The
Communicator
15
"i liked his hair, mostly.”
That’s how Steve Lingle, a 2010 graduate of St. Bonaventure University's Integrated Marketing Communications program, justified leaving behind a lucrative career at FedEx to open up The Quilted Squirrel with Jerry Lee, a 2012 IMC grad.
Of course, this isn’t the real reason. But it should give you a sense of the personality shared between the two entrepreneurs, hardly contained by the walls of their Hamburg marketing agency office.
The two met by pure happenstance. Lingle was filling in for Mike Jones-Kelley, a lecturer in the IMC program who teaches the copy writing class. Lee happened to be in the class Lingle subbed for.
Lee stood out to Lingle, who happened to be looking for someone to do design work for his firm, Lingle Marketing.
“I remembered Jerry from class, and I respected his work. I knew he was insightful, and, at least, mildly intelligent, so I reached out to him and told him I needed a designer,” Lingle remembers. “We met (to discuss the position), and it turns out, he had much more to offer than just design capabilities. We got to talking, and it ended up being a six-month process before we got to the point where we launched the agency.”
A lot happened in those six months. Before Lingle and Lee even began talking about the business, Lingle sat down with Jones-Kelley to discuss his aspirations. Jones-Kelley encouraged Lingle to think about positioning his agency as the most creative one in town.
“I started talking about strategy and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis and some very boring things,” Lingle said of his initial talk with Jones-Kelley.
“He actually pretended to go to sleep as he’s sitting in the chair. He said, ‘That’s all well and good, but that’s what everybody is doing. Why don’t you talk about creativity, because no one’s talking about that?’”
Lingle didn’t have to look far to find his creative counterpart. Lee won the Deb Henretta Award for excellence in the IMC program, in part for the immense creativity he showed in developing his IMC plan for Truck-Lite, the company Lee worked for at the time.
The two were a match made in heaven. Lingle remembers some of his initial conversations, and telling his wife about the possibilities.
“I said to her, ‘Jerry has this way of like, I’ll say something and he turns it around and has this completely different perpective that I never even imagined was there,’” Lingle said. “I really appreciate that about him. It brings a lot to the table when we are in brainstorming sessions.”
Lee echoed the sentiment about Lingle.
“Most of that only works because he’s able to tie down the things that I throw out. He’s very purposeful in the way he does things and that’s what makes him such a good writer — he knows exactly what he wants to say,” Lee said. “When I’m throwing ideas out there, and they are literally out of left field, he’s able to make sense out of it. We’re like-minded but different in enough ways.”
After he convinced his wife, Lee made what he jokingly calls an “irrational decision,” and left Truck-Lite, where he had worked for 13 years. Lee took a pay cut to join Lingle.
“Neither of us got into this for the money,” Lee, confident in his decision, said. “We didn’t get into this to be millionaires. We did it because we love advertising.”
Two recent IMC grads take a leap of faith and start their own agency
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