Part Four: Dashboard, then and now.

As Dashboard turns 10 in January of 2011, Barry Hillier, our CVO, looks back at the company on where we were and where we are going.

The end of the beginning…

From 2002 to 2004, Dashboard experienced good growth and many successes. We found a great first office, (that wasn’t actually a room), on Berkeley Street with a sub-let of the main floor and basement of a modelling agency. With the new office and some dedicated hard work came new clients. We won Salon Selectives, based on our Popstar series work that turned into later wins for Axe Body Spray, Sunlight Laundry, Hellmanns and Vaseline. In addition, we continued to grow our Ontario Toyota Dealer business greatly. We worked hard for our clients and we invested heavily in their success by providing much more than they paid for in everything we did. We felt strongly that our reputation needed to be built by great strategy and great ideas and we believed that our clients would refer us to others based on our dedication and work. It seemed to make sense to invest more time in our existing clients than spending that time looking for new clients. Growing our clients and gaining referral business would be the greatest evaluation of our work. In fact, after 2002 all of our business at Dashboard came via referrals from clients. We’re proud of that!

The three years following 2002 proved to be an MBA and more for an entrepreneur. I write this because there is a huge learning curve in running a business that you can only learn by actually running the business to really appreciate. I remember sitting around our boardroom table with our art director at the time, Shawn Wells, as a light bulb exploded over the middle of the table. Chris Grande, in mid-sentence, looked up and said “Shit, there goes another $5.” It’s funny because the financial needs of the business grew as quickly as our client base did. Good problems to have, but most people don’t think about the cost of light bulbs, photocopiers, paper, pens, stationary and so on. You see revenue and you imagine salaries, but there are COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) and costs that affect the business operations much beyond those simple initial forecasts. Like everything in life, those years provided the grounding to successful manage and profitably run an agency.

We learned and we grew and in 2004 I became a Father to a beautiful baby girl named Tatum. Another great year, largely full of highs, but ended on a low point. There was a minor recession in 2004. Nothing compared to the .com bust and certainly not comparable to 2008, but certainly a bump in the road. We were around 9 people at the time and several of our scheduled projects were pushed back from the summer to the fall. We held onto staff because we knew what was coming. The good news was the projects came through… in 2005. We were overstaffed from late summer to Christmas and this posed a problem. If you have never faced the torture of having to lay someone good off, I’m glad for you and wish that this remains true for the rest of your career. It is the worst situation an entrepreneur can ever find themselves facing. About six weeks prior to Christmas and facing a situation where payroll would mean putting the houses of Chris and I on the table or layoff, I found myself staring at the crib of my newborn daughter and facing a terrible decision… her or them. Not an easy decision and certainly filled with deep emotions. We laid two people off and learned that sometimes you have to do difficult things, but do them humanely. We ended 2004 by having a pot-luck dinner at Chris’ house and putting more money in their pockets. Fortunately, they quickly found work and we had our scheduled projects finally land in early 2005.