DOROTHY CRENSHAW: Someone I had worked with in my first public relations agency job called me. He had sold his firm. He said, “What do you think of starting up our own firm?” And long story short, a year later we did it.

 

We had a very successful business for 13 years.

 

Over time, my life changed, my values changed. We also started not to see eye to eye on things.

 

I took the best of the best staff with me. At our peak, we were maybe $10 million in revenues, which is large for an independent firm. Now, I’m only about $2 million, but I’m starting over. It’s very exhilarating.

 

SUSAN KARLIN: It was exactly like out of “Mad Men.” My father started an advertising firm in the ‘60s. I joined him in 1985. He passed away in 1992, and we ended up closing his company [and] people retired. I knew it was already in my blood. We were in midtown and I decided to start a new company, and I came down to Soho. We started with three designers; now we have 10 and we’ve been in business for 17 years.

 

 

DOROTHY: I never set out to have a female-dominated firm. I think it’s because my experience with women is that they are terrific employees and partners. Some people would say that women are more detail-oriented and more responsible.

 

I want to have men, though. The ideal is to have a mix. You never know what sort of subconscious issues are stewing inside of people.

 

It’s not always men who are more comfortable with men. Sometimes it’s women who are more comfortable with men.

 

In my early days of business with my male partner, we used to always pitch together. We rocked it. I think one of the reasons is that together we were like yin and yang, and we had something for everybody. It was a good match.

 

SUSAN: When we started, we had three female designers. We were four women, and it was like that for many years. It wasn’t selective in any way, it was just the best candidate.

 

Now we have a great mix. My creative director is a man, who has been here eight years.

 

 

DOROTHY: Within PR, the areas I would consider are health care, high tech and financial. Right now financial might not be the best, but I think women might have more leverage to stand out.

 

As what to do to stand out, I think you have to differentiate your business. And it doesn’t really have to be about you. It’s about products. Build your own brand identity. Speaking for myself, I don’t want it to be too much about me. I want it to be about the strategy, and have a grand sense of something beyond me. It’s also just better long-term planning. If you want to sell it, then you want it to live on, too.

 

SUSAN: I totally agree with that. You want to empower the team. You don’t want to have to be there at every call for every decision. A lot of times it’s saying to our key people, “How do you think we should handle it?” You may know, in your head, but you still ask.

 

DOROTHY: My favorite is, “What’s your recommendation?”

 

I don’t think people will be attracted to an organization that is so dominated by the founder.

 

SUSAN: I also don’t look at it that women should go into certain areas. We were raised to believe that we can do anything we want to do. Math or science, engineering. I think that’s the message. You should tap into what your passion is and then go after what you really want to do. It should be what you love to do.

 

 

SUSAN: First of all, you have to know your audience. Who are you trying to reach? How are you trying to change their point of view or persuade them to buy a product or to donate? What kind of communication vehicles do they use to receive information? That’s changing significantly. People are re-evaluating print, going electronic. A lot of clients are serving their customers in the way in which they like to be communicated with.

 

We started as a print-branding communications firm. We actually recently changed our name just to Suka, from Suka Design. We dropped the “Design” because it was too limiting. We do branding, messaging and strategy.

 

Clients are printing less, moving things online. We’re doing a lot more Flash. Helping them rethink how they can communicate. We can’t sit still and dig our heels in and say, well, this is just social media. It’s changing fast and we have to keep up with it.

DOROTHY: I think it’s absolutely fascinating what’s going on with PR. There are a lot of concerns that PR will go away or change because of the rise of social media and the fact that our traditional world doing media relations will be dissipated.

 

One of the key reasons why I wanted to reinvent myself and rebrand my new business is because I wanted to be about digital media, not so much social media, but my tagline is “creative public relations for a digital world.” That’s exactly what I intended to do. I’ve been spending a lot of time blogging, a lot of time looking at social networks, a lot of time on social networks.

