If you've ever worked with an agency and hated it, read on and see why I do things rather differently from most communications firms you've ever met.

Of course, I always have . . . from the very beginning . . . in 1983.

I stood across a desk from my professor, Gene, with my portfolio spread out between us, as he flipped through the pieces and nodded approvingly. It was just a few days before graduation.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re gonna make it in this business.”

My heart fairly sang!

I had been anointed. Not everyone who graduates with a design degree is still in the field five or ten years later – let alone decades. But I would be. Gene had spoken.

So here I sit, 27 years later.

My desk, as I write this, isn’t even five minutes from where we stood that day.

Now, there isn’t a business on the planet that, after almost 30 years, doesn’t put a few marks on a person.

But I’m still here.

Adding new techniques and technologies, all to do the important things a little better.

And still remembering one crucial fact that is, in fact, the only fact that counts. The only reason for me to sit here writing and you to sit here, reading:

With you, I get to be in the great part of your business – the part where you make your customers’ lives better – every single day. And I help you bring in those customers – every single day.

Just as I have for 27 years.

It’s been a wild ride.

I transferred to design school from one of those ivy-covered liberal-arts colleges in New England when I realized that my original passions – the law and sports broadcasting – had each left me cold in different ways: In the law, there’s often no real finished product. In sports, the odds were good that I would be finished - in some chilly little town - long before my product would ever see the light of day.

So I had developed a passion – instead – for the art of advertising.

For some reason I also thought it would be easy to get an agency job. I thought there were lots of agencies out there, with lots of openings. And they’d be just waiting for the brilliant, talented me, age 23, to tell them what to do and how to do it. (I hope you note the irony there.)

I’d served clients of my own all through school. As I got closer to graduation, I thought that would make me look more experienced than my entry-level peers, and more desirable to the agencies I wanted to work for.

Um, no. Not exactly.

Still, over the course of the Eighties I would find work as an art director – the person who decides what an ad looks like. Occasionally I’d fill in as a writer – at four different ad agencies. I would also go independent again in mid-decade. I would pick up a thing or two from each one.

I would also learn they put a lot of things ahead of helping clients bring in more customers.
And didn’t we just agree that was the whole point?

Agency K was a retail shop.

Their clients were furniture stores, which were usually going out of business. And car dealers, which were usually offering monster deals for your trade-in.

Now, these days I’m not that big on the trappings of success, but Agency K was a glorified storefront – not a plus in my 24-year-old eyes. And it was the Eighties . . . trappings were everything then! This place got clients by showering them with free sports and concert tickets, and letting them buy dinner for a local newscaster. They kept the clients – for a while – with more event tickets, and some face time with the celebs. Eventually the clients would wake up and realize all the schmoozing had been fun, but it wasn’t bringing in customers. And the party would be over.

Ad concepts? Marketing plans?

Please. At Agency K those were costs and distractions. As far as management was concerned, commercials were for screaming a retailer’s name and phone number as loudly as possible. And in print, the formula was to show little pictures of cars or furniture, with big, big prices. As far as they were concerned, nothing would work better (or probably at all), so why spend time or money trying to come up with anything else?

After all, they needed the budget for just one thing.

Media buys.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Heavy radio and television ad schedules can work well for local retailers. They can drive a lot of business to an owner’s stores. But I’m not sure Agency K’s media buys were about targeting the right audiences for the clients as much as they were about keeping their spending up at the stations that had the personalities they wanted to hang out with.

So even where the agency had some real expertise, its own priorities came before growing the client’s business.

After five months I got an offer from a real agency – and you'd better believe I jumped. Life would have to be better almost anywhere.

Plus, I'd found the perfect place in St. Louis, I thought.

Agency L: Finally. A real job at a real agency!

The model at Agency L really was creative excellence. Hooray! I would get pushed and prodded forward!

My new boss, Dackett, said our first loyalties were to our portfolios: The Work. I still call it that.

It’s almost a mantra: Nothing matters but The Work.

I think I believed the mantra long before I showed up at Agency L. But I don’t think it exactly means to me what it meant to Dackett.

To me,The Work starts with a deep understanding of the client’s business.

To you, reading this in 2010, that would be your business. Especially your audience.

Dackett was right: “You can’t bore people into buying your product.”

You’ve got to get their attention and give them something to engage with.

But you’ve got to make sure you’re engaging the right people. And you’ve got to make them an offer.

(Okay - that devotion to the offer is new. I became a direct marketer in stages: first in the 1990s, then, more hardcore, in the last three years.)

But even back then, it didn’t look to me as if we really cared about the client’s audience. It seemed to me as if we were mostly doing ads that would impress other people in our business. Award judges, for instance. And the hiring managers in bigger agencies, who could give Dackett and his favorite people bigger and better jobs. (I was not one of Dackett's favorite people.)

Again, let’s be clear. I like awards. I’ve won several myself.

Well, three.

But who made the rule that award-winning work can’t sell products and services?

Dackett's other specialty was the fake creative competition.

