Bill Sharpe is the former Chairman and CEO of Havas Worldwide, founder and CEO of Sharpe-Blackmore, MD of DDB Canada, President of Robins Sharpe. Currently his styling himself as CEO of a new marketing startup Simmons Sharpe. We met with Bill at the Prohibition Gastrohouse on Queen East. Over a beer and cobb salad, Bill told us why he was so successful over is last 4 startups: picking a great co-founder, filling gaps, and timing the visit just right to the anchor client.

What do you look for in a partner?

The first attribute is always Trust. Do you trust the person? Do you have the ability to have a dialogue during not just the easy times but the difficult times? Because obviously, every business will go through extremely tough times.
Is it a complementary skillset? Do they do something much better than I do? Then I should be able to do things much better than they do. And therefore we’re not bumping heads all the time and overlapping. It’s almost as if automatically some problem comes in and we both look at it and go, “this is yours“. “This is a math issue and you’re a math genius.” If it’s a softer issue or a client issues it’s, “this is for me.” I learned this the hard way. I started my first Agency when I was 34, and I knew virtually nothing about running a company. The only thing I had run before was a kid residential YMCA summer camp. So that’s how I ran the agency … like a YMCA summer camp.
Another thing with partners is you need to understand what’s going on with customers and who works best with them. So my first partner was a total opposite of me, hyper-aggressive and totally willing to kill, and so what happened was we balanced each other out because we had trust and we listened to each other about being more aggressive or being more passive. When a customer came in and said “I want to meet you today and then 3 months from now after your success report”, that was my partners. When a customer came in and said “I want to take measured and planned steps to get to my goal,” I spoke with them.
Finally, when you are bound together by only money it’s not a great partnership, so do you have shared economics of what’s going on beyond the money? It doesn’t take long to understand the softer side of the business – the question is do I want to keep working with this person? Are they going to respect my time? Are they going to see me as a professional who engineers things or as a mechanic who waits for things to break? If they see me as a mechanic the relationship won’t last long. So from the get-go, you need that consistent vision of what we want to do together.

How did you decide to pivot in your current business from a service offering to more of a technology offering?

I saw a gap. The gap I saw was essentially between the agency holding companies and the Deloitte’s and Accenture’s coming down the alley buying agencies. The agencies being in the middle. Then there are big production companies who started scooping up experiential marketing companies and they were coming up from the bottom. So if you are an agency, you’re high cost, you actually can’t innovate because “New York won’t let you innovate” and you can innovate only if you want to take a real career risk yourself. You are stuck in the middle with a known offering and a dwindling market.

So the gap could be filled with a digitally-focused consulting company, that actually executes but doesn’t touch anything that is conventional. As soon as you touch anything conventional you become a threat to the agencies. For us, that leaves ROI-based digital strategies.

So that’s where we pivoted. The Deloitte’s buy agencies because they have great connections with CMOs. We want to develop those relationships with CMOs as well by being innovative and efficiently solving the new problems. That might be an exit for us.

Advice for founders who want to reach an anchor customer

There’s nothing so compelling as going to your customer and showing them a good demo. Can you deliver? That’s the million dollar question. If you bobble the delivery that’s the end of the relationship. You need to get this right by practice and rehearsal and understanding what the client wants from you.

Going back to my industry, the CMOs are risk averse because it is such a complicated World. But the see-saw is that if you are too risk averse the competition will outflank you and you lose your job. Or you make a bad choice and you lose your job. What you need to understand is that you can bring a solution to this embattled CMO figure and ease their pain and nudge them to move forward.

This brings me to the other thing I have seen work if the demo doesn’t impress them.

Heather my partner is a phenomenal researcher. She wasn’t asked to do it, but she uncovered some solid gold information about one of our client’s core businesses. When we presented our findings to them they were floored that we brought such an important insight into the business they were in for decades.

So those two things: a great demo or business insights that give the client an advantage. Because they are both novel and you can leverage them into a relationship.

For us, we went from “a basic supplier” to “wow! you guys understand where our business is going!”

Any advice for new hires entering a new role that could be beyond their skillset?

I’m a firm believer of actually giving someone a shot. Whether they fail or succeed at a big task they do uncover truths about themselves and we can then build a great career on the things they are good at. When I had the feeling that someone could do it I would give them a shot, but I would build up a lot of oversite because after all, we’re a business, not an educational institution. We couldn’t damage a deliverable or a client relationship.

What I’ve seen is that technically most young people are smack on to the sweet-spot of a role, but what’s missing in all of the failures I have seen is the soft skills. By that I mean they failed to read the room – and reading the room is something that comes from experience.

What newly promoted employees should admit this to themselves is that they are not a 75-year-old master negotiator. Soft skills come from time spent with people, there are very few naturals with this attribute, and there is no education for this just lots of experience. Admit it. Ask for mentorship. You will be an asset sooner than you think.

Bill can be reached at his new marketing startup Simmons Sharpe Inc., or through LinkedIn.