Brad Weimert: Gay Gaddis, it is great to meet you in person in the studio in Austin. I appreciate you coming out.

Gay Gaddis: This is a great day to come out. It’s beautiful outside.

Brad Weimert: I refer to this as the reason that we live in Austin.

Gay Gaddis: It is. Few days in October, November, and April.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, right, right, right, right. I actually like the winter months coming from Michigan.

Gay Gaddis: Oh, this is a breeze for you, so to speak. But, yeah, we have a light storm here and there but it’s nothing.

Brad Weimert: Well, that was something special. The one, we’ve had two actually, while I’ve been here about ten years. And the one I laughed at initially because people got scared of it and then it got real. I mean, then it was eight days of electricity going down, pipes bursting. It was a real problem.

Gay Gaddis: Yeah, it really was.

Brad Weimert: So, you hit my radar because of your exit from your advertising company in 2019, a sizable company that you had grown for a very long time. And I want to talk about the process of that and what that looked like but I want to start at the beginning because as I dug into who you are in Austin and what your life was like, it started, well, it started earlier but with a fine arts degree at UT. Now, that is one of the degrees that I think most parents would tell their kids not to get and it translated ultimately into maybe the degree then. But the path led you to a very successful exit. Tell me about that and who you are in college and how it led to starting an advertising agency.

Gay Gaddis: Well, you’re right. You know, my father died when I was 13, and he was very hell-bent that I was going to be an engineer. I have some sort of engineering degree because he was and he was very successful with that. But he passed away when I was 13, and all of a sudden, my mom was a lot more open about where I wanted to go with my life. And I was really, really good as an artist, as a child, and through high school and I’ve won a lot of awards. And my high school art teacher encouraged me to major in art. So, I’d go after the University of Texas here in Austin and signed up for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art. And that’s not just an art degree. That is full on very, very intense because you’re in the classroom 9 hours a week for three hours of credit. You’re in the studio and you’re really trying to be an artist of some sort. I mean, I took all different kinds of art classes so I could kind of determine where I was going to go with that. But an interesting thing happened while I was here.

There was a man they brought in from New York who had been a Vice President of Creative at Young & Rubicam, a big New York agency. And he started this class inside the art department teaching us how to be art directors and creative directors in an advertising agency. Well, I got in the class. I became his teaching assistant, and I really did well in his class. And we were drawing then, though, because dial back, we didn’t have Max. We didn’t have computers. We had no way to do what we call comps to show a client our idea. So, in the advertising business, you went and show, “Here’s what it’s going to look like. This is what the magazine ad is going to look like or the outdoor board or the TV spot.” We do little frames. And so, we drew everything. And we had great skills with markers and fine pencils and all these things. And there were beautiful portfolios when we got out of school.

Soon as I graduated, I got a degree in fine art but I went right in the advertising business. Simultaneously, he was booted out of the art department because the actual professors of fine arts decided this was horrible, that we had this commercial person haunting the halls, teaching our kids, teaching our students to be commercial artists. Oh, my gosh, that’s blasphemous. So, they pushed him over to communications school. Had he not been there when I was there, though, I would have never gotten into the advertising business because my first job was as an art director and I could write copy. I always liked to write. And so, I would put together a portfolio. They had copy written for the ads and I could draw them, and that was my first job. And then it went from there.

Brad Weimert: Isn’t that interesting? I wonder about some of those things today. I mean, I think about that in a lot of different areas of life where the purist mentality gets in the way of the pragmatic mentality. And I appreciate both. I really do appreciate the notion of art for art and don’t corrupt it. And I also look at it pragmatically. And if I had a child that was pursuing art, I would want that person in the art room saying, “Hey, look how you could apply this and also make money.”

Gay Gaddis: It’s still a battle today because with technology and what some of the students are doing there and I get involved with the College of Fine Arts here at Texas and there are a lot of the students who are actually creating games and they’re working with the marketing students. It’s a little more open now, I think, too, for some of the students there on how they’re going to monetize their career. But there’s still the fine artists there and they don’t like it very much. It’s been a battle that’s gone on age-old.

Brad Weimert: So, I want to dig into the specifics of the agency that you built. But first, I think to set the frame, what was the makeup of the agency that you were a part of out of school? Who were they serving and what kind of agency were they?

Gay Gaddis: Well, you may have heard of them. It was The Richards Group in Dallas, which grew to be the largest independent agency in the country. And when I was there, there were 18 of us. It was a very small agency. And it was all about design and the top-level creative design. And so, I really learned a lot of what made something aesthetically beautiful and also was an ad. And so, that was kind of a great start for me. It was tough, though. I mean, it was really tough at the agency because there were so few people and we worked so hard. I mean, I never went home. I mean, it’s one of those stories. You get a job in the advertising agency for the great annual salary of 13,000 a year. I’m not kidding. That’s what all my salary was. And I worked constantly. And eventually, it just became a point where I didn’t really think that I wanted to be an art director anymore. I wanted to make it happen. You know, I wanted to lead the client. I wanted to be out in front of all of that and then hire people to do that for me.

So, I got out and I started going to school at night to business school and community colleges. And then later I moved to Atlanta and went to Georgia State at night because I realized there was a hole in my degree. I mean, I loved my art degree, but I had not one business class the entire time I was an undergraduate. So, I went back for an MBA and I worked really hard at that while I was doing all these other things. I might mention, too, that when I was in Atlanta, I had a very interesting segue out of the ad business and out of PR for a while. I worked for four guys who had gotten their MBAs at Harvard, and they had a management and leadership consulting business headquartered in Atlanta. And because of the relationships I had at Harvard, they had great ends at Procter and Gamble and Delta and Coca-Cola. And so, we were literally in some big corporate companies working with teams, working on leadership skills and on how to build the best teams for results and then decision-making qualities and how to plan.

And so, they were just really, really great at all that. And I was not necessarily prepared to lead that but I was like a sponge and I was right in the middle of it, writing about it, helping with a lot of the programs that they put together. And so, that was an education all unto itself while I was going back to school at night getting basic business courses. So, it all kind of came full circle in that before I came back to Austin and ended up starting my agency.

Brad Weimert: In the first agency that you worked for, what types of clients were you serving? What size of business were you serving?

