Industry & Services >> CEO Interviews >> March 17, 2004
RICHARD A. SEGAL JR. is CEO and co-founded of HSR Business to Business,
an integrated marketing communications agency, in 1981. Over the course
of the next 22 years, Segal has led the agency in becoming one of the
top business-to-business advertising agencies in the country, with a
blue-chip client roster that includes Eastman Kodak, General Electric
and Hobart Corporation. Most notably, Advertising Age's BtoB Magazine
named HSR its "Agency of the Year" in 1995, 1998 and again in 2002. He
has been regularly named on BtoB magazine's "Who's Who" list and
featured as one of 53 "Seers and Sages of the Techno-future" in Forbes
ASAP magazine and his comments appear regularly in business, technology
and marketing publications around the world. Segal's expertise has been
featured in Forbes, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek and The
Boston Globe. Prior to forming HSR, Segal's first career was in
politics. In the 1970s, The Cincinnati Enquirer called Segal "a child
prodigy of GOP politics." During the summers of his junior and senior
high school years, Segal participated in weeks of intensive leadership
training where he and other youths received direct instruction from the
likes of Milton Friedman, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger,
President Richard M. Nixon and future presidents Gerald R. Ford, Ronald
Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He went on to serve on the staffs of former
U.S. Senator Robert Taft Jr. and Cleveland Mayor Ralph J. Perk. From
1978-1980 he was executive assistant to the chairman of the Ohio
Republican Party. He served as a senior advisor and chief Internet
strategist in the 2000 campaign of Republican Presidential candidate
Steve Forbes. Segal masterminded the creation of Forbes2000.com, the
first Web site in history on which a presidential candidate announced
his candidacy. He is a member of the board of trustees for The Buckeye
Institute for Public Policy Solutions. Active in the Christian
community, Segal is an elder in his church and was referred to as "the
best PR Chair we've ever had," by the Reverend Billy Graham for his work
on Graham's 2002 mission to Cincinnati. Segal's clients and colleagues
rely on him for his incredibly informed perspective (he's a voracious
speed-reader of 4,600 words per minute), his sense of the big picture
and for his strategic ability. He's a self-confessed carrier of optimism
who possesses a tremendous bias for action, continually exhorting those
around him to "make something happen" and "tell me something I don't
know." Profile
Mr. Segal: We were founded in Cincinnati in 1981 as Business &
Industrial Marketers Inc., which is a mouthful, but what I would
probably
