introvert. I’m big picture; he sweats the details. We learned that those differences enabled us to support each other in powerful ways. Lee had two boys from a previous marriage: Ben, who was older than Rebecca, and Sam, who was younger. Of course this complicated things, but we worked through them day by day, step by step.
Before we married, Lee warned me that when you are falling in love, you have on rose-colored glasses. He said, “The reality of our lives will be their dirty little socks and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches smeared on the floor of the car.” I accepted the challenge.
But it was a tough time for all of us, learning to bring a very young family together. We put our heads down and the kids thrived. We did amazing things with them, but our favorite thing to do was to load everyone up on Friday afternoons and head to South Texas to the little town of Cotulla. Lee’s family is an old respected ranching family. These South Texas people were stoic compared to the gregarious folks I grew up with in East Texas. They were largely of German ancestry and firmly believed that the less said the better. Gabby people were frowned upon. Talk about tough!
To give you a sense of who they were, my husband’s great-grandfather, George Washington Maltsberger, was born six years before the Alamo fell. At fourteen years old, he left the farm he grew up on in Tennessee to pursue a colorful life as an adventurer, pioneer, Indian fighter, soldier, and stockman. He led one of the migrations of Mormons to Utah as a young man. When he decided to leave Tennessee and move to Texas, he blazed the trail riding two days ahead of his family to scout the best route. His father, accompanied by George’s fiancée, Roxana Allen, followed behind in their covered wagon.
Each night George would pick a place to camp, and he would carve a single heart on a tree to mark the spot. Then Roxana, who was an adventurous and skilled trail leader in her own right, would lead their band to the campsite a few days later. She would follow the hearts that George had left her, marking them with a second heart, along with a bar to connect them, so George would know how far she had proceeded in case she failed to appear at camp—which she never did. It was in this fashion that they ultimately made their way safely to San Antonio, got married, and started raising cattle, using the Double Heart brand that had brought them together in love, and in life.
Lee’s dad, Harry Gaddis, was a pharmacist and a bank director as well as a working rancher. Harry had passed away several years before we married, but his mother, Isabel Maltsberger Gaddis, was still very active and we became great friends. She was an expert horse trainer in her younger years, was a teacher, writer, and a folklorist of the vaqueros of the Texas brush country.
She taught me how to hunt for Indian arrowheads on the ranch, and I developed an almost mystical sense when I was close to finding one. The kids loved visiting the ranch and riding around in a big hunting rig, shooting guns, chasing jackrabbits at forty miles an hour across salt flats, and hearing spooky ranch stories over a campfire at night. I make a mean bananas Foster on an open campfire, straight from a recipe I learned as a girl from a waiter at the famous Brennan’s restaurant in New Orleans.
Another tamale story: We were spending one Christmas in South Texas. My husband went over to a little store that had a reputation of having the best tamales in the county. He was surprised to find the store closed, unheard of on Christmas Eve. He walked around to the back of the store, where the owner lived in a small apartment. He knocked on the door and the owner quickly emerged. “Why is your store closed?” Lee asked. She replied with frustration, “Every year I make tamales and all of these people come and buy them all. So the next year I make more and the people come and buy them all and want more. So I make more and they buy them all. There is just no satisfying them! So I quit.”
We did wonderful things with the children. Sunday nights were Mexican food nights, and we would sit at this funny little family-owned restaurant and have “pun-offs.” One kid had to start with a pun, and then each had to try to top it. The one who could not summon up a pun ended up being the goat. We taught them to make up a story and then stop about a third of the way through. The next kid had to continue the story, and the third one had to finish it. They really learned to improvise. I exposed them to a few nasty jokes, which were harmless but made them wildly popular with their friends. And they all learned the lost art of the practical joke.
After Isabel passed away, we sold the South Texas ranch and purchased a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, just about an hour northwest of Austin. We registered the Double Heart brand in Burnet County, just as G. W. Maltsberger had done in Bexar County in the 1860s. Our Texas Longhorn cattle proudly wear that same brand today, some 150-plus years later. In fact, you may not know that the term “branding” that we use in advertising today comes from cattle brands.
Today, the Double Heart brand stands for enduring passion, forging new trails, safe passage, and journeys motivated by love. And the Double Heart stands for a legacy of courageous cowgirls who won’t take any guff, who face down risk on a daily basis, know how to walk the walk, take care of business and, most importantly, how to survive no matter how great the obstacle or how great the challenge.
