Challenges for Early-Stage Companies (ft. Rachel Ford Hutman)

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marx.

Hey, it's Ed here. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. First off, I wanna say thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into us every week. As a result, we hit over 1 million downloads this week. We're recording in early July, 2025. And thank you so much. And the other reason is because we have great guests like Rachel Ford Hutman. Rachel, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thank you. I'm absolutely honored. Been a fan for, for a long time. So thank you for having me.

I'm really excited. You have a CEO perspective, great leadership of the Ford Hutman Media, and you're a board member. And we'll maybe talk a little bit about that. And so you may know from listening to some previous podcast that the very first question we have is, what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

I love this question, I have to say. So I am a huge Imagine Dragons fan.

Oh, yeah.

Right? I find their music so inspiring. I'll listen to it a lot of times at work for sure. And then my second one would be Rufus, which I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're a little like electro techno pop kind of. But they also, I find very inspiring too. So I always have music on, like while I'm working for sure.

Yeah, that's cool. We're gonna add Rufus. We do have a Spotify playlist for digital voices. I don't think we've had Rufus mentioned previously, so we'll be sure to add them.

If you guys haven't listened to it, you're gonna love it. I'll send you a couple of their best ones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please do. That'd be a lot of fun. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you live by or help guide you?

Oh my gosh, absolutely. So as a communicator, as a writer, I have always been in love with words. I had a quote book ever since I was a little kid that I still have. So this is a really tough question. I did drill down to one though, which is Emily Dickinson's, if your nerve deny you, go above your nerve.

I love it. Yeah, I love it. I'm just writing it down myself because we also are starting a, a separate list of everyone's mantras because we've done like Almost 300 recordings now. And so we've learned a lot from great people like yourself. So we're keeping tabs of, of everyone's words of wisdom.

Oh my God. I honestly, I love it. I also have The Man in the Arena. Um, the poem by Roosevelt over here behind me. You guys can't see it cuz we're only on audio, but yeah, I'm obsessed with the written word and just quotes all over my house for sure.

I love that one. In my conference room when I served at Texas Health Resources, I had that like giant emblazoned around the entire conference room because I wanted people to feel like this was a safe place and we should battle it out and do it for all the right reasons and not worry about what others think and so forth. So tell us a little bit about you before we jump into a lot of the different questions I have about your career and about learning from you about communication and leadership. Tell us about yourself.

Absolutely, absolutely. So a Maryland girl, absolutely love the state of Maryland and I've always loved water. And so I was always obsessed with moving to California and learning to surf. And so I did that. And in my 20s, I moved to California and got my master's in journalism at San Diego State. And I ended up staying in California for 20 years and learning to surf and fell in love with the beach. And they have an amazing PR community out there in San Diego. I've recently moved back to my roots and I'm still in the water. I'm a mom. I'm a mom of a 13-year-old boy who's currently driving me crazy with the whole teenage thing. I'm also a very spiritual person. Like I mentioned, I love words. I'm into yoga. Surfing is another one of my big hobbies for sure.

Wow. I did try surfing one time and I failed so badly. I could not even stand up on the board.

It was bad waves and bad teachers. I should have been teaching you. I always tell everybody, you know, you can't— you have to take them out slowly in gentle waves. You can't just throw them in there, you know, with the big stuff.

Yeah, it's still something that I'd love to do. And at one time, my wife and I, we were in Portugal just driving around. We stumbled upon this. I can't remember the name of the city, but it's like where the biggest waves in the world are.

Yeah. Nazaré? Nazareth?

Yeah, that's it.

Yes. Those are terrifying. Yeah. No wonder you're not wanting to get back out there. I'll take you to some good baby waves in San Diego and we'll do it right.

We'll definitely try that out. That'll be a lot of fun. So how did you choose media and specifically life sciences?

Yeah, so I actually wanted to be a reporter like yourself. I thought I was gonna be a journalist and I got my first job as a reporter at a local news outlet in San Diego. And I was so excited, you know, I felt like I was finally doing what I wanted to do. And then the financial crash hit in 2008 and my newsroom, half the newsroom got laid off. including myself. And so I remember my editor looked at me, Ed, and he was like, I don't know about the future of journalism. Like, you might want to look at other careers. So I got home and was kind of licking my wounds, and I remember saying to my husband, you know, these PR people are always pitching me. That seems kind of easy. I think I could do that.

Yeah.