Gay Gaddis: Well, Richards Group is just starting to grow and I hit it at the point that they got their first big bank account in Dallas that doesn’t even exist anymore. It was merged and bought and bought and bought so many times. But Steak and Ale was a client. That’s an old restaurant and some of those types of clients. So, we’re Dallas-based but the company is there. And so, we worked on some pretty cool projects. And some of the design work that I did while I was there I still hold up as beautiful work, but very, very different times.

Brad Weimert: Incredibly and I think one of the things that is fascinating about the path of advertising agencies, in particular, is when you started yours in 1989, it is an entirely different landscape. The medium is different, distribution channels are different, the tools are different. So, the roles and responsibilities within the company are different.

Gay Gaddis: Completely.

Brad Weimert: And also, the overhead to create the company is very different. So, we have tons of marketing agencies that are clients of ours today, and it’s a very attractive model to start today because it’s low overhead to start today, depending on the type you want. But the client that you are working with is important to me because if we fast forward to later stages of the development of your own agency, and we’ll get there, you’ve got huge names that you had as clients, right?

Gay Gaddis: Eventually.

Brad Weimert: Eventually, right. So, you have these massive enterprise clients that you worked for.

Gay Gaddis: The Fortune 100, I mean, yeah.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about the transition there. So, did you leave The Richards Group with the idea that you were going to start your own but you needed to build the skill set to do so?

Gay Gaddis: No, I did not. At the time, I was just trying to figure out what I really wanted to do. And that’s why I ended up being the Public Relations Director at Baylor Medical Center before I even went to Atlanta. So, I left the advertising side, went over, but I was still doing so much in the creative end because we were developing magazines and I actually changed the whole logo system for Baylor Medical Center in Dallas that lasted for years. Still, a piece of it is still there and that was way, way back. So, I was doing things for Baylor that was really ad agency-like. And see, that’s what I was saying is I enjoyed hiring the creatives to do my vision and I’d say we’ve got to change the entire graphic system for this health care facility and system. And I convinced the management to do it. And so, I was better at running those projects and leading those than actually doing the design work.

And so, that’s kind of how I eventually realized that even though I worked for other people, that one day I woke up and we were in a bad recession. Let’s just talk about the late 80s. Here I was in Austin. Austin was a sleepy town. For people who know Austin today, it seems to be bustling and happening and lots of cool people and things going on. When the late 80s, the entire country was in a really deep recession. Austin and Texas were particularly hit hard. The savings and loans all failed. You know, the real estate wasn’t worth the dirt it was built on. I’m serious. I mean, we were all just in the tank. And so, I was working for another ad agency here in Austin, and I wrote a business plan on how to get us out of this horrible situation. And I want to rethink the way we developed our business. And so, I thought I had it going. I thought it was going to be good and I made a mistake, critical mistake.

I didn’t bring the president of the company along with me, and he rejected my strategy, rejected my idea, and I went down the hall the next day and quit and said, “I’m going to go do this. I’ve got to go do this. I believe in it.” And so, I had no money. Broke. My husband and I were just in terrible financial situation, but I had $16,000 in a retirement account and I went and cashed it in and said, “I’m going to start my agency.” So, that’s all the money it really took to start an agency in 1989. Well, of course, we need a lot of other things. I had two employees I hired and one thing led to another. I had to beg someone to give me some space to have a little office. But fortunately, I had some clients in my back pocket and I was able to start the business with business. So, that was not a scary… It was very scary but it was at least I had some paying clients to walk in the door, day one. So, that was good but it was just a really, really bad time in Austin. There weren’t much going on here. There were no companies. I mean, all of our clients pretty much were outside of Austin because there was not much going on here.

Brad Weimert: So, I have no idea what the actual inflation-adjusted dollars are for 1989 but I’m going to take a stab at somewhere. I have heard stats are on this stuff from a similar period. So, I’m going to say it’s something like $50,000, but not much to start things. Where did that money go and where did the clients come from?

Gay Gaddis: The clients were really, let’s talk about my role at Baylor Medical Center. So, I got to be extremely knowledgeable about healthcare marketing and advertising before almost anybody was doing it. And so, I had connections because of my Baylor relationships with hospitals around the state. So, I went to them that I knew and asked them if they’d like to join my agency. And I convinced three people to do it, three CEOs. And so, that was our first three clients for our healthcare clients.

Brad Weimert: I love that.

Gay Gaddis: Yeah. But I knew the business and I think what every entrepreneur or what every business person has to know is if you don’t have some specific differentiation points and niches that you can go to, that would set you apart from someone else, you might not have a good idea. You may not be able to grow or move as fast as you want. But I will say this, even though I kept growing hospital business, I did not want to be a health care agency. And so, from day one, I started looking around for other types of clients to mix in because I didn’t want to be just branded as this only healthcare shop. And so, we started picking up other types of clients as fast as we could to balance that.

Brad Weimert: And the 16,000 that used to launch the company, how did you spend it to get that going? Did you hire staff?

Gay Gaddis: Yeah. That’s the first thing. I had to have people. I mean, that’s the key for anything, you know? And if I have anything I can leave your audience with today, it’s this. And this is one of the things I learned with the guys at Harvard. They taught me from the day I walked in the door by giving me some personality profiling assessments where my real strengths were. And there it was right in front of me. And you kind of innately know some of that stuff if you’re in tune with yourself but sometimes you don’t really know exactly where you should spend your time and your talent. Because if you work all the time on these weaknesses and these things you’re never going to do, well, you won’t get anywhere. You’ve got to go forward with the strengths. So, I knew what they were. And the first thing I did was hire two people that shored up my weaknesses and they had talent that I did not have. And that’s how we started.

And I was also fortunate because, again, we were in a recession and a lot of people had been laid off. So, there’s some great talent around who were willing to do freelance work. And so, as we needed someone, we picked this person here and that person there and whatever from all over the country. I would hire people, great talent. So, that kind of played in our hand, really. The recession left some great people without jobs who were quite willing to freelance. So, we put together teams based on the client need and we could just shift and move them. And it was a fluid way to run the business, to begin with.

Brad Weimert: And correct me if I’m wrong in any of these stats because you can’t believe everything that you read on the Internet, but the business was…

Gay Gaddis: No, you can’t.

Brad Weimert: The business was at 44 million in 2019 when you sold. Is that right?