The South Texas ranch, my godfather’s rice farm, and the Double Heart Ranch have been an important part of my life. I’ve learned so much by being close to the land. The ranch is very much a working ranch. Our Texas Longhorn cattle are beautiful. The breed comes from cattle brought to America by Spanish missionaries in the early 1500s. Many of the missions failed, and the cattle went wild and survived. Thousands were driven up the trail to Kansas after the Civil War. You have probably seen the movie Lonesome Dove. Lee’s grandfather was one of those cowboys. By the late 1920s the breed was almost extinct. A heroic effort went into saving the longhorns and they graze at our ranch today as a symbol of Texas pride.
I have lived a life of remarkable contrasts. A few years ago I had the honor to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Later in the day I caught a plane home to Texas and drove out to the ranch. I stopped to pick up groceries and, as I waited in the checkout line, I heard two men talking about stock prices—livestock prices. I asked them if the market was up or down, and they happily reported it was up. So there I was with a foot in two very different stock markets.
After years of successfully building client relationships, profitable business, and empowered teams, I became frustrated with the overall direction at the agency. We were doing OK work, but I knew there was a better place to be—the intersection between outstanding creative and work that produced specific, tangible results. I had a few teams already doing it, so I was confident that it could be done. But I wanted the entire agency to put a marker down committing to a higher standard.
So with a small band of insurgents, I developed a new business plan to do just that. We focused on the kind of creative work I was doing for my clients. We wrote the proposal, ran all the numbers, and I finally presented it to our president, who went down the hall to his office to read it in detail. Later that afternoon, he came into my office and told me he would not support my plan, that it was too risky and too expensive.
I left the office fuming, humiliated, and perplexed. The next morning, I walked into the office and quit. I proposed a deal so that I could take my hospital clients with me and compensate the agency by paying a percentage of earnings for several years. Doyle knew I had him over a barrel because he knew he could not keep those clients if I left. No one else had the hospital expertise that I did. So he agreed. I learned another powerful lesson: Always negotiate from a position of strength. I felt pretty strong when I walked out of the office that day.
This was in 1989 and the Texas economy was in terrible shape with the savings and loans crisis and many of the banks failing. Real estate wasn’t worth the land it was built on. Getting new business was like pulling hens’ teeth. I had a $16,000 IRA. In those days you had ninety days to transfer IRA funds into a different bank account, so I used that as a float to hire two employees, rent a small office, and buy a typewriter and some furniture. We did not have a fax machine, but some guys down the hall thought my assistant was cute, so they let us use theirs.
At the time, starting my own company seemed like an extremely risky move. I really believed in what I was doing, and so I leaned on my cowgirl legacy, bet on myself, and made the leap. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared, but as John Wayne once said, “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.” (I did get the money back into the IRA account in just under ninety days and avoided the penalty.)
A few months after I started the company, Lee and I were having dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. He was goading me as only he can. He said the last thing the world needed was another little advertising agency and asked me what I was going to do to differentiate my business. I started talking about the intersection of creative and results and winning awards. He stopped me in my tracks and called bullshit on me. I had a glass of wine and tried again, only to be shot out of the sky like a dove dropped with a twelve-gauge shotgun. I had another glass of wine and was getting pretty mad. Finally, I burst out, “Damn it! I want to do kick-ass work for clients who want to kick ass!” He got up and grabbed a paper napkin from the bar and wrote down what I said. He handed it to me and said, “That’s your business plan.” That napkin is framed in our lobby at T3 today, and that unorthodox mission statement has never changed. Our “Kick Ass” mission statement has been a powerful guide in keeping us on one simple but aspirational path.
Our agency, T3, started to grow pretty rapidly. We picked up Prime Cable, selling cable subscriptions in markets as far away as Alaska. We won ESPN’s top national campaign for that work the first year. We won two national ADDY Awards in our first few years in business. And our work was making the cash register ring for our clients. This was exactly where I wanted the business to be.
I remember when the Prime Cable marketing team came to our office to interview us about working with them, and I heard the phone ringing a lot more than normal. When they left, I asked my assistant what was going on with all those calls. She smiled and said, “Oh, that was me calling myself. I just wanted the office to seem busy.” She was a cowgirl.
