Part One: 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.

This was the beginning of the beginning… Part 1

It is interesting to reflect on the past, gaining new insights on the highs and lows with a little extra perspective. When I look way back, I always knew that I was going to get into advertising, being envious of the profession long before Mad Men debuted. It wasn’t just the booze that was the draw, but the ability to mix creativity with business from multiple categories in an always challenging environment. Smart, sexy, fun and it beat the hell out of factory work, which could have been my fall back given my background in Niagara.

So I started in 1993 after graduating University and was fortunate to experience great peers and mentors in what is now called “traditional advertising”, having worked at Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO and Communiqué. Back then it wasn’t “traditional”, it was simply advertising. Then the “Internet” started to influence everything. To be honest, it actually had much less relevance back then to advertising compared to the influence of Venture Capitalists and the general investment community. In saying this, it certainly sparked many conversations around the boardrooms with brand managers from the mid 90’s to the heady .com build and collapse.

I evolved into digital in 1999 when I was head-hunted into a digital start-up called Operex due to my traditional experience and the fact that one of my clients was Microsoft. It was another shop, one of the many that launched in the mid to late 90’s, that was initially conceived from an investment point-of-view rather than based in any actual advertising or marketing experience. This, like many digital start-ups, contained conversations about “multiples”, “2^nd, 3^rd, 4rth rounds of financing” and “IPO’s” more often than they did about “brand identity” and “user experience”.  Money came and went like it was water. It was exhilarating, frustrating and a hell of a learning curve in two short years. Besides, I was able to work on the Vancouver Canucks business and that frustrated the hell out my brother, an avid hockey fan. (I’m not a huge sports guy.)

So, near the end of 2000 and at the heart of what was already becoming one of the biggest cultural shifts in history, stood a business opportunity to link my previous experience in traditional advertising with the unique opportunity to become an entrepreneur. Ten years ago in January of 2001, I decided that the time was perfect to start my own agency. I called it Dashboard.

When I started Dashboard, it was literally from my condo across from Maple Leaf Gardens and with a mere $5,000 that was lent to me by my then girlfriend, now wife, Jennifer. (Still haven’t paid her back, by the way.) Now, leaving a senior position when you just turned 31, responsible for millions of dollars and having influence in how the agency operates isn’t an easy decision. The decision gets harder when you leave a well paying job for the opportunity to earn… well, you actually don’t know what you’ll earn. What’s even more fearful is that you don’t know what you could potentially lose. In the end, you decide to jump off the cliff with the belief a parachute will open. Inversely, you hope the sudden stop is so abrupt that you don’t feel it anyway.  Needless to say, January of 2001, I jumped off the ledge…