I’m a business owner. A small-business owner. A woman-small-business owner. Every year my business partner and I reflect on how we got here (props to Talking Heads…) We were both earning a good salary, living life without too many bumps or bruises. What was that impulse? Mutual outrage.
I was 38 with two small boys, and a husband in the process of changing careers via start-ups. My naiveté and impatience overshadowed the fact that I was basically the sole breadwinner. And my now-business partner and I had a dynamic that allowed us to amp up our annoyance at the incompetence (or so we thought) and dysfunction that surrounded us at our previous firm. In our view the workflow was cumbersome and the pressure to scream through a project and move to the next was inherently flawed. What if we were able to just dig in and really invest in our clients. Give them honest counsel? Tell them when an idea stunk and was doomed to fail? Hmm, it might actually be more “fun.” Wouldn’t they see the value in our partnership? See we were better than a competitor that just treated their business as a commodity? A few industry veterans suggested no. That volume is where profit is realized. Get efficient, close a sale, hand the project off to the internal staff, move on to the next sale and repeat.
Despite that advice…we launched Boom 15 years ago. Our philosophy? “Fewer clients, more personal attention.” If that sounds familiar, you must be a Jerry Maguire fan…remember the “memo”? It was called “The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business” and got him fired. Well — we didn’t get fired, but walked away from a pretty good gig to try to do it better. And…I think we’ve succeeded. The business of media relations and content placement (broadcast PR), has been, is and will keep on evolving. In fact, our “keep it simple” business model allowed us to weather the effects of the 2008 recession on marketing agencies pretty well. There was no term “virtual office” then, but that’s what we had created simply to do away with unnecessary overhead. We tapped the talent we had worked with and for years. No one was cutting their teeth on the business. Everyone was treated as a professional. And something funny happened the first week we were official: two of the biggest consumer brands in the country came to us for help. Both client contacts happened to be women who knew us personally, how we operated, and how we had treated them. We were off and running.
I write this in hopes to inspire you — if you have long been dreaming, thinking, imagining what your thing might be, if you’re ready to cut the chord — it doesn’t have to be some crazy leap. Maybe it’s just the simple reality that you can do it a
little better. Maybe a little smaller, but a little better. Technology, industry evolution aside — people are still people and want to be considered, listened to, and supported.
For our part, we can’t control the demands of marketers, objectives, and analytics, but as long as we stay focused on the principal that inspired us to go it on our own…I’m confident we’ll keep on keepin’ on. A small aside: as evidence of the work and the payoffs, we recently had the honor of working to support the first responders during the Carolina floods and California fires via @musicforrelief — and were flattered to be recognized among other much bigger players (CAA, Universal, Waner Music Group…) — it’s work like this that feeds that idea we hatched (borrowed…) 15 years ago. Onward!
You can check out more of the cool stuff we get to work on and just a few of the many messages we care about here.
Tales From The Bleachers 