Our first real growth at T3 came from me drawing on my health-care contacts. Marketing hospitals was a relatively new game, and very few advertising agencies had any real credentials. By developing increased expertise in this narrow field, I quickly became more powerful by building a competence that very few other people had. And during the rough economy between 1989 and 1991, hospitals were some of the few attainable clients who had sizable budgets.
Gradually my confidence emerged as assertiveness as I realized that I was probably the most knowledgeable person in Texas about marketing hospitals. There were only one or two people in the state who competed with me in this highly specialized field. I made friends with the people at the Texas Medical Association, who referred me all kinds of business. I was often asked to present to different hospital continuing education programs, which I loved because it rapidly grew my network.
We had one client, East Texas Medical Center (ETMC) in Tyler, Texas, whose major competitor, Trinity Mother Frances Hospital, was literally right across the street. If our client opened a women’s center, Mother Francis would do the same. If ETMC got a helicopter, Mother Francis would soon have theirs in the air. A well-respected hospital consultant told me, “If Mother Frances put a yellow submarine on the front lawn, ETMC would have theirs out on their lawn in a few days.”
We worked our referral network and soon represented a large hospital system in virtually every major market in Texas. I purposefully restricted my client base to Texas, so I could fly out in the morning to see our clients and get back that evening to be with my family. I could have easily grown our business way beyond Texas because of our specialized expertise, but this was the time that I realized I could manage the size and scope of my business to fit my family needs. I did not always make it home for dinner, but rarely missed reading books like Goodnight Moon to the sleepy children at bedtime.
When I started T3, I wanted it to be a “marketing think tank,” not an advertising agency. That’s where the T3 name came from: The Think Tank. We saw a lot of clients trying to solve business problems with advertising when there were better alternatives than just another ad. So we began to build a portfolio of “idea” people not traditionally found in an advertising agency. We brought in architects, psychologists, strategists, and presentation experts—all bringing different points of view to the table. It was an exciting time. Looking back, I see this as a major pivotal point in my life. Defining ourselves as a “marketing think tank” was clearly a power play that led to real innovation that was ahead of its time.
Two early examples of think tank solutions are emblazoned in my memory.
The first one is when a couple of guys came to us who owned check cashing stores across Austin. The purpose of these stores was to serve people who simply didn’t have traditional bank checking accounts. Most of them couldn’t afford the bank fees and were living paycheck to paycheck. Our client’s stores were named Money Box. After we put our think tank approach to work, we realized that the customers they were seeking rarely bought or read a newspaper. Many had no automobiles, and didn’t listen to the radio. Television was out of reach because it was cost prohibitive. Aha! We put their marketing dollars to work by converting their storefronts into large, dimensional structures depicting twenty-dollar bills emerging from the rooftops. The visibility and personality, plus a refresh of the interiors, gave the stores a reputation of being a reliable and safe place to do transactions. Business took off like hotcakes! Mission accomplished.
The second story is about a company called US Brick. During a new-home building boom in Texas, customers had a choice of brick brands. Most people didn’t even know there were brick brands. A brick was a brick. T3’s think tank philosophy went into high gear. We hired one of Texas’s best mural artists to hand paint their delivery vans to look like giant bricks. He even put sand in the paint to create a brick-like texture. They were like driving billboards all over the state, and we even used them to pull into trade show conferences and display brick samples out of the backs of the vans. This idea earned one of the early National Gold ADDY Awards that I mentioned. Once again, award-winning creative thinking intersected with success for our clients.
Around 1993, a friend from my college days at the University of Texas who was working at Dell Computer Corporation asked us to consult on one of their direct marketing programs. Dell had the same problem that most direct marketers at the time had, a lousy database full of duplicate names and bad addresses. This was way before the sophisticated database programs we enjoy today were available, so most direct marketers cobbled together their lists using a variety of third-party vendors. We really did not have that much data management experience at the time, but we did not mention that to Dell.
We made recommendations for some quick, fairly easy fixes, and we also made some long-term suggestions on consolidating vendors. And, while they did not ask us to do so, we came back with our Trojan horse—some creative ideas for direct mail campaigns that we thought could improve results. They engaged us to address the short-term fixes and to test our creative ideas. The campaigns did well and we started to get more work. A lot more work.
