Let me introduce you to one true crowd-pleaser. Mildred Douglas Chrisman just wasn’t cut out to stay in a stodgy Connecticut boarding school. However, they did teach horseback riding as part of the curriculum, and she decided she liked horses better than books. So she left school and joined the circus! Barnum and Bailey’s, to be exact, which led to an opportunity at the 101 Ranch Wild West show.
Mildred teaches us that sometimes you just must take a leap of faith. Go with your gut and courageously follow your dreams. One step of change will lead you to the next opportunity.
Not only did Mildred take that leap, but she was a real winner. In 1918, she won championships in Cheyenne and Pendleton. Bronc and steer riding were her sports, along with trick riding and trick shooting. Her dangerous relay races and bucking horse competitions worked the crowds into a frenzy of yelling, cheers, and applause. Not a demure bone in her body! Her personal brand was enhanced with flashy, fringed skirts and vests. Mildred was a master of winning over crowds from one road show to the next.
Cowgirls like Mildred learned to be extremely confident in their rodeo performances. But to become a superstar, you have to be willing to differentiate yourself and win over your audience time and time again. Once you have that down, it is much easier to assert yourself in situations where before you might have shied away. Building on competence doesn’t always make you qualified to be assertive, but pick your battles in this arena and you will eventually win the war.
Cowgirls have learned to be tough, but they are still very much women and act like women. Cowgirls have the power to assume both masculine and feminine traits when it suits them. They have the ability to go back and forth—to be vulnerable at some times and bold at other times. On top of this, they have the self-confidence to laugh at themselves for doing it. What emerges is irresistible. Men can’t do this, so this is a wonderful, unfair advantage.
Research published in Insights by Stanford Graduate School of Business, “Researchers: How Women Can Succeed in the Workplace” shows that women who are aggressive, assertive, and confident, but who can turn these traits on and off, depending on social situations, get more promotions than either men or other women. In many ways, women who learn to do this become more powerful than most men, according to the research.12
A woman who can take a powerful stand, laugh about it, and then slide back into her gracious feminine charm has a raw power that can disarm almost anyone. I have had this ability most of my life. I can play both roles pretty well. At this point, I do it instinctively. If this behavior isn’t instinctive for you, here is what I recommend. Try this out first with family or your Rough Rider colleagues. Learn to push the pedal and take a strong stand, then slip back in to a more kind, sensitive person. As my mother said, “Kill them with kindness.”
Being a bit of a chameleon by playing both feminine and masculine roles can help you find a business voice that works for you.
Solving problems gives you the authority to be assertive. The more you do it, the more power you earn, and the more trust you build. At T3, our clients bring us their marketing problems every day. In the early days of my career it was often difficult, if not impossible, to prove that an advertising campaign actually worked. My team had opinions, our clients had opinions, but there was not a lot of supporting data on either side. Generally, if a client liked his TV commercial and it connected (either made them laugh or cry) with his board of directors, and his buddies on the golf course said, “Hey, I really like your TV spot!” it was deemed a success.
As we moved into the digital space we began to develop better ways of proving up results. We could measure sales. We could measure page views, the time spent on a particular page and as a result we got much better at proving success. We moved from opinions about results to actual data about results. Now we have so much information that the challenge becomes determining which data points are the most important. Our analytics team can run reports on massive data sets searching for correlations we never dreamed existed. That is a powerful tool we deliver to our clients.
So today we test concepts, media mix, price offers—all kinds of things—and we have developed the skills to forecast how campaigns will perform. There is nothing more exciting than to launch a campaign and watch the results come in, in real time. We see the data pour in and we learn what mobile app ad pulls the best, what media delivers the most effective return on investment. It is like election night every day at T3.
Most of the decisions we make are fairly logical, but we have learned not to stop at logic. We push through with things we do not completely understand. Do customers react better to different typefaces? Are two offers more engaging than one? Does an illustration work better than a photograph for this specific information? Where is the best place for the “Buy” button on the page?
These learnings provide our clients with real solutions. Provable solutions. Our constant learning gives our clients power in their organizations. They do not have to say, “I think.” They can stand up and say, “I know.” This is simply raw power. It gives them the authority to bulldoze a lot of office politics and push their agenda forward.
