Why this entrepreneur and breaking bad news author is telling stories hiring a (3) CPO.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today I'm talking to Jehan all the way from Austin, Texas. Yeehaw.

Jeff, it's great to be with you. Howdy.

I couldn't resist, but say yeehaw. Now, Jeff, you've got your own agency, 36 People in Austin, which you bought when it was 10 people. Now you've got 36 people. So what I'd love for you to share with us today is how you've got the company noticed. What are some of the tools and tricks that running a PR firm you've used, but also some of the other sort of skills you learned from corporate life?

It's a great question, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to think out loud with you on it. I reflect on my time as agency, really, how I've gone through three phases. My getting noticed, maturity in the first phase. And the one thing I think that I've continued to do very successfully is I made a point of connecting to and joining unaffiliated organizations. So, for example, I'm in a group of 120 regional civic leaders here in Central Texas. They have nothing to do with my PR business. But by staying connected with them and being an active member of that affiliation, I've gotten more referrals in ways that I would have never believed possible then I could imagine. And it's typically not someone in the group. Right. It's someone that they know. And this, I guess I would call it adjacent marketing in some respects or indirect, but being part of something else, that's not actually, you know, not everything is connected to trying to get the next client. But you're making an investment in something bigger than you. That's a really powerful way. That's been helpful to me. And then I've continued to do. I did it, you know, in the early days of my ownership, I was really kind of. I did it naturally and unwittingly. But I have now since reflect back on the last 15 years and say, oh, that's been a really powerful generator of new business for me and Jeff.

And do you do those all yourself or do you send your team members out as well to do that?

I encourage my team members to go find their own organization that's associated with their part of the practice. So I have two big practice areas, the energy practice and the food practice. So the heads of those practice areas, I say go find an adjacent or affiliated kind of network or organization to contribute to and make that part of your natural networking and the investment that you make in Building a better world. And it'll come back to you. So for me, it's because we started out small. All of our business was local. Connecting to local people was a natural play. Now, thankfully, none of our business is local. I have no clients in this region, so I'm super happy about that.

Why are you happy about not having clients in Austin?

Well, because it shows me that we are scaling and we've got enough now mojo in our brand and in our systems and in our business processes and even in basics like our financial management, that we can become much more of a mega region or even. I'm going to tempt fate by saying a national level PR firm.

Yeah, and why not? I mean, geography has been flattened, hasn't it, Obviously by technology. Jeff, what about you? Talk about going out and visiting and playing a part in these different community organizations with COVID How have you managed to keep the marketing and the city going for Han?

Yeah, in much the same way, using the same kind of idea, Covid makes it tougher. But what I have found now is the key is to be the convener, be the person that sets up the Zoom meetings and creates the agenda. And if you'll make that effort, people will come. There's a real hunger for social networking and socialization in a Covid era, in the Zoom era. So if you're willing to shift your talents and energy from going to community meetings into convening meetings and being that facilitator, that to me has proven to be a really powerful way to keep the conversations flowing.

That is really good advice. And funny, we've always been paid as agency owners to organize events for clients, haven't we? But rarely do it for ourselves. So you're changing tech quite significantly there, Jeff, in a way, aren't you? Becoming sort of the public face of your own business as opposed to the agency was kind of being the scene shifter.

Yeah, no question. It really has led to the discovery in my own self of a second natural ability that I had and I really enjoy. But I have found myself now being invited to facilitate other organizations meetings. And I can do that for pay. And now I'm facilitating workshops and finding myself inside of other really fascinating conversations. But up in front of a room, either on Zoom or just last week in San Antonio, I did a workshop for 60 people on a. On an issue that I have no experience in. But this facilitation skill that I have learned over the years has really turned into something that now generates more and more references and my name and my business Card being passed around by other people.

So Jeff Hahn, who has his own public relations company over there in Austin, Texas, Jeff, what about for those companies and entrepreneurs that are not, if you like, naturally gregarious and unable to turn their hand to that because you have this as a business already. Right. But many, many entrepreneurs didn't start off because they're socialized. Right. They have a product, they've invented. Any tools or practices you found that.