Within just a few months the workload expanded rapidly and got a lot more complex, so I asked my husband, Lee, who had his own marketing consulting company at the time, to come help with strategy. Lee and the guys at Dell hit it off, and I ultimately talked him into joining my company. Over the next year we did hundreds of direct mail projects for Dell. We did lots of off-site planning sessions at our ranch just north of Austin. The Dell teams loved to get out of their cubicles, come to the ranch, and work and play hard. Skeet shooting, beer drinking, card playing, late-night storytelling around the campfire with red wine flowing freely. (No one was allowed to drive home; we literally padlocked the gates.) There were late-night poker games as well!
A quick aside: We had a guy working for us who was a great chef, and he cooked at these events. He also was a frequent winner of the poker games. A few years ago we removed some furniture at the ranch and discovered an ace of spades stuck into a crack on the underside of the card table! We always thought he was a skilled player, but maybe not!
The relationships we developed brought a lot more business. At this point we were really functioning as a think tank. The work we were doing was not something that would come out of a typical ad agency. In 1995, working with Dell’s senior marketing managers and Vijay Mahajan, from the University of Texas business school, we created the Dell Marketing Academy—a university-level course designed to teach the unique Dell business model to Dell marketers and salespeople. Dell faced a cultural challenge because they were hiring some of the top MBAs from the best Ivy League schools in the business. But those newcomers were often assigned to work with salespeople who had just graduated from Pflugerville High School a few miles up the road. We helped define the direct sales model and taught it as a core business strategy that everyone could understand. The MBAs all thought they had the answer and it turned out that the Pflugerville guys understood it better. It was a simple idea—go for share, not margin. It took a while for everyone to get on the same page. The classes were taught every other Friday afternoon at a nearby hotel meeting room. The original plan called for the course to last about three months. It went on for two years.
T3’s success gave us a lot to celebrate, and since my birthday was April 1, we decided that we would own April Fools’ Day in Austin by throwing a huge party and inviting all of our clients, vendors, media representatives, friends, and business associates. Clients would come in from all over Texas. It was a huge affair with big tents, a different theme each year, lots of food and drink, and a big band. One year April 1 fell on a Sunday, so we had a huge brunch complete with a gospel choir. The April Fools’ parties put us on the map as a major player in Texas.
Dell asked us to take over production of their small business catalog. We hired about thirty people and had the operation up and running in ninety days. I recall being at a small designer dress shop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and on the table was one of our catalogs. It was at that moment that I really understood the magnitude of what we were doing. We were touching almost every small business in the United States every month. It was a huge revenue driver for Dell. It was a massively complex production with hundreds of products in each catalog, extremely detailed technical specifications, and prices that changed every month. Rail cars arrived at one end of the printing plant with massive rolls of paper for the presses. Tractor trailers departed, fully loaded with catalogs, to all of the major postal distribution centers across America.
In 1996, Dell started selling computers online. Their business simply exploded. A year later, online sales were running at $3 million per day.4 Now IT managers could look at their monthly catalog to understand the options, and then go online to configure a computer to meet their unique needs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without having to put up with a pushy salesman from Texas.
We watched it all unfold before our eyes. We predicted that the Internet would someday be at the center of all marketing activities. Some clients and staff looked at us like we were crazy. “Well, crazy is as crazy does,” said Forrest Gump.
It was all new. There was no one to teach us. So we did the cowgirl thing. We hunkered down and learned it. We adopted cc:Mail, one of the first e-mail platforms. We were the first to learn how to use online sales results to make the print catalog more effective. We were the first to build a configurator in an online ad for Dell so that buyers could price their components in real time. We could even directly code to the Dell site and could change pricing in an online ad on the fly.
Dell had grown to become almost a third of our business, and we knew the danger of having a client portfolio that was out of balance. We knew the risks of pursuing Dell’s interactive business. But we jumped on it like a duck on a June bug. For Dell, we were a proven partner, we already had all the assets because of the catalog, and we could see the vision and opportunity to be in on the ground floor of the Internet.
In 2002, we opened an office in Manhattan because we were buying lots of interactive media for Dell. We had to do it because no one in Texas knew squat about purchasing interactive media. There were no big business publishers in Texas. We found a team in New York who were considered experts at the time and hired four of them to run our New York office.
Over the next six years T3’s relationship with Dell continued to grow. We were recognized with supplier awards and earned larger opportunities within the organization. We developed a strong sense of trust with our Dell clients. We were never the “lead” agency that did national advertising. We were always in the direct marketing or interactive disciplines, which was a good thing because we watched Dell go through five or six different national ad agencies over the years.
