Barbara Bates had spent a quarter of a century being pleased that nobody owned her agency. Then, in September 2016, she sold it. The explanation she published had a title involving flying pigs. For someone whose profession was choosing words on other people’s behalf, this was a cheerful way to announce that she had changed her own mind.
Eastwick, the Silicon Valley communications business she had co-founded in 1991, was joining Hotwire. Independence had been part of its appeal, including to Bates herself. She had enjoyed saying so. Now she was explaining why a partnership could offer something worth more than the pleasure of remaining answerable only to yourself.
Her verdict was compact: “We finally met our match.” The match soon produced an unusual career turn. Bates became Hotwire’s North America CEO after the deal. In May 2017, she became global CEO. A founder who had agreed to become part of a larger organization was now helping to run the whole thing.
Eastwick’s independent run, followed by Bates’s time as Hotwire’s North America CEO before taking the global role.
The client she chose to lose
There is another decision that helps explain Bates, and it involves sending business away. In a 2014 essay, she described Eastwick resigning its largest client in the early 2000s. For a small specialist agency, this was a considerable piece of subtraction. The company survived and eventually prospered. Roughly a decade later, she was willing to make a similar decision again.
Her reasoning began with the people who did the work. A communications agency sells judgment, knowledge, writing and relationships. Lose the staff who supply those things and the business has a problem that a full client list cannot solve. Bates compressed the economics into five words: “Our people are our product.”
She turned that belief into a practical argument for development budgets, outside expertise and responsibility for retaining staff. Employees’ job descriptions should include professional development, she argued, and people who taught colleagues deserved recognition. Her version of putting employees first came with spending decisions attached. It also required a willingness to tell a paying customer that the relationship had reached its end.
“Our people are our product.”
Barbara Bates, 2014
That is a more revealing test of a founder’s priorities than the wording of a values poster. A poster can remain agreeable indefinitely. A decision about the largest client has to make its way into the accounts.
Before she represented the story, she reported it
Bates began as an on-air journalist. The career offered a familiar bargain: progress could mean moving to another market for the next reporting job. After marrying, she decided that repeatedly relocating her husband around the country was an arrangement she wanted to change. Writing and communication offered a route into marketing in Silicon Valley.
Her subsequent work included the Benjamin Group. She later joined two friends to establish Eastwick. It was a move from reporting on events to helping organizations explain themselves, with a reporter’s attention to what makes an account worth hearing.
That attention remained visible in her advice to communicators. She encouraged them to think in pictures, find a narrative with movement and divide a story into chapters rather than deliver everything at once. The corporate presentation, in this view, had something to learn from stories people voluntarily finished.
Her teaching for entrepreneurs extended to the practical mechanics of dealing with the press: timing, a concise story, an accessible digital press kit and an active online presence. She treated the relationship with journalists as something to cultivate over time. That is a useful detail in a career built around publicity. The announcement may occupy a day; the preparation and relationships have to exist before it arrives. A founder learning those mechanics is also learning to consider the person receiving the pitch. How much context do they need? What makes the news timely? Can they understand the point without another meeting?
Her examples included the underdog, the comeback and the unforeseen consequence. Her own career would eventually supply the last of those. First, however, there were years of building an agency whose offering had to keep up with its customers.
Five logos, one awkward question
By 2013, Eastwick was expanding its content marketing work. It brought in veteran journalist Mark Veverka to lead that group. Bates’s explanation connected the move to a longstanding task: getting a suitable story to the people who would care about it. The ways of doing that were multiplying.
In September 2014, the agency announced additions across digital, social, editorial, research and analytics services. The vocabulary of the business was changing because the work was changing. Communications now involved more than securing coverage and waiting for the resulting article to do the travelling.
Eastwick’s 2015 rebrand made that evolution visible. Before changing its appearance, the agency asked clients, prospects and chief marketing officers what they wanted from a communications partner. The exercise was an application of its own trade to itself, which is often less comfortable than applying it to somebody else.
