• by Tom Hespos , July 9, 2002

The story of how two well-known media guys got fired from their jobs, did some serious soul-searching, and started an agency of their own. Chapter one: Tim Gets Fired Tim McHale, Day One It was the worst Easter weekend for my family in many years. I knew it was coming. I knew it for six months. The irony of it all, of course, was that I expected to get fired on April 1. I was wrong. The grim reaper didn’t show up until a few days later — I was his last appointment, the last of 15 or so. He told me that he was sorry. I believed him, but in light of the fact that I never expected to be in that particular place at this time in my career, I honestly had no clue what to do next. So I decided to say thank you for the standard package, go home, and figure it all out later. My last day wasn’t until the middle of the month. Day Three Things at the agency got weird. Rather than say that I was fired, they announced that I "resigned" due to "philosophical differences." Huh? I imagined I was Socrates, and they were Aristotle, handing me a cup full of free-range hemlock juice. The news alerts hit the wires around 11 a.m. Within 40 minutes, I received dozens of phone calls from well-wishers, emails from friends, and frantic cell phone vibrations from reporters all over town, calling to see what fire there was behind the smoke. Although I tried to explain that I "really" didn’t resign, but was democratically whacked like many of my fellow employees, several of the reporters didn’t believe me. From there, I decided not to pick up the phone. I had more important things to worry about. Chapter Two: Tom Gets Fired Tom Hespos, Day Eight I was midway through a whirlwind of a week. I had just returned from the great-granddaddy of all vacations, and I had just gotten a line on a nice piece of business for Mezzina Brown — $2 million in interactive spending. On my way to the door to take this news upstairs, I heard a knock. It was my boss, who wanted to know how I was doing. "Great," I told her. "We’re not doing so great," she said, "and I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go." I’ve only been "let go" once before in my career. In the first few seconds after someone tells you that you’re being "let go," you experience a strange sensation. It’s kind of a mixture of that "Oh, @#$%" feeling you get when you first realize you’ve lost your wallet, and the rejection you feel when the prettiest girl in class turns you down right in front of all your friends. Time froze for a second and a bunch of really random thoughts ran through my head, such as, "I’m going to have to empty all the water out of this 35-gallon aquarium in my office and haul it home in a cab." I decided that the only rational course of action was to gather up a bunch of my interactive buddies and go get Rat Pack–style drunk at a dive bar. Chapter Three: Tom and Tim Do Lunch Tom, Day 13, morning I had planned to sleep in on Monday, the first Monday of my new career as a pavement-pounder. But anxiety wouldn’t allow me that luxury, and I was up and typing by 6 a.m. At about 10:30 I got an email from Tim McHale, saying, "Sorry we couldn’t hook up at the bar last week. Let’s get together. What’s your contact info?" You see, there was something I needed to speak to McHale about. There was this wacky voice in my head that kept repeating a little mantra: "Don’t kid yourself. You won’t be happy working for another agency." I asked Tim to meet me for lunch that day at Mustang, a Tex-Mex restaurant on the Upper East Side with killer margaritas.

Tim, Day 13, morning Right before I was to take a week off with my wife to mull over the future, I read with great fascination that Tom Hespos, "the interactive media guy of all media guys," was being laid off. My first reaction was, "Great! Misery loves company!" Within minutes, someone on the Old Timers List suggested that Tom and I should hook up. I smiled, but didn’t give it another thought. I did want to hook up with Hespos, not to hear his own tale of woe, but to ask what the odds were of both of us landing something.

Tom, Day 13, afternoon When I saw Tim at the restaurant, he was smiling. Not exactly the type of expression you expect from a guy who just lost a high-six-figure-salary job with one of the most prominent agencies in the world. We sat down. We ordered frozen drinks. We started talking. We talked about why I was let go and why he was let go. We talked about stuff we were doing for the industry. We talked about our dream gigs. There seemed to be a few common threads: Both of us thought interactive wasn’t getting a fair shake. Both of us thought the big agencies didn’t "get it." Both of us thought that interactive and traditional media needed to make some compromises in order to accommodate one another. "Why don’t we start something together?" I asked out of the blue. Tim promised to think about the idea while he was out of town. After that lunch meeting, I found myself walking down 85th Street, quite buzzed from the margaritas, thinking to myself, "Tim McHale is the type of guy who gets a glorious write-up in Stuart Elliot’s column when he gets canned. Stuart Elliot doesn’t even know who the heck I am. Why would a guy like Tim McHale want to go into business with me?" I decided the best course of action would be to go home and take ÝÛ
åp. Tim, Day 13, afternoon When we met, Tom raised the idea of working together. We were both senior and well known enough that generating awareness of our new offering would not be a problem. The question really was, could we work together? Tom indicated that his biggest frustration with having his own consulting business a few years ago was the constant pain of generating Biz Dev. That was the part I loved most. My biggest issue regarding running a business was the day-to-day stewardship issues, which is the part of the business Tom enjoyed the most. After several margaritas, I thought, "OK, if nothing else arises, doing something with Hespos could be a great fallback."