In fact, we gradually achieved more status and respect as the bigger agencies fell by the wayside, and we started doing national campaigns for new product launches. Our last big campaign featured real Dell small business customers. We invited them to New York for a celebration and surprised them with ads running on the big screens in Times Square. They were thrilled! I remember watching those people standing in Times Square taking pictures of themselves up on the big screens.
At this point our Dell business was growing so fast we could barely keep up with it. If we had lunch in the Dell cafeteria, we would come back with more projects. So we knew we had a tiger by the tail. The question was, should we throttle the Dell business back so it did not dominate our T3 business? At this point Dell Computer represented about 50 percent of our income. We simply could not grow the rest of our business as fast as Dell. Plus, we were right in the middle of learning the Internet. We took the risk and hung in there because we were quickly building a unique expertise that very few firms had at the time: digital marketing.
But things change. Dell was not an easy place to work, and many of our personal contacts moved on. In 2008, Dell brought in a new team of marketing leaders. They made a decision to consolidate Dell’s global roster of advertising agencies, which ran into the hundreds, down to two or three big global agencies. It made a lot of sense because the complexity of managing different agencies in different countries was daunting. They hired the holding company WPP to build them a custom global agency focused primarily on Dell.
WPP promised to have it up and running in ninety days. They did not even come close. It was a massive project and the idea was flawed. It was too big, too fast, and most advertising people did not want to work for a single client, especially Dell, who was known for execution, not creativity. The whole thing turned into a complete goat rodeo, probably one of the biggest failures in the history of the advertising business. As the months went by, WPP got desperate and decided to try to make our company their Austin hub because, at the time, we were the only thing not broken. One of the Dell marketing executives came to see us to present the idea. We listened with great interest. The only catch was that we had to agree to sell our company to WPP. They believed they had the financial upper hand because Dell was our biggest client and they did not think we could survive without them.
Here we were in another important negotiation, and we did not have the upper hand financially. But we did have principles. Without discussing it at all, we said no. Actually, what we said was a bit more colorful, but you get the idea. We walked the Dell executive out of the building. No one said a word. We called the staff together a few minutes later and told them we were going to be out at Dell. We told them that we were not sure what would happen, but that we would be 100 percent honest with them and they would always know what we knew. We knew we would have to continue working the Dell business until they could find someone else to do our work. We explained to the staff that we would have to make cuts but that we would help them find new jobs. That was no small task as we were heading for a serious economic depression. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, but everyone understood and respected our position. That day was February 14, 2008. We called it the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. That cloudy day in February, I was stronger than bear’s breath. We told everyone that we would perform at the highest level of professionalism until our last project was done. And we did. And we did help everyone who was displaced find another job.
Ultimately we lost about half of our total annual revenue. WPP named their new agency Enfatico. Within less than a year, the new senior marketing team at Dell was fired. This was happening just as blogs and social media were coming on the scene, and the whole thing became the laughingstock of the industry. The entire project was gradually rolled into other existing WPP agencies.
Sour grapes? Not at all. In fact, it was actually the best thing that ever happened to us. I will always be indebted to Michael Dell for the opportunity he gave us. We learned to embrace change and be decisive, and we became an Internet pioneer because of him.
I love the business, but it is not all roses and bluebirds.
Dell’s departure was truly a blessing in disguise. We had several teams working on Dell and then another team that worked on everything else. When Dell left, a few people wanted to break out and form “T3 Interactive” to ride the digital wave. I said no. We had always been one big team, and I knew that we would be stronger together. With Dell gone we were able to pull everyone back into one cohesive team and refocus on the quality of our work. Fortunately, several factors aligned perfectly. First, I was free to travel (Sam, our youngest child, had just gone to college)—and I did. A lot. Second, we had real-world digital marketing credentials that few agencies had at the time. Third, major clients were recognizing that digital was not going away and that they had to figure it out.
Thank goodness I had developed a strong network of business people. I called all of them, and pounded the pavement to try to win new business, and thus save as many jobs at T3 as I possibly could. I was honest with all of my contacts. I told them how much money we were losing and why. I explained that I had some fantastic people who were ready to go to work on a new piece of business. My network came through in a crisis.
I racked up millions of miles and gained Executive Platinum status on American Airlines. Every major corporation in America was struggling to build digital marketing infrastructure. They had all decided that the Internet was not going the way of CB radios, as one of my traditional creative directors quipped. Our Internet prowess, which Dell had bought and paid for, became our Trojan horse.
