Superachiever Barbara Proctor

“My grandmother always thought I would do something with my life,” says Barbara Proctor, founder of Proctor & Gardner Advertising. Ms. Proctor’s grandmother was so right.

Born to a sixteen-year-old unwed mother in the rural mountains of North Carolina, Ms. Proctor’s memories of those early days still evoke sights, sounds and smells. She remembers “the three-room shanty where I attended school…hog killing time in the fall…and ‘feeling’ the storm from the mountains days before it arrived.” She also remembers segregation and discrimination.

It was Barbara’s grandmother who had the most lasting influence on her life.

“She taught me what is important is not on the outside, but on the inside. She said it is important to put something inside you, some courage, knowledge, or a skill – things that no one can take away,” says the chief executive. Her grandmother used to say to her, “She ain’t cute, but she’s right smart, and one day she’s going to amount to something.”

Barbara Proctor left the mountains of North Carolina to attend Talladega College in Alabama. She intended to become a teacher. After finishing her undergraduate work in a brief three years, she added another year of psychology and sociology. A summer job at a camp in Michigan earned her enough money to get to Chicago where she spent every penny. Intending to earn just enough to return to Black Mountain, North Carolina, Barbara took a job writing record album covers. She’s been a resident of the Windy City every since.

Ms. Proctor’s rise in the business world was steady. She grew like an oak tree planted in the sun. She spreads her branches with each new spring. And she weathered many storms and cold winter nights. She met with the kind of discrimination that black people have faced for centuries and she met with a new form of arrogance. Of this experience she says, “In advertising, the only thing worse than being a woman, was being an old woman. I was over thirty, female and black. I had so many things wrong with me that it would have taken me all day to figure out which one to blame for my rejections. So I decided not to spend any time worrying about it.”

Ms. Proctor started her own advertising agency on $80,000 borrowed from the Small Business Administration. In order to secure the loan, and since she had no collateral, she went to three ad agencies and got job offers of $65,000, $80,000, and $110,000. She used the second as collateral – what she herself was worth on the open market.

The first account was hard to land. It took six months and much selling. “In every case where something would have been an obstacle, I found a way to turn it to an advantage,” says Barbara Proctor. “I say, if you decide you’re a winner, then you are. If you decide you’re a loser, you’re right. I cannot buy the concept that anyone outside is responsible,” she explains. Now, more than a decade later, her successful company is worth over eight million dollars and employs nearly thirty people.

Ethics play an important role in Ms. Proctor’s business life, “Advertising is the highest form of persuasion,” she claims. Believing that advertising can be an instrument for social change, Barbara Proctor turns down accounts that conflict with her notion of social responsibility. “We mold opinions,” she states, “therefore we have a responsibility to those people whose opinions we influence.” Her company does not advertise alcoholic beverages or cigarettes. She has likewise turned down accounts that she feels are detrimental to the self-esteem of women or blacks. “My belief in the product is unimportant,” Ms. Proctor muses, “what I resist is the business opportunity to sell questionable or stereotypical products to consumers, especially when there is evidence the product is detrimental or reinforces negative stereotypes.”

Barbara Proctor has a “special kind of compassion for the women’s movement.” She gives advice to women who have not had the courage she has shown by saying, “Women fear risk. They want guarantees. If you are able to risk, able to lose, then you will gain. When women get to the point where they take the risk, fail and try again, without any loss of self-esteem, they will be free.”

This incredibly energetic entrepreneur, who sleeps only two to four hours a day, when asked if she ever gets tired of the hard work and the pushing, she answered, “Of course I do, I feel exploited at times. I feel overworked, misunderstood, misused…all the negatives. My solution is to push those feelings to absurdity. When I realize how absurd it is, and have a great laugh, the feelings are over for another year or so. I never go back and I seldom look back. I’ve made my share of mistakes and I’ve learned from them. Energy spent living in the past diminishes your time now and in the future.”

PSP: Ms. Proctor, your ethical views in relation to advertising are well known. How do they differ from the business ethics of your competitors?

Barbara Proctor: I do not presume to judge anyone’s standards but my own. I do believe in the “root and fruit” chain of conduct. Whatever you plant or leave behind flowers into something you will see again. You profit or lose by those recurring encounters. So I try to live and utilize my resources in a positive manner.

PSP: Are you always pleased with your “root and fruit” chain?

Barbara Proctor: When I meet the fruits of my behavior, generally I am well pleased. Occasionally I have lost revenue because there are some businesses I can’t represent and some people I cannot be comfortable serving. Some business people can separate personal values from business accommodations. I am less complicated and more consistent. There are certain values which remain rock solid with me.

PSP: Why has your personal philosophy worked so well for you?

Barbara Proctor: Assuming it has – if you mean by that, why do I seem to be more out front than my meager beginning would suggest – I can only express gratitude for that meager beginning. It liberated me in a way that being born in more favored circumstances couldn’t have done.

PSP: In what way was your “meager” beginning liberating?

Barbara Proctor: I have been poorer, uglier, lonelier, more scared than most women…and I survived that childhood. Life has been a piece of cake since I got an education. I have enjoyed the freedom which comes only from knowing what’s on the other side. I also know that when you buy inclusion and acceptance with conformity, the price bankrupts us spiritually. My greatest wealth is not financial. It is peace of mind. That shows. And it is infectious.

PSP: Is selling different today than it was 10 or 15 years ago?

Barbara Proctor: Selling is not different today. It remains the art and skill of exchanging goods and services for something of negotiated value. What has changed is the marketplace and the attitude of the buyers.

PSP: What has changed in the marketplace, in your opinion?

