In February, 2007, Bill White found himself in Singapore, up too early and scanning the Serangoon Harbor at sunrise, thinking about avian flu, biological containment, a country girl band and a cow. It couldn’t have been the airline food; he’d just completed a 19 hour non-stop flight from New York on Singapore Airlines, the best in the world. It was a nagging question that wouldn’t go away: Who wrote that song? And did Ron Salter do that work?

 

On the other side of the world, Ron Salter was learning more than he ever expected to learn about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), more commonly known as C8, an artificial acid used in making the coating for non-stick cookware. Ron was building a public relations program to inform a skeptical public about the safety of the drinking water supply. Earlier in the day he was managing a video crew strung together with safety lines hanging in thin air above the Ohio River on the most expensive highway project ever undertaken by the State of West Virginia, the Blennerhassett Island Bridge.

 

For Bill White and Ron Salter, these were normal days. And while they knew of each other and owned businesses in two states less than 10 miles apart, their paths rarely crossed, at least until nagging thoughts about the song and the cow and the girl group stuck to Bill from here to Asia only to be resolved by a late-night e-mail and a congratulatory concession: “Ron does great work.”

 

Since then, the connection between Bill White and Ron Salter, along with the cow, the song, the girl group and the Serangoon Harbor on the Malay Peninsula has brought two firms closer together in time and space, and forced a definition on each that transcends the notion of what they were doing before someone opened the barn door, kicked-out that talking cow and changed the future for the better.

 

In 2006, Salter, the president of Salter & Associates, LLC, a Vienna, WV advertising agency, and his staff had created a series of television spots for a regional dairy that were airing throughout Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. The spots featured a country girl group doing a video to an ear-pleasing, homespun tune, interspersed with enough wholesome farm and lifestyle shots to grow corn on a plasma TV screen. The payoff was a talking cow dissolving to a milk truck heading down a country lane directly to your table.

 

When he saw the TV spots before he left for Singapore, White knew the work was network quality. As a musician and songwriter himself, Bill appreciated how efficiently the music and lyrics set the stage for the rich visuals the creative team had captured. Bill traced the production back to Salter and sent a congratulatory email to let him know how much he appreciated the professional work (while secretly wondering how he convinced the client to invest so much money in such a high profile image campaign; Bill knew Ron left the budget on the screen and the client got their money’s worth, for sure.)

 

Salter flashed a thank you note to Bill, told him the cost was none of his business, and suggested they get together when he returned to the USA. Bill was in the Far East working with a Singapore-based life-science client designing biological containment systems used on the front lines of the SARS and avian flu, a pandemic the World Health Organization some believe can propagate from Indonesia to the rest of the world.

 

“Sure”, Bill agreed.

Ron Salter started his advertising agency, Salter & Associates, in 1986 in Vienna, WV. He’d been the creative director of a large advertising agency for years, but when multiple acquisitions turned his workday into an administrative contest, he took his crayons and went home. He was an art director, after all, a creative thinker and a visualist who respected client meetings and company bureaucracy, of course, but refused to hold his talent hostage to an epidemic of mergers and pinstripe suits driving up overhead and missing the point.

 

Salter & Associates was an immediate success. Ron brought his creative skills to bear on both business-to-business and consumer oriented advertising work across the Mid-Ohio Valley and throughout the USA. His work in the plastics industry won multiple awards and increasing business for major clients in the plastics raw materials market.

 

His client management experience and command of mass media attracted consumer accounts in healthcare, food processing, professional services, travel and tourism and real estate. The common thread through his work across all markets was his ability to marshall his staff with attention to detail, tight administrative budgets and waypoints, and above all, results for his clients.

 

As the base economy in the Mid-Ohio Valley started to move south of the border or offshore altogether, Ron adjusted and fined-tuned his service orientation and staff resources to improve the viability of his firm and the quality of work.

 

Ron’s persistence paid off. His work with Broughton’s Dairy, for example, a regional company acquired by Dean Foods, delivered significant returns to his client fighting to improve shelf space and market share amid generic brands in the supermarket. More professional awards soon followed. 

While Ron Salter was finding success in the advertising business, Bill White has always thought of himself as a writer and a marketing person. Following his enlistment with the 1^st  Marine Division in Vietnam, Bill took a job as a news director for a CBS-radio affiliate just when Watergate was heating up. While the stories were good, the money was not, and as Bill worked his way through college earning a degree in economics, he put his writing skills to work, first as a technical writer and then marketing manager of a laboratory equipment company prior to co-founding his own biotechnology instrumentation company.

 

As a client himself, Bill managed several agency relationships during the first ten years of his professional career. He worked with Ron, indirectly, as part of an account team directing the development of an ad series on cell culture systems for the scientific market. Bill’s greatest strength was crafted in his early success in building information bridges between R&D and marketing, and ultimately simplifying technical processes and systems into sales support and customer training programs. As Bill often says, “If you can’t sell it, the R&D doesn’t matter; and until I understand it, nobody understands it.”