Imagine, if you will, going in to your office and being told you were going to compete for the right to do your next project. That's how things worked in Dackett's group:

When a big assignment came in, Dackett would gather us all around and have a brainstorm – a group idea session. Or we’d go away for a while and come back with our ideas. Theoretically, the person with the best idea would produce the campaign. But if the project was big enough, Dackett and his favorite partner would take over the best idea for themselves and produce it for their own portfolios.

And, Agency L had another problem. One that was a little more serious.

Say we needed to shoot a photograph of pasta. You can’t return the casserole dish. You’ve cooked food in it. So it should go to the client – back to the company’s test kitchen.

But at Agency L, that gorgeous casserole dish had a way of going home with the agency people – and becoming two or three in the process. If we needed to make a neon sign for a commercial, the bid might also cover repairs to the one that hung over someone’s basement bar. And, both still photography and television generally got booked out of town for no good reason – just to give Dackett and friends an excuse to travel to luxurious locations on someone else’s dime.

We might have been working hard, but nobody was looking out for the client.

Not for ideas that would help the client’s business. Not for any decent management of the clients’ budgets.

It might have been the profligate Eighties, but I couldn’t understand why it was okay to put the client last. And I couldn’t shut up about it.

I was out the door in less than a year.

Agency B: A soft landing in Kansas City.

Surely things would be different at Agency B, where I would be in charge of the creative product.

Or so they said.

But having hired me on the strength of the work in my portfolio, the account people were shocked when I started to produce that kind of work on the job. Work that would get readers’ attention and produce results.

As opposed to work that looked exactly like what their competition was already doing.

I'll grant that when a company starts spending money on marketing for the first time, its people tend to see what the competition is up to and decide that’s what marketing in their industry is supposed to look like.

When they see something that looks different, it confuses them. It looks like it doesn’t belong in their market.

Several of Agency B’s clients were in that beginner stage.

The problem is, if you spend money on materials that look like your competition, and you get the attention of your target audience, where is that audience going to take their business?
Right to your competition.

Because all you’re doing is adding repeated exposures to the total impression your competition has already made on the market as a whole (including on you!).

At 25 I knew that instinctively but didn’t have the experience to express it properly – and neither did the account reps who were presenting the work to the clients. All around, there just wasn’t a lot of experience guiding the Ship of Client. Almost nobody in that office had any idea how to run a campaign that would actually work, so account people would decide to present work they liked.

As a creative, I had gone from “You can’t bore people into buying your products” to “Don’t scare the clients with work that might actually work.”

I got myself not fired – just laid off. Again.

Once again, everything came first – except moving the sales needle for the clients.

An agency of my own – again – at the ripe old age of 26.

I packed up and came home to St. Louis and hung out my shingle once again.

My slogan was, "Straight to the heart." Because I still believe that ultimately, every buying decision comes down to the desire of a single human being to say Yes. No matter the product, no matter the category or the market – whether Hearts On Fire Diamonds or the location of a corporate headquarters. Or 25,000 pounds of steel.

(You'll be interested to know that years of data from millions of dollars' worth of tested direct marketing campaigns show the very same thing. Human beings buy everything, and they buy for emotional reasons. Then they use facts and figures to prove their decisions were rational.)

With the agency experience I had under my belt, I landed a more sophisticated client – a marketer of natural food products based in St. Louis.

The client himself was a veteran of several very big agencies on the east coast, now turned natural-foods marketer. He had recently sold to a bigger company and moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis.

When he saw my campaign concepts for the first product we worked on, he said, “I’ve been looking for an agency in St. Louis for two years who can think like this. You’re the only one who could do it.”

Hmmm – if he really had looked at every agency in that period, that would have to include the two who’d fired me. Maybe it wasn’t me that was the problem. Was it those agencies?

For two years we would do everything a small consumer-goods account could need:

The stuff worked, and both my business – and the client’s – grew.

Putting results for the client first - or at least on a par with the aesthetics of the work - paid off the way I thought it would.

But this was still before computers. There really wasn’t time to service my clients and market my business, so growth suffered.

Eventually I wondered if it was time to give agency life another shot. . .

A last encounter: Agency P.

On the one hand, Agency P is where I met the Mac. Never again would I be without one.

In the 22 years since then, it’s become a body part. I produce everything on it, from logos and web sites to audio and animation. Also notes to the family doctors; party invitations; and all that stuff other moms managed to do for thousands of years without a computer at all.

(Thanks to the iPhone, in fact, there's even a Mac on me when I go out, and since I also use it as an alarm clock, it's under my pillow at night . . . )

On the other hand, Agency P was one more place where everyone had more important priorities than the big one . . . making sure the work actually grew the clients’ businesses.

It was there that I finally developed my Unified Theory of Small Ad Agencies: They don’t pay creatives to do the work. That’s the fun part. You do that on your own time. They pay you to put up with the nonsense you have to put up with so you can do the work:

Fake concept competitions, very much like Agency L: Work going to folks based on who their friends are, even if they didn’t know how to do it. That was an Agency P specialty.

Lip service to quality but real emphasis on speed. More like Agency K, with whom Agency P ultimately merged. So, sometimes, not even lip service to quality. Just get it done and get it out – who cares if it works?