Every day look for ways to prove the value of what you do. Measure it. Work to make it better. You will learn more and your confidence will soar. Your results will improve your competence. Do it over and over again. Your ongoing optimization proves you are gaining more competence. What a wonderful little virtuous circle for a cowgirl to ride into.
In South Texas there is an old saying, “Don’t stand there with hat in hand.” In the ranching world, cowboys did not take off their hat unless talking to a lady, or someone who could be considered superior to them. Or unless they were putting pride aside and asking for something, usually money.
Warm Springs Rehabilitation Hospital was a client of ours for many years. It was a small account, but we believed in their mission. It originated in the 1930s as a polio treatment facility. After polio was largely eliminated, their mission shifted to helping people with traumatic brain injuries. They were wonderful, caring people who stood up and took care of some of the most challenging cases—bringing people as far back as possible from devastating brain injuries. Many of them were the victims of motorcycle accidents.
They had one very nice, semiretired man who was their fund-raiser. He stopped by our office one day for coffee and confided in me that he was having a real challenge getting through to potential donors. He said, “I feel like I go in asking for money with my hat in hand.” The feeling he was expressing to me was that he did not feel any sense of power. It broke my heart.
I was determined to fix it because I knew the power of what the hospital did. I had worked for them for years and was a true believer. We built a complete fund-raising system for him that told the story of the original mission, of the win against polio and the bravery of both the caretakers and the patients. The messages were beautiful, sobering, inspirational, and they worked. The tools we gave him enabled him to find his own personal power by being able to tell an effective, emotional story about the need. He was never standing “hat in hand” again; instead he had a strong, emotional, authentic story that was worthy of serious consideration.
Cowgirls understand that they have to be assertive if they want to manage their own lives. They understand that life is a series of negotiations on almost every level. The terms “negotiation” and “power” conjure up a lot of negative, business-oriented imagery—fat, cigar-smoking men in stinky rooms making deals to only benefit themselves. I understand that. That is precisely why a lot of women shy away from thinking about how to be more powerful when they have these important conversations.
When you go into a negotiation, I want you to go in with your hat firmly planted on your head. I want you to go in confidently with as much power as possible, not to try to beat the other person, but to be able to stand up for yourself and find a win-win solution. Go in with pride about your accomplishments and skills. Go in as a strong team leader who has lifted people up. Go in as someone people trust. Go in with facts and figures and make a compelling argument. Go in prepared. And with all of your personal power behind you.
Go make a good deal, cowgirl.
You absolutely must understand the financial basics of your organization. Not understanding them will make you crazy. It’s like trying to play a game without knowing the rules. I made a point early in my career to reach out to Bill Lacy and ask him to teach me the basics of the advertising business. I mastered them and built the biggest book of business in the firm.
For years after I started my own business and we computerized our financial system, I kept my own little set of books on yellow pads just like Bill Lacy taught me. When our accounting team ran each month’s financial statement, they were always amazed how close my yellow pad numbers were.
There is not a week that goes by that I don’t have a meeting with our financial people. I always have a pulse on billings, profitability, projections, and collections. And, of course, how much cash is in the bank. Our T3 financial meetings take place on Friday afternoons as we wrap up another week. One Friday, I walked in the kitchen door at the ranch with a big grin on my face, and told my husband the company’s cash balance. He said, “Maybe it is time to take the money and run off to Mexico.” We haven’t yet.
That knowledge drives my short-term gut decisions. All jokes aside, if things are looking good, I’m pretty quick to approve a new hire. If it is a little soft, we may kick that decision down the road. In either case, it is a fast decision based on years and years of financial knowledge. Cowgirls always know their numbers, whether it is their latest time barrel racing or their Q1 profit or loss. In fact, cowgirls live by the numbers.
A funny story: My husband started his career in the broadcasting business. He ran a radio station, and his credit policy was “cash in advance for politicians, preachers, and mobile home dealers.” We all laugh and say that policy is still in effect today.
