Designing a Partnership Where the Hopes and Dreams Rhyme

While their bios are written individually, their stories today are woven together as the founders and Co-CEOs of Godfrey Dadich Partners (GDP), the venture they formed in 2017 and sold to the kyu Collective over the summer for an undisclosed amount.

Together, Dadich and Godfrey lead a 58-person, bi-coastal team that focuses on “truth-seeking in brand building.” In other words, they are storytellers who bring together the best of journalism, design, and strategy. And they’re dang good at it. They’re responsible for the new strategy and full redesign of National Geographic as well as the virtual experience of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Their first client as Godfrey Dadich Partners was the Obama Foundation.

Why then, when you have the former President as your first customer, and work with Nike, Netflix, Disney, IBM, Lyft, GE—the list goes on—do you sell your independent company three years in? In this interview, Godfrey and Dadich discuss the makings of strong partnerships, the way they evaluate opportunities, and how they realized that sometimes the tough things are the best things.

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Scott, in 2016, you were contemplating your next chapter after Wired. At the time, a large consumer electronics company was courting you. Is it true that Patrick, whom you met when his former company did brand strategy work for Wired, initially encouraged you to take the job?

It’s true. Patrick’s first and consistent advice was to take the job. I had been at Wired for 12 years at that point and that was the reason I moved to the West Coast. At the same time, I was also working on Abstract, which we just delivered to Netflix. We knew Abstract would create a cultural conversation around creativity and design. [The potential job wouldn’t allow Scott to pursue outside projects, a deal-breaker.]

As Patrick and I started to talk about the values we were both seeking, the more and more those conversations started to overlap with our hopes and dreams. They started to rhyme, in a sense. We were both dealing with business dynamics that were beyond the normal course of publishing and advertising, and yet they were related. It made more sense to assert our shared point of view in a context that would allow us to have the freedom to pursue jobs that were interesting to us, with clients that were making a meaningful impact on the world and colleagues and partners we drew great inspiration from.

Patrick: While Scott was going through his own journey of seeing what was happening to the world in publishing, I was on a parallel journey around advertising because I had started at Ogilvy back in the early nineties in L.A., and then later in New York. I started the firm Godfrey Q in 2003, and we were founded as an advertising agency. But by the time it got to be 2012, 2013, and we did the brand strategy work for Wired, I had so many clients calling and saying, “We want you to bring us great ideas, but we don’t want you to bring us any advertising.” When you hear that enough times, you realize that the currency that used to be attached to what you were identified by isn't what it once was.

I was having my own crisis with advertising. It gave me a great life. There are reasons to love it, and I still do today, but change was afoot and all of the economics of advertising were flowing to Facebook and Google and no one else. I wasn't sure what I was doing next, even though I was running my firm at that time. It was only when Scott and I came together on Christmas Eve 2016 at a Blue Bottle down on Sansome Street in San Francisco that we decided we were going to do this. By the time we got back to the office barely a week later, we had already developed our identity and put all of our plans in place to make this thing happen. On January 3, 2017, we started things in motion. On February 1, 2017, we opened for business.

How did you blend two cultures—the planners and sales managers from Godfrey Q and the storytellers and designers who came over from Wired—into one team, one culture?

Patrick: The credit goes to the teams, plural, who were, to a person, eager to learn new ways of doing things and to find out what the future could hold. For my part, I’d been trying to shift the center of gravity of the firm and its way of seeing the world away from being just advertising, and I couldn’t get it there. But as soon as Scott and I made this move, the change happened overnight.

Scott: Patrick's right; it was as much about the team and about our colleagues electing to choose that future and to pursue it in the ways that they found interesting. The work that Patrick and I were able to do was to hang the banner out and stand for the ideals of truth-seeking in brand building and create conditions where organizations can define and tell the stories around their own futures.

It’s worth remembering that Wired, at its best, was always about a mindset. It was about seeking a condition where technology and culture could intersect. It was about living for, and searching for, a tomorrow—seeking to understand what that tomorrow would look like and how it would feel and how people would interact in that context.

That was what we sought to create at GDP, to bring together a cohort of client partners, such that we could do the best work of our careers. We could pursue our passions and leverage what we're great at and create meaningful change in those client organizations and in the world.

How do you achieve creative success and financial strength at GDP?

Patrick: There is a simple triad that we use to judge an opportunity: Can we do great work? Can we have fun? And can we make money? Every once in a while you come up with one that's all three and it feels amazing. Quite often you can spend a lot of time doing two, and there's nothing wrong with that because there’s something to be said about doing good work and either having fun or making money. When you can't do good work or you aren't connected with the client, then you have to figure out why you're doing what you're doing.

Speaking of the financial aspect, in 2018 GDP had a client with seven figures in anticipated billings unexpectedly go away. How did you navigate the experience, and what did you learn from it?  

