NorthBay biz takes a look at Sarah Haynes’ The Spitfire Agency, which promotes events and helps market everything from nonprofits to big-name companies and celebrities—all with an “eco-groovy” bent.
No, really.
Tucked away in Mill Valley on a second floor above a jewelry store and a clothing boutique, the “eco-groovy” (Spitfire’s own description) office includes a small restroom that educates visitors about the environment while they’re taking care of business. A sign on the wall informs how soap interacts with Mom Nature. Another above a towel rack talks about using cloth towels instead of paper. There’s another sign above the toilet paper. The garbage can and a recycling bin enjoy their own signage as well.
If the loo sounds intense, you should meet Spitfire’s creator, Sarah Haynes. The 44-year-old Haynes, a native of Orinda, is the CEO, founder, chief negotiator, deal maker and bottle washer for the 11-year-old firm. She’s high energy but doesn’t make people nervous because of it. She’s persuasive without flashing a heavyweight need to control. She puts the environment in first place, along with social justice, but isn’t preachy about it.
As our interview unfolds, Haynes talks about working with Nike on a whole raft of events at her former company, On Board Entertainment, and she mentions the well-known overseas sweatshop issues that besieged the Oregon sports company. As she does so, I’m profoundly embarrassed peering at my feet, which are swathed in a pair of Nike Max Moto 5+ running shoes complete with air everything and a swoosh in San Francisco Giants colors. Though I’m certain my choice of footwear isn’t lost on my host, she graciously neglects to mention it.
The agency has a lot of stuff in its trick bag. This is from its website: “We’re here to get things done. We work with the most devoted celebrities, activists and bands. We produce sustainable events and tours. We book hard-to-get talent for progressive programs. We promote nonprofits and their causes. We produce fundraisers that yield high results. We jumpstart responsible businesses with innovative marketing campaigns. But above all, we’re here to educate the public, alter consumer behavior and ‘redefine cool.’”
The last part, about redefining cool, is the trickiest part. Cool evolves, but sometimes the train runs right off the tracks. Dick Cheney used to favor an undisclosed location that was kind of mysterious and cool. Now he’s become the Ryan Seacrest of the political set, and is overexposed and under-nuanced—which, of course, is never cool.
In the end, Haynes is out to make loving our Mother Earth cool. And loving your Mom has always been cool.
She’s passionate about doing right by the planet and has found a way to do just that while making a profit. This is much more difficult than it appears at first blush, and Haynes deserves credit not only for wanting to make a difference but, more important, in the long run, for finding a way to make doing so pay off.
The standard American take on “business as usual” is to find a need and fill it, build a better mousetrap, or discover a shortcoming in a marketplace and exploit it. The crucial factor has always been about finding the minimum profit margin and building on that. In the United States, we’ve always felt fine about using whatever resources we needed to make our businesses run in the black, without much regard for the idea of how we consumed those resources or, more on point these days, how the resources were replenished or even if they could be regenerated.
That Spitfire can make a profit from its green focus is important on at least two levels. Without putting money in the bank, the company would fold and the idea of changing corporate and consumer behavior would suffer. The second focus is more subtle but no less important. Until it’s quantifiable that a company can make money from promoting green behavior, going green remains in the same parlance as Ed Begley driving a Prius. You know the Prius is good for the environment and great on gas mileage, thus making it economical. You know Ed Begley cares deeply about the environment and, at one time, was good on “St. Elsewhere.” The problem is, the Prius looks like the car equivalent of an orthopedic shoe, and Begley is the poster boy for anybody who wants to make fun of the environmental movement.
Until Porsche or BMW makes a green model that George Clooney or Brad Pitt is sporting in the movies or on the E! Network, for too many people and companies, greening will always be looking to go from practical to sexy. By the way, I’d have used an American car company in that last example, except by the time this story hits your mailbox or newsstand, there may not be any left. Of course, the nice part will be that we’ll all be stockholders (sort of).
Which is cool, sort of.
