Is PR Worth the Effort?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week William Vander blumen says good public relations is absolutely worth the time and money Paul down says PR hasn't worked for him at this point he says there are all kinds of ways he'd rather spend his time and money meanwhile Sarah seagull who owns a PR firm offers some tips on how to approach and how to employ a firm effectively along the way we discuss what's expensive when it comes to PR and what owners can do it themselves plus Paul explains how he dug himself out of a sales Hole by not doing anything differently and we find out how the owners feel about all the new ways they're being asked to leave tips even in Good Times owning and running a business could be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by our principal sponsor the great game of business will it owners know they are not alone and facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report when CH magazine named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Paul DS who is CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which makes custom conference tables outside of Philadelphia Sarah seagull who's founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco and William Vander blumen who is CEO of Vander bloom Search Group a houston-based recruiting firm that works with churches and other faith-based organizations the episode is titled is PR worth the effort welcome Paul Sarah and William appreciate you taking the time I I want to start today with an article I recently highlighted in the morning report it was based on the anonymous comments of a PR agency Insider who basically argued that PR firms need better PR it said that many firms are too focused on getting that first retainer check and they don't spend enough time talking strategy and setting expectations with their clients Sarah we've talked about some of these issues a little bit uh in in previous episodes but I just wanted to give you a chance to uh to respond to this I certainly don't want to put you on the spot to answer for all of public relations any more than I'd want to answer for all of Journalism heav know but I'm wondering if you uh if you found the piece credible um I did not me it read like a disgruntled employee that doesn't get to have say over the biz development that there that the person's senior Executives um handle and is disgruntled about his or her or their I think the person was identified as as a male okay him yeah no I mean it honestly like it was it was a rant it for communications person um honestly they did not articulate their points very clearly to me that's said I mean there are a couple things in there I agree to that is an industry problem in general about um people coming into and seeking PR when they're not ready for it and you know even my agencies had that that problem where you go through the whole RFP process you land the client and then you realize when you're in the onboarding segment is that they don't have a lot of the the foundational items that they need to really go big and and leverage PR but you don't necessarily know that when you're pitching and working on getting a client on board so you kind of after the fact realize okay these guys don't really have all their ducks in a row in order for us to do an effective PR campaign William do you have any or much experience hiring uh public relations firms I don't know what any or much is but I'm on my fourth one okay you know not because I keep hiring the wrong one I I just hate paying the retainers you know I I keep thinking kie the world of information is flat the idea that somebody can call a friend and get you a placement should be dead by now with the internet but it's really not could you explain that William why should that be dead I don't know Lauren you and I are old enough maybe Paul not Sarah old enough to remember the word Rolodex you know like that's why you hired a search fir they got a great Rolodex or or to go all hidey fce a little black book you know everybody's got the same rollex now it's linked in in like I can get anybody's number I don't have to call a switchboard to get through I bet Sarah has contacts that she makes use of well no well here's the thing it's it's it's not about the contacts anymore because we all know that the number of people being laid off at news outlets is atrocious right now so there's a constant turn and turnover of the right people at the right Outlet what it is is about an understanding of how to work with reporters understanding of their deadlines understanding of the the things they're looking for the assets the understanding of getting items to them in a fashion where it doesn't make more work for them that's good and we actually do something that's really abnormal for most PR agencies is we provide our clients with our media list they have full access to them they can look at their emails and honestly like we've had people ask us whether or not like we worry about those clients going off and um trying to do their own PR and they never do because it's a lot of work it's not about just emailing you know Lauren at the New York Times and saying hey cover me that's not going to get you a story what it is is about cultivating the right angle that meets you know the segment of of whatever they're looking to cover and appeals to them as a writer and most businesses don't have the bandwidth time or understanding of the industry to do that William in those situations you were describing did you feel as though you were on the same page with the firms you hired that expectations were set appropriately before the contract was signed some better than others I think what what I have probably wrongly assumed is it's easier to find people and get in touch with them so PR wasn't necessary but every time I hire a good PR firm a good one we end up growing and I don't you know the the part of me this Dutch which you know is allergic to overhead is like uh golly do we really have to write that check but every time we do with a good one we