President Of eReleases.com: Mickie Kennedy AKA eRelease Boss – S2E51 (#79)

S2E46 Mickie Kennedy.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Here. All right. Three, two, one. Welcome welcome back to Boston Uncaged podcast. On today’s show we’re going to have an interesting conversation. We’re going to talk about eReleases and some of you may or may not know what e releases are. But after our guest kind of defines and tell you what he does and why he does it, I think it’ll be very transparent of how effective he releases can be for you or your business. So without further Ado, Micky, the floor is yours, man. Who are you?

I’m Micky Kennedy. I’m the founder and President of eReleases. I started it a little over 22 years ago. We’re based in the Baltimore area, and I started it largely to help small businesses, startups and authors get access to the media, including the news wire distribution.

Great. So I think I’m going to deem you the eReleases boss, because obviously you’ve been in the game for 20 something years. And so just to dive into that, so people that don’t really understand what an eReleases is, why don’t you kind of tell us a little bit more about that?

Okay. So about 24 years ago, I was in charge of sending releases for a telecom company, and my job was programming a Fax machine with 100 numbers, because that’s all it could hold. And I would hit send. And it would take about a day, a day and a half to send. And then I had to delete all those numbers and start over because we had about 190 some sources to send to. And so it was like two or three days wasted. And we started getting calls with journalists saying, hey, we really like the numbers and statistics that you’re publishing, and we’d like to see if you could just email it to us as Microsoft Word because we can copy and paste a lot of that data. And so I came up with the idea of email. It would completely replace this faxing service. And it’s not a news wire. So it’s a lot cheaper to disseminate through email directly to journalist. So I spent about a year contacting journalist. And I think when I launched, I had about ten0 journalists who had subscribed and signed up for the service. And it just has grown from there. Over the years. PR Newswire reached out to us and said, We’d love to work with you. And I was able to negotiate a national distribution, custom national distribution that we do for all of our customers. That goes over PR Newswire, and they charge about $1,000 to move a Press release nationally. And we’re able to include that. And our prices are $300 to $600, so substantially cheaper.

Got you. So I think you kind of dropped some terminology there. So this is to find that a little bit for our audience. What is the news wire exactly.

Okay. So News Wire is basically an electronic dissemination of news can be articles or press releases. There’s two different types of news wires. There’s the ones that publish articles that they’ve written UPI. Associated Press, Reuters. They move those types of stories along. It’s all been written by them, and then they license it to newspapers who, rather than pay someone in house to write an article, they’ll just pull it from the AP or Reuters or something like that and pay a licensing fee, rather than having to use their own staff to write every breaking news story because there’s only so many ways to tell a national story. The press release Newswires are similar and that they’re disseminated the same way directly into newsrooms and to journalists directly. But they’re sending out just press releases. So they’re not articles. They can be similar to articles, but they’re largely just objective third person stop file announcements where you’re just trying to get the meat, the who, what, when, where and how of the news that you’re wanting to send out and putting it on a piece of paper, or, in this case, electronic dissemination that goes out to all the different journalists and things like that. So the largest new news wire or press releases is pure Newswire. And in the US, there’s two other companies. There is Business Wire, and then there’s Globe News Wire, which is sort of co branded with the Entrada brand there. So I think they’re trying to decide what the direction of what you call that it’s going to be in the future. But it’s a powerful way for relatively small amount of money to get your message to as many people as possible possible. They tag it to the appropriate industries as well as tag it to your local news. So they know that if you’re a Chicago based, it’s going to be relevant for Chicago media, even though you’re sending it out nationally, and you might be predominantly music and entertainment as your industry of target, as opposed to something else, like sports or something like that. So these get tagged, they’re available. The journalists usually look at them by headlines according to the industries that they sign up for, and they can also do some editing as well. I’m not interested in anything that mentions classical. It’s music, but not classical, so they can put exclusions and inclusions to try and capture certain stuff and make it very specific for them. But they look at the headlines. If it appeals to them, they’ll click on it and drill down and the rest of the release. So that being said, your most important part of the press release is going to be that headline, because that’s where you win them or lose them. And then the next thing is the opening sentence and paragraph. Does that get them to move along in the story and read and really feel that you’ve got something there that they want to share with their readers.

