PR: A Noble Calling? - Newsroom Confidential

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PR: A Noble Calling?

By Dean Rotbart

Every small business owner needs a personal public relations agent. Don't laugh. Along with a competent accountant, lawyer, banker and advertising guru, a personal PR person is a MUST for any business with $250 million or less of annual sales.

Whether you operate a day care center in Detroit, a car wash in Indiana, a plumbing company in Austin or a computer software concern in San Jose, good public relations can make your business vastly more successfully and your personal satisfaction quotient soar.

Recognition is a wonderful thing. It pulls customers in the door. It boosts your credibility with vendors and lenders. It elevates your status as a business leader/expert. And, perhaps, most importantly, it is something you and your family can be so proud of.

I recently interviewed an elderly widow who along with her husband ran a corner grocery store for many years in Denver, Colorado.

Life for Millie and Ben had always been hard and money scarce. The grocery business was a 6-day-a-week business that required rising before sunrise and seldom finishing until well into the evening.

I was writing about Millie and her grocery because I'm fascinated by how vital a part of every neighborhood's fabric family groceries once were and I'm vexed by how little real recognition these grocers ever received for their contributions.

Millie lives in a tiny, tired house that doesn't look like its seen a fresh sofa, chair, rug or coat of paint since she closed the business after Ben's death more than two decades ago.

"What was your proudest moment?" I asked Millie, who passes most of her days now in a tattered recliner in her cluttered living room. With some effort, Millie rose from the recliner and walked over to a nearby chest, where she pulled a yellowed, folded newspaper clipping out of the top drawer, handing it to me.

I unfolded it, its quarters held together now only by shards of newsprint fibers, and revealed a front page photo in The Denver Post of her and Ben behind the counter when they were both young and the store very much alive.

"There were so many grocers, I don't know to this day why they picked us to photograph," Millie told me. "But we were so proud."

Truth be told, I was sad for Millie and think she is wrong. While press coverage feels good, in the broader scheme of life it isn't nearly as important as what your family, friends and customers think of you and remember you for.

But I understood in listening to Millie the enduring value that a public nod or pat on the back can have to those who labor largely unseen and unappreciated.

Whether your small business is a corner grocery or an Inc. 500 food processor, chances are you went into business with the aim of making money but have found that goal, alone, either elusive or hollow. Money in the bank is still a great goal, but so is the satisfaction entrepreneurs enjoy when they see the product of their labors and the satisfaction of their customers.

Media recognition of those achievements is an exquisite form of validation. Moreover, it is a noble goal for PR people, who too often market their services to the highest bidder - those who can afford the service but often don't really merit the attention.

I think helping good, hard working business people and volunteers achieve the recognition and success they rightly deserve is a noble calling. It is the main reason I write this FREE column. The difference between those who get the media's nod and those who don't is seldom merit. More often than not, it's know-how.

My grocer friend Millie got lucky. She still doesn't know how. Most business owners are too darn poor to actually hire a PR person and too darn busy to acquire the know how for themselves. Even those fortune entrepreneurs who find they've got the resources to hire a PR agency often find they would have better spent their money at the roulette wheel in Las Vegas. Such are the odds of find a truly competent, low-budget PR agency.

Reading my column won't make you a PR expert. But it will give you some rudimentary tools to do it yourself and, in my honest belief, to do it better for yourself than anyone you can afford to hire to do it for you.

Although I have advised some the largest companies in the world on how to improve their public relations, I myself am a small business person (publishing my own newsletter and magazine for 15-plus years) and have been featured or quoted in nearly 500 different stories in publications as influential as The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and so many more.

I don't want you to expect as much. That isn't realistic or honest. Most of you will be doing well to end up quoted or featured in your neighborhood newspaper or local daily. But it still feels damn good and it still helps bring customers and business through the door.

As a small business owner you already wear so many varied hats. I strongly recommend you add "PR Agent" to your professional wardrobe.

April 27, 2002