Ad agency's agent of change gets the boot
Outsider who came to shake up Davis Advertising gets warm
welcome, cold shoulder, all within 60 days
The man Andy Davis' advertising agency hired as vice president of client services little more than two months ago didn't have to get fired.
"If he was doing the job I wanted him to do, he wouldn't have been fired," Davis said. "We hired him based on keeping him here a long time."
Instead, Bruce R. Mendelsohn, who lives in Auburn and searched nine months for a job in Worcester before landing the Davis gig, is looking for work.
He chalked up his dismissal to "a clash of expectations," but also said small-mindedness and insularity hurts Worcester business, and keeps Davis, a successful and growing agency that just hired eight new employees, from becoming a real powerhouse.
The close-knit nature of Worcester's business community keeps people from stepping on toes, from branching out, from taking risks, Mendelsohn said. He said Worcester's business leaders and workers have known each other since childhood and work very hard to keep each other from failure, deserved or not. But that same mentality also breeds restraint.
Bruce Mendelsohn wanted to shake up Davis Advertising.A bad fit
Mendelsohn has an aggressive personality. He's a military man. Before coming to the Worcester area, he was director of communications for the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund in Washington, D.C. He didn't come to Davis to make friends, and he didn't.
"Maybe I did forge ahead without a clear understanding of my role," Mendelsohn said. "Maybe I did step on some toes."
Maybe that's an understatement.
Within the two months of employment Mendelsohn enjoyed at Davis, he interviewed every employee and fired two. He wrote a new employee handbook, and 17 new policies and procedures "to supplement" the employee handbook. He developed a new employee evaluation system and an employee discipline policy. He committed company job descriptions to writing and he helped put together a bonus program for account services staff.
And those are just the employee-related changes Mendelsohn made or proposed.
Davis is an old firm as far as advertising agencies go, and some of its employees have been there for 30 years or more, according to Davis. So it's easy to see how Mendelsohn, his corporate style efficiency bent and military stress on accountability might rub those comfortable, informal employees the wrong way.
Davis said Mendelsohn didn't understand small business and did not have an ad agency background.
"We made a mistake," hiring him, he said.
Once his interviews with Davis employees began, they realized Mendelsohn intended to shake things up, he said.
"I wanted to improve efficiency and employee development, all the things that a larger agency has to do, but there was a lot of push-back from employees," Mendelsohn said. "They are very successful with their model," he said of Davis. "I thought they could be more successful."
But "I guess I took people out of their comfort level," Mendelsohn said. "They said, 'We don't like what this guy is doing,'" he said. And they weren't shy about bringing those complaints to Davis and agency executive vice president Alan Berman.
Lori Schafer, the agency's public relations director, said neither Mendelsohn nor the agency knew what to expect from the other.
"It wasn't the right fit," Schafer said. "Sometimes things are entered into without both sides understanding what they're committing to."
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