Gay Gaddis: Yeah. Well, actually, advertising agencies are really bizarre the way we report our earnings. And so, yeah, that would be the net amount. We would report ourselves to be over 300 million in capitalized billings because that’s how agencies would compare themselves. So, it was really that was one stat but then the other stat is really more realistic on earnings.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. I love that. So, how long did it take you to get to – this is a 30-year run with this business, right? So, how long did it take you to get to the first million?

Gay Gaddis: You know, not that long. And here’s the thing. Not very many women, the stats are out there still today, this has been going on for years, ever make it to $1 million in sales. A lot of women entrepreneurs and sometimes they hold themselves back for family reasons, whatever, but they’ll make 500,000, 700,000 and they never even get to a million. Very few get to 5 million and then up there. But I would have to double back. And I think that we got to $1 million in sales probably within two years.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, in the initial period of growth there, you had some clients in the pocket that were health care that you didn’t really want, ultimately. I mean, you need it. You wanted it right in the beginning but you wanted to work on other projects. What changed after that point? What was the path from call it 1 to 10? And what changed in the agency?

Gay Gaddis: Okay. I’ll tell you. All right. Here’s the story. So, 1992. Now, remember, I started the company in ‘99. In 1992, I got a call from a guy that I had known at the University of Texas. We weren’t like best friends but we knew each other. And he was out at a little Dell Computer Corporation. And he said, “I’m not happy with this in-house agency we have.” He said, “Do you all come out here and let’s just talk about what we can do?” So, we marched out to Dell, which was all over town. I mean they didn’t have a big office then. It was just a little outpost here and there.

Brad Weimert: In ’92?

Gay Gaddis: Yeah. And so, we went out and talked to a group of the marketing team there and just started off on some projects. And one thing led to another and it started working and we kind of developed a loose relationship. But by ‘94, in those two years, we’d really started doing a lot of work for Dell. And I was in a room and Michael Dell walked in and he sat down with us and he said, “We’re going to start selling on the Internet because it perfectly fits our direct model.” Well, you have to understand, if you know the Dell model and the Dell history that Dell sell directly to consumers, directly to business, directly to the government. They didn’t go through resellers. They didn’t have retail outlets. They were direct. They sell direct. So, yeah, it did make sense. And we were doing a lot of direct marketing for Dell at the time. The mail, we continued to do that.

But I went back to the office and we had dabbled in some Internet stuff, believe it or not, at ‘94. I had some people that were doing some things. We did the very first Internet site for a beer company, Shiner Bock in the 90s.

Brad Weimert: Wow.

Gay Gaddis: Yeah, I mean, it was the first one ever.

Brad Weimert: I mean, obviously, anybody in Texas knows Shiner.

Gay Gaddis: Yeah. Well, sorry about that. Shiner Bock.

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I’m just saying. The rest of the world doesn’t know but the accent is there.

Gay Gaddis: I’m sorry. It’s a beer company in old Shiner, Texas but that story. So, he comes in and says that. I go back to the office and I said, “Not only do we need to dabble in this and have fun, we’re going to have to get really great at this or we’re going to lose Dell because Michael’s taken off. I mean, he’s going this direction. And if we don’t get it, we’re out.” So, we started hiring. We all did. I mean, we would sit down with our Dell clients and we were all looking for anybody who could figure it out. And we had to just do it on our own. And so, we marched hand in hand with Dell through the years. We did the first email campaigns, the first online advertising. I have it up in my office in New York because we had to find people who could place online media. There was no one in Austin who could do it. No one had a relationship with the publishers. No one knew how to do it. So, right after 9/11, there we were really doing just millions of dollars’ worth of online media. And I had to find someone who could do it.

So, we went to New York up in the office, their full-service office, and then other media came in behind it because, and this was again when online media was popular. People don’t buy it so much. It’s different now.

Brad Weimert: Just totally different.

Gay Gaddis: Totally different. But that was really like media buys and you had to have all the analytic tools. You had to have everything. We were doing search, we were doing online media, and it grew to San Francisco and we had an Atlanta office in Austin. And so, Dell was right in the center of our growth. We had a paying client and they were hard to work with. So, if anyone is listening to this today, I would tell you to your face, I mean, it was difficult because here’s the thing. It wasn’t that they wanted to be. It’s just that there was such a competitive absolute fire under them to compete against Compaq, IBM. We were trying to get them in the hunt to compete with these other big computer companies. So, it was just like, go, go, go. And if you’ve ever heard the 80/20 rule, which everyone has, that was a Dell thing. Let’s just get 80% right and to hell with the other 20%. We’ll fix it later.

So, we were just experimenting. We were out there doing new things. You know, we were doing virtual tours of offices before anyone even knew what it was. And we developed stuff that just had never been done in the market before because there was Dell saying, “We’ll try it. Let’s do it.” So, it was an amazing run with Dell. We worked with them for 16 years until we didn’t one day and that was a bad deal. I’ll tell you, if you want to, in a few minutes about that because that was an interesting thing. But here we are, though, this quite a smaller agency competing against massive holding company agencies. And we knew how to do everything. We were really the real deal. And so, we ended up walking into, I mean, I had a lot of connections and I work with a lot of people to get in these doors, but we ended up walking into UPS and Allstate, into Chase Corporate, into Marriott Corporate.

I mean, we just kept getting opportunities to get into the underside of what was going on with the digital revolution and all these companies, while their big holding company agencies were still pushing TV and print big, expensive print campaigns, we were in there getting results and we were like the little engine that could behind everything. Until at one point, we started getting more the budget because all of a sudden the world shifted and another recession, 2008-2009 really woke up everybody because they said, “We can’t spend all those millions of dollars on TV. Let’s let T3,” my company, “go in and see what they can do for half the budget and I bet we get more results. And we would do it over and over and over.”

Brad Weimert: Well, let me pause and get to the later collapse, the third collapse we’re talking about here in ’08, ‘09, and rewind back to 2001 but ‘94. So, for the thousands of people and beyond that hear this and hear about digital campaigns and media buys in them being different that don’t understand why or what that means, there were no tools to build websites. There were no WYSIWYG editors. There were no tools that did email marketing campaigns, and there were no platforms that you could buy ads on. So, correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, but when you were talking about media buys, you were buying space on somebody else’s website to run a banner on their website.

Gay Gaddis: Exactly.