So that was a very defined detail. And I think obviously, this is why I’m calling you to release, boss, because, I mean, you know, this thing hands now you don’t have to think about it twice. You can kind of spit out these answers when I was thinking about it. So let’s just do, like, a user case analysis, right. Let’s say I’m a podcaster. I’m new to podcasting, and I hear about these e releases, these news releases. What would that transition look like? I’m coming in. I’m saying I have a podcast. Like, what’s the next steps on that journey?

So if you’re looking for us to write the release, which we can do, you would just place an order. We have a little questionnaire that we asked to sort of get people started. Sometimes people are just like, here’s my website. That’s all the information that I really want to provide. So we’ll work based on how you want to work. Some people prefer a phone call with the writer. It just depends on what works for you. If you’re really busy, you may just want to send us a link and just say, write a release based off this. And then we put a release together in about three business days. We send it over to you to review, go back and forth, depending on if it needs some more information or there was something that you weren’t happy about. And then we can schedule it for distribution as early as the following business day. So the writing and distribution, I always say allow a week. It usually takes less than that. But if you have a release that’s already written, you can send it out for as early as the next business day, as long as everything’s there that’s required. And generally the news wire requires standard stuff, like a headline, a Dateline that usually as a city and state. It’s usually where you’re located. It doesn’t necessarily confine you to only that area, because some people sometimes feel like I don’t want to put a city or state down because this is national news. And I was like, but that’s true. But even Microsoft puts Seattle or Redmond Washington on theirs, because that’s where it’s originating from. It doesn’t get discounted for that. Then you usually have a few paragraphs and you can have a boiler plate, which is an about section you see usually at the end about and usually it’s a summary of your company or organization, or in this case, they have podcast about you, and that can be recycled and used again again. In all of your press releases. You can update it as you need to to include awards or anything else is worthy putting there, and then a Press contact, and the news wire requires a phone number as a Press contact. I recommend an email address as well. But one of the things that journalists don’t like is it always happens when they’re going to print. The managing editor says, I need a clarification on this. Did you mean to word it like that, and they’re like, yeah, but I’m not sure. Let me go back and contact them. So they really like that phone number, because if there’s a Press issue, they can contact you and get that resolved really quickly and it can still go to print.

So in another segment that you just kind of as a segue to with distribution. So I’ve dealt with some press releases before, and they’ll say they will guarantee 300 distribution channels, 600 distribution channels, and including in those distribution channels. Maybe it’ll include The New York Times and other well known brands. So what does your distribution channel really look like? Like what’s the span of range and what’s included in those distribution channels.

So it really depends on your industry targeting when you set up the release of how large it’s going to be. PR Newswire has in its database over 1.7 million contacts. So no one’s going to all 1.7 million because it just wouldn’t be relevant. So if you’re picking a technology and software as categories or something along those lines, it’s going to go out nationally to tagged for those people. And so if you’re sports or if you’re tagged with something else, you’re not really going to see that it’s available for you. If you if you’re a journalist and you scroll over to a different feed and pull up a different feed. But most people are looking at feeds that are relevant for them. And so it varies in size. There’s also this thing called syndication that happens with press releases. And that’s really complicated. But the PR Newswire doesn’t like it, and it’s slowly going away. And it’s basically when you issue a Press release, it gets replicated on a bunch of websites, and some of them are well known, like Yahoo Finance and maybe Market Watch and things like that. So it looks really nice if you’re a CEO or someone. You appeared on all these little Fox outlets, ABC outlet, little TV stations and stuff like that. But no one wrote an article about you. And that’s what caused the confusion that Pierre Newswire is starting to remove that. In the early 2000s, it was like the Cold War, where each news wire was trying to get more syndicated sites than the other one. And so there was a point where you could issue a release and get 300 or more links to all of these press releases that you have on all these different websites. It doesn’t really help you from an SEO standpoint because they’re all no follow tag, and Google doesn’t hate them. But Google just says we’re going to just discount duplicate content. You don’t get a penalty for it, but it doesn’t really help you. But a lot of PR professionals don’t like it because they’re having to explain to the people that are paying their bills. This isn’t the goal of a Press release. We’re actually looking for The New York Times to write an article, so we don’t want the press release on someone’s website. We want a distinct original article to appear, and that’s the ultimate goal.

