By Joyce Hooi

BOB Seelert, chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, really should have been Bob Seelert, president of Hartford Distributors for Budweiser beer. Back in the 1960s, when he had not even been old enough to drink alcohol legally, he turned down the silver spoon - or frothy bottle, as it were - and declined to take over the reins of his late father's beer distributorship. The man who has turned Saatchi & Saatchi into the global advertising powerhouse that it is today had been a junior at Harvard College then. Saatchi & Saatchi figured nowhere in his plans - it did not even exist yet.

And yet, the way Mr Seelert tells it, his future at Saatchi & Saatchi had been built into the blueprint of his life long before he had been old enough to drink beer. Ironically enough, it had been his mother's bold decision to run the beer distributorship after his father's passing that had propelled him away from it, towards a life of selling people dreams crafted from the storyboards of rarefied offices in New York, London and Tokyo.

'One of the things I learned from my mom's going into the business was almost a Saatchi-like thing: nothing is impossible,' Mr Seelert says. 'There were not many women in business positions beyond being secretaries, so the sheer audacity of my mother, doing that, kinda said you can do almost anything you want in your life. She had been bold and stepped out on her own, and so I was bold and stepped out on mine.'

As Saatchi & Saatchi's fortunes soared in the UK after it was founded by the Saatchi brothers in 1970 with - amongst others - their tagline 'Labour isn't working' for the Conservative Party in the 1979 UK general election, Mr Seelert's star was also steadily rising on the other side of the Atlantic. He had rapidly risen from a sales intern at food product heavyweight General Foods to becoming the chief executive officer of Worldwide Coffee and International Foods.

Even as a young man on the client side of the advertising table, Mr Seelert had watched the frenetic go-go world of ad men, agog with wonder.

The ad world in the 1960s had been, by his own admission, almost like the hit TV series Mad Men - a climate of cigar smoke decadence populated by cognac-swilling suited men and voluptuous secretaries.

'I can remember being invited to, and attending, what they called in the US, a 'three-martini lunch'. I could never drink three martinis in my lifetime,' says Mr Seelert with a sense of wonder that at 67, he has managed to retain. 'I would go and visit the agencies and I would see a lot of interplay between the men and women and you know, all of that. It was fun and games, much more than it was the 'roll up your sleeves and really work hard' sort of thing.'

If anyone is a roll-up-your-sleeves sort of person, however, it is Mr Seelert, who had been in town to talk about his new book Start With The Answer - a collection of anecdotes and principles for dealing with the world of business, based on personal experience.

Immaculately dressed for the interview, he displays an almost compulsive affinity for facts and figures - both retaining and spouting them. His book publisher, Wiley, had been founded in 1807, he tells in a slightly tangential aside (he's right).

When he was invited to give a talk at Cambridge University, he had done something that had rivalled a prospective fresher in work ethic - he had looked up its ranking, the prodigious fact-finder that he was. 'They were number one or two in virtually every ranking that ever existed,' he says, on another tangential roadtrip.

This familiarity with the grindstone can be traced back to his time at Harvard Business school. In his book, Mr Seelert recalls a time in his MBA class in 1966 when one of the star performers had been unexpectedly called upon day after day to make presentations on case study assignments. Until one day, that classmate had been caught unprepared.

From this, Mr Seelert had distilled the key learning point packaged folksily as 'Bob's Wisdom' at the end of every mini-chapter in the book - 'Expect the unexpected. Always be prepared. There are no excuses and no exceptions.'

In town to promote his book, Mr Seelert is, of course, impeccably prepared for the interview, armed to the teeth with the latest figures on the ad world, even though his capacity at Saatchi & Saatchi these days is that of a 'non-executive chairman guy', in his own words.

'In 2009, worldwide media spend was down 10.2 per cent versus the previous year. That would have been the first year of decline in my 15 years in the industry. In the US it was even worse - down 12.9 per cent. 2009 in Singapore, media spend was down 7.7 per cent, but in China, it was actually up 7.4 per cent,' Mr Seelert says, reeling off the numbers without the aid of notes or prompting.

And the numbers keep coming.

'Now we're just opening 2010 and we think that the world is going to tip up modestly, only 0.9 per cent in media spending. Now, the US is going to stay negative by 2.5 per cent. Singapore's going to recover to about 3 per cent growth.'

He's on a numerical freight train now.

'One interesting way to look at it is that over three years, since 2007, the world has been down 8.4 per cent. Singapore, for three years, has been flat - this year, it will be back to where it was in 2007.'