Patrick: That still stings because it was the coolest assignment. Losing it meant more than just the finances of it. There was a period of denial about whether it was really gone that made our hole bigger. By the time we got to April 2018, we were already at more than $2 million in the hole for the year. That’s a big hole for the year, because we had built the team around this assignment. But I think it says a lot that we decided we had assembled the team we thought was going to take us where we want to go.

We didn't want to take a step back, so we did everything we could to pick up the assignments that were going to enable us to turn a disaster of a year into a break-even year. Given our history, that's not a good business outcome, but, relative to the hole we were in, it felt like a victory by the time we got there.

Scott: It galvanized the leadership team and created a strength that exists among the nine of us as partners within the business. It provided and clarified the evaluative criteria that we use to measure a good client fit. There is no small measure of lessons that came from the work. Sometimes you need the perspective of time to understand just how much you're able to learn in a really challenging environment.

You were in conversation with SY Partners founder Keith Yamashita—whose company was a founding member of the kyu Collective in 2014—about joining the kyu Collective for more than a year. What discussions did you have, and how did you weigh that decision? 

Scott: Patrick and I had both worked in large organizations that have a very structured command and control framework, where decisions move from the top down. Having experienced what it was like to work in a more collaborative, self-deterministic manner as we have at GDP, the knee-jerk reaction was: Thanks but no thanks. We're having fun. We're making some money and doing good work, so I’m not sure what would be missing from this equation. But very early on in the conversations with Keith, he illuminated the work he was doing within kyu, both in helping to found the organization and defining a new way of working in a collectivist approach. It held a ton of appeal.

Patrick: Scott and I had different deep bruising based on experience: Scott worked in the publishing industry, and I worked for advertising agencies owned by holding companies. We had an allergic reaction to having new corporate parents. Our goal was to run a good business and control our own destiny. But then all of your assumptions go out the window when it’s Keith Yamashita.

Keith approached it from a place of knowing where we came from and having a big idea of where we could go. He referred to a meeting where we went out to dinner as a “dream date.” Only Keith can get away saying that and having it make perfect sense.

As we met with a couple more people within his orbit in kyu, we found ourselves more and more excited with the possibility. It became clear really early that our joining kyu was not an efficiency move around eliminating back-end offices and trying to diversify the portfolio. It was about kyu believing that we were best-in-class, one-of-a-kind, and the Collective would be better because of our addition. And we would be better by having access to the Collective.

What’s the biggest benefit to joining the Collective?

Patrick: I started a firm back in 2003, so by the time we actually were acquired, I had been independent, for lack of a better term, for more than 17 years. Sometimes it was the best possible thing. Other times I felt that I was not being able to lean into the expertise of my peers and leaders that I admire and respect. At kyu, I was able to look at people who were giants to me and all of a sudden I had access to them. I was able to get counsel.

I recognized that the things I was worried about were the same things they were worried about. Recognized that things for which I had no answers, sometimes they had no answers. I found the whole thing like a homecoming.

What about you Scott?

Scott: I knew that I could continue my education as a designer and as a leader by learning from these other renowned figures who had been through much more than I ever have. And I had the chance to be a practitioner in some of the worlds that we had covered at Wired: unpacking and framing where things are going, whether that's in transportation, news, media/design, or manufacturing—even communities and thinking about how we relate to one another as human beings. Those assignments are at the heart of what kyu seeks to nurture in the world.

This last question is for creative entrepreneurs looking to lead their own teams. If you think back to starting your company in 2017, what lesson learned in the past three years would you want to share with your younger self?

Scott: As a group, we’re a pretty ambitious lot. We want to help build our clients’ businesses while building our own. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the mechanics of a brief or a particular challenge that feels like it's everything—and everything all at once. It's the old stop-and-smell-the-roses adage: Sometimes the journey is the destination. And sometimes the tough things are the best things.

I think finding a greater awareness for the little moments in between what are perceived as the big moments. The hallway conversations and getting a coffee together, the quiet moments of the late afternoon when there's a good hum in the office and the music is on. It's easy to take those things for granted. As we rebuild and redesign for the hybrid culture of working from the office and from home, I'm trying to bring an awareness and a curiosity to what that will look like and make sure we enjoy it along the way.

Patrick, what about you?

Patrick: Since Scott's answer occupies such a rich territory of the right brain, I'm going to go left-brain. My strict advice to people is to have a fantastic CFO as part of your founding team.

Make sure that that person is empowered in every possible way to help you run the business appropriately, because running a business involves legal affairs and insurance policies and collection methodologies and cash management. And businesses go bad because they are undercapitalized. Because you know how to manage clients and you know how to manage the creative processes, congratulations: you're two thirds of the way toward having a real business. 

Matt McCue is the co-founder of Creative Factor. He lives in New York City, but is willing to travel long distances for a good meal.