So I mean, with that, I think you definitely define the differences between the standard news releases and syndication. So in that space, right. So you guys are essentially creating content that could then be picked up by an editor or editor in chief to use sections of that to then release it as a New York Times original piece. Is that kind of a goal?

Yeah they might recycle bits and pieces of the press release, but predominantly, they write the article, and it may not necessarily be what you announced. I remember where Microsoft announced they were getting rid of bulletin boards, and they said, We’re doing this because we want to provide safety on the Internet, and we find that this is a place where children can be preyed upon. And then the article that the New York Times wrote is Microsoft is getting rid of bulletin boards because they could never properly monetize them. They say that they’re interested in child protection, but they’re doing nothing with chat and all these other new tools where they’re there’s real stuff going on that’s really putting children in jeopardy. They expose the truth behind it. The press release inspired the article, but the article doesn’t really bear exactly what the press release is. That’s a wild example, because publicly traded companies are always trying to position themselves with the best foot. But for small businesses and stuff like that, a lot of times, what you issue is sort of the framework by which it gets turned into an article.

So recommendation wise. I mean, obviously, if you have a syndication, I’ve seen some of them out there to where their subscription based syndications that give you maybe three to ten articles in syndication per month versus what you guys doing, essentially creating original content. Is there a gift in using both, or would you just recommend using one versus another?

I don’t see any real benefit from the syndication side of it. You’re not getting the SEO benefit. There’s very few end users looking at the syndicated content, even though it appears on some of these websites, it’s usually a hidden section on the website. Go try to find press releases on Yahoo Finance. It’s a varied section on there. So my take is Yahoo Finance gets a lot of traffic, but very few of them are going to see your press releases. I said, if you get an original article written about you from you say The New York Times, you’re going to get a lot of traffic because that commands a lot of eyeballs, both in print as well as on the Web. And a trade publication is another example. It may not be a lot of traffic, but you might get a few hundred really targeted industry visitors going to your website. It’s very specific, and I feel like that’s probably a lot more important because those are the people that generally turn into potential customers or partners, or sometimes suppliers and vendor relationships get started that way. And it’s also a big credibility boost rather than automatically appearing on a website, actually having a journalist craft an original article about you that says something about you. And when people see that and click through to a website from an article, they’re much more likely to buy rather than open a new window and price shop. They’re like, oh, I want to do business with this company. I read about them, and now I feel excited about what I read, and I want to give them my dollars. I don’t want to open a window and go to Amazon and try to find it cheaper. So they tend to be more loyal customers that come from original articles or earned media, which is used interchangeably. And they also happen to come back again and again because they have that warm experience from the article that big credibility boost that they get that that continues with the life of the customer. So my customers have found that the people that they get visiting their website from articles are probably the most profitable customers that they get, and they work really hard to try and do that. And again and again, and it’s hit or miss with PR. It’s not unusual to do a few press releases that result in nothing and then you get a couple that just really go really well. And it’s a learning process where you’re trying to figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and if it works, can it be replicated? And that’s where strategy is probably the most important aspect of press releases, not how it’s written or how well written it is, but what’s the press release about. And strategically, did you come up with the best possible press release for your company right now?