 

What’s interesting about some aspects of social media… [I believe] it’s way overhyped. There are fundamentals of PR and about what we do that will always be there. We’re a little bit in danger of running after every shiny new thing, especially in the case of Twitter. Creative ideas, well packaged, and well communicated will always be the bread and butter of public relations, even if we’re dealing much more with social networks. We’re still going to need to come up with those ideas that make things interesting, funny, clever, link to pop culture, and are avant-garde. That’s successful public relations.

 

 

DOROTHY: [laughing] I think my proudest achievement is that I pulled it off!

 

I think it’s the fact that when I told the staff and when I asked them to follow me and place their confidence in me, they did it, and when I told my clients what I was doing, that they also gave me their confidence. It makes me very proud, but also a little nervous. I’m at the point where I’m grateful.

 

SUSAN: That’s an important word. Grateful. Have you ever seen [the movie] The Secret?

 

There’s one segment I like about the “Gratitude” rock. I have a rock that I keep in my bag, and it just reminds me to hold it and to be grateful.

 

You’re right; it’s a huge accomplishment to have had your business all these years, myself included. We’re very grateful for our clients, for our team, and for the people who are with us.

 

 

DOROTHY: Talk to as many people as you possibly can. People will be very generous with their advice. Know as much as you can. Learn on somebody else’s time. Having said that I know people who have just punched into PR without ever having worked at a firm but I think the advantage is having had worked at many different top, top agencies and learning from the very best.

 

SUSAN: Having a mentor is really key. Having a supportive partner – someone who knows all the players, who knows me, whom I can be very vulnerable with. Find someone to get inspired by, or someone to get really connected to. It’s all about networking. Ask for what you want and just build relationships.

 

I go to a peer advisory board called SoundBoard. We’re a group of eight people and we get together on a regular basis. It’s a membership-driven organization. We’re all entrepreneurs; we all have our own businesses. We all look to each other, even though we’re all in different industries. We all have the same issues, same fears, same makeup, same mindset, are driven the same way, and we don’t have all the answers all the time. Some have partners, some don’t. You have to learn from people, you have to be out there. You have to network with NYWICI and other groups.

 

Go to where your clients are. Go where your clients go if you are looking to build business.

 

 

SUSAN: It’s about paying attention. For me, I compartmentalize my life. I have Suka. I have my daughter. I have my partner. I have friends. And then I have me. It’s really important to nurture every one of those areas, and to really just pay attention. For my daughter I have to realize that even just sitting down and playing a game of chess is quality time. It’s always being aware of a balance.

 

And you do have to make time for you. I like to do yoga on Saturday mornings. One of my highlights of my week is getting on my bike, bike riding to yoga class, stopping at Hampton Chutney to get a coffee, and then biking down to the beach. That’s my spiritual retreat.

 

And then it’s my Saturday night date with my partner, and making sure we get to have that special time together too. And then that time to step away and really connect with employees and see how they’re doing and get a read on that, and connecting with clients, it’s constant. It’s looking at every aspect and making sure no one area is falling through the cracks.

 

DOROTHY: I am a big exercise person. Even though I haven’t been keeping up with my five-to-six-days-a-week schedule, I work it in when I can.

 

The first thing I did when I started my business is get office space within walking distance of my apartment. I told the realtor that this is how it’s going to be, I’m not going to build extra stresses in my life [by having to travel to work].

 

Having said that I don’t think you should expect a whole lot of work-life balance if you’re building a business. In the early days of building my first agency I remember [that] I used to pull all-nighters occasionally. And this is when the economy was just going straight up. We were able to go from zero to $5 million within the first year. But that was the dot-com frothy time. It’s even harder in a down economy. But if you’re going to do this [build a business] you have to make up your mind to have a time limit.

 

But the good thing is that you can compartmentalize as an entrepreneur. You can leave at 6. Pick up your daughter, make dinner and put her to bed. And then, work. Catch up.

