When Jeffrey Crowl was 9 years old, his father came home from his job as
a sales manager at a local newspaper and asked his family what it thought
of him starting his own advertising agency. The younger Crowl voted against
it for purely financial reasons. His allowance would go from 50 cents to a
quarter.
This early cutback would lead to substantial gain.
Jeffrey colored in the letters of ads his dad worked on at home while
getting the business off the ground. This was before computers did all the
work.
In 1981, 31-year-old Jeffrey Crowl purchased the business from his father
and has advanced it to what it is today, Crowl, Montgomery & Clark
Inc., an advertising and sales promotion firm with a waiting room full of
awards.
When he and his partner, Mark Clark, bought the company, interest rates
were at 17.5 percent. It only took them a year to pay back the bank.
“At that age, you have no fear,” he says. “It’s one of
those things that you probably don’t know enough to stay out of
business.”
He didn’t have much trouble keeping the business growing as he had
worked for his father for 10 years. However they did lose a major account
shortly after acquiring the firm. They took it in stride.
“Because you’re put in a position that you’ve got to
succeed, you do. And that’s the perspective we took.”
One thing he noticed as he grew older was a change in attitudes toward him
as a person and business associate, a change that today’s young
professionals may be happy to hear.
“I don’t know if there is a ceiling or a plateau at which people
say, ‘Well, he’s no longer that young whippersnapper that
doesn’t know anything,’ — to someone whose opinion they
respect on a business level,” Crowl says. “It seemed like it had
to be somewhere around that 35-year age where I could almost feel it
overnight. All of a sudden there was a change. I can’t describe it. It
just happened. I can tell you that it was very clear in my mind that all of
a sudden, people were showing a respect for my opinion and my business
sense.”