I frequently meet female entrepreneurs who have tried to bootstrap their companies and far too often they confide in me that they have not paid themselves, sometimes for several years. They feel a need to appear to be more successful than they really are by paying their employees, but not themselves. My reaction is usually not good, probably because my mother also tried to appear more affluent than she really was almost all of her life.
Do not do this. Not paying yourself means you are not facing reality and that you are babying the business. Make a profit. If you cannot run in the black, then cut something out and make a profit, even if it is small in some years. Force yourself to make smart financial decisions quickly to ensure a profit. Do not allow your ego to drive you into financial mediocrity.
The same principle applies if you work for a company. You should receive a salary that is commensurate with the contribution you make. If you are engaged and productive and deserve a pay raise and a promotion, ask for it, but always be there with stats and numbers and results you have achieved.
We did a lot of work years ago in the area of pharmaceutical research where millions of dollars were spent on clinical research trials. They lived by one mantra, “fail fast.” That meant that if a research project was going to fail, it was far better to do so early. Failing late in a trial meant tens of millions of dollars down the drain. When you have to cut your losses, you do it as soon as you can. Hanging on and not paying yourself is simply extending misery. I’m sure it has worked for some people. But I have much higher expectations of return on investments in both time and money.
Do not be afraid to apply a little creativity to finances. My accounting department has a long-standing policy of sending fresh-baked cookies to our clients’ accounts payable team. A nice warm cookie has a way of putting your invoice on the top of the stack as one of the first to get paid.
My father proclaimed there were more “characters per square inch” in Liberty, Texas, than any other place on earth. For example, there was “old man McGuire,” who sat on his porch in the evening where he would pass on the wisdom of the ages to us kids. If I would say it was too hot, he would say, “Well, if it ain’t cockroaches, it’s bedbugs.”
Guy Devore, the local grocer, had a famous trick of leaving a broom, package of cigarettes, or other items by the cash register. Without a blink, he would ring one of them up with a customer’s other items. If you asked why, he would just say, “Oh, I thought it was yours.”
The local jeweler was named Mr. Swindle.
Opal Hamilton, wife of the hardware store owner, wore a large picture frame hat, a mink stole, and white gloves to town every day well into her nineties.
Doc Griffin still made house calls.
When you become a powerful person, people pay attention. They talk about you and tell stories about you. That’s just what people do. So think about those stories that your employees and colleagues tell behind your back and will never tell you about. If you provide them with good material, their stories about you will tend to be more complimentary and positive. A funny story about a character is always more interesting than something snarky.
I attended a big wedding in Dallas recently, and after the ceremony, the festivities moved out to the Dallas Country Club (of course). I was with a friend and we came to the church in an Uber. We just needed a quick ride to the country club. I saw a big black Rolls-Royce go by, and I stopped and knocked on the window and asked if we could bum a ride. The driver looked a little shocked, but graciously agreed. When we got to the country club, another friend saw us drive up and said, “My God, Gay, do you know who was driving that car?” He told me that it was one of the wealthiest men in the United States, who rarely left home without a security detail. So I laughed and told everyone that I’d bummed a ride from a billionaire! My friends could not believe I had the gall.
We were in the Hamptons a few years ago at a media event and went out to dinner with our hosts. When we went into the restaurant, I saw Larry David sitting in a booth on the far side of the room and thought that was cool. We had a nice dinner and, as we started to leave, I saw that he was still there. My husband said, “Gay, don’t do it.” But I did and he watched in horror as I scooted up to Larry, sat down next to him in the booth, and said, “I never interrupt people like this, but my daughter loves you. Would you sign a napkin for her?” He replied, “Well, you did interrupt me, so what’s her name?”
I admire characters. Texans like Herb Kelleher, Ann Richards, and Molly Ivins. Great people like Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. People talk about leaders. Stories become legendary. Give them some good material, a combination of awe-inspiring and funny is good. Be impulsive. Be a character.
Part of being a character is doing unexpected, crazy things, and I have done my share of them. Again, opportunities come at you in strange ways if you put yourself out there. When you get opportunities to get out of your comfort zone, take them. Being bold and a little crazy empowers you.