We put ourselves out there, big-time. We won Chase, we won Marriott, we won Universal, we won Microsoft, we won UPS. We replaced the Dell business in less than a year and, in spite of the loss of revenue, made a nice profit. In fact, knock on wood, T3 has made a profit every year since we began. And we have never borrowed a dime to operate the company; we are totally bootstrapped. That is not easy; it means putting the pedal to the metal on new business, growing existing business, or cutting losses before it is too late. It’s usually a combination of all three.
Our work was not only great, in many cases it was breakthrough. We did a very early crowdsourced project for Renaissance Hotels where people shared personal snapshots of their favorite vacations on Renaissance’s website. We did an interactive tour of the new, updated rooms at Marriott. We were able to watch how consumers engaged with the site online. For instance, the most watched part of our interactive tour for Marriott’s newly redesigned rooms was when we showed a tight shot of the computer connection panel on the desk. The road warriors watched this more than anything else because they wanted to be sure they had the right connectors to get online. This is where the Internet got magical.
We’ve always had opinions and our clients have always had opinions. Suddenly, through analytics, we knew for a fact that more visitors to the site were more interested in the Internet connection than in the showerhead or the thread count of the sheets. Learnings like that cascaded one upon another, and everything we did started getting smarter and more effective because we could measure everything. My original dream of doing great creative and getting tangible results was now irrefutable.
I was frequently asked to speak at industry conferences, and we began to build a very solid, national reputation. I pinched myself to be sure that it was really true. I had built a very successful, very cool company that was worthy of respect and admiration. It took me a long time to get there. But we had arrived.
In 1997, Texas Governor George W. Bush asked me to join the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) board of directors. The LCRA, a nonprofit public utility that manages water, electric generation, and transmission for much of Central Texas, is the biggest wholesale electric generator in the area and employs more than 1,800. I originally said no, that I did not have the time. But he twisted my arm and I went to interview with the general manager of the LCRA. During the interview I told him, “I can’t drive all over Central Texas attending board meetings.” He said, “Okay, I’ll have a ranger drive you.”
So, I did the cowgirl thing. I accepted and served for six years, two as chair of the Water Committee. I was the first woman from Travis County to serve. It was an amazing experience—more valuable than the MBA degree I always wanted. I learned so much, met so many wonderful people, and was able to serve the State of Texas with the integrity Governor Bush expected of me. I even got sued by the city of San Antonio over a water deal that had gone wrong. It was complicated but I believe we did the right thing. I wear that fact as a badge of honor. Sometimes you have to stand your ground.
Many mornings I would walk out my back door at the crack of dawn, and there would be my LCRA ranger in his police car, lights flashing, waiting for me with a hot cup of coffee. Off we would go to La Grange or Bastrop or Marble Falls. In my arms would be the huge packets of information we received to review before each meeting; often there would be three or four huge binders of detailed information. The ranger and I would visit and catch up on family news, and then he’d focus on driving and let me work all the way down and all the way back. I even had a badge; no joke.
I have belonged to the Committee of 200 (C200) for over ten years. It is composed of half C-suite corporate women and half entrepreneurs, and the members are highly vetted and have achieved remarkable P&L responsibility and positions of leadership. Most are mothers, community volunteers, and board members and are passionately involved in advancing women in the workforce. C200 members collectively generate more than $1.4 trillion in annual revenues and employ more than 2.5 million people. I recently completed a two-year term as chair of C200, so I have personal relationships with some of the most powerful businesswomen in the world.
However, my first C200 meeting was a bit intimidating. I couldn’t believe some of the heavyweights in the room. CEOs of major corporations, wildly successful entrepreneurs, and women who had just plain knocked the glass ceiling down. Before long, I realized they were real women with families, issues, and struggles like my own. After speaking with a few members, I felt like I was home.
One of the first women I met was Ellen Hancock. She had been the most senior woman at IBM and was a true force of nature. She was hard-charging, curious, but also helpful and supportive. A couple of years later, Ellen would attend the opening of our T3 San Francisco office and drove my husband and me at breakneck speed through the backstreets of San Francisco in her Rolls-Royce to a dinner engagement. She was a cowgirl!
I was invited to join the Texas Business Leadership Council in 2003, and within a year was the second woman asked to serve on the Executive Committee. This bipartisan group of corporate CEOs and leading entrepreneurs studies issues that affect the ability of businesses to thrive in Texas—issues like transportation, energy, health care, water, and education.
