There is a sentence no founder is especially eager to write into a brief: make me unnecessary. Bill Donovan had spent nearly 40 years building an advertising agency with his name on the door. He knew the standard choices for an exit. Get a valuation. Find a buyer. Consider a merger. Turn a lifetime of client calls, deadlines and remembered preferences into a number somebody else might pay.
Then COVID arrived and made the number unreliable. The pandemic was the first thing to fail - not the agency, but the assumptions underneath the exit. Forecasts blurred, buyers became harder to read, and a sensible plan began to look like paperwork from a different economy.
The alternative was already inside the Lititz office. Ryan Donovan, Bill's son, had worked in the family business for years, widened his responsibilities, become chief operating officer and taken charge of the staff. His proposal did not sound like an investment banker's pitch. It was four words: “What about me?”
“What about me?”Ryan Donovan's proposal for the next generation
The profit was hiding in the plumbing
Bill changed his mind because Ryan was not proposing an inheritance in place of a plan. He was proposing himself as the next operator. The family brought in Compass Point, a family-business adviser, and turned the handoff into a 28-month project. The goals were prosaic and therefore useful: make the company scalable and profitable, build a stronger leadership team, fill gaps in middle management, establish a more disciplined operating rhythm, transfer ownership, and give the founder a real path out.
2021 to 2023
The result makes this more than a warm story about a father trusting a son. Donovan reported that net profitability tripled from 2021 to 2023 while revenue stayed flat. It also closed new business and built a strong pipeline. Treat the figure as a relative result rather than a disclosure of profit dollars: the agency says it made much more from roughly the same top line.
Reported net profitability index
Indexed to the reported 2021 level. This is a relative comparison, not a disclosure of profit dollars.
Flat revenue is usually treated as the embarrassing cousin of growth. Here it is the interesting fact. A flood of new billings did not conceal the transition. The improvement had to come from the machinery of the business - who decided, who owned the work, how goals were followed, and where the founder was no longer required to approve the next move. The company kept the surname and reduced the dependency.
A full-service agency, with groceries on its shoes
Donovan is a privately held, family-owned agency founded in 1984. It sells the familiar full-service list: marketing strategy, creative, digital and social, media planning and buying, brand activation, events, retail, performance analytics, and web development. The distinction appears in the way those pieces meet. Its portfolio is heavy with things that must survive contact with a shelf, a shopper or a rushed parent.
For Everything Legendary, a plant-based food company headed for Shark Tank, the agency had two weeks. It overhauled the e-commerce site, defined the voice and creative direction, organized photography and video, wrote product descriptions, and produced social, search, display, email and PR materials. Donovan reports more than $500,000 in sales during the first three weeks, distribution in over 1,000 stores, and a rise to the third-best-selling plant-based meat product in grocery.
For Perdue Chicken Plus, the problem was stranger and more domestic: how do you sell chicken blended with cauliflower and chickpeas to families containing people who inspect dinner for evidence of vegetables? Donovan helped name and package the product, then built the launch around the tactics picky eaters use to avoid greens. Its case study lists 7,500 retailers, 11.5 million households reached, 13,196 contest entries and 4,712 new email subscribers.
For the National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association, Donovan assembled 23 influencers and micro-influencers, combining paid and organic distribution. The program exceeded its stated reach goal by 217 percent, its impression goal by 195 percent and its engagement goal by 1,143 percent. For Stauffer's 150th anniversary, it scheduled the story for National Animal Cracker Day and earned more than 32 television segments. These are not identical assignments. The reusable idea is that the channel is chosen after the commercial problem, not before it.
The $1,000 footnote
What does Donovan cost? Agency pricing is custom, and confusing a client's ad budget with an agency fee would be neat, simple and wrong. The one useful public cost belongs to a recruitment campaign for a Midwest food manufacturer. Donovan says the campaign ran on less than $1,000 a month in ad spend and produced a 316 percent month-over-month rise in careers-page views in month one, followed by another 60 percent increase in month two.
A documented monthly media budget for one hiring campaign - not Donovan's fee, and not a universal price.
That result is copyable only in method. Define the hard-to-fill role. Choose a tight audience. Match the message and placement. Measure the conversion that matters, not merely the applause. A business with weak job economics, an unclear offer, broken application pages or a much larger labor market should not expect the same percentage from the same spend. Small budgets become sharp when the problem is narrow; they become invisible when the brief is sprawling.
What another owner can steal
The campaign lessons are useful, but Donovan's internal playbook is better. The founder did not simply select a successor and announce him. The company gave the candidate operating responsibility before the title, invited an outside adviser into a family decision, set an explicit transition period, strengthened the layer of managers below the chief executive, and tracked whether the business improved while authority moved.
Ryan had already expanded into general management and staff oversight before the ownership transfer.
The family used a 28-month process with defined goals for profit, leadership, systems and the founder's exit.
Middle-management roles expanded and organizational gaps were filled so the agency did not merely swap one bottleneck for another.
Profitability, pipeline, new wins, employee feedback and leadership stability supplied evidence that the transition was functioning.
This model requires a prepared successor, enough time to transfer tacit knowledge, and a leadership team capable of accepting real authority. Without those conditions, keeping ownership in the family can preserve the logo while weakening the company. Donovan's lesson is not “choose your child.” It is “make the choice answerable to the operation.”
Today Ryan Donovan is CEO and president. The agency still works from Lititz, still serves startups and established companies, and still makes an argument for the integrated shop: the same team can think about the package, the feed, the store, the media plan, the website and the numbers afterward. In 2026 that included helping the Lancaster Chamber build Land in Lancaster, a countywide talent-attraction brand shaped around a place the agency has occupied for four decades.
There is a pleasing advertising logic to the handoff. The best campaign eventually stops belonging to the people who made it; the audience carries the idea away. A durable company has to do something similar with its founder's judgment. It keeps the useful part - standards, memory, trust - and lets the person go. Donovan's hardest client was Donovan. The work appears to have run.