Barbara Proctor: With the development of high technology, specifically television, the buyer is seeing more things, more lifestyles, more options. This places a greater burden on the seller. Not only must a need be generated in order to sell the product, but the buyer must be reinforced in the purchase and conditioned to remain loyal to the choice in the face of newer and more provocative persuasion to make a different decision.

PSP: Why do people buy?

Barbara Proctor: There are many articulated reasons why people buy; they want something; they need something; a product makes a chore easier; a product makes them more attractive. The basic reason why people buy is the personal gratification they enjoy by successfully negotiating a solution to a perceived problem.

PSP: Then why do buyers change their minds when it comes time to repurchase?

Barbara Proctor: For the same reason that they bought in the first place. Often they are disappointed with their purchase because the solution requires an internal adjustment. The external purchase alone does not relieve the problem. This does not suggest that the articulated reasons for buying were entirely superficial. Soap is needed to wash clothes clean. The decision making which goes into brand selection, however, reflects the negotiated choice.

PSP: In America today are we selling needs or wants?

Barbara Proctor: What we are doing, in many cases, is worse than selling needs, we are generating needs. Women are often the victim of this process. Women are perceived as the turnkey of the American economy. We have commercials and programs blaming women for everything from dirty shirt collars to kids’ cavities. If everything in a house is there because a woman bought it or contributed to the purchasing decision, then this attack on women is not sexist, per se. One by-product of men setting up households which they run alone, and women waiting until later to marry, is that one-person households are the fastest growing household segment. Now men, too, will have their self-esteem tied to plates they can see their face in and shiny floors.

PSP: What do you see in the future for working women?

Barbara Proctor: Working women are a permanent factor in the American labor force. Not only are they here to stay in the lower “pink ghettos” of labor, but they have been in the line positions for more than five years now and should begin moving into the upper management levels of industry and the professions.

PSP: What do you think awaits them there?

Barbara Proctor: If men are objective enough to allow them access, fine, they will be rewarded. If they continue to reject women on top management, more and more women will simply walk away and begin their own businesses. Women-owned businesses are the fastest growing segment of all business. Never mind that our little businesses gross less than $100,000 annually. These women are getting experience and they are shaking the shackles off their minds. The women starting up and struggling today will soon be joined by their better trained, better funded, and more liberated sisters. This will be an exciting decade.

PSP: How do you think family life will change?

Barbara Proctor: Family patterns have already changed. The new morality has made it socially acceptable for men to walk away from their families. There is a very dangerous economic spectrum looming ahead for women who are stuck in the 1950’s mindset.

PSP: What is that?

Barbara Proctor: It is projected that by the year 2000 all of America’s poor will be women and children living with women. It’s called the feminization of poverty and it’s very real.

PSP: Do you see a way of dealing with these changes?

Barbara Proctor: Yes, I do. The family will have to divide up responsibilities more equitably. An entire wave of “liberated” women have determined that superwoman is dead. They simply cannot be all things to all people. The guilt is diminishing daily, and they have determined that goals and responsibilities are joint commitments by all members of a family. This need not lead to conflict between career women and homemakers. It should lead to a quantification of the home career and stronger protections for the homemaker.

PSP: How have women in the business world changed companies?

Barbara Proctor: As far as the big picture goes, women haven’t changed anything. We are still less than 3 percent of the corporate boards of the industrials, and well under 10 percent of top management of top companies overall. And that’s where the decision making occurs. On another level, women have made substantive changes in the business ethics, conduct and philosophy of the companies where they work.

PSP: What are your future goals?

Barbara Proctor: The two most immediate are attending law school and building my company into the organization I know it can be. That includes being a sound launching base for the second generation staffers and officers who helped build this company.

PSP: What was the biggest sale you ever made?

Barbara Proctor: In 1962 I was an international director for Vee Jay Records in Chicago. While negotiating deals in London, I signed the recording contracts for Vee Jay president, E.G. Abner, and brought back to America the very first Beatles recording. It amounted to millions of dollars directly and changed American music forever.

PSP: What was the most important sale for you personally?

Barbara Proctor: After six months of rejection, after rejection from potential clients who had loved me when I was working for someone else but didn’t believe a Black woman “had it,” I landed my first advertising contract with Jewel Foods in Chicago. That was in 1970.

PSP: To you, what makes a successful salesperson?

Barbara Proctor: The ability to match your product or service to the needs of the buyer. A successful salesperson must look beyond the resistance. He or she must hear beyond the objections being raised; the successful salesperson must penetrate the wall of withdrawal and touch the buyer when he/she is most in need.

PSP: Where do you feel salespeople most often fail?

Barbara Proctor: Too many salespeople attempt to emphasize the quality of the product rather than how it fits into the quality of the buyer’s life. The attempt to wear down resistance with insistence. They impress the buyer with knowledge of the product rather than understanding of the need. Total communication and patience to wait for the perfect time make a successful salesperson.

PSP: How do you motivate other people?

Barbara Proctor: I’m not sure I do as good a job of this as I could. Sometimes, I tend to assume that proximity alone is enough. I get frustrated that my people cannot pick up what I’m feeling by osmosis. I feel I can pick up on their vibes. Then I realize that it is a function of the limitation of time. I try to remember that each person in one’s life deserves personal time. When I feel that is needed I give it. People cannot execute a concept they do not understand. Beyond that, sharing the music is the best way to get people to dance.

PSP: What motivates you?

Barbara Proctor: I have been blessed with the most gentle supportive human being on earth for a son. I have been fortunate to have touched the lives of many people who have invested in me a lot of their energies, their dreams, their goals. Quite simply, I am needed. There is no greater motivation than that.

PSP: Thank you.