I arrived at my first meeting of the executive committee exactly on time—at 7:30 a.m. When I walked in, the likes of Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, and other Texas business luminaries were seated around the table. I was surprised the meeting had obviously already started. Herb hollered at me and said, “If you aren’t at least ten minutes early, little lady, you are LATE.” When I was elected chairman of the group several years later, my first act was moving the meetings from 7:30 to 8:30, which meant that we all had to be there by 8:20. Crazy Texans.
Texas has one of the hottest economies in the world, and I give my colleagues on the Business Leadership Council a lot of credit for helping to make that happen. They have made the state a better place to do business. And they have created amazing opportunities for the people of Texas.
It has been great for me to stay on top of key topics and listen to experts from all over the country talk about potential solutions for challenging issues facing Texas. Learning more and more about how politics works has helped me negotiate and influence for T3. Being part of this group has given me a unique platform to give back to the great state of Texas with my time and commitment to excellence.
A few years ago I got a call from one of my C200 colleagues, Kim Bishop. She does executive search and board of director placements. Kim said, “Gay, I have an opportunity you are going to be interested in at Monotype.” Monotype is a global company and owns over 20,000 typefaces that they license for everything from the printed page to all of our digital devices, even the displays in our cars. After I met the board members and key members of the Monotype staff in Boston, I knew I would enjoy working with them, collaborating and solving problems. I respected them and the operations of the company. And I was thrilled to learn that all of the pre-meeting documents that I used to struggle with when I was on the LCRA board are now automatically loaded on my iPad. How cool is that?
Today my focus at Monotype is to help the company align with the creative communities and to champion innovation. Life comes full circle. I have always loved typefaces. From the time I was a little girl, I would sit at my desk with pen and ink and practice calligraphy and typefaces. Later, as I studied art direction as part of my art schooling at the University of Texas, I would spend hours learning to draw and “noodle” every popular typeface—including Helvetica and Times Roman.
I have learned more about executive compensation, acquisitions, and the SEC guidelines than I ever dreamed of! The due diligence around the governance of the company and challenges we face as board members has made me a better CEO at T3. It is exciting to be actively involved in growing a dynamic, publicly traded global company.
I had another opportunity to say yes. I had the privilege to be invited by then secretary of defense Ashton Carter in 2015 to attend a weeklong behind-the-scenes look at our United States military. Along with a group of about twenty-five other notable leaders from all walks of life, we spent six days from way before dawn until late into the night learning about each branch of the military. It was one of the most awesome, inspiring experiences of my life.
I had the opportunity to fly up and down the East Coast in an Air Force C-17 cargo jet. I toured nuclear submarines, drove a coast guard cutter, dined on an aircraft carrier with the crew, and shot targets with the Army Rangers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina—one of the largest US Army installations in the world. The ranger shooting instructors teased me, saying, “I hope you can at least hit one of the targets with that pistol.” What they didn’t know is that as a cowgirl, I can handle a gun. I nailed six shots in a row, dead center! Talk about fun! They invited me to come back and shoot with them anytime. Sometimes putting yourself out there just means saying yes.
I came out alive and a much better person.
For many years I have traveled at least a third of the time. Long flights, often delayed. Endless meetings. Hotel after hotel. But when I come home, usually on a Friday night, I almost always drive out to the Double Heart Ranch for our weekly board of directors meeting. My husband and I fix a cocktail and climb into the hot tub and call the meeting to order. We catch each other up, talk about our kids and the challenges and opportunities facing the business, and laugh at all of the funny stuff that happened during the week. And we have made many, many decisions during those meetings. One good thing about the venue is that it has kept our board of directors small—just the two of us, and that has been a good thing.
I tell you a few of these stories to give you some of my perspective so you know where I’m coming from. I’ve had lots of life experiences both good and bad. Mostly good, I’m glad to say. And I have learned some lessons that may be valuable to you. I learned from my mom to make the most in life with the hand you are dealt. I learned from my first job that I have to collaborate with people. I learned what I was capable of when I stepped into that huge role at Baylor at twenty-two years old. I learned to act on the power of my convictions when I had my business plan rejected and started my own company. I learned to access my true grit when we lost our largest account. And I learned that we each have the power to make things better. I want you to have buckets and buckets of goodwill that translate directly into your personal power.
I invite you all to climb on. Let’s ride, cowgirls!