Mr Seelert's calling card these days might be that of the man who helped to get a limping Saatchi & Saatchi back on its feet, but back in 1995 when history had not yet been written and he had just been tapped to save the London-based agency from itself, the industry had been a lot more skeptical about the 52-year-old businessman from Connecticut.

By then, he had been CEO of three different companies and turned around two of them. But Saatchi & Saatchi had been a whole different kettle of fish, freshly scarred by the defection of two major accounts - Mars and British Airways.

'When I was approached about the job, I had some people who told me, 'Oh, no, no, no, don't go do that',' he recalls.

'On the day I got started, the founding brothers had been ousted by their board, they'd gone across town to start up a rival new group, M&C Saatchi, 6 per cent of the revenue had walked out the door, the company was losing money, we had too much debt at too high an interest rate and it was all coming due too soon,' says Mr Seelert, running through the oft-told tale of overwhelming odds.

'And because of turmoil, everybody in the company and all of the clients were asking if they should stay or leave.'

Mr Seelert - true to his business school and boardroom warrior background - had been prepared. 'To stabilise clients and staff, I got personally in front of as many people in as many markets, and as many clients as I possibly could, as soon as possible. I'd tell them who I was and hold out a promise that this was all going to turn out well,' he says.

'In the following six months, no clients and no people who were essential to us, left.'

In his book, Mr Seelert talks about the importance of melding left-brained management with right-brained creative people at Saatchi & Saatchi, and it had been in this time of crisis that his left-brained self had come to the fore.

'To refinance the company, I did a rights issue in the UK to raise about ????pounds;150 million to pay down the debt of the company and to renegotiate all of our bank lines,' he recalled. 'When I took the job, I had some people who said, 'Well you better enjoy it fast because it won't be there in three months.' '

Mr Seelert saw through those three months and raised the stakes to three years, by which time he had negotiated a triumphant merger of Saatchi & Saatchi with the French advertising and communications giant, the Publicis Groupe at a share price that was 450 per cent higher than at the start.

From that merger experience, Mr Seelert has added another nugget of wisdom to his compendium of knowledge. 'I have a story in the book that says the acquirer has rights. The acquiring company is going to have his accountants, bankers, lawyers, some process he uses, and it's a waste of time trying to protest 'But oh, our company used to do that better'. In my experience, they always end up choosing the one from the acquirer's company anyway,' he says, breaking out into chortles.

Coming into his 15th year at Saatchi & Saatchi, Mr Seelert is mindful of the challenges that had once been non-existent during his heyday.

'We used to intrude into people's homes. So on the first product that I introduced in the US with a television and print media campaign, I could force my way into 90 per cent of American homes, 4.8 times in a four-week period,' he says.

Today, with unlimited amounts of money, that kind of penetration is impossible, he notes.

'In today's world, people don't really want me to be intruding into their homes. We want them to be seeking us out. In short, we want to connect with them. This affects not only the media but our messaging,' he says.

'We refer to this period as the age of 'sisomo', which is short for 'sight, sound and motion'. And what it says is that people are seeing things on all kinds of screens. It's the age of 'screenagers', the age of instant access to everything.'

In this area, Mr Seelert has stayed true to the 'advice, counsel and perspective' mantra that he had cultivated as chairman, preferring not to wade into the murky complexities of Twitter and Facebook marketing on his own. 'We've got to hire people who are savvy in all of this. That's an important part of reinventing our enterprise on a daily basis,' he says.

Where reinventing himself is concerned, Mr Seelert has proven to be a veritable phoenix, a result of lifelong preparation and uncanny happenstance, just like the personalities profiled in one of his favourite books, Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. Like many of the people in Gladwell's book, he had simply been at the right place at the right time - in London on an unrelated business deal when the Saatchi brothers were ousted in 1995, for example.

'They wanted somebody who'd been in the international environment and I'd run the Worldwide Coffee International Foods business at General Foods,' Mr Seelert recalls.

'Another piece of serendipity was that they felt that Saatchi & Saatchi had underperformed in the US and that it might be good to have someone who understood US businessmen and companies - perish the thought - an American as the head of a British company,' he notes wryly.

'I'm kind of an outlier in this whole thing,' he said, in reference to Mr Gladwell's book. 'We should call up Malcolm Gladwell and make an amendment to the book. Why didn't you call me, Malcolm?' Mr Seelert says with glee.

As for his own book, he has read it so many times in the editing process that he believes it to not have a single misplaced comma or misspelled word.

'100 per cent accurate and proper,' he says. Quite like Mr Seelert himself.

This article was first published in The Business Times.