grow very first firm I hired was a firm that was recommended to me from my attorney who also represents a lot of our clients and it's uh a guy up on Time Square and uh he's got a fairly good-sized firm and not a one of them is a Christian and I'm sitting here trying to Market a book on pastoral sucession in Christian churches that was the reason we hired the firm was like let's go you know get our name out there and that sort of thing and I thought there's no way these guys are going to even understand what I'm doing and when we started I just talked to them on the phone whatever and they finally said you know if you'll come up here and sit down with us and figure out a strategy we can get this done they were absolutely right William if you had doubts about whether they could do it why did you hire them because my attorney told me to and he's pretty smart well isn't it Bill Gates that said that if he had $1 left he would spend it on PR yeah the problem with a lot of PR is that um or people hiring agencies is some of them go in thinking it's going to be the Band-Aid or the fix that is going to change their bottom line right and PR and building brand credibility takes time you're not going to become the sweetheart over overnight it just it rarely ever works like that and people are impatient like we you know we've had people be like well you we really want to be in the New York Times within the first three months of the relationship can you guarantee that first of all we don't guarantee anything we guarantee that we will provide transparency we guarantee that we will regularly pitch you out we guarantee that we will literally guide you along to everything that we're doing in our activities but you know sometimes your story won't stick Paul do you have any or much experience hiring public relations firms uh none none but I did manage to get in the New York Times first try so how' you do that uh I called a guy it was crazy he paid me it was amazing actually I think you emailed him first emailed him first yeah so so I'm sorry Sarah William you guys just went about it the wrong way well I I'll say Lauren uh you know looking at the article from this recent Morning Report one of the things it outlined was lack of a strategy session and I learned from my PR firm the first one I hired let's do a strategy session and it worked now they were very expensive and we used them for the campaign you know like a six-month campaign leading up to the launch of the book and I learned I think one of the things that that helped was I positioned my job for that six months as to be on call if they needed like you know the pope opened a Twitter account one day and they needed commentary for Fast Company within the next hour okay I got it so I think I had to learn that it's not just them if they need it done right away I need to make them the priority to make it work and I don't know Sarah if that's true from your perspective but yeah you have to make the reporters the priority I mean we've we've had where people are like well I sorry I don't have time to talk to that reporter today and we're like are you kidding me like you have to bend over backwards otherwise they're never going to call you back that's right I question can you walk through what was your strategy session with them I'm very curious as to what William before you answer that did you have that session before you hired them or after you hired them after I'm a one of the best book titles I've seen in a long time is the cvy book The Speed Of Trust I trust my attorney and he told me a few people that that that these guys had worked with around their books and I knew the results I'm like okay fine I'll hire them and then we did the strategy so how did you go about developing that strategy well first of all them learning what in the world I do I mean this is not a this is not anything other than a point of data but every partner in The Firm was a a Jewish guy that had no idea like so how does a pastor get hired what is that all about and what are you trying to do and we were a brand new idea to the to the church forget people that didn't go to church so they just needed to understand like who are you marketing to who do you want to reach you know what what Persona are you trying so they had to understand what we were doing and who we were selling to before they really said okay now I get it and and for me it it was I know how to write content for pastors for Headmasters of Christian schools for CEOs of nonprofits the real trick is how do you write content that will reach board members who are in any number of different Industries and that's where we went to the pr firm and said we need the business Community to recognize us for what we do and uh they did a great job they just charged a bunch of money and we didn't we were so much smaller then and we said we'll do a six-month campaign and that'll be it they're still doing great I think they're still growing and doing quite well and we stay in touch I've used PR firms when I've written a book the next book we wrote we decided to go with a a smaller group that was a little less expensive that frankly had connections in the church world and it it wasn't very good at all and I you know it may just be you get what you pay for wasn't a bad person but we just got very few placements and we were a much more reputable larger well-known company at the time uh third firm we hired was just on a oneoff it was people who were um uniquely placed for a brief season of time where I had great access to their contacts and and it and it worked great for That season of time but when they change jobs it all changed that's pretty nebulous answer but you know we're putting a book out this fall which I think is going to be pretty amazing and it's a business book so I did a targeted search for who are the best business book PR firms out there and uh made a decision and wait you didn't go back to the ones you were happy with last time no because this is this is not marketing toward Christians at all there's not one Christian reference in