Are not dependent on your personality to a certain extent. And I'll say that my personality trends towards being an introvert and where I, when I do facilitate, I'm exhausted afterwards because it takes all the energy out of me. It doesn't put energy into me. Where I have found the place where I get really recharged is in my own thought leadership, writing and posting content online. I've recently written a book on crisis communication called Breaking Bad News and Breaking Bad News took me seven years to write. But that careful introspection and the time to do that has allowed me now to communicate a whole new point of view into the marketplace that supports our two business practices, food and energy. So research and writing for me has been that tremendous introverted outlet, if you will. Yeah, that's kept me balanced.

That's fantastic. And then in terms of the, the methodologies that you, that you're finding around sort of content marketing, you're posting, are you posting sort of frequently, infrequently across all channels. What have you found to be like a relatively time not intensive, but sort of lead gen productive method?

Yeah. One of the things that I've learned in the process is that I have an affinity for long form, oh, good research, like 20 citations for every hundred words. Just a crazy mania almost. And I think that people are going to appreciate that. What I've learned is they, they don't because they can't. So what's really been the lesson for me is find a single place. LinkedIn might be your platform medium. It's very popular in some of the categories that I like to work in. But find that one place. Try not to overcook the grits, as we would say in Texas. Try not to write too long. People don't have time, they don't have the mental bandwidth to read anything that's more than three or four minutes long. Take care not to overdo it. Instead, write fewer words with more impact, which is the hardest thing to do. Right. The old saying, I'd have written less if I had more time. That becomes a very difficult trick. But write a good Headline, fill it in with three good paragraphs and you're done. Post good, go and then on to the next one.

And then what about video and formats, Jeff? Are you using much explainer video or infographics for example, or audio?

I'm not. I've decided that for me this is going to be my one thing to be good at and stay focused on. I think the, the advice that Warren Buffett gives to entrepreneurs is learn how to say no more than you say yes. And so I've just said no to all those other formats. I'm going to do this, I'm going to try to do it really well. And what I have found is that yes, I'm getting noticed, I'm getting inbound conversations happening, but mostly I'm happier. I'm happy with the product that I'm putting out because I feel like it's very focused and I'm actually even interested in reading it. So I'll even consume my own stuff. So I've just tried to stay very focused.

Can I say, Jeff, for your clients that you said are in sort of the needs business in, in power and food, are you able to get them to follow your approach with the same kind of results?

You know, that's a really great question and in fact it's true. Yes, the answer is absolutely yes. Especially in the energy business, there is a enormous shift happening all around the world in our change from a molecule based energy system to a mineral based ecosystem. And those clients, those that are going to be relevant in that minerals based energy ecosystem in the future, admittedly 30 to 40 years away, but if they're going to be relevant, they have to have a point of view today and they've got to start talking about that future. So yeah, I write a lot of content for clients who are very interested in establishing relevance and helping shape that future. And that then is paired up with digital marketing that my team does to help promote that content. But that one, two punch has proven very effective.

How interesting. Do you have any reservations or pushback from the client that maybe just wants to get into the traditional media? If you're writing sort of self publishing through your own channels, there's something sometimes from clients that you kind of copying out.

Yeah. In fact, just the opposite. In my experience, the reporters that we're working and pitching, they want to know that they're going to be speaking to someone who's got a genuine point of view that's interesting enough to interview. And we can point now to the library of content for our clients and Say, this is. This is the interesting thing that this person is cooking away on. So perfect fit for an article that you're working on or thinking about. And, in fact, I've even done one more thing for our clients. For one of them, I'm hosting a podcast, producing it for him, and inviting reporters as guests.

Interesting.

Oh, it's a reverse pitch.

And of course, once you're in the green room with the reporter, you're overcoming some of the anxiety of, who are you and what are you trying to get from me? Right, Jeff?

Absolutely right. And so he as podcast host, me as producer, we get to ask the reporter questions and, of course, slip in an idea, put in a little quote, and the reporters are just like every other human. You know, to be a guest on a podcast like me on yours, it's an honor, It's a privilege, and your ego is stroked by it, and you love it. So reporters are no different. They'll actually take the time to do it just so they can get in an interesting conversation.

Yeah, and I think that's a really nice point. We were talking just a bit earlier about the need to have conversations with our teams. You saying that now in America, you're back in various amounts of lockdown. Jeff, what have you been doing as a business owner with staff that are variously not coming back to work? How are you staying in touch? Because I always think of communications are not just about the external. It's also about your internal and also your allies. So how are you keeping people aligned if you've got 36 staff serving multiple clients? The clients wanted to feel as though they're working with one team. How do you do that?

