Cowgirl Power

by Gay Gaddis

  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.

  Divorce. New Love. New Family.

  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 la
ter. 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.

  Cutting My Own Trail

  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.

  Building My Competence

  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.

  The Liberation of Being a Think Tank

  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.