it it's a leadership book and it'll go to the larger business public like the Daniel pink uh Adam Grant kind of a and I wanted so you think the non-christians that the firm you used last time to Market to Christians won't be able to help you with this one which is not aimed at Christians he said they were expensive how much is expensive well isn't that a great question you know I talked to them they have since I mean this was eight years ago when I used them they've really pivoted more toward consumer goods and you know they could work with us but it would be not their specialty um so I'm like well who is the best at marketing business books in that really small space and made a decision based on that going back to the question of being expensive like what is expensive to you in in terms of book PR you know if it's costing me more then it would cost me to hire a really great top level employee then that's a lot how much would a top level employee cost I'm not going to go that far oh come on it's going to be more it's going to be north of 100 Grand right yeah that's what I was thinking yeah it's well over six fig lineup in the budget put it that way okay I'm sorry I like to know these things so does everybody who's listening Sarah and I'm curious do you think that sounds like a lot too no I mean honestly so when you hire an agency the benefit that you get is you know you get a team of people you get access to all of the tools that we use like we have you know media databases we can pull your TV appearance you know you're not just getting the the headcount you're getting access to a full Suite of research and um and data that we have available but people don't want to pay for PR there's always I get a lot of people with sticker shock when I talk to them um just because they don't understand that like there's a lot of stuff that happens in the background that they may not be aware of and it's these tools that we invest in to do it but um I did have one question for you I want to know how when you said that you researched and and looked for PR agencies that are are good at doing new books how did you go about do that like is it through referral or Googling or yeah little bit of everything I mean I stalk for a living what I do so like oh is as random as this sounds awful but literally running into Malcolm Gladwell at dinner uh to all right who does Daniel pink use who does Adam Grant use who do and just try and do a convergence around because you maybe maybe it's because I run a really Niche business that I'm a Believer in the niches but uh I I was just wondering there is there a firm or two that this is who those guys all go to like no they they know that one thing wait did you go up to his table and ask him who his PR person is well I'm not going to go into the conversation but yes I did I I am that guy that went and talked yeah yeah so uh we we have a a number of mutual friends that he's done podcasts with and for and uh so it it was fine so if you're going to the places that people in your same space go to what incentivise as a PR person to pitch you as an expert or Malcolm as an expert like that's the problem is if you all go to the same person like you're I beg to differ Sarah I beg to differ it's about when books get released they they're not going to pick me if they've got an author who has the same launch date because it's all about building a campaign around a book and a concept and you know Malcolm Gladwell is not going to present himself as an expert on spotting talent and what what talented people end up showing as their traits but you ask that question when you're vetting them right absolutely okay absolutely I want to go back to Paul for a second um Paul you mentioned that you haven't hired PR firms but you have gotten uh in touch with reporters and if people didn't realize it you were actually referring to me at the New York Times you sent me a an email and I have to say I responded because it was a very unusual email it was very genuine told me things that business owners often don't want to talk about including the fact that your business was not doing well and that I might be interested because you would be willing to talk about what it's like to go through bankruptcy happily you didn't end up having to do that but that was the start of of our relationship William similarly we had a mutual friend and who introduced us and we wound up having lunch which led to you uh writing for me at Forbes first Paul did you did you consider hiring a firm before doing that all right I don't think that my experience is replicable so we could tell the story all day I don't think so either but what I do think what you did was you gave a reporter access to the bad stuff which is what most people try to insulate themselves from you are going to say all right I'm going to show you what's going on under the hood and that's what reporters want so yeah you can do your own PR if you're willing to like show your cards a reporter is going to say yeah if you can give me unprecedented access we got a relationship Lauren I'm sure you and I met because I probably pitched you a hundred times before we even connected in real life but you know it's it's about we're constantly trying to get our clients to reveal what's under the hood because we know that's going to be interesting to them so yeah you're what you did you can replicate that but you have to be willing to do that well there also has to be an intersection between what's being offered and the time that it's being desired so I've been no I've never tried to hire PR people but I've had various I remember when I was very young somebody called me once from I think it was the Wall Street Journal and uh said hey I want to write a story about about people who were working on Wall Street and left to start woodworking businesses you know to fulfill their lives and I said well that sounds interesting but I never worked on Wall Street and so click that was it and then there was another time after I started writing for the times when someone wanted me to comment