Sure gives you a few good conversation starters. And it makes for good stories about you. Find your own path to becoming an interesting character.
Cowgirls win their horses’ trust gradually, step by step. It takes time. It takes determination. It takes lots and lots of goodwill. If I have learned one thing in life, it is that building trust is the single most powerful thing you can do. If you earn someone’s trust, you do it one step at a time until it forms a long-standing bond.
While climbing the enormous sand dunes in Namibia, I recall the voice of our guide. He said, “Step by step. Slow by slow.” As I conjured every ounce of patience and strength I had, I eventually looked back and I had climbed the dune. It takes patience, extreme focus, and determination.
My business is built on trust. Our clients bet their careers that we will help them win. If we fail, they fail because they chose us. I failed a few times, but not many. When I did, I always raised my hand and took full responsibility for it. Sometimes I had to put my money where my mouth was, but I always tried to do the right thing.
Our obsession on winning client trust led us to many long-term client relationships—Dell was with us for over sixteen years. They trusted us to do what we said we would do, and we trusted them. That does not mean everything was easy, or a proverbial day at the beach. It did mean that problems could usually be resolved because everyone was working together in good faith. Both parties sought to find win-win resolutions.
Mutual trust speeds things up. When you have worked with someone for years and she tells you a project has been fully proofread, you simply accept her word for it. You don’t need to check it for yourself. If we quote a price for a project for a long-standing client, they simply accept it because they know we will price it fairly for both parties.
An important caveat about trust: sometimes two parties trust each other too much. I have seen this happen when deadlines are short or a project’s complexity spirals out of control. Sometimes, you get complacent that the other guy will save your ass one more time. I don’t mind trying to save someone’s ass, but when I move into ass-saving mode, it is my responsibility to let everyone know that risk has gone way up and ask the question, “Do you really need it that fast?” If the answer is yes, then we both must affirmatively acknowledge that together we are taking on more risk than normal. We have made that mistake more than once with the best of intentions. We teach our teams not to allow it.
Sometimes, years of trust can be compromised by a harsh word, terse e-mail, or an inappropriate text message. When this happens, apologize profusely, and if you have a legitimate concern, discuss it face-to-face and take responsibility. Try like hell to work things out and restore trust.
I remember my first trip to Corpus Christi after winning the Spohn Hospital account when I was introduced to the hospital CEO, Sister Kathleen Coughlin. Sister was very gracious to me and we had a good visit, talking about several pressing marketing projects to be addressed. When I got up to leave, she took my hand and said, “Remember, no money, no mission.” I remember thinking what a smart woman she was; she had just made me feel responsible for the financial success of her heartfelt mission. She met me where I was, and I was hooked for life.
She could be alternately sweet, tough, demanding, and unpredictable. In the days before e-mail, she wielded voicemail like a sword, often leaving scathing messages for her staff in the middle of the night. She was a little unorthodox, but no one questioned her dedication toward her mission. I loved her dearly. Sister Kathleen was a cowgirl.
Stop for a moment and think about who trusts you blindly.
Who do you trust? Go thank them.
As athletes know, sometimes it is in the last ten yards of a run or exercise that you have to dig down deep and find that last burst of energy to carry you through. Cowgirls know this implicitly.
Recently, on the last day of an adventure-filled and physically challenging trip to Africa, I fell and broke my kneecap in half. I didn’t know what I had actually done to my knee, but I did know I had to buck up and make the thirty-two-hour door-to-door trip home to Texas. With the help of wheelchairs and attentive British Airways flight attendants who diligently packed my knee in ice, I made it home. (Oh, and I did have a few gin and tonics along the way!)
However, my inspiration to keep going was one of my cowgirl heroines in this book, Fox Hastings. I kept thinking how Fox had broken her ribs in a rodeo but kept going and never quit, as if nothing had happened. She must have been in pain, as I was, but she kept a smile on her face, and the show went on. She said she could not let management and her fans down.
Many times in my life, my Rough Riders would tell me I was pushing myself too hard—to the point of sheer exhaustion. I can remember in my personal and business life sprinting the metaphorical last ten yards drawing on every bit of courage and energy I could muster. But, once again, like Fox, I realized that people were counting on me. Family, employees, and clients. I simply did not want to let them down. So, in those times when I felt like I was hanging on by a thread, I tightened the girth and kept going.