Brad Weimert: And that was the only type of media buy you could do. And there was no reporting on it.

Gay Gaddis: Well, we did get reporting.

Brad Weimert: You made your own.

Gay Gaddis: We made our own.

Brad Weimert: Right, but there’s no reporting tool at that point.

Gay Gaddis: No, there wasn’t.

Brad Weimert: There’s no Google Analytics.

Gay Gaddis: No, nothing. And so, you’re absolutely right. I mean, we were so innovative and always first to market and we just tried things over and over. We were one of the first companies that even said mobile wasn’t going to go anywhere. Well, look what’s happened now. I mean, we were out there getting clients to do these things on mobile that people say, “You’re crazy. That’s never going to go anywhere. No one’s going to buy anything on their phones.” Well, well, they did. So, yes, over and over we would just get out there and experiment and see what we could do. And we did have to build it ourselves. You’re right. I mean, my developers at T3 were brilliant. I mean, we had software engineers that could create these things out of nothing.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about that part of it because there are parallels today with AI and where we are and sort of leaning into being able to figure out the path. AI is different because you probably, well, it’s different in a lot of ways. But you just said, “We had engineers on the team that could figure it out.” But when you originally signed with Dell and started developing with Dell before they said, “Hey, let’s go hard into the Internet,” that doesn’t really exist yet, right?

Gay Gaddis: It really didn’t. Not to us. I mean, it was in the government somewhere but the working people of the world didn’t really know they could touch it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It’s ‘99 to ‘01 was the first burst, really. And then after that was the time when it actually started to get adoption, right? When Internet speeds became functional, they didn’t tie up the phone lines. So, you’re in this beginning era. Presumably, you didn’t have any engineers on your advertising team. So, when Dell says, “Hey, we want to go deep into digital,” how did you approach finding people to do that and allocating resources to do it?

Gay Gaddis: Well, yes, we always had to look for people in the most unexpected places. And so, if I had just gone and hired advertising copywriters at one point, I would have been screwed because I had to find journalists. I’m getting an analogy of how we ended up finding people to do certain things. We hired a lot of journalists because they write different and they dig and they look for information. If you go to traditional advertising copywriters, they look for the creative brief. That’s how we talk about in the ad business. You have your outline of what you’re going to write about. Then they go off and write. So, we always had to look for people who were curious and we would literally go to like Motorola and we would get a 3 a.m. and we would look for engineers. We looked for people who were kind of having an interesting time on their own discovering this Internet. And we used to have a company that would come in and help us just connect our computer desktops, all these things.

And I would look for some of those people and say, “Do you want to come and help us figure this out?” And so, we just had to find people in the most unusual places that were willing to just say, “I know I’m not an ad person, but I bet I can sit down and learn how to do this.” And most of them were self-taught. They were people who were curious about what was going to happen with this medium, how it was going to change our lives. And we just went all over the place looking for it. Now, opening up in New York helped a lot because all of a sudden we had access to some people through some of the publishers, and it’s what you’re talking about. So, we were buying massive amounts of advertising on Forbes for Dell for one publication. And so, they would find people and all of a sudden, Google was kind of bubbling up.

Brad Weimert: Hold on. This was Forbes print at the time and/or eventually their…

Gay Gaddis: Well, their digital.

Brad Weimert: Their digital. Got it.

Gay Gaddis: We became the largest advertiser in Forbes Digital in the country. Well, we didn’t but our clients did.

Brad Weimert: Right. In what era is this?

Gay Gaddis: That would have been 2004.

Brad Weimert: Okay. Right. So, now we’re fast-forwarding a little bit past the initial launch. Right? So, you’re figuring all this out. And I guess one of the questions that I have there and I imagine there’s not going to be a simple answer to this, but if you look at the early the start of T3, you have a lot of exposure and risk going into it, despite the fact that you have a couple of small clients in your pocket. Or maybe not small but not game-changing, right? As you lean into digital heavy, how exposed did you feel in taking risk and gambling because you did have Dell behind you, this large client that was willing to test things? So, presumably that fed some of the creative and also sort of reduced risk.

Gay Gaddis: It did.

Brad Weimert: But how exposed did you feel in that process and kind of what was the balance? How did you look at it?

Gay Gaddis: The interesting thing is because I never borrowed any money to run my company ever. Now, I want you to think about this. I did not take out loans. I didn’t use bank loans. Nothing. Not even a line of credit. I always step back from that and we had to make our own adjustments so we could get through whatever bad time or whatever things were going on because I didn’t want anyone controlling us. And once you take money from someone, they do. I will say this. My business was not like a manufacturing business or you had a lot of inventory. Some companies need the capital. They have to have it. They can’t survive without it. So, I’m not saying you don’t ever want to do that, but the fact that we never did, made me extremely responsible for everything. And it was me. I mean, my name was on the contracts, everything. And so, whatever happened, the buck stopped literally with me.

So, very early on, we started hiring the best attorneys that we could to do contracts for us and we worked with them side by side. And I’m going to name who it was. It’s Baker Botts here in Texas. And we worked initially with someone who they didn’t even know what Internet contracts were going to look like, and we didn’t really either. But what would happen as you go into a big company and they would throw out their cookie-cutter advertising contract to you, “Sign this,” and a big major client that will right now remain nameless came to me and said, “Look, if you want to work with us, the legal department called me and said, ‘Sign this.’ We’re not going to mess with you. We don’t have time to mess with you, this whole agency.” And I said, “I can’t sign it because you don’t know what you’re asking me to do because you don’t know what I’m going to do.” And so, we ended up back and forth, back and forth. When it was all over, their general counsel called me and said, “You got the best contract in the house.”

Because what happened is we realized that most contracts were never going to be written for the ambiguity that we had to deal with. They were not written for the data issues that we had to deal with, the security issues. And so, we got very much in the weeds of all those contracts, and we had literally fabulous contracts with all of our clients. They paid us, we were covered, and I could sleep at night. Now, it didn’t mean something couldn’t go wrong at any moment but we were very well covered from a great relationship with our clients with contracts that were binding and they covered things. And of course, when things would change, we’d have to go back and adjust. And we were really good about watching our contracts. Oh gosh, we’re doing something now, and no one even knew we could do. So, we’re going to get in here and make sure that’s covered. So, it was just always a legal thing too going on to keep us really on our toes and our clients understanding what we were going to deliver.

