An Ad for Family Business Brices Have Grown Their shop for 17 Years
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
He was a TV anchor for NBC.
She was a television host for a weekly magazine program on ABC.
Hal and Joni Brice, founders of Heil-Brice Retail Advertising in Newport Beach, were competitors of sorts in the early days of their careers.
But not for long.
The two dated, were soon married and began working together on Joni’s show, “PM Magazine,” in Phoenix.
That was in the early 1980s and they’ve been a business team ever since.
“It’s quite natural now,” said Joni Brice of working with her husband. She is chief executive and he is president. “We’ve been married 20 years and we’ve worked together 17 of them.”
After Joni’s show ended in the late ’80s, the duo waved good-bye to working in front of the camera and moved into the world of advertising via Smitty’s, a Wal-Mart-type store in Arizona, where they learned the ropes of creating successful ads.
“We were the advertising department,” Joni Brice said chuckling.
Hal developed a vendor-marketing program that eventually was used by grocery stores throughout the country and laid the foundation for the Brices’ advertising agency, which the couple founded in 1987.
They moved to Orange County and set up shop in a spare bedroom of their beachfront mobile home in San Clemente.
And, just like any other start-up, there were ups and downs.
The couple began with two clients, one a grocery store in San Diego. A family friend helped with the workload, which included writing scripts, editing and shooting about 12 TV commercials a week.
A year later, the mobile home was wiped out by heavy El Nino rains. The agency was relocated to another San Clemente location before moving to its current spot, Corporate Plaza in Newport Beach, in 1996. There’s also an office in Arizona.
Now the advertising shop, which has grown to 38 employees, boasts a variety of retail clients, such as Ralph’s, IHOP, The Los Angeles Times, Snyders Drug Stores and Factory 2-U. It ranked No. 8 on the Business Journal’s list OC ad agencies, with 2000 capitalized billings of $90 million.
“Just about everybody needs to have a retail focus to sell,” Joni Brice said. “We focus on retail from the bottom up: store signs, branding the stores, radio and television broadcast.”
Over the years, Heil-Brice has received numerous awards for its creative work, and business “has been very consistent,” Joni Brice said.
But she says she’s proudest of the agency’s focus on family.
The Brices’ daughters, Jazz and Jade, grew up at the agency, helping Mom and Dad. Employees bring their kids to work and leave them in the supervised playroom.
“It actually has been easier than I thought it would be to have my children with me and to have other people’s children come to the office,” Joni Brice said. “There’s so much to gain from it that it outweighs any deficits. I just love the fact that (work and family) are not separate boxes.”
The policy has made for some long-time employees. Vicki Scruggs, the agency’s director of finance, has been with Heil-Brice for 13 years and brought her children to work for many of them.
She said her colleagues are like “family” and everybody works together to get an account win.
“We try to maintain the attitude that nobody is lowlier than anybody else,” she said. “Even accounting is important to getting a spot on the air.”
Meanwhile, Joni and Hal say they balance each other out, which makes for a good work environment and healthy business.
“We each have our strengths,” Joni Brice said. “We understand what they are.”
Joni describes herself and Hal as having varying degrees of “type A” personality. Hal focuses on the creative end and Joni concentrates on financial and administrative work.
And they both share a passion for philanthropy.
The agency, which sponsors its own charity golf tournament annually, spends a lot of time supporting local charities such as Casita de San Jose, an organization that runs group homes for abused children, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