I'm gonna try that. And I kid you guys not, at that point I had my master's in journalism and communications, But I didn't have a PR job. Financial crash just hit, you know, jobs wiped out. I could not find a job to save my life. I got turned down, I think, from 8 PR firms for an internship.

Wow.

And finally, the 9th PR firm took a chance on me because of my journalism background. And I had to start at the bottom. I had a master's degree and I had to start with an internship, not getting paid, but I was grateful for the experience. And it was very humbling. And I'm so glad I went through that. And then as far as the life sciences go, being in San Diego, it's a very biotech-heavy industry. And so thankfully that first agency was in biotech. And so I just fell in love with biotech. My mom actually had her life saved on a clinical trial. And so it kind of all came full circle for me because I always had a lot of respect for the healthcare industry. And so now all of a sudden I was able to put my two kind of passions together.

Yeah, that, that's amazing.

Yeah.

And that kind of explains how you moved from working for others and creating your own agency, which is, uh, super cool. And obviously the catalyst that made that happen. So you get to work with a wide variety of professionals, and I'm really curious, you know, how that might help some of our listeners. What are one or two areas that companies, like when you take on a client, what are one or two areas that most companies need help with?

Oh my gosh, I love this question, Ed. So I have worked with companies, you know, at all stages of development, currently focusing more on earlier stage companies. And I think one of the biggest things is that they don't really understand thought leadership, which is really what communications and where I sit in the media relations world do. And so for anyone who doesn't understand, thought leadership is really sharing your expertise with the industry. But it's not a direct sales tactic, right? 'Cause that's marketing and advertising. So a lot of companies get confused there and they try to put public relations and communications into that marketing advertising bucket. And we're very separate. So we support sales, but we're not directly sales.

Right.

And I actually spoke on a conference about this recently to a bunch of earlier stage companies and their minds were blown because everyone's an expert in something, right? And so I was trying to help those companies understand you have to figure out what you're an expert in, and that's what the media cares about, right? So say we're talking to probably a lot of digital health folks right now. Say your company really helps hospitals, right? You're able to help hospitals with, you know, getting surgical procedures done more efficiently through AI. Well, that's your expertise. So we want to talk to the media about maybe hospitals where you've had impact.

Yeah.

How you've maybe helped physician shortage, right? Like, what's the problem you're solving? And so I really work with companies to pull out that expertise and then share that externally with whatever audiences they're trying to target— media, investors, hospitals, whatever it is.

Yeah, you probably can't give the name of a company, and that's okay. But can you give an example of a company, like just what we're talking about, where they were sort of struggling, you came in and helped them, and what were the results?

Yeah, so happy to share kind of specific examples. One of the companies actually I'm currently working with, and I think I think they'd be more than happy to have their name mentioned. The company's called Lionis Bio, and they have an amazing diagnostic test that can detect autism in children as young as 1 month of age using a strand of hair. And so this is super exciting. The challenge is it's not FDA approved yet, but it is CLIA lab approved, which is what you actually need to be able to sell this type of test in the United States. So we want to get the word out in regards to this. test, right? But I was explaining to them that what the media cares about is really the impact of the test, and so we really needed those caregiver stories basically of children having autism diagnosed earlier. And so that was something we really worked to start to garner, and it takes time. You don't have those initially out of the gate. So we did a lot of groundwork, we call it in the beginning, which is kind of reaching out to people, talking about the promise of the technology. But again, reporters and media aren't as excited about the promise, right? They want impact. They want results. So once we started, we're now getting those caregiver stories, and now we're really starting to see impact with the media. We've had some great results with the media, and it's because of those caregivers talking about how this has changed their lives, right? Having their children diagnosed earlier, being able to have these children treated earlier. All research shows the earlier you can detect ALS, autism, the better the chance for the child to have the best life possible. And so, and then timing, right? We just got lucky with timing. You know, there's been so much in the news lately regarding autism. So while, you know, this technology has been in development for 20 years at Mount Sinai, we just happened to time things perfectly. We didn't time it, but just the way the news cycle works, right? Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't.

Yeah.

Sometimes you don't and you got to get even more creative, but that's been for me very inspiring seeing now we have those stories and the media's really starting to latch on.

Yeah. 'Cause basically you could have the greatest product, but if you don't get this communication right and this thought leadership piece separate from sales, you may go nowhere. Similarly, you may have an average product, but if you have excellent communication, right, and you time things right.

It's so, honestly, Ed, it's so true. I'm glad you brought up the importance of, of communication, right? Yeah.

