From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [102]
I started with Danny and Charlie as a copywriter at $100 a week, and when I left in 1963 to go to Fuller & Smith & Ross I was making $18,000 a year. I didn’t last too long at Fuller & Smith – no more than nine months or so – and the next place I worked, which was Ashe & Engelmore, was an even shorter time. In 1964 I went to work for Shep Kurnit at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller and I lasted there a couple of years. From Delehanty I moved over to Ted Bates in 1966, making $50,000 a year plus all the grief they could give you. We started our own agency in September of 1967 after Ron went out and practically raised $80,000 all by himself. I knew very few people with $800, much less $80,000. This September we will celebrate our third anniversary in business and of course we will have a big party. I really don’t know what we’re billing, but it must be someplace around $20 million a year, which is not bad at all. We’ve got fifty-three people working for us and we’re paying some of these people $40,000 or so a year, which is not too bad, either. We have never been fired by one of our accounts. We resigned a couple of small ones because of some trouble with them, and one account, The Knickerbocker, just disappeared. We have a company car, a Lincoln, and one weekend last summer I drove out in it with my family to Montauk for the weekend. I locked the keys to the car in the trunk just as we were about to come back, so there are still strange things that happen now and then.
Last summer, one of our clients mailed us a check for $400,000, which was to cover a lot of television buying, and Ron and I took a look at that check and started to giggle like kids. It is a very weird feeling to hold a check in your hand for that amount of money and not think about skipping town to Brazil. When we go to the Coast to shoot a commercial they are very nice to us at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it’s great to sit at the pool and get paged. Our banker is nice to us, too, and we even have a line of credit. Guys call us up and try to hustle us to go public, which I hope we will never do. We have terrific offices at 625 Madison Avenue, a full floor, and the day we moved into the place we ran out of space. I work crazy hours and not long ago I spent three days and nights trying to control an AC-DC actor who was starring in one of our commercials. This guy tried first to make it with every girl on the set and after he went through the chicks, he then started on the shooting crew.
We have come a long way in three years, baby, to steal one of Leo Burnett’s lines. The year we went into business, about 140 agencies also started up. There are now ten of those new agencies left. The problem with all of these new agencies is that most of them are started by creative guys who really aren’t business-oriented. And they start agencies for the wrong reasons. A guy gets fired and he decides to start an agency. Guys don’t plan their agencies. They don’t plan their growth and they wind up in trouble.
A friend of mine just opened an agency and he said, ‘Gee, I don’t know if I should work out of my house or if I should work out of a hotel.’ I said, ‘You’d better work out of a hotel. At least if you have a prospective client call you he won’t get your mother on the phone.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ I read in the paper the other day that he just started in a hotel – a hotel I’d never heard of. I thought I’d heard of every hotel in New York but I think this one is one of the Lyons hotels down in the Bowery. I don’t know where he found it but he’s in business. He’ll fold.
New agencies always start at lunchtime. Everybody goes to lunch and everybody bitches at lunch. ‘Those sons of bitches, they don’t