Court Crandall, founder of Ground Zero, believes in looking for “players with character.” He describes two such “players” in a touching piece published in Adweek.
The longer you do this job, the more you find that doing good work is the price of entry and it’s all the other stuff that separates the folks you really like from the ones you can’t live without.
In 15 years of owning Ground Zero, there haven’t been many folks who regularly beat me to the office in the morning. Noah Clark (who is moving to Boulder to work for Crispin) was one of them. It should also be noted that he was often the last to leave at night, if he left. I don’t say this to glamorize long hours or a sweatshop mentality, but to point out that he typically wasn’t burning the midnight oil or the pre-dawn oil to better his portfolio, but to make a presentation look a little better, work on the agency new business materials or polish an ad that was still a little too rough around the edges for his liking. This kind of dedication earned him the moniker “The Cleaner” from Laura Eastman, our head of account services. Like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, Noah was the guy who fixed things, no matter how screwed up they might have been when someone dumped them in his lap. When another art director left on vacation, Noah picked up the slack. When another team dropped the meat in the dirt, he picked up the pieces.
Selflessness is not exactly a common trait in this business. Hence, there’s an opportunity to stand out by being selfless.