this was from a I think it was from CNN and they wanted me to be in New York in like 30 minutes or something to comment on something I was like I can't do that and I didn't even get it out of my mouth before the foam went down so well I think that just because you have an interesting story doesn't necessarily mean you're going to know where to direct it and whether that approach is going to land at the right moment and that's one of the reasons why I don't think that my story is replicable I've got it was just an astonishing piece of luck and in your question of like hey I'm two weeks from failure I'll hire a PR firm like that doesn't even make any sense I didn't have two pennies to run together no you're right it doesn't make any sense to ask you why you didn't hire a PR firm like who would do that anybody who would do that would have failed years before I did because but I do agree with Sarah that what you your experience there was replicable because you offered something that was likely to get a response from a journalist well I didn't know that I mean Paul your experience of like getting these these um inbound requests from reporters and them hanging up on you because you couldn't do it when I was a reporter like you do the whoever calls back first wins sometimes because you're on Deadline you're trying to find somebody to talk about a specific subject that is trending in the news and Paul if if you don't have the time to do it or you know the background appropriate they're just going to hang up and move on to the next person because that's the demands of their job yeah I after it happened to me once or twice I was like I get it these people are busy they got 24 hours of content to produce every day and they're not going to mess around what you can do is if you want to establish that relationship that no I can't but I can connect you with this person who can because if you can maintain that relationship and provide them an Avenue to connect with somebody else they're going to continue to want to connect with you because you've been useful to them well okay is that a good use of my time that's probably almost always no and so as a small business owner you got to play the percentages and I'm often presented with possible courses of action that have a low expected payoff per hour of effort and I just have learned to just be like ain't doing that I could I could get a better deal on on my trash collection and make more money so that's just how I think about it it depends on your priorities like if you're a small tech company right and and you think that you know getting in the New York Times is going to help get more investors to invest in you then you're you're going to see that that's a worthwhile um uh effort for you to go about but like if your situation may not it may not result in I you may have aspirations for that while I have the floor I just wanted to say one thing about strategy to go back to that is that the one way I think um to the best way to determine whether an agency has has um an ability to assist you with strategy and help you figure out your target audience is by looking at their blog my blog for our company is very specific everything we write is written for and curated for the people who may hire us so it's it's it's written with the CMO the communications director or the VP of Communications in mind that is our audience I can't tell you how many blogs are out there put out by PR agencies that are like how to do PR how to get into PR and I'm like why are you wasting time it it's maybe it's good for recruiting but really you should be reaching out to the people who want to hire you by creating content that's interesting to them and useful to them my last blog I wrote was about how to put together a good request for proposal so that you'll be able to get all the details you want from a potential agency you know that useful to that audience well could I comment that possibly the people who are writing the the what you call fastel blogs are just making an SEO play to try to get their website to uh show up when people ask that question well what are even if they're doing it just for SEO you really want your SEO to be about making your way into PR getting your first job in PR like that's not the SEO that you want if you want to use it to to drive business we we we SEO optimize all of our blogs too but like we're optimizing it for key words that are going to gain us visibility with decision makers Paul I want to challenge something you said uh when you talked about the the relative merits of spending your time talking to a reporter versus trying to get a better deal on trash collection I really wonder if if you're right about that I mean if you got the Wall Street Journal to write about your firm because it makes high-end conference tables that show up in boardrooms all over the country and you've done you know projects for the Pentagon and lots of other high-end places that you could name I think that might be more valuable to you than a good deal in trash collection is that really what you meant yeah and it's based on experiences I had a long time ago back in the 80s and 90s when I was starting out and I would land some feature in the local newspaper or the local lifestyle magazine and it was always very exciting but it never really actually led to any any uh real work what what has led to work for me is ongoing regular appearances in places people are looking for the product and that took two forms prior to 2003 I would just run ads in a local magazine and that got a response and after 2003 we stumbled into extremely favorable search results for from Google and that's there every day and I I just am not as excited anymore about sort of the you know your day on the front page of this or that because it it just disappears so quickly how do you quantify like how did you know that that article didn't get did you do you every time you somebody comes into your shop do you ask them the question of like how they how they found you absolutely I've been doing that since 1987 so yeah