Gay Gaddis is the cowgirl-in-chief of creativity
by Eric Webb | Published by the Austin Business Journal
[ARTICLE] Looking back on her youth in East Texas, Gay Gaddis sees a wild child. If she wasn’t out riding horses, she was making a mess at home. Sometimes, she would run into the classroom where her mother taught kindergarten and cause a ruckus. To keep the little cowgirl contained, her mother would pull out a canvas, some tempera paint and an easel.
“It would calm me down, and it would make me focus,” Gaddis said. “It just became part of me.”
She later channeled that creativity — and boundless energy — into a pioneering, award-winning career in marketing and advertising. In 1989, Gaddis founded T3 in Austin. Under her leadership, it grew into the largest independent, female-owned agency in the country. After three decades and countless tech-forward innovations, she sold the company in 2019.
Another fresh canvas in front of her. A lifetime of experience at her fingertips. As she’s done countless times, Gaddis embraced reinvention. The artist’s next masterpiece: building a legacy of mentorship at the University of Texas at Austin.
In honor of her trailblazing career, Gaddis is this year’s recipient of the Special Achievement Award at ABJ’s annual Women in Business Awards. Previously, Gaddis received the 2022 Best CEO Legacy Award and a 2011 Best CEO Award.
And as if all that wasn’t impressive enough, she’s still a whiz with a paintbrush.
Gaddis was born in Houston, but she grew up about 45 miles northeast in Liberty. It was a small town of about 5,000 people at the time, now famously home to a replica of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell (sans crack). Her father, Gene Warren, worked for Gulf Oil Company and later started a surveying firm, while her mother, Dottie, ran a school.
Gaddis’ father died when she was 13. An only child, she remembers the community surrounding her family with love in their time of need. “I really attribute a lot of my success, honestly, to the relationships and the things I learned in that little town,” she said.
A stellar student, she immersed herself in extracurriculars like yearbook, student council and competitive essay writing. She designed costumes for the drill team. As a member of the Valley Players, she performed in stage shows like “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
Soon, Gaddis went through a looking glass of her own. While a junior in high school, she visited Austin for a Texas Longhorns football game. “The team runs out. People are screaming and jumping and carrying on,” she remembered. “I just thought, ‘Wow, I want to be a part of this.’”
Gaddis majored in studio art at UT. Studying art taught her to take critiques, meet deadlines and find solutions. She also worked as a teaching assistant for faculty member Leonard Rubin, a Madison Avenue veteran. After graduating in 1977, Gaddis used her drawing talents to find illustration and comp work in the advertising field.
Those early professional years took Gaddis to Dallas, where she worked for the Richards Group ad agency and Baylor University Medical Center, then to Atlanta for a stint at business consulting firm Leadership Dynamics. In 1982, she returned to Austin and took an advertising job at the William Lacy Agency. Though the move prevented her from finishing graduate studies at Georgia State, she was about to enter a class all her own. “The rest of my MBA was just hard knocks,” she said.
Amid a recession battering the Central Texas economy, Gaddis took her career into her own hands in 1989. An experience at her advertising job left her feeling dismissed and unappreciated. So, she took $16,000 out of an IRA and founded her own agency. Eventually called T3 — short for The Think Tank — the firm started in a small office with two other employees and three clients.
Gaddis admits that bootstrapping her first business in the middle of a recession might have been naive, but she felt ready. Back home, she had managed the family’s finances after her father died. She also had a proven track record of delivering results for other people’s companies. “I was really, really committed to saying, ‘I can make a buck,’” she said. “I knew I could.”
In 1992, T3 took on nascent tech giant Dell Technologies Inc. as a client. It blew up into a huge account for the firm, and the two companies worked together for 16 years. The agency developed pioneering digital marketing campaigns, helping catapult Dell to the top of its industry.
Gaddis describes those days as the Wild West, full of opportunities for her fledgling operation to capture consumers’ attention in new ways. T3 took a data-driven approach to measuring campaign results. The agency outmaneuvered lumbering big-name firms that were slower to adapt to a digital world. “We were one of the first in mobile, one of the first in social,” she said.
As T3 grew into a tech-savvy powerhouse, its portfolio glittered with marquee clients, from JPMorgan Chase and UPS to 7-Eleven and The Coca-Cola Co. Things moved fast, with little time to dwell on tough days. Gaddis called the late 2000s recession, which spurred layoffs at T3, “one of the worst times of my life.” But as the digital economy evolved, the company regrouped and chased the next frontier.
Company culture was crucial to T3’s success. Gaddis learned the value of authenticity in her hometown. “You have to be genuine. You have to be caring, but you also have to be tough, because bad times are going to come, and you have to make quick decisions,” she said. “I watched all that in a microcosm growing up.”
The agency received a flurry of national attention for its T3 and Under initiative, which launched in 1995. Gaddis encouraged parents to bring their young children to the office with them, an unconventional policy for the time. She remembered parents handing off babies to each other so they could take calls. Later, T3 also welcomed dogs to the office. It felt like working on a family farm sometimes. “I honestly started it out of desperation to keep those women in the office, because I needed them to work on the Dell business,” she said. “It did people a lot of good to pet a dog or to carry around a little baby … It was the best break in your day.”
In 2016, Gaddis’ stepson, Ben Gaddis, took over as president of T3, though she remained CEO. During a family meeting in 2018, he raised the idea of selling the firm.
But as time went on, she realized that her next act was already underway. A 2016 solo gallery show in New York took her painting career to new heights. She wrote a book in 2018, titled “Cowgirl Power: How to Kick Ass in Business and Life.” The cattle and border collies at Double Heart Ranch, the Burnet oasis she owns with husband Lee Gaddis, kept her plenty busy. (“I’m a country girl at heart,” she said.)
Confident in her ability to reinvent herself, Gaddis stepped down as CEO when Los Angeles-based marketing company LRW Group, now known as Material, acquired T3. The sale went through in October 2019.
“When you sell a company, it’s never the same again,” she said. “I knew that. It was hard to let go on a lot of levels.”
Gaddis’ Longhorn ties run deep, and so, she returned to her alma mater for inspiration. In addition to lecturing at UT over the years, she’s been part of the Dean’s Advisory Council to the McCombs School of Business and an advisor for both the College of Fine Arts and the Moody College of Communication. UT has honored her many times over, including the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2022 and induction into the McCombs Hall of Fame in 2020.
Through her work with Texas Exes — she joined the board in 2019 and served as president and chairman from 2023–24 — Gaddis spent valuable time with students. She loved what she saw in them, and she wanted to help.
In 2021, she co-founded Women Who Mean Business, a leadership development program through McCombs. Over six months, high-achieving women accepted to the program receive tools and mentorship to help accelerate their careers. Gaddis knows what it’s like to be one of the only women in a boardroom full of men. “I could be intimidated and put off by it, or upset about it, or I can just dig right in,” she said. “That’s what I do, and I’ve always done that.”
And this fall, she’s launching Texas Trailblazers. The program brings together distinguished students from across the university to foster their leadership skills.
Mentoring the next generation of leaders has given Gaddis reason to reflect. She considers what wisdom she’d impart to her younger self — the wild child in Liberty, the art student at UT, the bootstrapping businesswoman ready to strike out on her own. “Don’t be afraid when growth comes and knocks on your door,” she said. “Because if you don’t grab it fast, it can pass you by.”
For the profiles on all of the talented Women in Business 2025 honorees, visit the Austin Business Journal.