Gary Prouk is back in business and devoting the next stage of his career to building an agency with his name on the door.

Holmes Prouk is the new name of Holmes Donin Alloul, and represents a 50-50 financial partnership between Prouk and another award-winning creative director, Peter Holmes.

The two will be co-creative directors, while Gilbert Alloul, now agency director of hda, takes on the role of president.

The agency isn’t using any buzz words or hooks such as ‘integration’ to describe how it plans to operate.

‘We’re not trying to be all things to all people like a lot of other agencies are trying to do these days,’ says Holmes.

‘Small agencies starting up feel the need to have a buzzword or phrase about how they are different and how they’re going to manage themselves. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

‘If they don’t produce good advertising, they’re dead.’

Holmes Prouk is already looking to hire a number of senior people, including a chief financial officer, and expects to increase the size of staff to 22 from 16 by the end of this month.

Plans are underway to move from hda’s open-concept space to larger, more traditional offices.

In addition to the $7 million Ault Foods assignment won by hda last month, Alloul says the agency has been busy working on several other substantial pieces of new business, but the agency’s principals declined to say what they are.

While Prouk has been uncharacteristically quiet since his ouster this summer from Lowe SMS, now Roche Macaulay & Partners, the rumor mill has not. Talk about the alliance between Holmes and Prouk has been on the street for a number of weeks.

The big question has been: How can two creative directors, known in the industry as being headstrong, work together?

‘If this was something that resulted from the Lowe implosion, we wouldn’t be making this announcement now,’ says Alloul. ‘We would be making it next summer because we would still need to sit down and talk about it, think it through and see if we are actually in alignment.

‘It was fortuitous for us that Gary became a free agent.’

Discussions between Prouk and hda have gone on for more than a year and a half. During that time, they got to know each other and realized they had the same philosophy about creative and running a business.

‘I know people believe Peter and I are both strong-willed and cantankerous and will probably kill each otherI hope not,’ says Prouk.

‘While still at Lowe, we were very interested in trying to do something with Peter and Gilbert in terms of either investing in them or buying them because I was really taken with them and their work,’ he says.

Much has been made in the press and in the industry about hda’s Ault win.

Ault, a former long-time Lowe SMS client, bumped heads with Roche Macaulay’s management following the merger of the two agencies, and the business was resigned by the new shop.

The dairy foods company is headed by president and ceo Graham Freeman, a close friend of Prouk’s. Because of this relationship, it was speculated that Freeman and Prouk would be pulling the strings when it came to placement of the account.

Prouk denies he was involved, claiming he was waiting quietly on the sidelines as the legal loose ends of his recently severed relationship with Lowe SMS were tied up.

Prouk goes on to say Freeman was not even on the decision-making committee that awarded the account.