Management’s true goal for the staff: Fill in a 37.5-hour timesheet with legitimate project numbers that don’t count against anyone’s actual budgets.

In other words, most agencies bill by the hour. (I don’t.) To justify keeping everyone employed, managers have to keep folks busy. With lunch, a full week is 37.5 hours; any staffer not billing that many hours to a client is expendable. (And, the fact is, agencies keep their staffs lean enough that most people are working 50-60 hours. 37.5 is a slacker's fantasy.)

But every account rep has a budget for each client that represents the amount that client is willing to see on a monthly invoice. The rep, naturally, lives in deadly fear of going over that number, because the agency wants to get paid the full amount – but the client has often been trained to dispute anything over the budgeted amount. So it’s just better if the staff doesn’t charge their time to any of his clients - even if they’ve been working on nothing but his clients for the last six months!

Don’t pay attention to results. We can always blame the client’s sales and service departments anyway.

And so much more.

As far as I’m concerned, every agency I’ve ever worked for has missed the main point.

It was clear that agencies were no place for me.

But there had to be somewhere – where great work that got great client results were the main thing, and clients were happy to pay for those results.

A Shining Campus On A Hill.

I thought I'd found that place when I landed on a Shining Corporate Campus in the Hills. There we did the best job of producing client results and delivering really good client service I'd ever found.

The first four years were magical.

I made some of the best friends I have today and picked up some valuable management tools I still use.

I met a future 15-year client – the marketing head of a separate business unit – who started by borrowing me for a few weeks when I didn't have to account for my time.

And developed a style for proposal development and production that put me in demand across the company. That could still be a stand-alone product line – probably should be, in fact.

In the fifth year, the area where things had been magical got dissolved into a bigger part of the company.

I still learned valuable things:

I started my conversion to direct marketing. (If you and I work together, we'll build your brand by developing identity materials – but then we'll promote it with direct-response marketing, onlline and off. As great as it feels to have wonderful-looking materials, it's an even greater feeling to see them bring in money instead of send it out.)

I met my mentor for the next nine years, a guy who had done great things in big agencies from upstate New York to San Francisco. He had, in fact, run the direct-marketing division of Foote, Cone and Belding – the San Francisco agency that originally made Levi's famous.

But even though client results were supposed to be the name of the game, once again, other priorities got in the way – perhaps more than ever.

Like filling out paperwork exactly right, so it would work with the corporation’s old mainframe.

And worshiping profit margins at the expense of profit dollars:

A $11,000 profit on a $12,000 sale was a marvelous thing, because the margin was more than 90%.

But a $15,000 profit on a $60,000 sale was grounds for homicide, because the profit – though bringing in $4,000 more in dollars, sported a pathetic 25% margin – far short of the 50% target the company sets every year, for every product.

In fact, it was my paperwork deficiency that separated me from full-time life on that campus – though there are divisions of that corporation that are clients to this day.

So, yes. It’s been a wild ride.

Remember that I started working with clients by myself at age 19.

From the point of view of all those agencies I worked for, maybe that experience spoiled me from the beginning.

Everywhere I worked, I kept measuring the reality against the pitch – that thing we keep telling our prospective clients and our newly-signed-up clients.

If you've hired agencies before, maybe you’ve wondered if your agency really believed it.

Maybe you already knew a lot of agencies didn’t, and that’s why you never took a chance on working with one.

And by agency, I mean not just an ad agency, but also any of those other entities that look and work like agencies:

There’s only one reason for any of us to be in business.

To grow your business.

Apparently, only a few idiots have been fool enough to keep believing that after all these years.

I'm one of them.

Design school never educated it out of me.

Agencies couldn’t fire it out of me.

So since 1994, I’ve been on my own for the third time. I doubt I’ll ever work for another group again.

Which I trust you'll see as good news for your business.

Because now I can focus on falling in love with your products and services – and your customers.

I can develop your message as if I were your customer. (And your distributor, at that level, and so on . . .) So they can fall right back in love with you.

Remember up above, that bit about 'every buying decision comes down to the desire of a single human being to say Yes.'?

How many times have you been locked out of what would have been the biggest deal of your life, and the reason was that the key decision-maker wanted someone he/she liked better? Or the deciding factor was something else that had nothing to do with the rational facts of the case?

I bet it was every damn time.

It has been for me, when I was in that position.

Okay . . .

How many times has the decision gone your way because the key decision-maker just felt you would work better together? Or because the referral came from someone your client trusted?

Also every time. It just doesn't sting as much, so it's harder to remember.

That's the value of being in touch with your customer.

So . . .

If I'm doing my job with your brand, your products and services will go from being something customers need into something they want.

That will somehow, subtly, become part of the key to their hopes and dreams in the area that's appropriate – personal growth, financial security, the well-being of their family or even just their outlets for fun and escape . . . or that will banish their fears of loss in those areas.

And how about this? Instead of worrying about how to get past the gatekeepers, let's get them on your side, lobbying the big boss to go ahead and buy already . . . from you.

So look around.

Make sure you like the work.

And imagine how your life will be when your company grows, because you're working with someone who actually cares about your business, and treats your producs as if they were her own.

Now, that's fun!