I mean if if there was if there was an immediate bump I would have known it and I've got data going back decades about the number of inquiries per month and where they come from and it's very granular at this point and I think that one of the things that I mean I may be hijacking the show but I think it's very important when you're a small business to think carefully about what is actually going to move the needle now press coverage is always exciting it's cool to be in the in the front page to have your picture B everybody's very excited your friends see it but those things may not have the same long-term value as actually sorting out something like trash collection or some other internal process that could deliver you profits in a way that a single shot at press coverage would not do so I'm I'm just skeptical about about the value of that and let me just give you another counterfactual so I wrote 179 columns in the New York YK times over four years and I don't know how how many people read those Lauren Millions probably I got a total of one job out of that as far as I could tell now there was utility in having a outbound link from the times to my site that really helped our SEO but in terms of people who just read what I wrote and then wanted to buy a table from me it was one and so if it was just me appearing one day one one uh one story I don't think that that is generally as valuable as whatever you can set up that's ongoing regular puts your name in front of the people you need all the time that's a PR program like a one hit wander getting in the New York Times once is not going to do what you want it to do you need to have a ongoing PR campaign where you're constantly reaching out um and building back links from other outlets you know like the the backlink is is King especially for your SEO you know so people can find you you come up in search when somebody says I need a new conference table you're you the more the more backlinks that you have leading to your website is going to increase your CR credibility and and give you what you want to do but you know even the local newspapers they have pretty high domain authorities and getting a backlink from them nowaday was really value but you have to look at it as like a a cumulative thing you know like you can't expect a lot from a one hit Wonder okay well I'm I'm going to bow out of using myself as a model of anything because I don't think anything about my business experience has been replicable I got the top search results from from Google gave them to me for nothing I had done nothing at all never at a backlink to anybody they just chose a picture on my website one day so now that was 2003 and maybe Google just operates differently but I've had in my in my business life two remark able Strokes of luck that changed everything and I did very little for one and nothing for the other and the very little was writing an email to Lauren which took me 15 minutes and nothing was being in the right place at right time for Google so again you can ask me the question I'm giving you the honest answer of what my experience suggests which is the pr has not moved the needle for me I would point out on that that the columns you're talking about the posts that you wrote ran in a small business blog in the New York Times so was read primarily by small business owners uh during the Great Recession um and the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession and and that might have had an impact I'm curious it might have William you have uh you've had a similar experience you've ridden a lot for Forbes um not necessarily being read by your your primary customers your target audience do you feel that's moved the needle for you in any way 100% how so well I don't if I knew how I'd start a PR firm and charge people for it oh I mean I've got some ideas I do think Sarah could probably speak into this better than me but one of the decisions that I was not happy with with our business that the SEO people told me to do was the naming of our company I didn't want to be I didn't want it to be named after me I've got a weird name you guys have heard the story before the SEO guys are like yeah but your name is so weird you can misspell it and it'll come up so when I write for Forbes and my name as an author out there my brand is out there too so it's helped a ton and I think we're also a little bit different we're not building conference tables there is no barrier for entry into search you just say I do search hang a shingle now you're a search guy I've tried to position our work as thought leadership and not vendor I've tried to say we're we're a trusted advisor not a big Rolodex that requires creating content that people view as you know thought leadership trusted advice the the book we wrote on pastoral succession my mother thought she was going to have to buy all 12 copies of it I mean are you kidding me William you're writing a book about what in the world are you thinking I'm like no no no no this is going to be the book this is going to be in all of the Seminary libraries where that's the goal the goal isn't to sell a million of them the goal is to be the trusted resource on this one topic and it's really proven to to be a huge differen maker so I have a an unusually dependent relationship on content and that may not be true if you're manufacturing tables or if it's Jay with frames or you know I don't know other businesses and U Lawrence heard me say I've got a religion and Philosophy degree like most people that have a philosophy degree then their career saying do you want fries with that you know like I so I'm not the business guy but for me we're forever wed to producing good content and then if my author name is the same as our brand name it goes so when I get a PR placement like that PR firm those guys in New York they really like they got the Chicago Tribune to write a feature in their Sunday edition called the rise of the pastor search firm like how good is that that's good I was in London on a for a Tony Robbins conference and they got me an