The Telephone Call That Started My Career in PR

I was on the job at a firm in the Washington, DC area, performing public relations back in 1997. Someone contacted us who actually wasn't a customer of ours but who was desiring to engage a PR company. He had just been presented with a national award in his business, heating and air conditioning.

He was really stirred up. It meant a lot for his firm, and this was an outstanding accolade in his industry. He was looking for a public relations company to basically compose and distribute a press release for his firm.

While I spoke with him, it felt very apparent that he wasn't qualifying for our criteria for a potential customer. At that moment, we were searching for someone who was willing to sign on to a minimum of half a year, but in fact happier with 12 months or more. I think our minimum agreement was $35,000 back then.

So I told this and he was really sort of distressed. He said, "You know, I believe I've called every PR concern in the Yellow Pages, and no one will take my money. I have a basic requirement. I want a company to compose and develop a press release and then get it out there."

Back then, there weren't many options. There was only a single press announcement service on the web, and it was only specializing in technology. We still had the big guys like PR Newswire and Business Wire, but that was basically all in those years.

I told the prospect that he might have better odds phoning around and inquiring some small and medium sized businesses if they knew of someone who was hunting for employment in the public relations business.

I could feel he was very frustrated because he had a requirement and he believed my company was in the business of providing press release development and distributing press releases, and it plainly didn't make sense to him that we wouldn't desire his money.

He didn't know that for customer develpoment, our PR company was paying something like $5,000 only in developing reports, research, brochures, and all this background material merely to transport a customer under contract.

Looking at someone who only had one press announcement created and distributed with utterly nothing else that they desired done thereafter didn't meet our business pattern. It still doesn't match the business pattern of a lot of public relations concerns. There are many more individual practitioners who are likely willing to meet his demands, and they're much simpler to discover these days with the internet.

I decided this was a extremely significant niche that truly wasn't being exploited, so that conclusion an alternative, perhaps a web based alternative to the newswires which could also furnish services that didn't necessarily compete with PR providers. That's sort of how the suggestion for eReleases began.