Bates said the company’s existing identity no longer reflected the integrated business it had become. The new look included five logo variations. One can imagine the stationery conversation. Her explanation was that clients and their stories differed, so a single rigid expression did not suit the agency’s approach.
She described Eastwick as “quirky but pragmatic.” There was pragmatism in her rebranding advice, too: do the research before choosing the appearance, involve stakeholders without collecting endless vetoes, and allow enough time for the work. A new website and materials could require six months or more. Even a company paid to tell stories needed to resist giving itself an implausibly tidy one.
Independence meets a map
The pressure behind the sale was geographical. Technology clients wanted help beyond the United States, and Eastwick had already worked with European partners to provide it. Hotwire was a familiar collaborator. The two businesses had been working together for more than a decade when they announced the acquisition.
The combination gave the US operation 70 employees: 42 in San Francisco and 28 in New York. Bates and Eastwick president Heather Kernahan stayed in leadership roles. The announcement also retained the leadership teams from both agencies. This was an expansion built around people who already knew the work and, in many cases, one another.
For Bates, the choice involved whether Eastwick’s US connections and Hotwire’s international presence could serve clients better together. In her announcement essay, she emphasized common attitudes toward employees, culture, experimentation and ambition. She also acknowledged the years she had spent celebrating independence. The flying pigs were her way of admitting that readers had reason to be surprised.
The transaction’s public terms began with US$5 million in cash, with additional payments dependent on performance over four years. That was an initial company purchase payment. The more interesting personal consequence arrived eight months later, when Bates’s responsibilities expanded from North America to the global agency.
- 1991Co-founds Eastwick in Silicon Valley.
- 2016Eastwick joins Hotwire; Bates leads North America.
- 2017Becomes Hotwire’s global CEO.
- 2021Moves into an advisory role at Enero Group.
Being seen changes the job
Bates’s thinking about leadership also changed in a less transactional setting. In 2015, she wrote about attending a Watermark awards ceremony and noticing young women absorbing the advice onstage. The scene made her think about her daughters, who were then working in San Francisco.
Eastwick had already supported organizations promoting women in technology. Yet Bates admitted she had personally regarded herself principally as a busy CEO, without giving much attention to the additional significance of being a woman in that role. The audience at Watermark made the value of a visible example harder to overlook.
Her essay described work with Women’s Startup Lab, the Anita Borg Institute and Women 2.0. She connected diversity to the perspectives and competitive abilities of an organization. This was also a personal adjustment: someone accustomed to providing visibility for clients was reconsidering the usefulness of her own.
There is a modesty in admitting that the lesson arrived after years of running a business. Leadership profiles tend to polish away such revisions. Bates left hers in the account. A person can spend decades explaining other people’s importance and still discover a new reason to show up herself.
A bigger organization, the same question about people
At Hotwire, Bates’s remit eventually covered roughly 290 staff across 12 offices in nine countries by 2020. The agency’s services expanded across digital and social work, content, visual storytelling, web services and analytics. Its working practices included Thoughtful Working, which gave employees autonomy and accountability over where they worked productively.
That year, she received an Individual Achievement SABRE Award. The recognition covered a career stretching from television journalism through founding an agency to leading an international business. Her response credited colleagues, mentors and persistence alongside good fortune.
There were other ways she spent time with people: volunteering with the YMCA and Habitat for Humanity, helping build houses in Mexico with Amore Ministries, and serving as a Girl Scout troop leader. These activities sit comfortably beside her professional insistence that skills become more useful when shared.
In 2021, Heather Kernahan succeeded her as Hotwire’s global CEO, effective July 1. Bates moved into a newly created senior advisory role at parent company Enero Group, supporting mergers and acquisitions in North America. The founder who had once evaluated whether to sell her own agency was moving into work that involved considering other combinations.
It is a fitting last turn in this chapter. Bates had defended independence, invested in employees and then accepted a larger structure when she thought it would serve the business. The decisions make a coherent account precisely because she allowed herself to revise the answer. Even a communications founder sometimes needs a new headline.