 

Bill’s capability for information architecture led to a career in industrial and scientific marketing and communications. He co-founded Offenberger & White, Inc. in 1985 with longtime art director Warren Offenberger who retired in 1995. Since then, Bill has navigated the resources of OffWhite into deep technical waters, working for clients anywhere in the world who need clarity and results in sales tools, customer education, documentation and advertising. With more than 8,900 projects completed, OffWhite technical marketing work has ranged from bioreactors and free-piston Stirling engines to ultra-low refrigeration systems, electronics, power and data distribution, process instrumentation and much more.

 

At the center of Bill’s information management philosophy is the concept of “empowering the last person hired”. He explains, “As emerging companies grow into new markets, new distribution channels and establish new geographic outposts, they must add new people.  If we can educate the newest people more efficiently, and give them confidence to market and sell their products, we can turn the investment in experience, street smarts and intellectual property into a revenue producing asset. “

 

Recognizing the value of the Internet as an information platform, White invested in leading-edge information platforms and Web development tools, eventually establishing the firm’s Ed.it™ browser-based content management system.  According to Bill, “The Web revolution brought our capability for content development and marketing integration front and center. Despite new, two-way pathways to the market, our business is still and will always be about content and delivery, whether through conventional print media or new Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, mash-ups, RSS feeds and whatever comes next.”

Back from Asia, Bill met Ron for dinner to catch-up on the country girl band, the cow and more than twenty years of war stories about running their businesses on parallel paths so close to one another. Ironically, they didn’t view themselves as competitors, which led to a frank discussion about successes in client services and outcomes, challenges in new business development, and reach beyond an economically depressed area both called home for so long.

 

Bill detailed his experience with clients in Singapore and Japan and his desire to move the company into a global market with a handpicked selection of current and new clients. Ron talked of business opportunities that perhaps they should explore together. It didn’t take long to build a short list of clients who they knew could benefit from the combination of experience, staff and resources that both firms could present as a unified front.

 

One thing they would not do, they agreed, was to merge. Both had investigated this approach to growth, yet they saw no benefit in getting preoccupied with a corporate exercise that would entangle two corporations in two states and resources best invested elsewhere in client retention and new business development. Fresh from a short meeting with an attorney, they crafted a simple, one-page agreement, defined their alliance as a business development initiative with clear objectives, and built a working identity today known as OffWhite/Salter.

 

Ron Salter’s staff has ebbed and flowed for more than 22 years. He’s opened offices in three states to meet client demand, only to see client mergers and acquisitions collapse personal working relationships into tedious days of conference reports and politics. Back to one office, and despite the ups and downs of the business, his core team has remained intact, skilled in media and public relations management, creative development and production, print, broadcast and more. As Ron puts it, “You can’t claim loyalty to your clients unless you prove loyalty to your staff.”

 

For Bill, this was a first proof compatibility with Ron. In a business where the inventory walks out every night, loyalty to your staff is front and center. Attracting good people, challenging them, creating an environment for growth and connecting them directly with clients is easier said than done. For Bill, his staff has been a source of ideas, energy and hope. That’s why any talk of a strategic alliance would have to be a group decision.

 

As relationships go, it was time to meet the parents.

 

Bill and Ron called individual meetings to bring both teams up the curve. The message was simple: One plus one equals a lot more than two. What can we do together, and how can we work together? Bill took his staff for a visit to the Salter facility in Vienna, WV. He and Ron looked for chemistry. By the time Ron’s staff visited the OffWhite office in Marietta’s historical district a week or so later, the relationships were already in place and the question was moot. Bill and Ron could work together because their staffs could work together. It was time to take OffWhite/Salter on the road.

 

Clients don’t like surprises. They want results. Ron talked to a few of his longstanding clients about a potential alliance with OffWhite. Bill did the same. The feedback was not only supportive, it was challenging because it was the first test of the “so what” factor.

 

As one client asked, “What does this mean for me?”

 

As a client himself for so long, Bill was direct and to the point when it came time for the elevator speech. “Ron’s firm does some things better than we do; they have more experience at it. We do some things better than they; we think differently. And together, we can bring more to bear on helping you make money than we could standing alone. The test is managing the relationship. We can do it. Can we bring more value to your company? Yes.”

 

The OffWhite/Salter alliance is in place. The Web site www.offwhitesalter.com forms a neutral platform from which business development will be managed. It’s a practical reality that the people who work for OffWhite and Salter & Associates are the ones that deliver the value. Both Ron and Bill have the experience to appreciate how important it is for their respective staffs to own the results of their work, both creatively and professionally. Such a philosophy is the basis for continuity in business relationships that clients hold so dear: Minimizing uncertainty is a deliverable that comes packaged with every OffWhite/Salter job.

 

While both firms remain rooted in their own identity and strong in their original corporate, financial and organizational structure, the employees of both firms will have a lot to say about what the future holds. And what the future holds, nobody can be sure, except that Ron and Bill will work hard to empower their own staffs, to invest in the tools and technologies required to make them productive, and to view the next piece of business as geographically irrelevant.

 

OffWhite has proven that a highly unique marketing firm in Marietta, Ohio can manage the worldwide marketing responsibilities of a Singapore-based firm with more than 300 distributors in more than 100 countries. Ron Salter has proven that smaller markets and tighter budgets are no excuse for restrained creativity. Plus, he’s proven that cows can talk.