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With the explosion in
domain values in recent years Grant has been well rewarded for
his prescience. So much so that he has begun giving back through
a series of generous domain donations (totaling hundreds of
thousands of dollars) to grateful educational institutions in
the U.S., including his alma mater, Arizona’s Prescott
College.
There
were times in Grant’s life when the kind of philanthropy he
practices today would have seemed like the wildest kind of pipe
dream. He had walked away from a dream job on Madison Avenue
so he could move to New York’s Adirondack Mountains,
even though there was no job waiting for him there. After the
move, the company he started wound up folding but like all great
entrepreneurs, Grant bounced back and bounced back big.
Some of
that resiliency may have come from growing up with two
rambunctious brothers. The three boys were born in a five year
span starting in 1953 when Rob was the first to arrive. The
family lived in Evanston, Illinois (suburban Chicago)
at the time but soon moved to Memphis then on to Providence,
Rhode Island as Rob’s dad climbed the corporate ladder,
becoming a VP at one of the first business conglomerates, Textron.
|
Rhode
Island's Narragansett Bay |
Most of
Grant’s formative years were spent living near Rhode
Island’s Narragansett Bay where he developed a
love of sailing (a love that played a big role in his
first successful business that we will be talking about
shortly). He would sometimes take off for days at a
time, exploring the Atlantic Coast in a 25-foot sloop.
Grant also developed an appreciation for nature and love
of the outdoors during this time and that love would be
a critical factor in the decision I mentioned earlier to
walk away from a promising advertising career in New
York City. |
Though
he had an idyllic life in New England, Grant said he had
grown a bit tired of “East Coast culture” finding it a
little too pretentious for his tastes. When the time came to go
off to college he zeroed in on a school on the other side of the
continent. “I really wanted a change
and I had never been out west so it had this romantic appeal to
me. Prescott was also an experimental college that offered a
brand new concept that allowed students to design their own courses
and majors. It was something that really clicked with me – a
chance to get out in the great wide open and explore the
world in this unstructured academic environment,” Grant said.
| “Prescott
also attracted a lot of rebellious, independent thinkers
and it was a very exciting mix. We all knew we were part
of something new and I just found it
to be exhilarating,” Grant added. |
|
That
freedom to be as creative as he wanted to be would serve
Grant well when he graduated and went out on his own.
With
his degree in hand, Grant
headed backed to Rhode Island and opened his own
business – in fact two of them. One was a boat
building company called Breton that manufactured
16-foot daysailers. The other was a restaurant in
historic Newport, a joint venture with some
friends. Breton leased and managed fleets of sailboats
for local resorts that would in turn make them available
for guests to rent. |
Classrooms
at Prescott College |
|
While in
that business an interesting twist of fate would send Grant off
in an entirely new direction. In 1977 the America’s Cup
yacht race would be coming to Newport and Grant knew the whole
world would be watching – especially since the Cup would
be defended by the Mouth of the South, media mogul Ted Turner
(who would wind up winning as the skipper of Courageous).
Grant got the idea to use the sails on his fleet of boats as
huge billboards that would be impossible to miss when the TV
cameras from around the world were trained on the local waters
where the famous racing series would be staged.
“The
concept was something that no one else had tried at the time,”
Grant said. “I pitched the idea and was able land King
William Scotch as our sponsor." Grant hired a handful
of craftsmen to hand sew the giant highly detailed logos on the
sails of more than a dozen boats.” The whole idea was kept as
quiet as possible because Grant knew if the stodgy America’s
Cup committee got wind of it, they would be horrified and do
anything they could to keep Grant’s boats out of camera range.
Rob
Grant's King William Scotch flotilla at the 1977 America's Cup -
Newport, RI
“The
day of the race we towed the boats out to the entrance of
Newport Harbor. Moments later hundreds of press boats from
around the world headed our way and up went our King William
Scotch sails! It was a gorgeous day and the sails were just
beautiful as we cruised in formation right through the press
fleet. You could literally hear the motor drives on their
cameras whirring away because they had never seen anything like
this at the America’s Cup before,” Grant recalled fondly.
“Instantaneously we wound up in about 150 publications
worldwide including Newsweek who ran a big story on this.”
The
scotch company was understandably delighted with the worldwide
exposure they got for around $40,000 and that successful
gambit opened the door for Grant to start an entirely new
company called Creative Sail. “You never know where
something is going to lead,” Grant said. “You start with one
idea and it morphs very quickly into another. The whole point of
this is that you have to remain very opportunistic and very
unstructured in your thinking. I think that is the hallmark of
anyone who is successful - they are very good at turning on a
dime when necessary and that is what I have tried to do throughout my
career.”
|
In
fact soon after this success with sailboat advertising,
Grant decided to turn on a dime again and head for New
York City to see if he could parlay his marketing skills
into a career on Madison Avenue. He set up shop in what
he called an incredibly seedy hotel on the West Side
where he hooked up with aspiring art directors that
helped him produce a portfolio of storyboards to take
around to the different agencies to see if one would
like what they saw and give him a chance.
“It
was a very grueling process but finally someone at Grey
Advertising sent my portfolio up to their new
Creative Director |
|
| Billy
Giles (a major figure on Madison Avenue at the time)
who thought Grant had real potential. He called Rob into
his office and after a short interview asked him is he
could start the next day. “I was stunned. I had been
looking for so long I didn’t really expect to hear
anyone say yes,” Grant said. But Giles did and Rob’s
foot was in the door. |
Even
though he started out with a desk in the hallway with the
secretaries, Grant was ecstatic just to be there, especially
since Grey was one of the world’s top ad agencies. His first
big break came when he was on one of several creative teams
that were given an assignment to come up with a slogan for the
Playtex company describing a new bra that broke new ground
in terms of comfort for the women who wore them.