The amazing thing about this is that you will many times miss out on the greatest things in your life and career if you don’t push yourself past what you think you’ve got in you. Try it. You cannot sustain it every day, but the day will come when you need to reach out far and grab the prize. When others fail and fall behind, they will marvel at your courage. It is a great confidence builder and will set you apart from the herd!
I have been fortunate to have had many life experiences. Each experience is a lesson learned that gets filed away in your mind. Lesson upon lesson ultimately presents itself as gut feelings—instincts that help you navigate life. As those lessons become richer and more diverse, the better your instincts become. Your confidence builds, your character grows, and fear of failure diminishes.
Through the years we have had promising clients who were not performing up to our profitability standards. Sometimes we resigned them. But often, when we had a gut instinct that we could not only turn them around, but make them home runs, we loosened our standards and took a chance that we could make it work long-term. Those were always gut decisions. I remember clients that we nurtured for several years, making slow but steady progress. We were wrong about a couple of them, but most of those clients developed into major pieces of business for us.
One day I got a call from one of my account executives, who worked with Midland Memorial Hospital in Midland, Texas—one of our clients. She had just heard on the radio that an eighteen-month-old baby, named Jessica McClure, fell into a well in Midland and was stuck twenty-two feet belowground. We knew that if the baby survived, she would end up at Midland Memorial Hospital. We immediately called our client to see if we could help but the phone lines were jammed. We decided that our only option was to hop on the next plane to Midland.
Our account executive was on-site in less than four hours. I would have gone as well, but I had a baby at home so I worked the phones from Austin. We did not wait to ask for permission from our client because we could not even find her; the two of us made the decision based on our gut instincts. Our client had a tiny staff and the look of relief on her face when my account executive arrived told the whole story. This was in the early days of CNN and “Jessica in the well” became a huge national television story. We were contracted to do advertising work for the hospital, not public relations. But our team, supported by writers and creative teams in Austin, worked with our client to manage the hospital newsroom and field interview requests from all over the world as rescue personnel tried to dig a parallel shaft to rescue Jessica. Some fifty-eight hours later they pulled her to safety on worldwide live television.
We stayed on the story from Midland and Austin for about a week fielding questions and wrapping up details. We never sent them a bill for any of our time or expenses. But we won the lifelong loyalty and trust from our clients, the hospital CEO, and the board of directors. It was simply the right thing to do. Almost thirty years later, if I need a reference for a new client, my call to Midland always gets returned within an hour or less.
Overall, I have had a great time in my business career, but I have also made some mistakes. A few really big ones. They almost all come down to decisions about who to hire or accept as a client. My last mistake was a doozy. I let someone into our company when my gut said no but my head insisted it was the logical thing to do. I learned my lesson, one more time, the hard way.
I can always tell when I do not like the choices before me, because I watch myself resisting making a decision. When we moved into our new Austin offices on Lamar Boulevard a few years ago, I hated all of the choices I saw for modular office furniture. It was too cube-like. I procrastinated and would not decide. Finally, Lee and our facilities manager started prototyping furniture we could build ourselves. It took a few iterations, but they got it right and I said yes the moment I saw it, and it has worked great.
Pay attention. Your gut is the unconscious network of all of your life experiences. It is everything you have learned about people, about success and failure. It does not explain itself; it presents no logical argument. You cannot run a search on it. Yet to ignore it almost always is a mistake. In fact, I cannot recall a time when my gut was wrong.
If you want to be powerful, when your gut and your head disagree, tell your head to shut up! Ride with your gut, especially the older you get. You will be right more often than not.
I walked into a bar in New York one afternoon after work to meet one of my clients. He was standing at the bar and said, “I just ordered a bottle of wine with a straw. What do you want?” He had had a rough day. So I pulled up a chair and listened. He was managing global marketing for a major pharmaceutical company and was beyond frustrated with how hard it was to implement change across such a huge organization. We did not find an answer that afternoon, but he was in a much better mood when we left because I listened to him vent.
