Most Annoying Man in America” (Simon Cowell on The Tonight Show)
• Modern Day Ben Franklin (Joyce Wycoff)
• “Mr. Know-It-All” (ABC-TV’s American Inventor)
And my personal favorite …
• “Business Robin Hood” (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
That’s the hype on me. The plain truth is, I’m a short balding guy with a taste for comfortable tropical shirts, comfortable jeans, and comfortable Birkenstock sandals. The difference is, I’m not afraid to think big, and I have sufficient supplies of energy and enthusiasm to turn my ideas into reality.
The Early Years—Real World Entrepreneur
I was born of a middle-class family in Portland, Maine, 253 years to the day after the birth of Ben Franklin, a circumstance that has tinted my outlook and influenced who I am.
At the age of 12, I started my first business performing as a magician and juggler and selling “learn to juggle kits”, magic tricks, and balloon animal kits. I called myself Merwyn the Magician, after my dad, who was not a magician and who deeply regrets the fact that his first name sounds a lot like Merlin.
In college I formed Campus Promotions International, a little company that marketed beer mugs, T-shirts, and just about anything you could print a logo on to four different campuses. I published a vinyl phone book cover, the kind with the ads all over them. Money was tight, so I took lots of items in trade. I got a diamond ring from a jeweler that way. It was the ring I gave to Debbie, my high school sweetheart, when I proposed.
Twenty-something—Corporate Rebel
The University of Maine spat me into the world in 1981 with a degree in chemical engineering and a hankering to get into marketing. I’d worked as a summer engineer at Procter & Gamble’s Mehoopany, Pennsylvania, paper plant in the pulp mill, where I learned that chemical engineering was not my life’s mission.
Instead of taking the classic path for a chemical engineer, I applied to P&G’s advertising department. At the interview, I performed a few magic tricks, figuring that any company that couldn’t appreciate a trick or two was not a place where I wanted to work. I got an offer and was hired on with Coast soap, a fine deodorant bar.
“Were there times I wanted to strangle Doug? Absolutely. He was what I call a ‘high-maintenance subordinate.’ You had to watch him like crazy. He’d be nodding at what I was saying, but his mind would be somewhere else. Linear, he’s not. His divergence paid off a number of times in the context of inventions that would not have been discovered simply by taking incremental steps forward from where we were.”
– Barb Thomas, my first boss at P&G
In time, I became the company’s first and only Master Marketing Inventor. The P&G Finance department calculated that my Invention Team could take a product to market with 10 percent of the staff, in 16 percent of the time and at 18 percent of the cost of a similar project in another part of the company. It wasn’t that we were any smarter. It was that we had a different mindset; an entrepreneurial perspective I now call the Eureka! Way.
It was a wild time. We wore comfortable clothes, worked 16 to 20 hours a day and loved it. The company loved it, too.
“Doug brings an extraordinary degree of creativity, entrepreneurial instinct and energy to his work. He has brought eight product concepts from invention to shipping, all within the past year … with a ninth project soon to follow. This has to be something of a record.”
– From my final personnel review at P&G
The corporation acknowledged and respected my efforts. But for all that, it’s still a corporation. And as with all corporations, certain rules of protocol are to be followed. The review continued:
“Doug has just one key opportunity for improvement: he needs to treat the ‘system’ with more respect… . (He) takes almost malicious pleasure in ‘beating the system’ by developing new product concepts faster and cheaper than if work were done through traditional channels … It does not help to rub people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation or their tortoise-like speed”
– More from my final personnel review at P&G
Guilty as charged.
One February morning, after about a decade at Procter, I awoke and realized it was time to get on with the next phase of my life’s journey. A lot of people wait until they’re 65 to retire from the corporation and start living the good life. I retired in my early 30s.
Thirty-something–Corporate Rebel For Hire
I borrowed Ben Franklin’s pen name for my new company—Franklin having published Poor Richard’s Almanac under the name, Richard Saunders. And that, in a nut, was the birth of Richard Saunders International.
Ben is my spiritual mentor. He’s the original American inventor, as well as the original American entrepreneur. We share the same birthday, January 17, a scant 253 years apart. We both have receding hairlines and irreverent senses of humor. We both have far-flung interests ranging from science to business to politics. Our profiles and physiques are strangely alike, although I think Franklin may have had one or two more chins. The Wall Street Journal noticed the similarities, too:
(Hall and Franklin) “sort of look alike, especially when the balding and bespectacled Mr. Hall wears colonial-style shirts with puffy sleeves.”
– The Wall Street Journal
The original vision was for Richard Saunders International to pursue a combination of corporate innovation consulting and independent inventing/licensing.
Inventing was fun and profitable; we sold or licensed a number of board games and consumer electronic products. However, the innovation consulting business quickly took off at a level I never would have expected, and thus the inventing business was put on hold.
Our work for Pepsi-Cola, the Eveready Battery Company, AT&T, and Walt Disney generated a big buzz in the media world. In quick succession, we made multiple national appearances on Dateline NBC and CNN and were featured in Inc. Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and others.
Lou Dobbs on CNN reported research that showed the average American home has, on average, 18 products that we’ve had a hand in jumpstarting. In some cases, it’s been the invention of a new product or service. In other cases, it’s been the invention or reinvention of a client’s marketing methods. The number is not nearly as impressive as it sounds–when you realize that we work for clients like Walt Disney, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Kraft, Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola, and hundreds of others of the bestselling brands in the world.
As our work generated publicity, the name of our invention service, Eureka!, took over, and the name Richard Saunders International was assigned to the corporate holding company. With the construction of a custom-built creativity center just outside of Cincinnati we officially became known as the Eureka! Ranch. Franklin’s spirit lives on in a display in the lobby and in the Eureka! Ranch logo, with its flying kite and rising sun
The official name is Eureka with an exclamation point. Eureka! recognizes that magical moment
