Taking the team approach to growth

Paying little heed to hierarchy is working well for Aloysius Butler & Clark

For one Delaware marketing communications firm, success is as simple as AB&C.

That’s AB&C, as in Aloysius Butler & Clark.

Founded in 1971, the national business-to-business and consumer marketing agency with offices statewide snagged the top award of The News Journal’s annual Best in the Business competition for small companies with 100 or fewer workers.

“We’re thrilled,” said Donna-Marie King, AB&C’s director of strategic communications and employee of nine years.

But it’s not the only recent award for the Wilmington-based company on-the-grow.

Chief Executive Officer and President John Hawkins was honored in the fall by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

The firm also won honors for online marketing excellence in the 10th Annual Webby Award Competition earlier this year. The International Academy of the Visual Arts picked AB&C from among more than 2,300 entries worldwide as a Silver Winner in the marketing category for its Web site, www.a-b-c.com.

Central to AB&C’s success, its site says, is “a fresh perspective in marketing communications”—with whatever combinations clients need in market research, strategic planning, branding, creative services, media planning, public relations and new media presence.

Working with national, regional and local accounts in industries such as health care, tourism, finance, technology and the life sciences, AB&C’s 50-plus-member team also finds time to help groups that benefit others.

Each year, AB&C works with several nonprofit organizations to provide them a range of public relations and design services pro bono, company leaders say.

Several staff members participate on the organizations’ boards of directors. And as often as possible, AB&C employees also participate in those nonprofit groups’ fundraising efforts.

For example, King said, the firm’s team on the Autism Speaks Walk in April included nearly half the staff—and most who couldn’t participate supported the cause as donors.

Teamwork, she said, is at the heart of what makes AB&C distinctive. The company’s leadership operates with little hierarchy or pretense, its leaders say, with owners and employees working together to provide individualized client services. Hawkins is active in overall account service, development of new business and agency management.

The company’s bottom line is growing as well. AB&C reported annual capitalized billings of $35.47 million in the last fiscal year. That’s up from 2005’s $25.4 million, noted in News Journal files.

Also by the numbers, AB&C is a place where workers stay:

  • Just one in five has been there less than two years, and more than one of every three has been there a decade or more.
  • Last year only one worker left. “She got a job with one of our clients in New York,” King said. “Now she’s a client.”


Hawkins started the firm with his father, E.B. Hawkins, and Dan Mealey. They used their middle names for AB&C to avoid being recognized if the firm failed. Hawkins has been president since 1980.

Before AB&C, Hawkins—a University of Delaware graduate in business administration—was a member of the management training program and a financial adviser with Wilmington Savings Fund Society. Earlier, he was WILM News Radio’s general sales manager.

While tough economic times have pinched many marketing firms, AB&C has a long, strong growth pattern, said King, who attributes its success to its leadership and team approach.

In 1999, having outgrown its first rental space, AB&C bought a unique headquarters—a turn-of-the-20th-century, three-story former funeral home at 819 Washington St. in Wilmington, renovated by EDiS Co. More growth led to renovation of the vacant top floor two years ago.

"It’s a great place to work,” King said. Much of the building’s historic charm was kept, the windows open and there’s free parking. “We love it,” she said.

This year, more growth led the firm which—has had a second office in Rehoboth Beach for some time—to expand with the opening of a third Delaware site, at 116 W. Water St. in Dover.