And words.

And simplifying. And I think a lot of digital health companies particularly have a lot of challenges with this. It's like they think more is more and you have to be very clear, concise. As you know, reporters, like they're not following your company day to day. I heard this from a potential new client the other day, won't name a name.

Right.

But he basically was frustrated that everyone didn't know what the technology did. And I'm thinking, why would they? You know, nobody's— you're following your company and your technology every day, but we're not all sitting there with magnifying glasses doing that. And so I think that's maybe a little bit of like hubris or something where you need to understand that if they're not understanding what you do, it might be because you're not communicating it accurately.

Yeah. And that goes to my next question, which is down to the individual level. So we talked about the companies and what they need to do. But what are you seeing in most pe— like the average leader that you run into and how, what are one or two things that you might share with them to make them better? Because I know a lot of the audience is listening and they're probably thinking to themselves, hmm, there's probably some things I can do better. So your observations over the years, what are those one or two things?

One or two things they can do better. I would say really trusting your consultants if you are outsourcing something. And this is something I've really seen. a struggle with earlier-stage CEOs because they're so used to doing everything. It's hard for them to let go of control and it ends up overwhelming them. And then they become a bottleneck too. So, then things aren't able to move forward because they're not able to review a document or they think they need to review every document. Like, you probably just need to review it at the end of the process. And so, really trusting those people around you and hiring, that's the other thing, hiring really well, right? What's that Silicon Valley saying? Hire slowly, but fire quickly.

Yeah.

Right? It's true. You know, I think you need to be very, very diligent in who you're bringing onto the team and bring the best and then trust them. And that's in-house as well. I think a lot of times CEOs, especially if they've founded the technology or created the technology, they become so married to it. And I've seen a lot of CEOs fail, honestly, because they're not able to realize They can't control everything.

Yeah. No, I could, as you're saying that, I'm like, well, I could think of myself making similar mistakes.

I mean, honestly, Ed, me too sometimes, right? It's like we, you just think you have to touch everything and honestly, it's not the truth.

Since this is Digital Voices, are there any sort of digital tools that you leverage in your practice that helps these companies and these individuals?

Yeah, absolutely. So internally we've been using a few different things. We use something called Asana to really track time. time, and we use that a lot for our billing structure, and that's been really good. Project management, I guess that's really helpful there. FreshBooks, that's where actually that's more of like our invoicing and things like that. I'm a big fan of that one. I'm starting to dabble with ChatGPT more, I have to say. My husband, who is our Chief Operating Officer, he loves ChatGPT. I keep joking that he should be getting paid like PR fees because he's like proselytizing this thing everywhere.

Right.

Are you using it that much yet?

Yeah, I use it to supplement some of my work for sure.

I am finding it helpful with research. Like I love, like I needed something done. I needed to understand the real-world evidence landscape and IPOs in the last 5 years. I put that in and it brought out, you know, and I needed it concise. That's the other thing, right? It's like, I don't have time to read 5 pages. And it gave me this nice like one-pager and I was like, thank you. And that was amazing. So for research, I am enjoying it. What else are we using? I think those are probably the main, main things. And then we have some stuff that's media specific that your reader or listeners probably wouldn't care about. But Muck Rack is something we use to really understand journalists like yourself. And that gives us a really cool background on the journalist and like your most recent articles. And that's really important because if you are pitching media, which some of your clients might be, if they don't actually, if they haven't got to the stage where they can hire a consultant.

Right.

If you are pitching someone, and I'm sure you're going to appreciate this, Ed, read and understand what they do, right? Like, step one.

Yeah, it is amazing some of the very simple things that just aren't done. And, you know, that's one easy way for anyone, any person individually or company, to double their capabilities or, you know, their progress is just to Learn and, you know, about whoever they're working with or their prospects or whatever.

Or just keep learning. Sorry to interrupt you, but I read this great article by Mark Cuban the other day on Inc., and he was talking about the reason he's been so successful is because he's never stopped learning.

Yeah.

Yeah. That really inspired me. But he was like, if you're not continuing to learn, he was like, you're behind.

Yeah. And the whole thing on AI, you know, what I, what concerns me and I, and I see it, You can see it. You just go to LinkedIn and you can see it.

Yeah.

You can tell the difference between something that's fake and real. And so that's why when you ask the question, I talk about how I let it augment what I'm doing, but I don't let it replace me because, you know, there's no heart in it. Yeah.