Your customers want tangible results; that’s the price of entry. But I have learned over the years that they want more. Many of our clients are in large organizations that are high-pressure environments often burdened by bureaucracy, complexity, and frequent management changes. If we can get them the results they need and then go one step further, we build powerful relationships. Clients often see us as change agents who can make their corporate lives better, or at least more fun. If we come in with creative concepts, a positive can-do attitude sprinkled with fun, and a few proactive big ideas, we make them smile and give them hope and energy. We actually can power them up to go back and effect positive change in their companies—which furthers their careers. And ours.
I have had so many clients tell me, “You are the highlight of my day. You come in upbeat with fresh ideas and challenge us with new thinking.” We purposefully walk in with positive energy, excited by the work we are going to present, and it is so fun to see the smiles we leave behind.
We worked for a small nonprofit hospital in Temple, Texas, that remodeled their emergency room and wanted to attract more patient volume by becoming more of a walk-in clinic than a formal ER. This little hospital was literally across the street from one of the biggest, finest hospital systems in the country, Scott & White.
Great advertising campaigns are usually built upon a known belief, something that people believe is authentic and true. We did a few focus groups and found that Scott & White was notorious for long ER wait times. Everyone in the Temple area joked that Scott & White’s “S&W” logo stood for “Sit & Wait.” We seized on that insight and started a radio and television campaign that proclaimed our ER was for people who did not want to “Sit and Wait.” The entire community got the joke, but what was so special was the impact it had on our client’s staff. Their morale jumped because, for once, they stood tall and were able to best their very capable competitor. It was a huge emotional win for the entire organization, and the campaign won top national hospital marketing awards. Plus, we could measure the financial uptick from the ER visits and hospital stays coming from the ER. Just what I love, great creative that kicks ass and gets tangible financial results!
Done well, creating hope and energy yields another self-sustaining virtuous cycle that gets better and better over time. You gain power by understanding and creating that hope.
Your clients and customers have career aspirations just like we all do. They have ambitions, egos, and dreams like us all. When you earn their trust, they begin to share some of those thoughts. When we were able to, we always tried to help make those dreams come true.
When Sister Kathleen, our client at Spohn Hospital, was elected president of the Texas Medical Association, I helped write her speech and produced her presentation for her. I made that wonderful lady look pretty hip. We had a client at Dell who was a great organizer and doer, but not very strategic. One of our senior account executives would meet with him over lunch once a month and help him brainstorm about his next moves. This guy understood that planning was not his strongest ability, and he genuinely appreciated our help. Focus on your strengths and get help with everything else.
We have worked on new ideas for good clients who were trying to sell an idea to their management teams. If a client had an idea and was trying to secure a budget to make it happen, we often would put together some concepts to support her or build some kind of prototype. We never charged for any of that work. We were always glad to help, and it always came back to us in spades. One of the most powerful things you can do for someone is give a hand without taking any of the credit.
Little things are so important. For years, when I handwrote all of those anniversary and birthday cards for all of our T3 team members, they were personal and filled with gratitude for their specific wonderful accomplishments. I reinforced in each card the good work recognized and rewarded at T3. I thanked our clients with real, genuine gratitude. My mother always told me that if you love someone and appreciate them, you should tell them. Right now.
A public act of profound kindness empowers us all. We recently had a six-year employee leave T3 to take a new job managing human relations at an Austin start-up—it was a remarkable opportunity for her and we all supported her decision. Her hometown is New Orleans. So after our last staff meeting that she would attend, one of her co-workers (who in a former career toured the world with Bob Marley and other reggae greats) stood up and started playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on his trombone. Everyone got a white handkerchief and we had a parade around the office followed by beignets and rosé. It was a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, because she had touched every one of us during her years with us. She left T3 in tears of joy, feeling the respect and love that she earned.
OK, it was not spontaneous. It was planned down to the last detail by my wonderful Internal Development team, who deliver profound acts of kindness every day. They just made it look spontaneous! (Most companies have a Human Resources Department. At T3 we call it Internal Development because their primary focus is on growing and connecting our people.)