Change on many levels
It’s unrealistic to expect all businesses to behave in an environmentally sound fashion of their own accord, since capitalism is about doing things for the sake of profit, not for the sake of doing the right thing. Companies will do the right thing when there’s a profit to be made, or when doing things the wrong way becomes too costly or unpopular. So businesses like Spitfire are becoming more relevant. Not only does the company help commercial and nonprofit entities change their behavior for the better when it comes to Mother Earth, Haynes takes the practice two steps further.
First, Spitfire endeavors to take companies beyond the “Look at me, I’m green” syndrome, for the sake of posing or just using green as a marketing tool, to a place where companies actually look at their impact on the environment and change practices to lessen their carbon footprint. Second, in many cases, when Spitfire comes on board for an event or to work with a company, changes are made to alter consumer behavior, thus having a much deeper impact.
For example, Spitfire is responsible for helping green the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. Over the course of the multi-day music festival, on average, each attendee drinks 24 bottles of water to chase his or her thirst. The festival sells about 80,000 tickets, which means about 1.92 million plastic bottles—which is a bunch, no matter how you slice it. Now consider that across the United States, someplace between 86 and 90 percent of plastic water bottles end up in landfills, depending on which estimates you use. This is to say nothing of the amount of oil needed to manufacture the bottles and the amount of fuel required to distribute the water.
Spitfire set out to decrease that number by partnering with Stanley, a festival sponsor, to sell resusable, stainless steel drinking bottles. Sales proceeds helped dig wells and filter water onsite, plus $1 from each bottle sale was donated to Global Water Challenge as a way of not only bringing clean, healthy water to places in the world that lack the resource, but also of raising the issue with 80,000 concert goers. Finally, the water thermos and informational program hopefully influenced future behavior of those who attended the concert.
The Spitfire vision
On this day, Haynes is in her office, which overlooks Mill Valley’s Java Jungle, a trio of coffee houses located so close to each other you could stand at the front door of one and hit the other two with a well aimed coffee bean. While the beaneries square off over the hearts and minds of those who jones for lattes, Haynes, dressed casually in a blue print skirt and a white top, relaxes on a couch doing her best to explain how Spitfire has worked with the likes of Robin Williams, Interface Carpet Company and Madonna along with PETA, Hotel Triton and the Foo Fighters. Larger clients include the Rothbury music festival, actors Woody Harrelson and Daryl Hannah, and musicians the Red Hot Chili Peppers. To begin, she does much of the work herself. “I actually like doing the grunt work, the detail stuff,” she says. She also outsources some tasks to a quintet of people she’s worked with over the years.
Defining what Spitfire does isn’t easy. For instance, let’s say Linkin Park wants to hit the road with a new show, and the rock group wants to make the tour earth-friendly. They might engage Spitfire’s services, and the agency would find and lease biodiesel buses to transport the group and its crew between gigs. Spitfire could source souvenir tour shirts for sale at shows that were made from organic cotton in a sweatshop-free environment, as well as offer a wide variety of ancillary services.
Haynes’ company also tracks down top-flight performers to play at shows for nonprofit organizations looking to either spotlight their cause, raise money or both. The agency can lay out a marketing strategy to include partnerships that will benefit not only the nonprofit but the sponsoring companies as well. Haynes does marketing and promotion on behalf of a wide cross section of companies and organizations with a decided bent toward the environment. She puts sponsorship deals together and offers creative services, everything from website design to copywriting. “It’s really not a very good business model. I mean, you want to do only one thing and do that really well. But this is a great life model for me—I like variety and learning and breaking new ground.”
Spitfire wants to work with companies that produce hybrid cars and tree-free paper. “Our perfect client would be the Trust for Public Land,” says Haynes, a smile booming across her face.
Out of the office
Haynes is clearly not your average exec. Her idea of how to measure success doesn’t have much to do with profit percentage increase year-over-year, or the building of her client base. “I look at it like, I want to be able to take a month off and work in refugee camps in Africa this year. How do I make that happen?” she says.
For Haynes, though, it isn’t just about putting enough away in the coffers to make the trip pencil out. It’s also about getting clients who have her on retainer to sign off on her being out of touch for that time. “I end up asking them, ‘Which months will work for you?’ And then I keep talking to them until I find a combination that works.”
