After ten minutes with Ed Tettemer in the offices of the agency he founded with partner, Steve Red, you begin to understand the agency’s passion for excellence. After an hour with Ed, you begin to understand the intensity of his personal passion. You begin to understand it but I have a feeling that, even after days and days of exposure to him, you probably wouldn’t get the whole picture.
“Passion,” the word, may seem descriptive of a complicated set of feelings and opinions. Oddly, in thinking about Ed Tettemer’s passion for his agency and its clients, it seems rather simple. It’s just that he wants everything to be excellent: excellent clients, excellent co-workers, excellent marketing solutions, excellent creative executions, excellent everything.
“Where’d you go to college, Ed?” (A question most interviewers ask without expecting surprises in the response.) “Never went to college. Dropped out of high school and never looked back. Got my college degree at the Elkman agency and my graduate degree at Earle Palmer Brown.”
Maybe it’s best to start at the beginning. Ed was born and raised...