Remembrance of a great man

I am saddened to report that my co-blogger, Jim Macdonald, aka "JLM," has died.  Here is his obituary. Readers of this blog will have noticed that most of the posts, and all the best posts, are his.

I joined The Merrill Anderson Company in 1979 as a Tax and Trust Editor.  I was then a recent law school grad, and Bill Stafford (head legal writer) was pleased with my writing sample.  I wrote for our estate planning newsletters aimed at lawyers and CPAs. These products needed a "legal voice," which I supplied. 

Jim was at that time Executive Vice President.  I didn't know what that title meant, and I still don't.  Jim had been hired by Merrill Anderson himself, while Merrill still ran the company, and so he already was an old hand.  Jim was our senior creative man, and as such I had very little interaction with him in my early years, as I reported to Bill.  Jim was in charge of our most important product, the Monthly Trust Bulletin (aka MTB, Trust News Bulletin, Financial News, Investment and Trust Newsletter, Jim changed the moniker from time to time), sent by trust departments to affluent prospects.  The original focus of that newsletter was getting the reader to make a will and name the bank as executor of the reader's estate.  By 1979 the product mix had broadened to include living trusts and investment management accounts.  Jim also wrote sales collaterals, including our Family Financial Planning Library, our Trust Services Series, and later our Target Markets.  He also invented Financial Planning Ideas, an oversize brochure that collected eight to ten novel personal planning strategies, to be used as a response device or a leave-behind at a prospect meeting.

Given his background in art history, how did Jim become so expert in trusts, estates, and investments?  Partly he was self-taught, he was a voracious reader, but also he went to Trust School.  That was before my time, so I don’t know much about it, but it was an industry-sponsored education program, and I think Jim received some sort of certification from it.

My first collaboration with Jim came in 1981, when I wrote copy for IRA brochures intended for the general public.  These fell under Jim’s supervision, and he was evidently pleased with my work.  Sam Heitzman, our super-salesman, did a fantastic job of selling those brochures, making that a banner year for our company.

Every year Jim ran a survey of all our MTB customers concerning industry trends and their desired coverage for the newsletter.  He produced a report of the survey results, which were presented to an “Editorial Advisory Board” of customers for review and discussion.  This annual meeting happened at the National Trust Conference, which attracted trust officers from all over the country.  About 1984 or so, I was invited to go to these meetings as well, adding some “gravitas” (because I had a law degree) and answering questions, especially in the years that the tax law changed.

In those meetings, and especially in the marketing reports Jim wrote to summarize them, he showed a remarkable knack for gathering a wide range of disparate customer inputs and distilling them into coherence, into a persuasive marketing plan.  Brilliant!

Jim’s work on each issue of his newsletter was meticulous, thorough, and clever, transforming what was really advertising into something engaging and persuasive.  At the peak we were printing well over one million copies of his work every year.

For many years Jim wrote his copy on a manual typewriter, which I think is still at the company offices.  It belongs in a museum.  In the late 1980s the editors received Macintosh SE computers for doing their work, and Jim had zero resistance to the development.  On the contrary, he quickly became a computer enthusiast, and found additional software to make our work easier.

I moved more and more to the creative side of the business in the 1990s, under Jim’s mentorship.  One important piece of advice, he told me to drop the “throat clearing” I tended to start articles with, and get to the point.  The first paragraph has to grab the reader, so get to it.

I remember Jim telling us this story.  One of Merrill Anderson’s bank clients cancelled their account.  They had commissioned a survey of what their customers liked most about the bank, why they chose to do business with the bank.  The number one reason was “convenient locations of branches.”  No one mentioned the bank’s advertising.  The advertising was therefore a waste of money, they would divert that into the branches.

A few years later, the banker was back in Merrill Anderson’s office.  “It seems our branches are not very convenient anymore,” he said.  The advertising was restored.

Jim retired in 1997, and I took over his office, his newsletter, and his computer.  I still have that computer, I’ll have to check to see if it still boots up.  I had some good newsletter editions, but in all honesty I never filled Jim’s shoes—no one could.

Final note.  When the man who hired me, Bill Stafford, died in about 1984, many of us from MACo went to his funeral.  It was a Quaker funeral, something I had never experienced.  At one point, the pastor asked us to meditate in silence on Bill’s life, what it meant to us, and to testify to the group when the spirit moved us.  When Jim spoke, it was an astonishingly moving and perceptive look into Bill’s career with Merrill Anderson, something most of the friends at the funeral knew nothing about.  I was in awe of Jim’s extemporaneous speaking ability.  He demonstrated that gift again, that same level of insight, at Pat’s funeral.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.  With the advent of interstate banking and desktop publishing, the market for Merrill Anderson’s services has shrunk considerably.  Still, JLM’s extraordinary contributions to the company gave it enough momentum to last 30 years beyond his retirement.