interview with the BBC in studio like how good is that so it's made a ton of difference for us but but we probably are a little bit of a weird business all right I want I want to move to a different topic but but first I just want to alert all the philosophy Majors out there that they should send their letters directly to William and not to me I want to go back to Paul uh Paul you may not uh have hired Public Relation so you're not disagreeing with me Lauren well as as as the father of a philosophy major um maybe we'll have to have a conversation uh offline at some point Paul you don't uh hire PR firms but you have been spending a decent amount of money on a marketing campaign every time you're on I ask you if you have anything new to report and you never disappoint so I'm going to ask again any anything new in how that campaign is progressing uh we're finally there's been a there's been a big hangup that is my fault which is part of the introductory uh research that we conducted with this marketing firm turned up information about our target market Architects and interior designers which made it clear that our existing website was not a good fit for that market and since then we've been building a new one and uh got to the point where it needed to have all the content loaded and put into it and I'm I'm sort of a a fool in that I insist on every word on all my websites should be written well by me and uh my current website breaks all those rules because the web guys wanted to have it written for SEO results which is fine but I'm just finishing up this new website the way I want it it's a very different website and I'm I'm about a week away but I got very hung up in trying to help my sales team get us out of a sales hole for the last 2 or 3 months and uh because we were way behind pace and running out of work and we've recently turned it around uh as of yesterday and I should be finishing up the website either tomorrow or early next week and then we can resume with the sort of the outbound portion of the marketing campaign which is trying to support or trying to drive traffic to the to the new website using uh what I think is called programmatic advertising and I have my doubts about it but I'm kind of have to let these people have a shot at it so that's where we're at delays on my part and but we're ready to to launch very soon how did you dig yourself out of the sales hole I don't know we had our best year ever last year and every day we came in and we did five things and we were doing the same five things at the beginning of the year and they weren't working and then we continued to do the same five things because they've worked pretty well for the last three decades and now they're working again so I think that it's it's maybe just a blip it may have been some some Lull in the Stream of projects that uh that is a a lingering result of the pandemic but I really I couldn't tell you based on my experience is everything you do you know you try to figure out what works and eventually you're going to arrive at stuff that works almost all the time but it never works all the time and you get into weird blips where it either works better or worse than it should and uh it's good to know the difference and to understand whether there's something you're doing or whether everything you're doing is likely to work at some point and you should just keep doing it as opposed to messing around with it and that was my thought when we saw sales slow down at the beginning of the year was I thought very hard like are we doing something different are we doing something worse is there something about our pricing is there and I just couldn't come up with anything that we were doing different everything that we were doing had worked great last year so I just decided to write it out I told my people hey we're in we're in a fix our backlogs disappearing but we're it's not going yet so we got work to do let's keep going and I'll finally be able to get up in front of on Monday and say see I told you we just had to wait around and now we got the orders we needed so take of that what you will Sarah or William have either of you ever been in that kind of position where you're wondering whether you should keep doing what's worked in the past or try something different uh I never keep doing the same thing I'm like I'm obsessed with doing finding efficiencies and doing things differently all the time which is probably also has its faults but I are are you talking in general or about sales specifically about sales like yeah you know but maybe it's because I haven't hit that like one thing that will get us new business for for PR at least I think we've talked about this before it's like you don't advertise like it's all through referral and building reputation and I'm sure William has the same thing it's like you don't necessarily advertise you create content you you you show up in places um and so I have not discovered that one magic thing that is that drives all of our traffic I would love to hear what William has to say on the topic well I'd love to have a great answer there are a few constants Lauren that and this is going to sound canned but the best tool that our sales team has is US performing good work you're only as good as your last search and if we're doing good work it's a lot easier to sell making sure our quality control is right and our deliverables are good I become much more interested in that as a sales tool than ever before another constant and one of the reasons I think Lauren you and I ended up being friends is we we're both big Believers in providing good content you provide good content and people will listen that's like the new magic advertisement beyond that I'm kind of with you Sarah I don't want to you know the seven last words of the church you ever hear this phrase I I won't get it I'll probably say it in eight words but it's we've never done it that way it's a common joke in the church you know it's this supposed to be this Maverick thing founded by a young guy who got killed for his you know uh