Chapter four: Looking In the Mirror Tom, Day 15 I loved the idea, but I expected that Tim would come back from vacation with a clear head and tell me that a McHale-Hespos collaboration wasn’t in the cards. So I started sending out resumes and cover letters by the boatload, and struck up conversations with a couple of agencies, some of which turned into job offers. At this point, the writing on the wall was just becoming legible: "When are you going to wake up and realize that slaving away at another agency isn’t the answer?" Tim, Day 22 As vacation wore on, the idea of working for another company, becoming another employee, was literally making me sick. But when I thought about developing a partnership with Tom, it didn’t feel like work. It felt like doing something fun. Tom, Day 23 The highlight of my day was getting an email from Tim, in which he mentioned that he was discussing "doing the entrepreneurial thing" with his wife. And he wanted to speak to me when he got back from vacation. Hope was still alive! Tim, Day 24 Tom emailed me back telling me he’d gotten a job offer. I froze as I read. His email went on to say, though, that he’d turn the offer down. He wasn’t going to take it. He said he was still interested in discussing how we could work together. I breathed a sigh of relief and suggested breakfast Monday morning. Chapter five: Tom and Tim Do Breakfast Tim, Day 27 I went to Tom’s with a conviction: Even though I have no idea how to launch a company from scratch, I am fully committed. It felt right. I had made up my mind to stop all conversations I had begun with other companies. I felt like I’d been just let out of prison. Tom, Day 27 Tim showed up promptly at 8:30 a.m. with bagels from the shop down on the corner. We started talking about what a McHale-Hespos collaboration would look like. I talked to him about the successes I had when I was on my own two years ago. He talked about the meetings he would be able to get with the heavy hitters. I talked a bit about how I wanted to get my hands dirty putting together campaigns and executing them. He talked about wanting to be the guy who kicks down doors and secures business. As we talked, I noticed that things were really beginning to jell. We could make this work. Tim could get the business and I could see to getting the work done. I got the sense that we would complement each other perfectly. The second Tim left my apartment and I locked the door behind him, I performed something I like to call "The Snoopy Happy Dance" right in the middle of my living room. You know, when Snoopy was having a really good time and he would tilt his head toward the sky and do a little jig with a big, stupid grin on his face? That’s exactly what I did.

Chapter six: Working Out the Details Tom, Day 28 Toward the end of my last entrepreneurial gig, I had incorporated a business called Underscore, Inc. I liked the name because the underscore symbol was used everywhere in the interactive arena and it conveyed the interactive focus of my business. Surprisingly, when I suggested the name to Tim, he really dug it, too. We brainstormed a bit and examined the deeper meanings behind the word "underscore." The word also means "to emphasize." Tim and I asked ourselves, "What do we want to emphasize?" The answer was obvious. We wanted to convey an emphasis on marketing… Underscore Marketing! Tim and I agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone about Underscore until we were prepared for a PR launch. Tom, Day 29 Underscore got together for its first company-wide meeting. Our agenda was filled with all the neat stuff one has to do in order to get a company off the ground: filing papers with the state and federal government, writing creative briefs, deciding on a service offering, and tons of other gargantuan tasks. Everyone really stepped up to the plate. The design of the Underscore logo, the layout of our business cards, the design concepts for a good chunk of our collateral materials, all came from my sister Kim over the course of a few weeks in early May. Her fiancé, Rob, an accountant who knows partnerships inside and out, offered support by keeping our books, handling our articles of organization, talking to the lawyers and basically doing all of the stuff that Tim and I didn’t have the time or energy to do. We were on our way. Tom, Day 33 Tim and I brainstormed. We wanted to offer full-service media planning, buying, and campaign maintenance. We wanted to focus on cross-platform marketing, leveraging both our online and offline experience. And we didn’t want to simply pay lip service to the notion of cross-platform marketing. That day, we started to develop a new process for planning, negotiating, and executing cross-platform media campaigns. Over the coming weeks, as we refined and tweaked that process, we decided that it needed a name. Right then and there, two media guys turned into two creative strategists. We wrote a creative brief and did some more brainstorming, which resulted in a name for the process that would also make a great tag line for the agency itself: Market the Experience.

Market the Experience is all about leveraging the strengths of each component medium of a communications effort. Not only does it ensure a cohesive brand experience, but it also ensures that a marketer will make appropriate use of each medium in the mix. It allows us to break down marketing objectives into discrete tasks, which are then wedded to the most appropriate media to tackle each task. When all is said and done, the strategy functions as a singular experience for the consumer. Chapter seven: The Birth of an Agency Tom, Day 38 I awoke with a start at 6 a.m. when I heard the phone ring. "It’s in there," said Rob, obviously unimpressed that I was still sleeping when he called. "What’s in where?" I asked, still groggy. "The Times," he said. "Check it out." I ran to the closest newsstand and bought a copy of The New York Times. Right there in the business section — in Stuart Elliot’s column — was a brief recap of our press release. Tim’s name was there. My name was there. Underscore’s name was there. I was ecstatic. I bought eight copies of the Times. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, I received another email from Tim. We had received our first assignment. The Interactive Advertising Bureau wanted our help in planning and executing a campaign to tout the benefits of interactive media. Not only were we getting our first formal assignment, but we were also getting a vote of confidence from the IAB — the organization of record for our trade. This time, I did the Snoopy REALLY Happy Dance!

Check out our diary on... www.underscoremarketing.com/extras/birth.html