Brad Weimert: So, I think what I heard was some of the risk mitigation and what made you feel comfortable, rolling the dice, taking the swings was, yes, the larger clients and also the contractual obligations that were put in place. Were the contracts longer-term? How did those contracts work with Dell, for example?

Gay Gaddis: Well, they were usually annual contracts, and then you would have addendums to them if you took on work that was not in the original contract. And so, we would always say, “Okay. Gosh, we’re taking a…” At one point we’re doing all the catalogs for Dell. We did 12 million catalogs a month. Well, that is a different animal than anything else. Good grief. There was a huge change and you cannot believe all the work we did on that. But each time you go in, there was a publication. So, it’s a different kind of thing. So, we were just really, really careful about it. And I had a great accounting department and I had relationships with the accounting departments and all these companies, and they talk to each other a lot. And we would work back and forth with each other on when our payments were coming, what was going to happen. And you could plan then. You knew what was going to happen even in a bad recession or whatever. We worked around all that.

So, that’s the only security I had really is knowing that we had great relationships both with the clients, accounting people, legal things locked up. And then you could take some risks because you had a basis for it. And I’m a risk taker anyway. Now, I’m going to roll the dice well before a lot of people on things because that’s just how I’m made. And that’s the way I am. But you don’t take risks that are not based on sound business and good people and trust.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. 12 million catalogs a month seems horrific.

Gay Gaddis: Oh, I won’t even tell you how crazy it was getting them across the country. So, they would start in one place and we had 144 tractor-trailer trucks taking these all over the country. And we time exactly when they were going to hit Maine or exactly when they were going to hit California. And we had to have people in the call center at Dell ready to go when those were going to hit. So, it was a logistics incredible project. I mean, everything, and just creating it, but then just the legal birdseed in it. I mean, it was this incredible project.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, Dell, I mean, this is actually not the story that I thought it was going to hear. So, this is super interesting. Digital, that’s a really, really cool way to learn and lean into the digital space. It’s also very unusual for somebody to, A, have sort of a key player that helps fund it, B, have the desire and persistence to lean in so heavily to figure out the digital environment pre-tools, right? Figuring out the internet pre-actual tools to navigate it was very different. Building websites was very hard, all the creative was. As things changed, so if we move into ’04, we’ve gone through 9/11, you’ve gone through a crash, where are you then in this process? And did you lose clients through ’01, post-9/11? Did the contracts allow you to navigate that? What did that look like?

Gay Gaddis: Well, again, we still had Dell there and we were just rocking and rolling and just growing and growing and growing. And the more we would do well and get results and we measure stuff, the more work we get. So, that was there at that time frame. The other thing that was going on is that for people who don’t remember this, I mean, back around the 2000 timeframe, all these companies came to Austin, all these startups that were these Internet sites that were going to sell stuff on the Internet, Garden.com and Appliance.com, and they were beating our door down. And, yes, I would have liked to have had some business, but I turned down every one of them, every one because they did not have a good business plan. People were not ready to buy their refrigerators on the Internet in 2000. They weren’t going to do it. I knew they wouldn’t. And so, it was a waste of my time to have to even listen to them.

And they were all arrogant and they all had venture money behind them and they all had $12 million and they all wanted to be on the Super Bowl. I mean, it was just like a broken record over and over. And finally, I said, “I just didn’t want to talk to them anymore.” And so, we just kind of settled down with the clients we had and got through. But it was just a real distraction, to be honest, for a while. And they all failed and they all went bankrupt. And they took down a lot of agencies because a lot of agencies went with that and took these clients on. And they literally almost bankrupted a lot of agencies.

Brad Weimert: So, hindsight’s 20/20 and I can look at that and say, “Yeah. That makes total sense. I understand how that shook out.” But it’s a bold move to reject that opportunity and that money at that phase. Look, if they weren’t venture-backed, I would say, “Okay,” but they came with…

Gay Gaddis: They had money.

Brad Weimert: They came with money. So, what was it that allowed you to make that decision? Was it that you didn’t want a distraction and a shiny object? Was it that you truly just thought this wasn’t a real opportunity? Or was it that you didn’t have the staff to execute with bandwidth or some combination?

Gay Gaddis: Would never be in the bandwidth. We could always grow staff if we had to. And I did it over and over and over. I always go to this is how we grow the business, to be honest. The secret sauce of anything is you always go to the end consumer and you study what they’re doing and what they might do. And if they’re not willing to buy a refrigerator online, then nobody else is. If I talk to 50 people and do a focus group and say, “Would you buy your garden tools online?” “No. I don’t really like that,” well, I knew that their business models were flawed because the audience wasn’t ready for them yet. It didn’t happen until later. Now, buying computers online had worked but certain other things people were not willing to do. And so, my gut just told me it wasn’t going to work and it didn’t. Now, I will say this. We did take one, one of all the hundreds I feel like I talked to, and it was called Rx.com. And they were going to sell…

Because there was already a model for buying medications, prescriptions through a direct kind of like Dell. There was direct marketing where some people ordered prescriptions through a mail-order program. And so, to be able to do it online wasn’t that big of a leap. Eventually, they did not. They were not successful. And it wasn’t because the model wouldn’t work. It’s just that the insurance companies didn’t cover and there were some issues, but we got paid for everything, so I didn’t lose any money on it. It was kind of hard because they were kind of holding that part of the business but we got paid and we didn’t get scarred from that. But overall, I could just say that people weren’t going to buy those things online. They weren’t ready yet. And you can’t push the consumer. You can push innovation in front of them, give them options, but you cannot push a consumer to do something they’re not going to do. We always studied the end consumer. We paid so much attention to it.

With all of our clients, we’d say, “Okay. What are your consumers saying? What are they doing?” If they’re going there, and that’s why we got so excited about mobile. We let people do things on their phones. We offered a free Slurpee. We had 7-Eleven as a client. If you passed by, we knew where they were. It sounds creepy but remember the old days of GPS? Okay. We know you’re driving by or walking by a 7-Eleven and we just do a little thing. It says, “Hey, come in. It’s hot today. Have a free Slurpee.” So, we started using things where we saw consumers starting to use it, and then we would just push the excitement of it. If they’re using it, how do you make it more interesting? Innovative? How do you delight the customer more? How do you help them and not bug them? You know, we had to be really careful. You don’t want to bug people, but if you did something that made their life better, we were amazed how much they’d want to share.

