Stan Richards's Unique Management Style
An in-depth look at how one man built the nation's largest independent advertising agency on one principle: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.
Trevor Paulhus
Old School Stan Richards opened his first shop in the mid-1950s.
Courtesy Company/Greg Booth
On the Verge Richards and his design pros in 1974, shortly before The Richards Group relaunched as a full-service ad agency
After more than four decades in business, there are certain things that Stan Richards, the 78-year-old founder of The Richards Group, believes to be true. Employees, for one, must arrive by 8:30 a.m. (not 8:30-ish-they have to punch in). Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you'll be docked $8.63. Arrive promptly to meetings or be shut out of them. Close of business is 6 p.m. Finish your work and go home.
Given all that, you could be forgiven for concluding that Richards runs a widgetmaker or a call center or a print shop—the kind of operation in which work needs to be highly regimented to get done efficiently. In fact, The Richards Group is an advertising agency.
And not just any advertising agency. Founded in 1976, The Richards Group is the largest independently owned ad shop in the country, with billings of $1.28 billion, revenue of $170 million, and more than 650 employees. Its portfolio is packed with some of the most memorable campaigns of the past 30 years. Chick-fil-A's famous cows, those alluring Corona beer ads with couples lounging on the beach, Motel 6's "We'll Leave the Light on for You"… all were born at Richards's Dallas headquarters. Most recently, and infamously, the agency went perhaps a bit too far, sparking a nationwide controversy with a set of startlingly direct ads for Summer's Eve cleansing wash. The spots declared "Hail to the V"; some cheekily used hand puppets to play the roles of multiracial talking vaginas.
Highly structured and rules-bound companies, of course, are not supposed to produce work like this. "Creative" industries such as advertising, software design, and the like are supposed to require a loose, anything-goes culture, in which workers are free to come, go, and dress as they please. It's a world of verdant campuses, foosball tables, and caffeine-fueled all nighters. Introduce things such as start times, end times, and time sheets—rules—and watch your creatives run for the exits. Richards, obviously, feels differently. "We need to be disciplined," he explains. "We are not gallery painters who paint when the feeling moves us." And Richards has made it work. The 29 creative group heads at Richards's shop have an average tenure of 17 years. "The genius of the place is completely counterintuitive," says David Fowler, who wrote the landmark Motel 6 spots back in 1986 and today is the executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather in New York City. "Somehow, Stan made you feel like you were only limited by the size of your ideas."
The way Richards sees it, his unusually regimented approach, honed over the course of decades, will outlast shifting tastes, disruptive technologies, and—with the help of a decidedly unconventional succession plan of his own devise -- his own mortality. Today, as he encounters obstacles he never could have predicted (such as bloggers enraged by his agency's take on feminine hygiene), he knows a good agency, like a good ad, binds commerce to art. He's betting his legacy that his rules will remain the linchpin.
On a recent summer afternoon in Dallas, Richards can be found in his natural habitat: a creative-planning meeting. This particular gathering concerns a new client, the Dallas-based electricity reseller TXU Energy. The brand, spun off from Texas Power and Light when the state privatized its utility industry in 2002, is in search of a new corporate identity. Too many Texans consider it a faceless monolith; the corporation's private equity owners asked Richards to help make it more personable and endearing. Do for us, they asked, what the cartoon cows have done for Chick-fil-A.
As Richards sips from a travel mug of tea, 11 copywriters and art directors gesticulate, speak in funny voices, and talk along with videos in an attempt to pitch scenarios as diverse as a noirish detective on the lookout for low bills to a kangaroo bouncing on a pogo stick bouncing on a trampoline—anything that might make TXU Energy seem cute and likable. But in practical terms, what they are trying to do is get a reaction from their boss. That is easier said than done. Occasionally, Richards smiles or asks a question. But for the most part, he stares silently, his eyes narrowing as though fatigued. Each pitch is met by the same, inscrutable utterance: "OK."
One pair of creatives, Lynn Fredericksen and Kevin Paetzel, pitch the tag line "Our Energy, Your Life" and propose TV commercials featuring YouTube—inspired videos showing all the nutty things people choose to do with electricity—such as blow-drying a parrot. Richards smiles slightly at the parrot. "Read the offer again," he says. Fredericksen does as he's asked. Richards breathes in deeply, while others in the room shuffle papers. "OK." The pair toss out another idea, "Wedgie," a reference to the way rival energy companies trick their customers into higher bills. "OK," Richards says. "Thanks."
David Eastman, a creative group head, is up next. His idea: a robot mascot, "Tex-U," a high-tech, well-muscled superhero designed to personify the brand. Eastman acts out several scripts, alternating between human voices and Tex-U's robot voice, which includes a hysterical-sounding electronic giggle. Richards again responds with a slight smile.
A dozen or so pitches later, Richards concludes the 90-minute session. "My only comment is that we have figured out 20 different ways to complicate the offer to the point where it's almost impossible to figure it out," he says. "But there were things I thought worked. They were…"
The room is silent. "Lynn and Kevin, your spot called Wedgie. I thought there were a lot of things wrong with it, but there is potential there if you can figure out specifically how to communicate your point. Eastman, the robot direction works reasonably well. The key is figuring out how to design the robot so that it has the appeal of Wall-E. Currently, it doesn't have that." That's it. Richards makes a point not to comment on work he doesn't like. "I learned long ago it's not worth it to try to fix bad work," he tells me later.
Richards has always run meetings this way. "If you got a 'way to go,' you'd be on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day," says Doug Rucker, who joined the agency in 1987 and served as a creative head until 2001, when he left to start his own shop.