teachings beliefs and it's quickly turned into one of those calcified things in the world so I'm always telling our folks we we can't turn into that old church that'll never try anything new like we can't let that happen we recently did a a marketing study of ourselves like what's worked in the past when have we seen the biggest growth and it's usually when we're like a half a step ahead on a op in a new trend right before anybody else Twitter right when it came out I mean I HubSpot when it was a new thing um so so we're we're now like looking for what is the next new thing and how do we ad adopt it a little quicker than others so it's I guess I'm a mixture of a few constants good steady work great content and a pattern that has shown up of us finding a new thing and doing it just a little bit sooner than everybody else we just about out of time I just want to run one more thing by all of you which is I've been reading a lot of stories lately about tipping and about how a lot of consumers are getting annoyed by constantly being asked to tip in places where they didn't used to get asked to tip none of you rely on tip to income but you're all consumers of things I'll raise my hand yeah it annoys the hell out of me and uh I find that the easiest way to deal with it is to use cash and if it's a situation where I don't even have to think about interacting with a person during the actual exchange of funds I just don't tip like I order online from a local Indian restaurant and I'm going to go pick it up and they're asking me for a tip and I'm just like well no sorry if you want want more money raise your prices but don't ask me to give you extra when I'm not actually receiving a service so I'm pretty crusty about that I don't I don't like doing it at all I like to be the best Tipper the guys had all day and and it's because I've had that job a number of times and you you are forever making somebody mad either the cook because you're asking for something special or the bartender for the same reason or the people because you can't provide what they need and it I mean it was just one of the hardest jobs I've ever had and it was funny invariably I'd wait on a table with people that I knew were people of means and I I actually would find napkins where they' figured out exactly what 15% was and not one penny more and then I'd wait tables and get these huge tips and I'd ask what do you do for them oh I wait tables so I've got a soft spot and having said that it bugs me to no end when I go to a pickup food counter where I've had there's been no service and I'm asked to provide a a gratuiti so coming from the guy who loves to be very gracious with tips it makes me crazy yeah that's exactly where I am if I'm sitting down at a restaurant and someone's busting they're but to to get me the food I understand it's a hard job I'm a big Tipper in those particularly if it's a cheap restaurant like I might leave 15 bucks on a $20 bill if it's like some little breakfast joint and Lany Michigan like why not that doesn't hurt me at all but I'm getting service it's when it's sort of tacked on just to see what happens that's what bugs me totally agree Sarah the automated kiosks now where it's like built into their systems like I think when they first came out I would just I would tip because I it showed up and I need to tip and I guess that's what you do now that we're out of covid because nobody's touching things and but they still need their tips but now I say no and every time I hit no I feel guilty I feel like somebody's watching me well sometimes someone is if you're you know you can pay that way in a convenience store or something and they turn the thing around and they're watching you as you hit no right it it it is uncomfortable it is very uncomfortable and you know it's they do at the grocery store near me too where they ask you if you want to round up and donate and I have very specific Charities that I donate to and I I while I admire the grocery store for doing that like no I'm not going to round up because I'm giving my donation to an organization I've given to for the last 25 years like it it makes me feel uncomfortable to do that I think it's helping businesses facilitating tipping because people don't carry cash anymore more like I don't have cash in my wallet maybe maybe have $3 or something like that but like it's very rare that I have cash with me so I have a feeling that this is helping bring tips back up that said also in my industry I would love to have tips how would that work Sarah well we we once had a client who gave us a really big bonus at the end of the year they're like yeah we're sending you a bonus and we're like never heard of that before ever in my years of PR they were like we're really happy with all the work that you did and we're just so delighted because we had gotten them in Fast Company and a bunch of other stuff and you know it was fantastic it was really like a a great feather in our cap and you know I I think that people hire us as a service but don't like we have clients we like literally we're getting them hits every week um and it's in great places and they're like okay great next one we're like H it would wouldn't be bad be tipped for like an extra good job I think that it would make my team feel good like we we apply for awards and we win Awards and it makes my team feel good so I think that you know if that people my clients want to start tipping us I wouldn't I wouldn't be opposed to that so we're kind of coming full circle here you you need to start a PR campaign advocating for PR firms yes I need that not for me but more for my team we'll check back with you Sarah to see how that's going I'll I'll let you know what happens all right my thanks to Paul down Sarah seagull and William vanderlan and to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com thanks everybody wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcast follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by just tharon founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone hey [Music]