Roger Neathawk and the Art of Leaving Room

A guest musician pressed a key on the old organ at Richmond’s Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. The key stayed down. Roger Neathawk remembered the incident years later, when the cathedral was replacing the instrument. “And the guest artist pushed a key down and the key stuck,” he recalled. An organ has many ways to command a room. This was a rather inconvenient one.

The story is a useful entrance to Neathawk’s life after advertising. Here is a retired agency executive talking about an instrument that ought to work when someone sits down to play it. There are donors, craftspeople, administrators and musicians around the project. The person at the keyboard gets the audience’s attention. A considerable number of people have made that moment possible.

That distribution of attention runs through his career. Neathawk helped establish a Richmond agency in 1984, led it for nearly three decades and eventually stepped back. He taught students, served on boards and shared a professional honor with a co-founder. His name has occupied a company sign. It has also occupied the much smaller type of a donor list.

A surname is a heavy piece of signage

The business began as Market Strategies Inc., founded by Neathawk, Susan Dubuque and Chuck Miller. In 2000, it became Neathawk Dubuque. Four years later, a merger with the Roanoke-based Packett Group produced Neathawk Dubuque & Packett. The agency acquired Chattanooga’s ddN in 2007. A founding partnership had become a business with more places, more colleagues and another surname to accommodate.

A sequence of company names looks tidy in a timeline. Living through it is another matter. Every addition brings the practical business of working together: people who have developed their own habits, clients expecting continuity and decisions about who will do what. The record establishes the transactions. The names themselves let us see a company repeatedly making its circle larger.

Eventually, the initials NDP did some merciful work for the signwriter. A surname can be a badge of responsibility, but three of them ask a fair amount of passing traffic. The shorter name also had room to belong to employees who were neither Neathawks nor Dubuques nor Packetts. A business founded by particular people was being carried by many others.

The committee with four-legged constituents

At the agency, collaboration could have a very literal presence under the desk. Employees brought dogs to work. In 2012, Neathawk described how a task force developed the office’s pet policy. Its members included people who brought dogs and people who did not. The composition mattered: everyone shared the office, so everyone needed a place in the discussion.

Neathawk did not personally bring a pet to work. That makes his participation more interesting. The policy was not simply an owner’s accommodation for his own dog, extended as a courtesy to the staff. It dealt with a preference held by some employees and its consequences for the rest. A pleasant idea needed an arrangement people could live with.

Advertising offices are easy to describe through their eccentricities. The dog makes the photograph; the policy seldom does. Yet the quieter detail tells us more about how an office functions. Someone had to ask whose experience counted. Someone had to put people with different preferences in the same conversation. Even a creative workplace occasionally needs a committee, preferably one that can distinguish enthusiasm from permission.

An award with room around it

On April 1, 2016, the Richmond advertising community honored Neathawk and Dubuque together with the Mike Hughes Ad Persons of the Year award. The occasion recognized their professional and community contributions, including the agency’s pro bono work for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Japanese tattoo exhibition. The recognition belonged to two people; Neathawk directed attention toward a larger group.

“You don’t stay in business for 32 years and get an award like this by yourself.”

Roger Neathawk, 2016

He included the agency’s employees, clients and vendors in his acknowledgment. Vendors are an especially practical addition to an acceptance speech. They are part of the work, even when they are outside the organization chart. An agency depends on relationships that extend beyond the names at the top.

The chair changes hands

Two years before that award, Neathawk had already changed his relationship to the agency. In 2014, Danny Fell, president since 2012, took on the CEO role. The transition was part of a long-term succession plan. Neathawk moved out of day-to-day management and became non-executive chairman of an expanded board.

The arrangement had specifics. Fell and controller Michelle Ward joined the board alongside founding partners Neathawk, Dubuque and Miller. Neathawk would maintain an office in Richmond, represent the firm in the community and continue teaching. There was a new chief executive, a wider board and a defined role for the departing chief. The change was more substantial than replacing the title on a business card.

Succession is easy to praise in the abstract. Its practical test is whether someone else can make decisions. A founder remains an unusually influential presence, even after changing seats. The distinction between management and board leadership gives that presence a different place to operate. In this case, the public outline of the handover makes the division visible: daily leadership passed to Fell, while Neathawk retained governance and community responsibilities.

The assignment had another audience

Teaching supplied another place for his experience to go. At Virginia Commonwealth University, Neathawk required groups of marketing students to develop plans for Richmond-area nonprofit organizations. He also brought in guest lecturers with expertise in particular aspects of marketing. A working professional could give the course a view beyond a single instructor’s experience.

The assignment’s design deserves attention. A student team had to produce recommendations addressed to an organization outside the university. There was a grade at stake, but there was also another reader, with a job to do and resources to consider. A plan could be beautifully organized and still ask too much of the people expected to use it.

That is a demanding kind of education. It asks students to translate an idea into something someone else can act on. Listening becomes part of the assignment. So does restraint. The most elaborate recommendation is not automatically the most useful. By putting nonprofit projects into the course, Neathawk gave students a setting in which professional judgment had to meet the circumstances of an actual organization.

Growth belongs to the people doing the work

The agency kept changing after his move out of daily management. In 2017, NDP combined with Free Agents Marketing. Fell was the president and CEO announcing the combination. Free Agents principal Ken Wayland joined as an executive vice president, bringing another leadership voice into the business.

The combination added work and experience across financial services, hospitality, retail and real estate development. Its public announcement described a larger team and a broader set of capabilities. Those are company milestones in a founder’s story, but the distinction in responsibility matters. By this point, other executives were making the case for the business’s future.

There is a temptation in profiles to give a founder permanent authorship of everything the company subsequently does. It makes a tidy narrative and a poor account of shared work. Neathawk’s role in establishing the agency is clear. So are the later leaders’ roles in changing it. A career becomes more interesting when the people who enter along the way retain their own names, jobs and decisions.

The names return in smaller type

In Richmond’s musical life, his involvement appears in the records of the Symphony as well as the cathedral. Symphony board minutes list him among those attending an April 2020 meeting. A later Symphony publication thanked Neathawk and Miller among supporters who increased their financial contributions. Meetings and gifts occupy different parts of an institution’s life. Both help explain how someone participates beyond attending a performance.

The cathedral organ donor list offers a more personal arrangement of familiar names. Neathawk and Miller dedicated a pipe in honor of Dubuque. They also appear with dedications honoring the foundation’s board and the organ campaign’s leadership. People who had founded a business together appear again around a project with a different purpose.

A donor list is modest reading until you notice those connections. It records gratitude in a form that can survive the evening when someone said thank you. Here, the old professional circle surfaces inside a musical instrument. The agency’s founders have become part of another institution’s supporting cast, with their acknowledgments attached to specific pieces of the work.

A company moves on; a city remains

Neathawk retired in 2021. In October 2023, NDP became Two Tango Collaborative under CEO Amy Baril and executive creative director Erin Sarro. The new name emphasized human-to-human collaboration. It belonged to the agency’s next chapter, after changes in ownership and leadership. His surname had left the brand; the business he helped establish continued.

The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart Foundation now lists him as chair. Its purpose is to preserve a Richmond landmark, which places attention on what must be maintained over time. The organ replacement made that concern audible. A concert depends on the instrument’s readiness long before the guest artist presses the first key.

There is a pleasing change of scale here, from the quick attention an advertisement seeks to the patient attention a building requires. Both involve other people’s work. Neathawk’s public story keeps bringing those people into view: partners, staff, successors, students, musicians and fellow board members. At the cathedral, the hope is wonderfully concrete. The next musician should be able to press a key, lift a finger and trust the instrument to do its part.