The first thing you notice upon entering the corporate headquarters of Little Rock’s Stone Ward — before, even, the walls bulging with industry awards and accolades denoting the quality of the ad firm’s work — is the Circle. Simple, modern and sleek, the icon is more than a corporate logo hatched by the mad geniuses here who create such things daily.
The Circle, in its symmetry and continuity, represents the soul of the company itself, spooled with strands of word and image worsted into brands that neatly, seamlessly articulate how consumers see their clients and often, how their clients see themselves.
At the center of the Circle, forming and shaping the core around which all of this is wound, sits co-founders Millie Ward, president, and Larry Stone, CEO, two very different people whose personal and professional arcs met and melded into one. For more than four decades, theirs has been a relationship of audacious vision, creative tension and unwavering commitment that defines true visionaries.
“We’ve been extraordinarily blessed,” Stone said. “This [story] is really not about Millie and Larry; this is really about this whole circle of people over the years who’ve made all this happen. We’re just the champion and the catalyst; that’s it. Everything can be used for good or evil; you’ve got to focus on what it is you want. What role is it that you want to play in the process, and what position do you want to take?”
For many people, defining that role in life is a process that takes years. Some never find it. For Ward and Stone, who married in 1999 after what Stone calls, “a long courtship,” their march toward each other and the field of advertising started early.
Born in St. Louis, Stone would live briefly in New Jersey where his father was stationed in the military. When his parents’ marriage ended, his mother toted him back to south Arkansas, where her family was from and where she would remarry. He spent the bulk of his upbringing rurally, practically on top of the Arkansas-Louisiana state line.
“My mother was musical. My father was curious and inventive, artistic. So, I had that genetically and environmentally,” he said. “I was one of those kids who could draw in school, who always aced the biology test when you had to draw the flower, right?”
But it wasn’t science that inspired his career choice, but rather television, and as a junior in high school he set his sights on the advertising business.
“I was inspired by television commercials, in the beauty of them and the music and acting and all that sort of thing,” he said. “I wanted to be an art director in advertising so that I could use my talents in that way. I was the first on either side of my family to go to college; didn’t know how I was going to pay for it or how I was going to do it, I just went on blind faith.”
In 1969, newly graduated from Louisiana Tech University, Stone began his career in Little Rock. After honing his chops at small local agencies, he landed his first creative director job at the tender age of 26, for what would become Watkins and Associates, in the mid-1970s.
About this time, Ward was graduating from college bent on a career in print. Born in Missouri and raised in Wynne from the age of 6, she received early encouragement from her high school English teacher, which led her to Arkansas State University.
“I declared an English major, but my first semester I took a reporting class in the college of journalism, and I loved it,” she said. “I decided to switch my major to journalism with a minor in English, and that’s what I did. First of all, if you worked on the college newspaper, you got a small stipend, so it paid some money.
“I did just about every position I could possibly do, except advertising,” she added with a laugh. “Loved that, so I thought when I got out of college, I’d be in publishing.”
Her first job after graduating ASU was as a sales assistant with Merrill Lynch, a period notable largely for bringing her to Little Rock and for hounding superiors to launch a newsletter to indulge her journalistic ambitions. They declined, but through a friend she’d land at the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, where she’d work on the magazine, Inside Arkansas.
“I got to go all over the state and interview CEOs and plant managers and the people who were doing business in Arkansas and ask them why they were successful, why they worked in Arkansas, why they had chosen our state to do business in,” she said. “It was wonderful; it was like an MBA in publishing that I could have never had otherwise.”
The duo finally entered each other’s orbit in the early 1980s at ad firm Combs Resneck, where Ward was a copywriter and Stone was creative director and partner. When the shop dissolved a couple of years later, Stone and Myron Resneck launched Stone Resneck with offices in Little Rock and Memphis, bringing with them Ward. They did so with the understanding she was on track to become a partner, which she did, forming Resneck Stone Ward. A few years after that, another split and Stone Ward was born.
The early days were typical of any fledgling enterprise, where the unknown is catalyst for hustle and the creative process was soaked in adrenaline. The duo not only recognized the disparities in their respective skill sets, they harnessed each other in ways that were most beneficial to the process.
“NASA is built on redundancy; there is no redundancy here,” Stone said. “What she’s great at, I’m not. And what I’m good at, she’s not.”
“Early on, we sort of made the natural decision that I would be the person who would manage the clients, and he would be the person who would manage the creative,” Ward said. “Even though we were both doing some of those things, we just kind of naturally went down our paths to make the business work.
“I’m better suited for client relations, because I’m the talkative one, I’m the outgoing one, I’m loud. I’m a promoter, and Larry is a thinker and imaginer, he’s what they call a persister.”
Entrepreneurs don’t prove themselves in times of largesse; they reveal their mettle during periods of trial and adversity. When the fledgling agency was six months in, its largest account took its trade elsewhere. It was at this existential juncture that the partnership would first show what it was made of.