And it can't, it can't. And I completely agree with you. You can tell when something is written by AI for sure. It, it still needs 100% the human. Touch. So I think we're gonna be okay, cuz actually one of my PR friends called me yesterday and he was kind of asking me about ChatGPT and like he was really worried about it because he mostly does content development. And I basically said what you said. I, I said supplementing is okay to kind of get you to like first base, you know, but you do still have to absolutely write that material and it takes your understanding of the industry to write something that's truly compelling.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, you're a CEO and a board member, things like that. So I wanna pivot now to leadership. Was there anything in life that helped you, you know, that happened earlier in life to make you the leader that you are today?

Yes. Yes. Well, first off, I would say I didn't think I was gonna do this. And so I have to credit one of my former colleagues when I used to work at IBM, and he kind of gave me the push. He went to a venture fund, Steve Toll. if he's listening. And he said to me, he was like, you should really start your own company. And I was like, I'm not special enough. And he was like, yes, you are. He was like, you know everyone. He's like, you have the skills. He's like, I basically find entrepreneurs and help them create companies. And he's like, you are that kind of person. And I think everybody sometimes needs a person in their life to kind of give them that push, especially someone that you really respect, which, you know, I respected Steve so much and still do. And so he became my first client and And that for me was the kind of just push I needed to say, I can do this. And then he also said, what's the worst thing that happens if you fail? He's like, what happens? You just go back and work at a company. So, I think sometimes in life too, we almost make things bigger than they have to be.

Right?

Like, we're so scared of failure that we never take that. Another quote, leap and the net will appear. Leap and the net will appear. And when I did this, I do think I just leaped. And then all of a sudden I realized, you know, it wasn't a big deal. And one last thing I'll say too is one of the reasons I didn't think I could do this is because clients weren't banging down my door to work with me. Well, it was because I hadn't started a company.

Right.

You know, I was working at all these PR firms and working at IBM. But so of course, like, they're not like, why won't you work with me? But once I created the company, all of my network from all of my past experiences came back. And that honestly has been incredibly humbling from the beginning of my career at my first firm when I was in my late 20s to, you know, just a few years ago. Every relationship matters, no matter, and especially at trade shows or whatever. I think a lot of times people are just talking to people they think can do something for them. And I've never been that kind of person. I'd rather talk to 2 people and have a real conversation than 20 people that, you know, you just get business cards from, right? And so I think being real and, and building actual relationships and connections with people has served me so well in my, in my career.

Yeah. I, I tell people that all the time. They, they always want numbers. I need to talk to, you know, 100 people and it's so shallow.

It's so shallow. Yeah. It's so shallow. And you just never know who's gonna be that, that connection, right? Yeah. It's, it's been honestly humbling. The people that have remembered me from a dinner From just a, a, you know, random happy hour where we just spent an hour together. Like they weren't even in my industry. Like it's been so humbling, the people that have come back into my orbit. Yeah. Um, I never expected it.

It goes back to our AI conversation. You gotta be genuine and authentic and, and don't focus on the numbers, but focus on the individual when you're with them. And that'll change, change everything. So in 5 years, your son will graduate high school, 9 years college. What, What would you say to his college graduating class? What are one or two things that you would tell aspiring leaders to think about as they look towards their career?

Oh my goodness. Well, have you heard the UT, that amazing commencement speech by the commander at UT? His name is escaping me.

Yeah, I know exactly who you're talking about.

I can't think of his name right now, but I listen to his commencement speech probably like once a month just because that thing inspires me so much. I'm like ready to go after it. But a lot of the things he says in there, I probably would say back to them. It's like the size of the heart is what matters. It doesn't matter how fancy the person's career is or how big they are, right? And knowing who you are and sticking to that. And honestly, I fell into my career by following my passion for writing. And I didn't even know this whole PR career existed when I was growing up. I just loved writing to the point where my mom would drag me out of my bedroom. And be like, you need to touch grass. We didn't call it that back in my day, but she was like, you need to touch, you need to get outside.

Yeah.

And so I followed that love of writing even though my dad was like, you're never gonna make any money. And so I would tell them that, like, whatever your passion is, follow that and eventually a career will find you.

Yeah, that's a good point because even we all know people, everyone knows stories where someone might be financially successful in terms of the world, but be miserable. And hating their work. And that's a terrible spot to be. So yeah, I think if you follow your passion, you may be poor for a while, you may be poor forever, but you'll be happier.