They work for Pizza Hut. Found out people wanted to tell which protein they liked the best. They wanted to tell us. We asked. They told us. Okay. I’m a Dallas fan. You know, at 3:00 on Sunday afternoon, Dallas is playing. So, you get an ad from Pizza Hut that says, “Our hot pizza is going to be there in 30 minutes and you get a discount. Would you like that?” Yes. So, it was always kind of doing things that we felt like were maybe a little intrusive, but we were delighting or helping the customer. And listening to the end consumer was the king of everything.

Brad Weimert: So, you talked about mobile and that coincides with this ’08, ’09 where we bounced out of a minute ago because the first iPhone came out in ‘07 and certainly was the beginning of real mobile. We had Blackberries before that.

Gay Gaddis: Oh, I love my BlackBerry.

Brad Weimert: I did, too. And I didn’t understand.

Gay Gaddis: I had carpal tunnel surgery because of one.

Brad Weimert: Well, I didn’t understand how we were going to get rid of keyboards. I remember vividly thinking, “I don’t want a phone that doesn’t have a keyboard.”

Gay Gaddis: Oh, I still have one. I have figured it out. My iPad has a wonderful keyboard with it. No, no, no. I still don’t do well on an Apple.

Brad Weimert: Oh, really?

Gay Gaddis: No. I have to… Because I was so addicted to my BlackBerry, I was the true CrackBerry. I was one of the very hot users. And real quick story, if you want edited out, fine. So, everybody in my entire company was all on Mac or Apple products but me. And I still had, well, I had a Mac on my desk, but I still had my novel CrackBerry, as we called the BlackBerry. And my IT department stalked me for like three weeks. And I would tell my assistant, “Tell them I left. They were coming to bring me my new iPhone.” “No. She’s not here today.” And so, I would run and they said, “Gay, we cannot support you. You’re the only person that we’re going to support on this and this is going to go away. It’s not going to sustain. We have to do it.” So, finally, they convinced me I had to get that. But truly I was just an early adopter with it and I loved that. And it was such a great way to be able to message people from a plane, well, not end of the year but at the time. I was just always communicating. It was just…

Brad Weimert: Sure. Yeah, I loved mine. But relative to mobile advertising, the mobile advertising opportunities didn’t launch until the iPhone, etcetera, or did they?

Gay Gaddis: No. We were starting to do things earlier than that because you have to remember the iPhone wasn’t the only thing because you had Samsung and you had other. So, we were trying to use whatever was available to us, but it was just barely, barely it was early. The iPhone, though, everything exploded. And just because of the usability on those and what you could do with them and even the graphics were better. And that made a big difference in what you could use and do with them as well. And you know, we bought mobile ads. I mean, we just used it everywhere we could but I think the iPhone was really when it all really took off, which is because of what I said.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Okay. So, let’s keep going down this path. And then I’ve got some questions about a couple of other areas of your life because you’ve got other chapters that are super interesting as well. But as we approach 2019, some people grow their business and just sort of stumble upon exit. Some people deliberately craft a path to exit. Which one were you?

Gay Gaddis: I was not planning to sell the company. And you make different decisions. You’re absolutely right. If a lot of people start a business with the intention to sell it and they know they want to get their equity out of it and they have a timeline and they march toward that. And I know a lot of people have been very successful at that model. My thing was always I love the business so much and I didn’t really want to ever sell it because it was like, to be honest, it was like a baby to me. It’s my second child. I loved it. And my husband was very involved in it with me. And it was our, you know, I ran it but he was a very major part of the operations of the company for a long time. Not in the beginning, but he came in later when Dell started growing, to be honest. So, it was never something to do as a sale.

But I also had been told and coached by a lot of people that if the time is right, you better think about it because you don’t want to sell a business in the worst of economies. You don’t want to sell out when you’re on the downhill. You want to sell when all systems are going up. And our eldest son was in the business and he was doing a lot of some of the innovation and a lot of the cool things that we were starting to get new things. And he and the rest of family sat down with me and said, “Maybe this is the time that we should just at least see what’s out there.” And this was early 2019. Let’s just see what the market’s like. And I just freaked out. No, no, I don’t want to do it now. I can’t do this. And so, finally, they convinced me, well, let’s just at least go down the road to figure out if we have good buyers or anyone’s interested. I said, “Okay. Go down to the end even though this is going to be painful going through all this and all the finances we have to dig up and all this stuff. I want the right down to the last day if I don’t like the deal to get back out.”

So, the nice thing is we were not desperate to sell. We didn’t have to sell then. Now, you look back, though, did I have my guardian angel on my shoulder or something? Because we sold at the end of 2019 and the year came COVID in 2020 and everything just flipped. And no one was really wanting to buy things and the economy was all in just a turmoil. And so, it was the right time. It really was. And I’m very fortunate that it happened that way. Although I must tell you, it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for me at all.

Brad Weimert: What was the makeup of the company at that point, number of employees, locations, etcetera? And what were the terms around the sale for whatever you can share, feel like sharing?

Gay Gaddis: Well, the thing about a sale is that, again, we had a really great track record. We had great clients, we had great contracts, we got paid on time. We don’t have any debt. I mean, we were very attractive and we had a lot of interesting buyers. And so, what happened, though, is that I decided from the time it was looking serious that we were like, “This could happen. You know, we really were going to get through with this,” that I wasn’t going along with it. They couldn’t have me. And even if that affected the price because I was so independent, I’d run it for so long and made all my decisions and never had to look over my shoulders. Like I told you, I didn’t borrow any money. I don’t want a board of directors. I didn’t want people telling me what to do. And I felt that I was almost unemployable at that point. And so, I negotiated with them. I said, “Ben, our oldest son, will stay and these key people are staying.” But I said I’m leaving. I will literally walk out the door of the day, we are done and I’m gone. And so, that was it. And it was awful. It was like pulling a Band-Aid off, a bad Band-Aid because, foom, I’ve just gone, disappeared. I had to say goodbye to everybody and all of that. But it was the right thing because I just couldn’t have worked in like that. I mean, I’m just too independent. I just can’t do it.

Brad Weimert: How much did that, I mean, as you know, it is tremendously common to have burnouts. I mean, it’s almost, it is the rule, right, that it happens to some extent. How much did it hurt the price or valuation of the sale?