“In those days, there were printed books, a manufacturer’s directory, of all of the businesses in Arkansas,” Ward said. “I went to school in Jonesboro, and I had a familiarity with Jonesboro from the economic development work I had done. I said, ‘We’re going to Jonesboro, and we’re going to cold-call all these businesses and see if we can’t get some work to stopgap this.’”
“I’m this quiet, reserved, shy, insecure creative guy going, ‘Oh no, I’m not doing that,’” Stone said. “She grabs me and pulls me all the way to Jonesboro, and we call on all those manufacturers, people who have the need to do catalogues or brochures on their products. Stuff we could do quickly and well and had the experience to do, and it would be high worth to them and high worth to us. In one trip, we got enough business to make it.”
In the decades to follow, Stone Ward would create memorable campaigns for a long list of clients based in Arkansas and elsewhere, including TCBY and Nickelodeon and current accounts U.S. Soccer Federation, Snap-On Tools, Baptist Health, Sissy’s Log Cabin and Sport Clips Haircuts, to name a few. Each account carries its own creation story of narrow escapes, near-misses and last-second inspiration, meshing a complicated set of gears across multiple channels to arrive at a finished product in a way that somehow looks easy.
“One of our core principles is nothing’s constant except for change. So, get used to it!” Ward said. “In the ’90s when we were doing work, television was what made things go viral. Now, we’re using a TikTok video. Things have changed.
“We’ve stayed on the edge. I remember we were one of the first agencies in Little Rock that did digital work. We had a national client, Terminix, we were doing all the national advertising for, and they came to us and said, ‘We’ve got to make some digital advertising.’ We said OK. We had held some meetings about what is the internet. We had a couple people on staff who could do it, and we did it. We did it because we had to.”
Today, Stone Ward is a $50 million-plus, full-service force in the advertising industry, with an office in Chicago as well as Little Rock. Longevity has brought accolades, including the couple being inducted into the Southwest Advertising Hall of Fame in 2017. Stone is a past Arkansas Advertising Federation Ad Person of the Year and Silver Medal Award recipient; Ward is a member of the Sam W. Walton Arkansas Business Hall of Fame.
Both are equally distinguished in their philanthropic and community service endeavors with decades of support to organizations ranging from Bridge2Rwanda and Arkansas Cinema Society to Baptist Health Foundation and Arkansas Sheriffs’ Youth Ranches and many more. And while their reputation and prosperity have been solidified through the company’s success, truth be told it’s the service portion from which they derive true riches and fulfillment.
“It’s like rules to live by, something we’ve always believed scripturally and spiritually,” Ward said. “In Luke it says, ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ We’ve always wanted, no matter what we were doing or where we were or how small or big any type of success was, to be able to share with people who really needed it; to help nonprofits that can’t afford big budgets or big agencies or people in our community that may need some kind of help.”
Of all the taglines and slogans Stone Ward has developed over the years, the most insightful may well be the one it’s currently crafted for itself, eight weighty words hewn from introspection and mortared by principle. It reads, “Together, we are a creative force for good.”
“It is really not about Millie and Larry. It never has been,” Stone said. “Every circle, no matter how large or small, is a unified group for whom a handful of values is way more powerful than a thousand rules. Now, every circle needs a catalyst and a champion, and Millie is that champion and I’m that catalyst. But the Circle is what it’s all about, and what makes it happen. We are just helpers.”
Photography by Jason Masters
MILLIE WARD ON WINNING TEAMS:
One thing you have to do is hire the best people you can. We have had some brilliant people here and today we have some of the smartest people, who I’d put up against anybody, anywhere. A winning team, I think, is about knowledge, but it’s also about if the middle of the road is here, always having a couple of people that are out here laying the groundwork for the next thing.
LARRY STONE ON PARTNERSHIPS:
If you’re going to have a partnership, the best formula is having complementary skills. That way, you’re not stepping on each other, but you depend on each other, and you support each other. You’re using your unique talents, and the other person uses their unique talents rather than both of you having the same talents in conflict with each other.
MILLIE WARD ON EXCELLENCE:
Always strive to maximize potential. We want every person who works here to be working to their potential, because we want every idea we produce and send to a client to be the highest potential we can manage among all our brains. And then, we want to do whatever we can in the marketplace for that campaign to reach its potential and get the results that allow the client to be successful.
LARRY STONE ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP:
People who think all you’ve got to do is have courage and good luck or whatever and it’ll all work out, need to know there is also sacrifice. There were points in this process where we didn’t have enough money to pay us, but we always found enough money to pay everybody else. If you aren’t willing to do that, you don’t have any business starting a business.
MILLIE WARD ON CLIENT LOYALTY
Relationships should be built on trust and respect and if you don’t manage them like that, you will fail. Manage relationships like you manage your marriage or your best friend. Mistakes will be made, but if you’re striving for excellence, if you’re truly striving to be excellent every day, you are going to be better than if good is good enough.
LARRY STONE ON FULFILLMENT
Be careful who you choose to work for. Our work will never be any better than the client will allow it to be, because they are the client, and they get the last say. So, we have been careful about who our clients are and if you look at our client list, those are the people you want to be helping. Don’t go after the shiny objects, go after the real gold.
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