Grant,
intent on making a name for himself, stayed up until the wee
hours almost every night trying to come up with something. Grey
told the writers to concentrate on the word “fit” (just as
domainers would concentrate on keywords when they came on the
scene some 15 years after this). Among the words and
phrases Grant scribbled was TGIF but his translation for
the famous acronym was “Thank Goodness it Fits”. “I
looked at it and said That’s It! I knew it was going to
be huge,” Grant said. When he showed it to the Creative
Director the next morning a big smile crossed his bosses’
face. Playtex loved it too and Grant’s idea appeared in all of
their ads. The campaign was very successful and Grant was soon
ushered into his own office as a reward.
|
Rob
& Pat Grant
New York City - June 2007 |
He was
soon working on other major accounts including
Proctor & Gamble, Northwest Orient
and STP (which resulted in Grant working directly
with legendary NASCAR driver Richard Petty
who was the company’s spokesman). Grant went on to win
several major advertising awards including The
President's Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement
in 1982 for the Northwest Airlines campaign and a
variety of awards for television including one for an Izod
Lacoste campaign.
In addition to his
status as a highly respected copywriter, Grey brought
Grant something even better. He met a bright young
account executive there named Pat and they soon
fell in love and were married. However Grant found there
was also a downside to his occupation. Advertisers
doled out multi-million dollar accounts
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based on how
well they liked the ideas coming out of the different
agencies. Landing one big account could make or break a
company. “It was a very intense period. I
literally worked day and night,” Grant recalled. |
After
six years in a very high pressure job burn out started to
set in just as Rob and Pat had their first child, Elizabeth
(Caroline and Charlie followed over the next few
years to round out the family). With a family to think about
now, they decided to pull up stakes and make a radical change in
their lifestyle by moving upstate to the mountains. All of their
friends thought they were crazy and warned them that if they
walked away from their jobs they would never be able to come
back. Grant said, “even so I looked at my life and thought if
I stayed in Manhattan and raised a family it would be enormously
expensive and we would have to live in an apartment out in the
suburbs. It just turned my stomach to think that I could spend
the rest of my life going back and forth to the city on a
commuter train.”
“I
also thought here I am, expending all of this creative energy to
make money for other companies – why can’t I do this for
myself? I had this tremendous urge to channel all of this energy
into something that would be mine. So we made the move and
headed for the Adirondacks. We rented a house up there but
didn’t have a clue what we were going to do! It was a very
scary time,” Grant said.
| He
finally decided to start an Adirondack furniture company
in Saranac Lake (Adirondack furniture is a
popular style of casual outdoor camp furniture that
originated in that region). “The idea was to take
something that had always been a cottage industry and
market it on a national scale,” Grant said. The
furniture company started hiring local craftsman and
their high quality hand made pieces were soon in high
demand. In fact a big Christmas order from Saks Fifth
Avenue resulted in Grant personally filling up a U-Haul
trailer to take a load of his furniture back to
New York City where the pieces were displayed in Saks’
windows. |
Adirondack
chairs |
Grant
targeted the design trade and gained strong acceptance in the
high end market. The problem was he couldn’t find enough
qualified reliable craftsman to produce enough pieces to meet
the demand. If it was deer season most of his workers simply
disappeared! Eventually he came to grips with the fact that this
was a cottage industry that wasn’t scaleable and decided it
was once again time to try something new.
Grant
had actually already taken the first steps on another path while
the furniture company was still going. “I was beginning to buy
real estate because I felt there was a great opportunity in
these mountain resorts where I thought property was grossly
undervalued. I began to buy old commercial buildings in Saranac
Lake and residential property in Lake Placid. I remember
buying an old 3-story commercial building for just $20,000! I
got seriously involved in rehabbing these buildings and then
turning around and selling them.”
“We
happened to get lucky because we hit that market just as the
Adirondacks were starting to be rediscovered,” Grant said.
“People were starting to come up from New York, New Jersey and
Boston and I found I was able to sell the residential properties
for two and three times what I paid for them.
That kind of ushered in my real estate era.”
|
Camp
Cobblestone
One of the multi-million dollar waterfront
camps
Grant & Associates has listed over the years. |
Real
estate was an area is which Grant really thrived.
“Around 1991 I decided to start a brokerage firm,”
he said. “but in 1991 we wound up entering one of the
worst recessions in history, one that went on for two or
three years. I remember thinking my timing could not have
been worse.” Still Grant managed to hang on and
slowly built a reputation during those lean years,
especially when he won listings for local waterfront
camps (properties that could sell for $1-$5 million).
His marketing background came in handy because it
allowed him to develop marketing plans for property
owners that other brokers couldn’t do as well. That
was the birth of today’s powerful Rob
Grant & Associate Real Estate firm. |
As the
economy started growing again, Grant’s business boomed. At
this same time, in 1995-96, Grant became aware of the Internet
and domains. “That was a remarkable awakening for me because I
had the Madison Avenue marketing background and I had the real
estate background and suddenly these two powerful thing
merged.
I looked at a domain and thought My God, not only is this a
brand as the Internet develops, but it is also has all of the
properties of real estate,” Grant said.
|
Coming
Up on Page 2
-
How
Grant Assembled His Multi-Million Dollar Portfolio
-
Through
All of the Ups and Downs Why He Never Gave Up
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Why
Grant Has Given Away Hundreds of Thousands of
Dollars Worth of Domains
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Where
He Thinks the Domain Business is Headed Now
Continue
to Page 2
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