My Parting Thoughts (After 31 Years)

In the Beginning

Work life has changed a great deal since my father’s generation. My father worked as the foreman at a paper mill his entire career. I am my father’s son, because even in an age when moving from job to job every couple of years is commonplace, I too wound up with a one-job career. After earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree specializing in drawing and painting, I had an opportunity to live abroad in London, England for 2-1/2 years. When I returned to the States in 1981, I began my career as a freelance illustrator. To help subsidize my income, I worked 2 to 3 days a week as a contractual production artist for a small ad agency while I continued to build up my own clientele. In 1984, I decided to turn my one man band into a sustainable career (and get married, while I was at it). My new bride, Claudia, was courageous and supportive, asking only “that we have insurance.” I promised her that we would, and I was off on my career path as the owner of an agency.

The first three years were rough, since neither my wife nor I brought any money into the marriage. We started with little more than a beat up old Toyota Corolla (which I bought for $3,000 cash from the proceeds of one of my first assignments) and a few months’ rent, but love conquers all. I had never viewed myself as a risk-taker, but looking back over my career, I guess I was. Of course, I learned along the way one has to take risks to create a business worth anything. Fortunately, I entered the commercial arena when illustration was still a specialized manual craft and designers didn’t fancy themselves illustrators because they had a drawing program. Since computers wouldn’t make much of an impact in the creative industry until the end of the 1980s, I spent 8 to 10 hours a day, typically 6 days a week, airbrushing illustrations for large and small agencies, publishers, freelancers, and company marketing departments. Subject matter included magazine editorials, posters, book covers, cut-away engines, medical illustrations, New Yorker-style cartoons and more, and since Photoshop wasn’t released until 1990, I also did a lot of manual photo retouching.

Early Career

After about a year as a one-man shop, I began to get requests to do design work. I’d typically do an illustration for a print ad and then the client would ask, “Why don’t you lay it out as well? Here is the copy.” For a while, I designed out of my hip pocket, but it wasn’t long before I hired Paula, my first designer. Paula was with me for 10 years, until she set up as a freelance designer in order to spend more time at home with her growing family. I’d like to say that I had a strategic plan for growth, but I didn’t. The business grew organically as work increased, and I soon added designers Amy and Beth. Foolish or not, I never turned anything down in those early years. When a new challenge (um, I mean opportunity) would come along, I’d go for it and then figure out how in the heck to pull it off. I did a lot of figuring things out back then. The one constant was that I always committed to doing my best. That often meant working well above the project budget because I just couldn’t bring myself to do sub-par work. Never just a job, I had passion for what I did. That creative drive served me well (not always in the short run, but over the entirety of my career). By 1998, we were a design firm with five employees, and soon we began to get requests for larger campaign work that required more strategy.

Ad Agency

In 1999, we were working in a 780 square foot office. That needed to change, so in early 2000 we moved into our third office that would be our home for the next 15 years. We decided that we needed to stop doing project one-offs, so we hung out our shingle as an advertising agency. This afforded us the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and take on larger clients and offer more substantive services. Over the next couple of years, our client base increased and our staff grew to 8. We decided to knock out two walls and increase our space to about 1,700 square feet. Later we added a digital photo studio.

Branding firm

In 2006, a few years before the recession, we began to get requests to help our clients better understand their unique offerings and position themselves against their competitors. Our Creative Director at the time, Julie Tibus, already had a passion for branding, and she led us into our final incarnation as a brand development firm. This offered us the opportunity to help our clients at every level. After a few more years, we reached a dozen employees and I knew that twelve felt right. Since I was a creative — not a “suit,” I felt that growing larger would compromise our family-like culture and stretch my own ability to lead an effective team. The last decade has been the most rewarding, as we were a small firm willing to take on big challenges. We expanded into extensive brand development and deeper research including customer surveys and focus groups, SEO, user experience, animation, retail brand development and much more — all in-house. Our clients found it appealing that even though we were small, we could do it all.

My Team

Which brings me to the “we” — my staff. I have been most fortunate in the “Hileites” I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years. Every member we’ve hired was able to handle multiple skills with expertise, something that’s important in a small company. On the few occasions that I’d interview someone with a “big agency” background, I could never find anyone who had the breath of skills we needed. And for nearly the entire 3 decades of my business, I never had an employee leave because they didn’t like the job or the culture of the company. Of course I had to make the difficult decision to lay a few people off over the years (although not during the recession), and others left because they started a family, or moved out-of-state, but I was, indeed, fortunate to be able to retain great people. This was one of the most important aspects of our longevity.

Final Thoughts

Thinking of starting a creative firm that can stand the test of time? Here are a few of my recomendations in no particular order:

Treat everybody the way you want to be treated (and I mean everybody, from delivery people, to interns, to potential clients who you know aren’t right for your company). This paid off in a big way when I landed a large client who was referred to me by a person who I had met and given advice to several years earlier, when they were a student.
Surround yourself with employees who are smarter and more talented than you are. If you think you are the sole reason for your success, you are mistaken. Much of the best advice and counsel I’ve received in my career came from my employees.
You will screw up (regularly), get over it, fix it to the best of your ability and move on.
Change is not the exception, but the norm. If you are adverse to constant disruption, you can’t run a business. (When I moved the company into our second office we quintupled our overhead and two months later we lost our three largest clients.)
Same goes for conflict resolution. It’s not possible to run a business if you expect agency/client relationships to always run smoothly. I decided to try and view client disagreements through their eyes to the best of my ability (which was sometimes frustrating and could seem unfair, but burning bridges is serious business).
Get off your high horse. Embrace humility and admit when you’re wrong. Apologize to your employees and clients when it’s warranted. I’m an extremely tolerant guy, but one of my pet peeves is a person full of their own self importance.
Always aim for excellence, and your employees will do the same.
A sense of humor is not just a good character trait — it’s essential.
Technology and analytics are meaningless unless there is a GREAT idea behind them.
When someone is dogmatic in their approach, they will nearly always be proven wrong.
Finally, creative people need a visual, fun, and supportive environment.