Ways to increase revenue for your small business for Public Relations

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you've had a super successful career right entrepreneur marketer influencer storyteller give us your back story how did you get to where you are today i got my start very early days i graduated from the university of texas at austin i have a master's in organizational communication and technology very few people actually know this i was studying under one of the preeminent scholars on time believe it or not time and communication so a lot of interesting things around that now would work from home and so forth but but i was fascinated by social media in general at large i thought man this is going to change the world i know you said that i just spoke at south by which i did they did my keynote but the first time i attended south by was in 2008 so super early days that was the year actually interactive had just launched so there were 200 of us and i know pre with the numbers were like 20 000 plus at interactive so you could just see how much that's changed in that short amount of time and as a grad student in austin in texas i actually did my thesis on twitter when it had about 2 000 users so super early days um people would say what's tweeter facebook is something my kids use i mean social media was just not even you know a blip on the radar if you will but i was passionate about it i thought this is really going to be a game changer and i found especially a lot of interest in small businesses at the time to say if this helps kids get customers in the door we're game and so um that's that's how i got my start more from academia and then you know being being 22 when i started my company um which is now zen media i find the most fascinating thing is that i tell people this you know if you're starting a company your best friend is a bit of naivete and i'm grateful that i had a lot of naivete starting out so very naive about a lot of things but it's good i think it it works in your favor because if someone as a founder or as an entrepreneur tells you the entire road you have ahead of you and every challenge possible i think i think it can be daunting um so so yeah so that's how i got my start and uh you know couldn't get a job got out of school nobody understood what social media was and i i don't say that i don't say that lightly it was a lot of companies uh left and right rejected me and just didn't see that that had any potential to change how business was done communications were conducted and so forth so again i'm talking really early days and so you know at 22 i have a choice i can either change my career trajectory into something that maybe i was less passionate about but had more broader appeal or you know i i put my own shingle out there so i thought hey self-employed sounds good and and i didn't know i had a lot of demand again from small businesses at the time when we started out to say if this gets customers in our door or game remember this was 2008 2009 so giant recession looming right biggest thing to hit the us since the great depression so there was just a lot of hunger in small businesses to say how can we use this how can you know this we're game to try anything that helps and so that's those are my routes that's how i got started um and then yeah and then just grew from there and then a few years later many of those companies that were not very interested in the world of social media came knocking and and yeah man i mean you know you know much of the story after that but haven't looked back um grown zen media you know we passed a million in revenue in the first three years i share a lot of my story too because i feel like i've i get a very unique perspective of perhaps a very different perspective into marketing in pr than other people have because i came from academia and then at 22 like i didn't have any connections any network i think it was six years after starting my agency that i even realized that most people start their agencies they have like a book of business they started a corporate job and then they transfer over right like i didn't know any of that so so again my navy helped i only knew what i was passionate about what i was good at uh i feel like my skill set's pretty limited but this is one of the things that it's rather limited to um so yeah man so that's how i got my start and uh you know we we grew we went from being social media to earned so today we do a lot of pr content social those are our three main buckets and we work predominantly with tech and b2b companies so a lot of a lot of expertise there and kind of seeing what's actually working in the trenches [Music] you