Succeeding in Public Relations and in Business

I believe that successful business leaders are generally optimistic. I went to an Inc. 500 conference, and I had never seen so many wide-eyed optimists in my life. There is a climber named Jim Bridwell who has a saying: “Doubt is the enemy of success.” If you are sure, people will follow. It is all in your perspective. For example, I remember one week when we lost five employees, and all of my senior managers were upset. But my wife (our cofounder) and I had a different perspective. We didn’t worry that we were now down to 150 employees, instead we thought: “Wow, we have 150 more employees than we had eight years ago!” So, a difference in perspective.

There is a concept among some people that a business can be on cruise control for a while. I think that is an erroneous notion. Companies require constant attention and adjustment. It is more like flying a helicopter than a plane. You can take your hands off the wheel of a plane for a while, but you can’t take your hands off the stick of a helicopter for more than a few seconds before it starts gyrating out of control. By “constant attention and adjustment” I mean that you have to sweat the details. You have to delegate, but you also have to be willing to get into the details and understand what is really going on in the organization. Some of the most successful of our clients are those that have been willing to make frequent adjustments to their organizations.

To be successful in business one has to know how to pace an organization. You have to know when to put the pressure on and when to cut some slack. This is intuitive—you can’t learn this art in business school. But it is a characteristic of a successful CEO: that he or she understands how to set the appropriate pace of the company.

You need to have a strong division of labor among your senior executives. In marketing this is crucial. Sometimes we’ll start work for a client with uncertainty about who makes the real marketing decisions. Is it the vice president of marketing, the CEO, or someone totally different? Marketing not only decides pricing and promotion, but the shape of the entire product or service offering to meet the needs of the customer. If you do not know who has the power and authority, and who is finally charged with that responsibility, you have a good chance of stalling out in marketing terms. So a clear division of labor among senior people in an organization is something we look for in our clients. If we do not see that, we are not shy about letting the client know that perhaps there should be a little more clarity in the division of labor.

Successful companies know what they want to do and stick to it. For example, when my wife and I started our PR agency, we knew exactly what we wanted to do. One thing we knew was that we were not interested in creating jobs for ourselves. A lot of people, when they start consultancies, are really looking to create jobs for themselves. We had no interest in that. We wanted to create a significant entity, a significant company. Our first goal was to be the biggest agency in New England. We achieved the goal of being the largest independent PR agency in New England in fairly short order—it didn’t take many years for us to do that. But it was always our goal to create a significant organization, and we knew how we wanted to do it, the kind of clients we wanted to focus on, and the approach we wanted to take that would be most effective and set us apart from the pack. We look for clients that can clearly articulate what they want to do, and give us the sense they want to stick to it.

I believe in over-investing in people early, a business principle I learned from my mentor, GE’s Jack Welch, for whom I was a speechwriter. People are the most important decision you ever make—hiring the right people and putting them in the right place. In our company, when we were very small, we hired people that, a CFO would say, we couldn’t afford. We hired them way before we could afford them, way before the business could justify their salaries. But I firmly believe in the strategy of over-investing in people early; getting the best possible people regardless of the cost, and giving them room to run with their ideas. I believe in doing this regardless of the state of the economy.

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