 

SUSAN: Our jobs are not 9 to 5. Sometimes I get up at 5 in the morning, I’m on email for an hour, and then I go work out. Sometimes I even wake up at 4 a.m. because I can’t sleep and I work.

 

SUSAN: Risk-takers, calculated, smart risk-takers. I think they’re driven and focused. Whatever it takes to get it done. They are driven by winning the clients, or the money, or what they’re doing. Just looking at my peer group at SoundBoard; seeing these men and women cut from the same block, we all seem very much alike. We have the same fears. It’s not like we’re driven by a fear of failure. We’re vulnerable, but we have confidence in ourselves. Some of them have had businesses for 25 years so they’ve gone through two recessions, and this is their third. You’re only going to go up from here. We don’t crumble. We may get knocked down, but we’re going to get up again.

 

 

SUSAN: Twitter Revolution. [I read it because] I knew there had to be something more than what I just thought about Twitter. We’ve been spending a lot of time following other design firms, about what they’re doing, what they’re linking to. We’re very interested in using that as a way to communicate with people.

 

 

DOROTHY: I think Twitter is way overhyped. I don’t have the time during the day to do conversing. I mostly tweet content. I really think, and I have about 1,400 followers, I think it’s really hard. Not a lot of people are listening. Twitter isn’t really two-way. Ninety percent of tweets are done by 10 percent of the people. I think the follow model hurts a lot of listening.

 

One week I was tweeting madly. I’ve set up tweet layers so I can do it while I’m out of the office, or I have to have someone else do it for me. It really is a time commitment. This same week, I was at a client meeting in New Jersey, and we were talking about Facebook – we were talking about a client’s Facebook – and I wrote, “I’m eating pizza in Monroeville, New Jersey” [to update my Facebook status]. I’d never say that in Twitter because that’s the cheese sandwich cliché you want to avoid on Twitter.

 

On the way home, my Blackberry was buzzing. I got five responses within 15 minutes to my Facebook status. Obvious answer: because these people know me. They are listening. They know me, they know my clients. It’s a real network. Like the old-school networks that started it out. My Twitter network, not so much. And I even have real followers as opposed to spam blocks. But still, not a lot of people are listening and that’s because people are just adding followers.

 

It’s hard. You need tools, you need software, you need time, you need helpers. I want clients to know that it’s a time commitment to do it and they need to have goals, curate content and followers and blah, blah, blah. But then there’s good old Facebook where you need permission to add friends and most people actually know the people who are their Facebook friends.

 

I definitely think Twitter has a great deal of marketing potential; it has proven its customer service potential, there’s no question about that. But for the PR 2.0 conversation, it’s not there yet.

 

SUSAN: Two things come to mind. One is the parallels of the power of networking and the power of networking, let’s say at NYWICI. How important, how people want to be part of a community, and that happens to be face-to-face networking. I think that’s why social networking is taking off so much, especially during a down market. People really want to connect with each other. If they can’t do it face to face, they can still do it in a real and free way.

 

 

DOROTHY: I remember saying this to a friend, “Courage is when you keep going despite your fears.”

 

SUSAN: We still have fear. Mental fear.

 

DOROTHY: Oh, absolutely.

 

SUSAN: But we’re not going to stop ourselves. And to the budding entrepreneurs of NYWICI, to be able to follow your passion, and to look to what you want to do and to just go for it and not be afraid. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. You’ll look back and think, “I wish I would have.”

 

DOROTHY: Whenever I’m at a crossroads in my life, I think, I’d rather regret what I did than what I didn’t do. That’s a more poignant kind of regret. If you look back at something and think, “Well, that turned out to be a mistake. At least I tried.” It’s better than saying, “What could I have done?”

 

Follow Dorothy Crenshaw on Twitter @crenshawcomm, Susan Karlin @sukacreative and Sammy Davis @sammydvintage.