Over the years, as the agency matured, Richards relaxed some of his rules. The shirt-and-tie mandate ended in the early '90s. Staff members now have the freedom to decorate their cubes as they see fit, and the blinds—at least when I visited—seemed to be set at different angles. Richards no longer insists on OK'ing every piece of work. The time sheets and the mandated start time remain in place, though. There are new rules, too. Richards discourages e-mail, preferring that people speak in person. When they send messages to clients, he requires that the missives be clearly written and carefully proofread. Slipshod work, he believes, makes for a slippery slope.
On the third morning of my visit, Richards shows up to my hotel at 5:45 a.m. dressed in shorts, a tank top, and a black sweatband around his head. Ever since he had his hip replaced in 2008, he has been unable to run every day. Now, he alternates running with grueling spin classes. Today, we're spinning.
Richards climbs on a bike. A minute later, he is joined by The Richards Group's creative group head Tina Johnson, who oversaw the work on the Summer's Eve campaign, and principal David Hall. Halfway through the class, the only other man anywhere near Richards's age quits, his face wracked with pain. Afterward, Richards looks sanguine. "Not a bad workout, heh?" he says.
Richards has never doubted his vigor. But when he hit official retirement age in the late 1990s, something had begun to change in meetings with prospective clients. They were beginning to ask, each in their own diplomatic, awkward way, what would happen to the agency when Richards called it quits—or, well, keeled over.
Richards found it a reasonable enough question. So one afternoon he sat down and drew up a succession plan. It is designed with only one goal in mind: to ensure that The Richards Group persists in the future the way Richards has it set up today. Richards has two sons, one of whom runs his own ad agency in San Francisco. But neither wants to fill his father's shoes. So when Richards dies, sole voting power and management of the company will be awarded to one of four employees who will run the agency autonomously, just as he has. They are two art directors, a copywriter, and a principal—Glenn Dady, Gary Gibson, Mike Malone, and Dick Mitchell—who have worked for him since almost the beginning. Richards will provide no clues as to who will prevail. ("We try not to think about it," says Malone.) At the same time, all the company's equity will be donated to a nonprofit—which he has selected but not yet named—on the condition that the agency never be sold to a holding company or anyone else, ever.
The plan is unusual, if not unprecedented. And it presumes that the nonprofit, which has not been informed it will be the recipient, agrees to such a scheme. (Richards will say only that it is one he has been involved with, which makes MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Salvation Army, and Southwestern Medical the most likely candidates.) Still, both Richards's CFO and his wife have signed off on the idea. And because Richards is the firm's sole owner, it's his call.
Of course, even as he was crafting his succession plan, Richards found the idea of retirement unimaginable. He still believed his biggest accomplishments lay ahead. In 2002, for example, the agency won its biggest account ever, worth $18 million a year, when it signed up Hyundai Motor America and its dealerships.
Richards, however, was no longer a young man. And just as TiVo, social networks, and mobile phones were rocking the foundations of the traditional advertising industry, young boutique agencies with funny names (StrawberryFrog, Mother, Modernista!) were swooping in, pitching clients newfangled ideas and taking projects right out from under the noses of traditional shops. That's exactly what happened with Hyundai.
In 2006, Hyundai appointed a new chief operating officer, Steve Wilhite. Though relations between client and agency remained congenial, Wilhite grew frustrated with The Richards Group's work. He challenged Richards about it. "When you die, would this be the work you'd want to be remembered by?" asked Wilhite. Richards had to admit that it wouldn't.
So when a young, upstart agency called Siltanen & Partners cold-called Wilhite with ideas for Hyundai, Wilhite listened -- and then decided to produce its ideas as national commercials shortly after. The relationship with Richards Group deteriorated quickly after that, and in early 2007, the carmaker announced it would be hiring a new ad agency.
Overnight, revenue at The Richards Group fell 10 percent. But then something interesting happened: Richards's infamous time sheets became an unexpected secret weapon. Thanks to detailed budgeting data, nearly every account, even the tiniest ones, had strong margins. As a result, even though sales took a big hit, the bottom line remained intact.
Meanwhile his staff, by then 630 people strong, continued to pitch new business. And bit by bit, the agency built back its revenue. Heineken handed the agency its Amstel Light account. Then, the group won Orkin, the extermination company. When Advertising Age published its list of agency rankings in 2008, The Richards Group's revenue had edged $2 million ahead of Doner, an agency in Southfield, Michigan. It was now the biggest independent agency in the United States. Richards had never taken a loan or given up one share of equity.
Of course, there have been setbacks. Consider the surprising, lively—and to many, extremely offensive—ads for Summer's Eve earlier this year.
The agency had won the campaign with a slogan dreamed up by Tina Johnson's team: "Hail to the V." The idea, Johnson says, is "that if you love your vagina, your vagina will love you back." From the outset, the creative team planned to take on the taboos and euphemisms that normally surround feminine-hygiene advertising. When Angela Bryant, the head of marketing for Summer's Eve, arrived at The Richards Group to hear the pitch, she walked into the lobby to find all 650 employees assembled along the stairwells surrounding the agency's central atrium and copywriter Matt Bull standing front and center, ready to recite a humorous poem he had written in tribute to the word douche. "We can take this word back, so that it means: one with great freshness," Bull declaimed. "Abraham Lincoln...now, he was a great douche. Mahatma Gandhi? Douche. Stan Richards? Truly, there is a douche among douches." Richards laughed heartily.
