Back in 2001, Coudal Partners was on the ropes fiscally. And according to Jim Coudal, it’s the best thing that could have happened.

"After 9/11, we lost a lot of business. And we were in trouble. It wasn’t any problem of ours. One company got bought and other people cut back on their spending," he explains. "It’s the best thing that ever happened to us because we pulled back and said, ‘Well, do we wanna build up this whole thing again and go chase business that we don’t want and get into pitches and win or not win business based on the whims of people who are stupider than we are? Or is there another way?’"

It was the culmination of years of frustration from doing client work. "We never really maximized our creative potential by, I can say it, whoring ourselves out to people who knew less than we did," he says. "If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product. You’re selling yourself short by selling that on a work for hire basis."

To illustrate his point, he brings up the product that now generates the most revenue for the company: Field Notes. "We do a good job marketing it," he explains. "We sell hundreds of thousands of these things and we make money out of it. If I did that same work for this other company called Yard Notes and we did exactly the same work, they’d paid us $50,000 for the work and then sell a million of the memo books. We didn’t get any of that million that our work did. From an economic standpoint, that’s the essential inequality. Your own stuff is potentially more lucrative and also comes with peace of mind — and not having those ulcers that come with knowing full well that you know better than the client but still have to kneel down."

Evolving goals

Coudal started out decades ago as a creative director for a big Chicago ad agency working on high profile accounts. But even then, he wasn’t happy with the system. He’d reach goals he set for himself yet still found himself dissatisfied.

"There’s this great quote by Dan Gilbert. He said that the reason that most of us are so unhappy most of the time is that we make our goals for the people we are when we set them, not for the people we’re gonna be when we reach them," Coudal explains. “And when I started at an ad agency I said, ‘I need to be a creative director. I need to be a hotshot creative director in an agency that’s highly visible.’ And I got there and was miserable doing work I wasn’t particularly proud of for people I didn’t like."

That’s when he left and, along with partners Susan Everett and Kevin Guilfoile, started a new eponymous agency. Despite the new company, the result was a familiar feeling. He says, "I wanted to bill $20 million and win some Addy Awards. That’s what we wanted to do. So we just kept pushing. And then adding people and growing and working for clients and we never evaluated whether this is really what we wanted to do. We were just trying to get to this arbitrary goal for no reason at all.

"I had set goals early without reevaluating where I was in terms of my happiness as a person. And I had to feed the beast. If you start adding people, then you gotta bring in more work and sometimes you gotta bring in work that you’re not particularly fond of in order to make the payroll to pay the more people that you’re hiring to do the work that you’re not particularly fond of.

“I had set goals early without reevaluating where I was in terms of my happiness as a person. And I had to feed the beast.”

"One thing leads to another and all of a sudden you look at the work you’re producing and you’re not proud of it and you’re out at the bar after work making fun of your clients. That’s funny for a little while, but that’s no way to go through life. It makes you jaded. If you don’t like your job, there’s something wrong. And going to the bar and complaining about your job is a symptom of something wrong.”