Yes. And I was, like I said, I had to go back to the beginning and that was incredibly humbling. Having a master's degree, having all this debt and having to go back to square one. Yeah. With that internship. But I'm glad, I'm so glad I did because it did humble me. And then I did have to work my way up. And I've always been that kind of person who loves a challenge. And I think that being knocked down in that way early in my career, thinking I was going to be a journalist and everything was just going to happen, and then realizing it wasn't as easy as I thought, but then something better even came along.

Yeah. You've mentioned that a couple of times, and I just want to amplify even more the fact that you had the humility To make this pivot and take you had masters. I have a similar story, but I'm not going to go into it. You made this pivot, which required you to really humble yourself, and from there you were able to rise up and go further than than you could ever imagine. So that speaks a lot about about your heart, about your following passion, about resilience. So that that's really cool. It's a great it's a great story, and again why. One of the reasons I wanted to have you as our guest. What about recharging other than surfing, recharging your batteries and remaining fresh? So obviously, you know, you're running a company and you're a mom and you're a wife and you've got other things going on in your life. How do you stay fresh?

Wow. I think this is a struggle for us all, right? Especially us Americans. 'Cause right now I'm hearing about all these European vacations my European clients are taking and I'm like, oh, it must be nice.

Yeah.

It is a constant struggle. And I think I would encourage everyone to keep fighting for that balance as much as we can, especially in this industry right now where I think we're all feeling even more pressure to work even harder, right? But for me, it is time with family, definitely spending time with my son, being outside. We love playing football. I'm very active. I played a lot of sports growing up. I didn't actually cover that, but I played Division I lacrosse. So I am like a super active person. And so I feel like anytime I can get outside and see the sunshine's great. Paddleboarding. We're on this beautiful river here. And then I'm a writer. I'm a writer, Ed. I've been working on my first book for probably 8 years.

Nice.

But you know what? I'm not going to give up. And so, when I can find time to really write, I'm the happiest if I put in a few hours into my book because it's like my baby. I'm a perfectionist, but that honestly feels really, really good when I can find— oh, and painting. I love painting too.

Wow. You're, you're like this Renaissance woman, uh, doing a lot of different things and on the side happen to be CEO of your own media company.

I squeezed the CEO thing in.

It's just an afterthought. No, this has been great. I really appreciate your time. We talked about everything from music and we're gonna add Rufus to our Spotify playlist.

Yes. And Rufus, on your knees. I'm gonna send them all the best ones, all the best ones for your playlist.

Yeah. And we'll put it in the show notes as well. And then we talked about quotes, but my favorite one that you mentioned had to do with leap and then the net will appear. I love that. I used to think of, I had something similar that has helped me in my life as well, because sometimes you just got to make the leap, take the jump, or catch the wave.

Yes. Well, my whole brand is on, I don't know if you've noticed, it's Catch the Wave, and I have a big wave on my website. But one other quote I have over here you can't see is, What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?

Oh, that is good. That's poetic.

Put that one on there. Yeah, I'm obsessed with quotes.

Yeah. No, those are, those are some good ones. We talked a lot about your career, sort of how you came to, uh, start your own firm. And then we really doubled down on communication and the things that you're an expert in, both from what companies should do, like what, what are one or two sort of hacks that anyone should be doing? And then also on an individual level, and I think one of the main things we talked about was just, uh, trusting whoever you hire, hire the right firm and then trust them and let go. 'Cause that's something we all get stuck with. And then, a reminder for everyone, AI as augmentation, not as replacement. Uh, that was great. And then we talked a lot about leadership and having a mentor who helped you quite a bit. And then following your heart, following your passions. We covered a lot of different things and how to remain fresh. What did we miss, Rachel? Or is there anything you wanna double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Yeah, I think the only thing I would maybe double down on is just that importance of clarity and communications in regarding what your company does, that value proposition, and being really honest with yourself, right? Because I think a lot of companies, it's hard. It's hard to really be honest with yourself about what the technology does. Not what you hope it does.

Yeah.

What it can actually do and what's proven. Because that's the other thing, that's like the first question an investor is going to ask you, right? A reporter is going to ask you, and you're going to get called out quick. And so just being very, very honest with yourself about that and making sure your messaging sticks to that. You can always have forward-looking, visionary-type messaging, but keep that over here. You really need to be concise and, and clear with your communications these days.

Rachel Ford Hutman, thank you so much for being part of Digital Voices.

Thank you. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices podcast with Ed Marx. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.