If this runs counter to your take on how to build a business, stay tuned, there’s more contrarian philosophy to come. I ask Haynes what happens if one of her clients refuses to go along with the green program. She gives her head a gentle shake, “I’m a pretty strong personality. These companies and people know who I am, what I believe in and, for the most part, they’ve come to me to help them change things. So that really isn’t much of a problem.”
She begins talking about one company that essentially wanted to take half measures in terms of going green. “They were like, ‘No, we really don’t want to do that,’ so I just stopped working with them.”
She pauses for a moment, as if she’s remembering something important. “On the other hand, there’s nothing more disillusioning than having a client you really feel gets it, and getting a Christmas card that’s obviously printed on virgin paper. It’s like, c’mon guys, this isn’t right.”
It started with a song
This isn’t the kind of career that one begins by going to Wharton Business School. Haynes likes to say she went to the school of life. Though she started off school at San Diego State University and did a semester at sea via American College in Paris, the real pull for her was toward radio, drawn by the music and the energy. From there, she made a move into music, working for record labels as a promotion and marketing rep.
A natural outgrowth for Haynes was promoting live music, so she started On Board Entertainment, a full-service company that worked with Ford, Anheuser-Busch, MTV and Sega, to name a few, promoting events like Ozzfest. Though the business boomed and Haynes was having a good time, something didn’t fit. “I was doing a snowboarding festival for MTV that was sponsored by Slim Jim Beef Jerky—and I’m a vegetarian. It felt like I was running into too many personal conflicts of the heart.”
The turning point might have been a talk Haynes had with Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. His band was writing tunes about the Zapatista revolution in Mexico, but the audiences were just hearing the music and not understanding the larger themes. So Haynes grabbed up de la Rocha and some like-minded friends in 1999 and created the Spitfire Tour, barnstorming colleges with speakers waxing eloquently and passionately about the environment and politics. The name was inspired by the notion of “spitting fire,” meaning addressing racy topics. “The tour spurred my idea to activate all we had talked about, so that’s why it became the Spitfire Agency,” she reveals.
Today, Haynes is the driving force behind the greening of the Rothbury Festival, a multi-day camping and music festival in Rothbury, Michigan, which attained a 94 percent waste diversion rate in 2008. While a ton of talent, including John Mayer, Dave Matthews, Widespread Panic and Snoop Dogg, entertained thousands of happy campers, Haynes had a force of 750 employees at the event. Working through a unique program that let employees attend the event for free (save for a $30 registration fee to cover the cost of the program) by working three shifts of five to seven hours each. The event has become legendary in music, environmental and social responsibility circles.
Woman with a mission
If Haynes runs an unusual business—and she surely does—then the business is the perfect fit, since her life is anything but run-of-the-mill. To begin, she’s personal buds with Woody Harrelson, no pun intended. Harrelson, an advocate for many issues (yes, even beyond the use of hemp), is a friend and client of Haynes and bunks at her Mill Valley home whenever he finds himself in the area.
One of Haynes’ fondest possessions is her 1965 Airstream Trailer. She’s a huge fan of camping, which makes much of the festival business that Spitfire does a natural fit. She’s a big fan of Burning Man, the annual art, music and cultural happening in the Nevada desert.
On many an evening, she hikes on the hills and trails surrounding her hometown and then relaxes in her hot tub. As far as a family, Haynes says she’s currently sharing her pad with five cats, three of them rescue kitties from a kill shelter that’s she’s trying to find homes for. She’d like to find property in West Marin to start an animal sanctuary, and is currently shopping a bit to see if she can find a site that would fit the bill.
In the end, Haynes has found a way to blend her life with her livelihood, something that’s mighty rare these days. About 11 years ago, she was on a plane and her seatmate inquired about what she did to keep the wolf from the door. After explaining how Spitfire worked, her fellow traveler said, “So what’s your mission statement?”
Haynes had to confess that she didn’t have one, but, rising to the challenge, she promised to have one before the plane touched down. After a bit of thinking, this is what she shared: “To have minimum impact on the planet while having maximum impact on its people.”
That pretty much covers Haynes on all fronts.
