Читать книгу Driving Eureka! - Doug Hall - Страница 47

After 10 years at Procter & Gamble, I looked up one January 1st and realized my growth had stopped, so I decided it was time to retire from corporate life and start my own company.

With three credit cards for financing; our family basement as the office; and my wife, Debbie, five months pregnant with our third child, I founded what is known today as the Eureka! Ranch. The company’s purpose was to turn innovation from a random gamble to a reliable system. However, in the 1990s, the business world was not ready for system-driven innovation. Innovation was the practice of Creative Gurus.

So, in a fraudulent move, I marketed myself as a guru. I say fraudulent because the truth was that my so-called expertise was actually powered by smarter systems for finding, filtering, and fast-tracking fresh ideas. Marketing myself as a guru worked. The media and clients bought it:

“America’s #1 Idea Guru”

—A&E Top 10

“America’s #1 New Product Idea Man”

—Inc. magazine

“Former Procter & Gamble marketing whiz Doug Hall goes to any length to encourage a fresh perspective . . . clients say it works.”

—Wall Street Journal

“[Doug Hall is] an eccentric entrepreneur who just might have what we’ve all been looking for—the happy secret to success.”

—Dateline NBC

“When Doug meets Disney, creativity ne’er wanes; our team explodes when he jump-starts our brains!”

—Ellen Guidera, VP, Disney

Clients came from around the world to work with the “guru” at the Eureka! Ranch just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. The majority (88%) of our business was repeat. We worked with the best and brightest at innovation at the time: Procter & Gamble, Nike, Disney, American Express, Hewlett Packard, Ford, Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay, Schlumberger, as well as thousands of other consumer and industrial companies around the world.

We worked with companies that were desperate. Sadly, when they reached out to us, it was often too late. That was the case with AT&T (the original), Blockbuster, Circuit City, Maytag, Chrysler, and Gillette. We worked with each of these companies within a year of them ceasing to exist as independent companies.