Yeah, even. And there's been a couple, three significant adjustments for me. The first is, even as a small company, 36 folks, the person that I most recently hired is a human resource chief people officer. And I was resistant to this idea completely until I discovered, especially in this lockdown era that we're in, man, people have a really serious need to connect and have safe conversations. So chief people Officer can go talk to them, help them understand what's happening in the company, and be a communicator for me on my behalf when I'm not connecting to them individually. That's one investment I've made that I think is starting to show real benefits. Because right now, that the war isn't necessarily against Covid or a pandemic, it's a war for talent that we're in. Trying to find talented people at competitive price is really hard. So our focus is on retention, not necessarily recruiting and hiring. That's one. The second is, though, I've made adjustments in my own communication with the entire staff. Every Thursday now, we do an all hands meeting. That used to be once a month, now it's once a week. And in lieu of social hours, I'll invite like for example, two weeks ago we had a magician join us on Zoom and this magician could perform a card trick with the entire staff. We sent out decks of cards to everybody and we had ourselves a social hour with this magician as the performer in front of us and got to enjoy that experience together. So we're inventing and investing in different ways. But I have to say that I am quite concerned, especially for your younger generation workers, they don't have the experience of the in office, growing up inside of going to work every day and being around that social and learning the cues and the things that you do and that you don't and the water cooler talk, all of that stuff is missing. So for you and I, we've got that experience and it seems like, oh, it's okay, just fine. For our younger people, especially fresh out of school, who've done a year of school on Zoom and now they're going to be starting their career on Zoom. I'm worried about that. I'm concerned that they're going to be missing almost the intangible or the soft skills of the career that come only through social interaction. So very tough situation right now.

You know, it's going to be interesting to see as well how this generation engage with clients as well, because a lot of the role play, for example, in those early meetings with clients where you go into the client's office and you take donuts and drinks, there was sort of a quite elaborate protocol, wasn't there, that that now is missing as well in these calls for people. And what about partners, Jeff? Because I always think there are these three different audiences. You obviously got to have partners both for referrals, to work with people. Any tools or any tips that you've got around how you're keeping your referral network and implementation network kind of spinning as well.

Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm going to use the acronym. You use the SPEAK acronym. One of the things that I'm doing with our partners is I'm spending more time again in individual or in collective Zoom venues, trading stories and the S in your Speak acronyms. Storify is I'm finding to be one of the most important gifts that I can contribute to the continuation of the Relationship with our partners. We have to tell stories about what's going on in our world. How are we feeling? What is the. The characters and the setting, what's the conflict and the conflict resolution. That's real storytelling. And what I'm finding when I'm convening those sessions is the more that I can storify what's happening in our business, the better people feel, the tighter the connections feel. And so I'm practicing more and more on storytelling in my own little orbit.

Yeah. And when you say storytelling, could you just give us an example of how does that translate then into making a story?

Just a quick example. Yeah. Typically, you know, oh, let me tell you about this particular client. Here's the revenue, here's the work to be done, here's the task, et cetera. That's not the story, that's a list. So I'm going to tell the story now about the struggle that this client's in and what they're facing and the changes that are happening in their business. You know, it becomes the archetypal story types, like, you know, overcoming the monster or Dave Goliath tapping back into those archetypal formats and then starting from the emotive side rather than the business task list side. And so I'm just finding myself saying, hey, let me tell you what Jim faced the other day. This was a really difficult situation, and this happened, and that got sad. And trying to find some detail that allows them to feel what our clients are feeling. I've had to do more of that in my practice, getting better at it. But I find that it's more time intensive these days and still more. It's stickier.

Jeff, if you want to stick close to you because of the great wisdom that you've gone over there and Austin, how can they get a hold of you?

Best way for people to get in touch with me is through my author page. Breaking Bad News is the book, and the website is breakingbadnewsbook.com. you'll find me there with a way to sign up. You can even get a free copy of Breaking Bad News. If you're a listener of Jim's, you can get a free copy. I'll put a special promo code out.

There for you, Chance. You're too kind. Thank you so much for joining me on this show today, the Unnoticed entrepreneur. And you're doing a wonderful job of getting noticed by listening and sharing. So thank you so much for joining me today.

You're welcome. I enjoyed being with you.