John Bliss audio story - the downside of going downmarket in tough times

John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. This story is part of a longer interview from 2010. John talks about the risks of going downmarket to get clients when the economy turns bad.

You can listen to the story here (1:48).

Transcript:

I will have been in business 35 years on June 1. I've seen a number of economic cycles. There's good times and there's bad times. One lesson that keeps coming back and was proven again in 2009, which was not an easy year: there is always a tendency to go downmarket in bad times, so you have revenue coming in the door, so you don't have to lay off people.

It hurts, because even unsophisticated clients who don't pay as much, they're still going to require an enormous amount of time. And, in down times, you're still going to run the risk of them not paying you. And we ran into that in 2009. It didn't hurt us badly, but it hurt.

If we took 5 clients that we wouldn't normally have taken, I wish we'd only taken, say, 2 of those. Because that we could have absorbed that more easily. So that's another lesson.

At the time, it's tough to remember that, when you see your base clients reducing their fees. And you're reading scary economic headlines. You feel, any business almost is good business.

John Bliss audio story - a couple of hiring mistakes

John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. This story is part of a longer interview from 2010. John states that hiring experienced people was much more risky than "growing your own," and provides two examples.

You can listen to the story here (3:30).

Transcript:

Your biggest mistakes are going to be your hires that don't work out. Because you invest a certain amount of time in .. And then once you've hired them, our philosophy always was, we'd rather wait too long to fire than fire too quickly. And I think that's the right posture. But it also means that when you make mistakes you pay a little bit more for it.

The area of biggest mistakes, and I would bet you could talk to a lot of entrepreneurs in a service business like mine, and they would have had the same experience. Lateral hires - in other words, people that you hire from other companies, instead of growing from your own entry level - lateral hires are an area rife with potential disaster.

And we had a number of potential - um - actual disasters. The thought is you hire somebody with experience and connections and maybe can even bring in a little business. And what we find is invariably almost complete disappointment. This is true for lateral hires from a number of areas.

One, we hired somebody who had experience working in PR departments of 3 or 4 major corporations. And he was a perfectly nice guy. But people that are corporate animals are absolutely unfit for the entrepreneurial environment. They're too political in what they do, because in big corporations there's too much politics. They're more concerned with appearances than with actualities. And we learned that through a couple of painful experiences - we didn't want to hire people from big corporate PR departments.

But we didn't extrapolate from that lesson #2, which is that we shouldn't hire people from big PR firms. Because we hired someone from a big PR firm, and we said, "We're an entrepreneurial organization, Sometimes you're going to have to take orders from people 20 years younger than you. Is that a problem?" "Oh, no, no."

"You're going to share an office. Is that a problem?" "Oh, no, no." So we hired her and of course both of those things were huge problems. She was stuck in the same kind of bureaucratic mindset as people from big corporations.

So, a couple of those hires we paid dearly for. We lost time and momentum because they were in house. The only saving grace is, talking to heads of other PR firms, I think we haven't made more mistakes than anybody else, and actually may have made a few less.

But mistakes they were. And they're painful when they happen.

John Bliss audio story - for entrepreneurs, the cost of losing focus

John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. This story is part of a longer interview from 2010. John discusses getting more and more involved with a nonprofit side project, and the challenges that created in his main business.

You can listen to the story here (2:37).

John Bliss audio story - don't give away equity for nothing

John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. He sat down for a lengthy interview in 2010, from which this story is excerpted. John talks about inviting a partner in when he started his PR business, since "50% of something is better than 100% of nothing." But when the business changed, the partner's role became less important, and John had to eventually buy him out.

You can listen to the story here (3:01).