Bad times germinate Fuller/Sacks agency.

Bad times germinate Fuller/Sacks agency

When is a good time to start a business? Ask John S. Fuller or Cary Sacks that question, they might say, "In the midst of a recession."

At least it would seem so in the ad agency business in Los Angeles. The pair opened the doors of Sacks/Fuller Advertising just a year ago. Now the seeds of an ad agency recession planted at about that time are in full bloom in the city, measured by the "resume index" - the number of unanswered employment applications floating around.

"Look at it this way," says Fuller. "A recession in the business is about the best thing that could happen for small, growing agencies like ours. A lot of agencies in the city right now are scrambling, not making any money, cutting back on staffing and services.

"That makes a huge number of clients ripe for smaller agencies with a different motivation and orientation, ones that sweat blood to treat clients like a king, like they're part of the business. If you're spending full time taking care of your agency, as many of the big ones are doing now, you can't care for your clients as well."

It's more than wishful thinking. Both Fuller, the senior partner at 39, and Sacks, the junior partner (in age) at 31, have seen it work.

They were launched because they thought about getting launched. One day early in 1989, when both worked on the Sanwa Bank account for Della Femina, McNamee WCRS in Los Angeles, a large branch (about 100 employees, $200 million billings) of a very large agency, they began to talk about what they really wanted to be when they grew up.

President of the agency? President of any big agency? Creative director of the agency or any agency? It didn't appeal to them. What did appeal was to be president, partner or creative director - or all three - of their own agency.

The chance came just a few months later.

Della Femina resigned the Sanwa Bank account last August to take on the California Federal Bank business. Suddenly there was an opening. Fuller and Sacks had an opportunity to skip out on their own with the Sanwa business.

It wasn't quite that simple, since 28 other agencies bid for the $3 million (billings) Sanwa account. But the two certainly had the upper hand, since they were known to Sanwa executives, both American and Japanese.

There was something else. They had to have the nerve to get up and go.

"We were in a nice, safe, comfortable position," says Fuller. But what is safe? Fuller adds, "I'd just had a long talk with an entrepreneur client of ours who got me thinking. He said the best security - perhaps the only security - was belief in yourself. He also said the bigger the company, the less your security. You're less important because there are so many of you around. So you can be sent packing and not be missed."

Fuller had always sought the "security" of a big company; his father had worked for IBM for 30 years. Sacks also had sought large company protection, although his father is entrepreneurial, a partner in a New York agency, Sacks & Rosen.

Yet when the door opened the two decided to go for it. They pitched and won the Sanwa account. In the first year, they have brought in Thieves Market, a boot retailer billing about $1 million, Transamerica Insurance Group, a property-casualty insurer billing about $500,000, and Lojack, a homing device for locating stolen cars. Together, billings amount to some $5 million.

They don't want to grow rapidly - or, rather, too rapidly - and get back into a situation similar to that they recently escaped. Sacks says he would be "one happy guy" to double billings within a year. He adds: "It's sort of like a commercial I once wrote for Sanwa Bank - I'd rather have one client 10 years than 10 clients for one year."

Fuller agrees. "Growing rapidly would tear us apart," he says. "An ad agency is nothing but a group of people who meet and understand clients. You need that `company culture,' which is your people understanding and working with each other, and if you go to rapidly you can't develop that."

He, like Cary, would like to see the agency double in size by next year, and then growing to perhaps $25 million in three years.

In the current agency environment in Los Angeles, that is a very reachable goal, Fuller thinks. Not only can a small agency offer close attention to a client, but also it is flexible in its approach. Not often, for example, are resignations necessary to gain a new account, as in the Della Femina-Sanwa situation.

"This used to be a service business, where clients were all," says Fuller. "Then came the mergers and acquisitions and the public stock offerings and the like and pretty soon you had a financial entity in and of itself and you worried more about your day-to-day stock price or your quarterly results than you did about clients.