Gay Gaddis: I won’t tell you that it hurt that much because here’s why. I mean, it did some. I’m sure it did. I will never even know for sure. But I have written a book, and I had also gotten back in my art career. And I had a show in New York in 2016, a one-woman show that was very successful. And I was following the path of my art thing again and doing book tours all over and doing speaking all over the country. And so, to be honest, I was there and my spirit was there, and I was kind of the culture person, you know, a lot of what was at T3. But I wasn’t running the show exactly like I had been. You know, I watched the money, believe me. I mean, I was very much there but I was not in every client meeting or I wasn’t going to the meeting. I wasn’t in every staff meeting. I just wasn’t as present as I had been. So, I’d already kind of started extricating myself a little bit. And that was even before we decided to sell because I felt like it was time to reinvent myself. And I wasn’t bored with the company but I wanted to move on to my next chapter in a way. So, I guess what I was doing without realizing it is I was selling the company.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Positioning it for sale even if you weren’t doing it consciously.

Gay Gaddis: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. So, you graduated from UT with a fine arts degree, which rolled into this wonderful company. And before we started recording, you mentioned that you were a serious artist and your face got serious when you said serious artist, which is I know you’re a real artist because I poked around and looked at some of this stuff. I want to hear a little bit about the art projects now, but to bridge the gap, I also want to know clearly this is a huge part of your life, the art in general. Do you think that your background with art aided you in your ability to grow the company or it was a way to balance you through the company and allow you to pull away and have your own personal life doing it?

Gay Gaddis: Well, I didn’t paint or really do art projects of whatever you want to call it for a long time because I was so involved in the company. But the other thing in advertising, there’s a lot of creative people that you hire and so they’re really artists or they’re creative, like what you learn as an artist as you be trained in school. So, I was really good at managing those people because I understood them and they knew I did. I was a creative person inside and I knew what it felt like to create and how your emotions and how your soul’s in it, you know?

Brad Weimert: Did you look at the business as the creative outlet?

Gay Gaddis: Yes.

Brad Weimert: I love that.

Gay Gaddis: To me, that was it. I mean, I wasn’t painting. I wasn’t a solo artist, but I was always creating beautiful things and the people that I hired. Yes, it was ads, but we did gorgeous things. I mean, we did some video that was just fabulous. And, oh, we were the very first people in the country to put in our own in-house video as an agency. We were doing video stuff way before anybody, and they all thought it was bad because we weren’t film people. We weren’t hiring the right… No, we’re just shooting it ourselves and then we got really good. And we did just fabulous stuff. So, to me, that was art. You know, it was right there. Every day, I was surrounded with creative people and interesting, beautiful things we were doing. Some stuff weren’t as pretty as others but, gosh, it was overall just a very much of an artistic endeavor. So, yeah, that was kind of my art out there in the world.

Brad Weimert: So, the other thing that is a significant chunk of your life is, well, that’s the book is Cowgirl Power and you now have a program at the University of Texas Business School, McCombs, right? What’s the title of the course?

Gay Gaddis: Women Who Mean Business.

Brad Weimert: Women Who Mean Business. And so, you’ve got this throughline of female entrepreneurship. How does that element, specifically in your mind, plan the business today being a female entrepreneur versus in 1989 when you started? And what’s different?

Gay Gaddis: I don’t even know how I did what I did sometimes. You know, I go back to that time. It was such a different world. Now, even though there are challenges and that’s why we teach this class and this program because it’s for women who have ten-plus years of experience. It’s not for undergrads. These are for women who are out in the trenches working hard. And so, yes, I’m still amazed at some of the gating factors and issues that women still have today. And somehow I got around those and I’m still the only woman in the room in some things I do and it doesn’t bother me. You know, I was intimidated many times in the past by some pretty important people. But somehow I was so determined to make money and to do things well and to succeed that I just would push ahead somehow. And I’m trying to teach that grit and determination to people that you can do it. You know, and most people lack the confidence to do the things I know they can do. I don’t know why. And I don’t know if it’s a female-male thing but for all of us.

I mean, there’s just times where you don’t feel like you can do things but if you dig down, that’s why I call it cowgirl power. We all have it inside of us. You just have to dig it out. You know it’s there. And you can accomplish so many things that you don’t think you can do if you just push it that one next step. Just when you think you don’t have any more left in you, you just take it one more step. And I would push myself into situations where I thought we could grow the business. You know, it was hard. Now, I don’t want to say this was easy but that’s what it takes if you really want to make a difference. And the bottom line of all of it, yes, I wanted to make money for my family. I could do it. And I knew how to. I wanted to create great things for clients. I wanted them to succeed. I wanted their businesses to grow. And then all of it. It was the most beautiful thing of all.

And I talk about the creative people, that everyone who worked for me in some way was creative even though you were in the accounting department. I said, “You’re the most creative people in the whole building.” But it was a joy to me all those years to employ all those people. And sometimes it was tough. And you didn’t always have perfect people on your team and you had to make changes and all that. But me knowing that I took the risk every day to let them practice their craft or be great at what they do and I could provide them with the salary was just a wonderful blessing. It’s just a great feeling as an entrepreneur to think, “Gosh, I created all these jobs.” And that’s what it was really about to me at the end was pretty amazing.

Brad Weimert: What was a learning lesson or a big mistake that you made through the process that would be helpful for others?

Gay Gaddis: Were you just tripped off because of what I said? Yes, it’s people. So, everything really revolves, in my company and still today, on the people that you surround yourself with. And I mentioned early on that I found out where my weaknesses were. And you’re always looking for those right people to shore up your weaknesses and to do the things you don’t do well. And that’s who you put around you. A few times, along the journey, though, I would let people in the company that were just not the right ones. And they look good on paper, they interviewed well, they had the credentials. I even could get pretty good reviews or references, but something about them, I knew they weren’t right and I’d hire them anyway. And then they’d get in and it was just awful. I mean, they were worse than I thought. And people didn’t want to work with them. Clients were complaining. And so, the fastest thing you have to do is to get them out. And many times they were pretty senior. It happened more with the senior people than some of them at the entry people.

