There is a particular kind of optimism involved in buying an old building. In 2010, Schafer Condon Carter bought the Holden Block, a four-story survivor erected just after the Great Chicago Fire. It was 138 years old, handsome in a bruised sort of way, and required an extensive restoration. SCC planned to turn its 34,500 square feet into a headquarters.
This is a strange move for an advertising agency. Agencies rent fashionable floors, hang up a neon aphorism and remain ready to move when the lease, client list or fashion changes. SCC bought stone, timber and four old vaults. The gesture said permanence. The business it housed would survive by doing the opposite: changing repeatedly, sometimes uncomfortably, while remaining independent.
Founded in 1989 by Tim Condon and Mark Schafer in Condon’s River North apartment, SCC grew from a boutique into an integrated shop. Gail Carter helped turn it from a creative outfit into a strategy-led full-service agency. The company added public relations and digital capability, acquired Romani Brothers in 2008, hired former Sears and Potbelly chief marketer David Selby in 2009, opened an à-la-carte content studio in 2017 and invested in marketing technology. By 2018, it reported 28 consecutive years of revenue growth.
The building was the easy restoration. The harder one was the agency’s succession.A 37-year independent confronts the founder problem
The intern in the room
Ben Behrman arrived in 2009, during the financial crisis, as an intern. He reportedly told the founders that he wanted to run an agency one day. This was either charmingly direct or the sort of statement that colleagues remember mainly to tease you later. But Behrman stayed. He moved through client leadership, business development, operations and agency economics. He managed an enterprise digital partnership with Adobe. Seventeen years after joining, he is president and CEO.
The line was not straight. SCC tried an external CEO. The experiment did not work, according to a 2026 account in The Drum. Then Covid arrived and made the agency’s next chapter less theoretical. The founders could have recruited another outsider. Instead, they chose the person who knew where the pipes rattled.
That decision changed more than the name on the office door. Tim Condon moved to executive chairman. Behrman assembled a younger operating group: Craig Miller in creative, Amy Cesta in client leadership, Joe Raser in strategy, with new responsibility across media and growth. By the end of 2025, SCC said it had won close to a dozen assignments in a year - roughly one a month - and adopted a crisp promise: “Create. Impact.”
The product is the reframe
“Full service” is among advertising’s least useful phrases. It can mean one team that removes handoffs. It can also mean a long menu with three competent items. SCC’s current offer covers strategy, creative, design, production, public relations and paid media. Its better explanation is visible in the work: find the habit that makes a category boring, then replace the habit with a human problem.
For GUM, the agency moved the story away from white teeth and toward the connection between oral and overall wellness. SCC handled brand strategy, creative, production, design, paid media and influencer work. The company’s case study reports an 8% lift in purchase intent and 13% in brand awareness.
For UChicago Medicine, it rejected the soothing conventions of hospital advertising. “Illness doesn’t fight fair. Why should we?” framed medicine as an opponent with resolve, not a building with nice lighting. The case study reports a 21% increase in consideration and a 12% lift in perception.
The LiftMaster assignment is the neatest demonstration. A smart garage hub is hardware. In-garage delivery is relief from rain and porch thieves. A simple app demonstration, set to “Jingle Bells,” helped Chamberlain Group sell nearly twice its Smart Garage Hub goal and exceed an app-connection target by 62%. The idea did not need a theory of culture. It needed a package sitting safely inside.
Independence has a bill
The familiar romance of the independent agency is creative freedom. The less romantic part is paying for enough capability to compete. SCC built or bought its way into PR, digital, media, design, content production and technology. MAKE247 began with seven people, 4K equipment and Portillo’s as its first standalone client. The studio was designed for brands that needed a steady flow of social assets but did not necessarily need an agency-of-record relationship.
SCC also experimented beyond fees. It led an investor group into Uncle Dougie’s sauces in 2012, then applied its own marketing and distribution advice with money at risk. By 2015, the agency reported sales up 300%. It helped launch the analytics startup Social Market Analytics and operated an investment portfolio called SCCventures. These were not side hobbies. They trained agency people to encounter the client’s least poetic question: will anybody buy it?
The model has limits. Integration pays when a client has one consequential business problem and allows disciplines to work from the same diagnosis. It is less useful when procurement slices every channel into a separate contest, when a global marketer needs hundreds of local offices, or when a client merely wants cheap production volume. Challenger thinking also fails when “different” is chosen before “relevant.” A zag is not a strategy if customers do not care.
What to borrow on Monday
SCC’s method can be copied without hiring SCC. Begin with a category sentence so ordinary that nobody in the meeting notices it. Banks are serious. Hospitals reassure. Oral care is cosmetic. Garage openers open garages. Then ask which real customer anxiety the sentence ignores. Make the creative move there, not in the color palette.
There is one more lesson in the succession. Founders often search for a successor who can preserve their creation, which is another way of searching for a museum director. SCC chose someone formed by the institution but young enough to revise it. Behrman inherited relationships, not instructions. The new group kept the independence and changed the language, leadership and market emphasis.
An old agency does not stay young by pretending it has no history. It stays young by deciding which parts of the history are tools.SCC kept the ownership and rewrote the pitch
Today the client list runs from Tootsie Roll and Giordano’s to Old National Bank, GUM and UChicago Medicine, with consumer and B2B work sharing the same premise: rational categories still sell to emotional humans. Navy Pier chose SCC as its creative and media partner in 2026. The agency’s Giordano’s work later earned a Television Academy Foundation nomination. Neither proves that every zag works. They suggest the old building still contains a functioning workshop.