- John Butler

This year, Butler Shine Stern & Partners turned 15. I think the exact day was June 12, but to be honest I can't remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I do remember that Mike Shine and I met Greg Stern at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, took him on a fishing trip in the Bay, caught a barracuda or two, and convinced him to leave with us after we showed him a bank account overflowing with freelance money. Beyond that, we didn't have any accounts to speak of, nor, come to think of it, did we have many client contacts.

We were blissfully naive. If we had known how hard the next 15 years would be, we'd probably have stayed at Goodby until they fired us. Up to that point in our careers it was pretty much creative nirvana for us. Yet for some reason, Shine and I had always wanted to work for ourselves. We didn't really know what that meant beyond being masters of our destinies, wanting to create our own unique culture and, along the way, making advertising a little less awful.

We hit the ground running with some nice press. We were the first creative team to leave Goodby and form a company, and both Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby remarked that they were surprised it took 10 years for something like that to happen at their place. But, they had left Riney and were generally supportive of the effort, congratulated us, and then told Mike and me to pack up and get out of there by 5 p.m. that evening. I also remember Silverstein telling us that no one would ever take us seriously in Sausalito.

Stern hung out for another four or five months. This was partly because he's a nice guy and wanted to make sure he didn't leave them hanging (he ran Sega), and partly because he was arguably a bit smarter than us and wasn't 100 percent convinced he wanted to throw in with two guys who used an air gun to shoot pigeons and rats that crept into the office.

The other thing that unites us is we've never been super-interested in making traditional advertising. We always wanted to create stuff that went beyond the ad because, let's face it, most ads are transient and disposable, and a heck of a lot of them are meaningless pap. (Full disclosure: In these 15 years together, we've contributed to that more than once.)

We wanted to make stuff that could seep inside the fabric of culture and possibly change the way people felt about brands -- and how they felt about what we did for a living. I'm not trying to sound self-important here, but in the end, if you don't want to try to do something that matters, what's the point in doing it?

We hit a bit of a speed bump in 2000, along with the rest of the industry. But we survived it because we were smart about our finances and didn't front any media money to the fledging dot-coms knocking on everyone's door with VC money. Taking a cue from Jay Chiat, we reinvented the place and bought an interactive company. I think the one enduring reason for our success is that we aren't afraid to reinvent. We don't get complacent. It probably comes out of the same impetus for starting this company in the first place: We get bored really easily.

We finally scored with Converse Brand Democracy and, from there, after almost eight years fighting the good fight, we finally felt we were on our way. Today, we number more than 120 people in the same Sausalito location we started in and have a client list we're quite proud of. This is still the hardest thing we've ever done, but our hard work seems to have paid off. None of us are entirely sure what the future has in store for us, but there's one thing I do know: If it ever stops working, we'll just change it all over again.

John Butler is co-founder and creative director of Butler Shine Stern & Partners in Sausalito, Calif.