I let in a senior person who seemed to be the right one to take us in this new direction or had great leadership skills, I thought. And then they didn’t. And so, you had to just escort them out and it was very painful. But the staff was always so appreciative because it would get to that point where you were really hurting your team and that’s how I could justify. Finally, one day I sat down with someone who was very, very talented, and I said, “Guess what? You can’t stay here because nobody wants to work with you. And I am sorry about that, but I’m not going to line them up outside the door here but no one wants to work on your team anymore. Why don’t you go do this someplace else? Find some other group. You’re going to do fine. You’re talented but it’s not going to be here.” And those are painful conversations. Oh, especially with someone who has a pretty big ego and very, very powerful in their own way. And those are what I call fierce conversations.

Brad Weimert: Worst conversations for me are the ones that people do want to work with but aren’t very good or people that are very good but rough to work with. Those are the ones that I tend to let stick around too long.

Gay Gaddis: Well, that’s a mistake. And I will say to everyone in your audience, the minute you know something’s not right and you know it in your gut, you’ve got to start making the change because it will hurt you and the business in the long run. I’ll say one thing about myself and I don’t doddle on decisions very long. Some you can’t make any faster than you can but the minute I see that I need to do something in life, I just make the decision and move on. Most people who are pretty successful, I think, have a good decision-making understanding. If you doddle around and you wait and you’re not sure, then you become indecisive and you also sometimes miss the best opportunities. And probably Dell taught us a little bit of that, if not a lot, because again, they would just say, “Look, we just got to make a move here because if you didn’t, the market opportunity could just evaporate like that.” So, we got to make a move now.

And so, we make quick decisions. Quick, quick. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. And I was just kind of became at the cadence of that and all the business is that, okay, you got to make a decision and move on. If it’s not right, we’ll fix it. But don’t sit back and wait for the perfect time for something to happen because it never will come.

Brad Weimert: I had a conversation earlier today, actually, with a very good friend of mine, Cameron Herold, who grew 1-800-GOT-JUNK? from 2 million to 106 million. And he said, “The moment you have doubt, you have no doubt.” And we were talking about employees in particular but I love that sentiment. And you framed it. It’s ironic because you said essentially the exact same thing and you said the moment that you recognize it, you have that gut feeling, take action on it.

Gay Gaddis: Now.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. Where do you want to point people to learn more about Gay Gaddis or your art or the most recent art project or the book or whatever you want?

Gay Gaddis: All right. Well, I’m very fortunate because I’ve sold over 200 paintings since I got back in this, and they’re wonderful collections. I mean, I’ve got paintings all over the world, and I’ve been very fortunate to have some galleries that trusted me and gave me some opportunities early on, really. But you can go to GayGaddis.com and there’s an art site that comes out of that which is really just about my art. I do some commission work, not a lot, because most of my work is just I paint from what I see. So, I paint mainly skyscapes of all kinds. It can be rainy, it can be sunset, it can be beautiful clouds. They’re pretty abstract, most of them, but I’m painting literally from what I see. I paint something the other day. I wish I’d painted it bigger. It’s only 5×7 but it’s just a beautiful painting because I’m a farmer, I’m a rancher too, and we were looking at our high fields sadly that dried up over the drought during the summer. And we got into cutting in the spring and then nothing. And we usually get two cuttings and nothing.

So, I was standing with my ranch foreman by the fence line looking into a coastal field, and the grass was just withered kind of sitting there. And all of a sudden the sky started like moving like, gosh, is there going to be some rain? And I painted it right then and it rained the next day. It rained. And it’s a beautiful painting of the grass and then the sky that was moving. I don’t know. There’s something really emotional and spiritual about it to me because I paint things that mean a lot to kind of who I am authentically. And so, the paintings, they really are from my soul. And I said that a few minutes ago, but one of my art directors one day came to me and he said, “You know, a lot of the work we do here at T3 comes from our head. You know, we’re thinking through, we’re smart, we create things.” He said, “But when you’re painting, it’s from your soul.” I said, “You’re right. It’s just there.”

And sometimes hours go by and I’m painting. I don’t even know it’s been that long. I look down and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s 6:00. I’ve been painting since noon.” And so, it’s just something you do. It’s just a very spiritual thing for me. So, you can go find it there. I paint all sizes, all types, even little tiny canvases are fun sometimes. I don’t know why I get into this, but I do that. And then big triptychs and big things. And then I still have my book out there. It’s evergreen and people still like it. And it’s my story and my advice about all this stuff. And then as far as The Women Who Mean Business at McCombs if they want to check that out. It’s a really amazing program. We’re getting awesome results. And the last piece is just I like talking about these things because I’ve lived a life that I’ve been fortunate in a lot of ways but I made my luck too, as you always say.

I’ve worked really hard and I want to talk to people about how can I help you. You get to a point where you want to help other people achieve their full potential. And if anything I say or anything I do can awaken that spark of that one idea that makes you say, “All right. I’m going to take that next step or I’m going to step back and do this.” That’s great. And that’s what I’m about now. You know, I want to give back and I’ve got some other things up my sleeve, too. I think we always have to continue to evolve and things are going to change and times are changing. And I’m excited about what’s next. You know, that’s how we’re in the companies like, “Hey, what’s next?” And so, this is what’s going on today but if you talk to me in a month, I’ve got something else up my sleeve actually right now that I can’t even talk about that I’m excited about. And so, it’s all focusing around creativity, leadership, and helping people to be the best they can be.

Brad Weimert: Wonderful. Well, if nothing else, you have been consistently innovative on the edge of things, learning, growing, and expanding throughout the course of your career. So, it’s an inspiration to hear that and see that. We will link to Cowgirl Power and your art.

Gay Gaddis: And you can sign up for our newsletter too. It’s just something I do that it takes a lot of work but every other week I send out a very succinct, it’s short, it’s not like some of these long epistles, but I send out a newsletter that’s got something pithy or interesting or a business tip or something I’m observing. And we have a very organic following and we have hardly any opt-outs. And so, if you want to sign up for the newsletter, I’d be delighted to bring you on board. You can go to my website and it’s easy to get there. So, we’d love to have you as a subscriber. But that didn’t cost anything. It’s just something that I do every other week.

Brad Weimert: Wonderful. Well, we will certainly link to it. Thank you so much for your time.

Gay Gaddis: Thank you, Brad. Appreciate it. It’s been fun.

Brad Weimert: It’s been great.

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