Got it. It makes perfect sense. So let’s just time travel back. I mean, obviously you’re knee deep in this space currently right now. But in your background, I mean, how did you get into this space? I mean, were you, like a kid running around with a notebook, taking notes, journaling things? I kind of looked at your background. You’re also a poet. Like, how did you get into this space?

Right. So I pursued a Masters of fine arts and creative writing in Northern Virginia. And I’m originally from North Carolina, and that’s where I moved up to the DC area. And I realized I am not built for waiting tables. And that’s what a lot of other poets and writers were doing. And so I found a corporate job. And I liked being an editing and writing and PR because I was using my creativity and my skills. And so that’s sort of how I transitioned into PR. And it is definitely the creative part is the most important part. And it’s the one that’s taken for granted from a lot of people. So I recently put together a mastermind class of just PR strategy for my customers just because I’m really tired of customers not getting media pickup, and they’re sending a Press release on a new hire. And they don’t realize that strategically, that’s not very important. The readers of newspapers and trade publications are only about this interested in a new hire. But if you’re writing about your take on a new trend within your industry, and maybe you’re saying something different than everybody else, that’s a little bit wider. And that gives you a much better chance of getting some media pickup. And so that’s the part of the whole press release thing that I love is taking that strategy and that creativity and trying to figure out where the holes are in your industry. And can you address it with the press release? And is that an opportunity?

So I think you brought up another really solid point. Using of a Press release based upon what you just described essentially is not to say, hey, we have a new product or a new service is to talk about a particular topic that’s essentially trending. But giving a different point of view, is that correct?

It can be one of the things I talk about with strategies is there’s lots of different approaches. And if you have a new product or service that’s like a milestone topic, it’s good. It could do really well. But for a lot of people, they’re not issuing new products and services every day. So you may only be introducing a new product or service once every two or three years. So that’s where you have to make your own news. And it might be you conducting a survey or study within your industry. It could even be of your customers, your leads, and then publishing that to your industry. As long as it’s 100 a sample of 100 people or more generally, all they’re going to cover it or be interested in it, especially if you asked a lot of intriguing questions. I always say take the questions that you feel a study should have and then add two or three oddball questions, little quirky questions. And those are the ones that generally get picked up. When I see an article written, it’s generally the headline of that surprising quirky little question that gets mentioned there. And you see it in Cosmopolitan going back decades. Where on the cover, it’s like 17% of all men do this in the bedroom. Page 58. Everybody’s stumping through what the heck is on page 58. And the same thing works across lots of different industries. It doesn’t have to be as sensational as that, but it can be really intriguing or interesting. Sometimes it could be a questionnaire and you just have an open ended question with a field that says, What’s the one weirdest thing that someone left in a car when when they traded it in and someone just list a few things, and that can result in here’s a roundup of the ten craziest things left in a used car that was sold at the dealership. And people like to read those types of things because it’s like a human interest element to it.

Yeah. I think it’s definitely interesting because, I mean, anybody that understands marketing is always the psychology of the individual reader at the end. So to your point, you’re kind of peeking into their psyche, catching their attention enough, then hit them with a solid headline, a solid by line, and then hopefully by doing those two things, you get them to read the content and then convert or get to the pitch line and then move forward to the action that you want them to do, which is essentially buy a product or buyer service or at least sign up for something. So it’s definitely interesting the way you’re doing.

Yeah. Thank you.

So in addition to that, you’ve been doing this long enough to where you probably had some really out of this world kind of crazy stories. Like what’s the most interesting or crazy story in your business that you’ve ever been presented with?

Well, we did a Press release for somebody who created a foam that you drop on a Hurricane or developing storm off the coast. And supposedly it reduces the severity of the storm. And that person got the government involved and they went down to the Gulf and they tested it. And needless to say, it didn’t do what they wanted it to do, because that was as far as it went. It said that they didn’t see any measurable decrease that they wouldn’t think would otherwise be there. But I thought that was really interesting, and he got picked up by a lot of different places. He got asked to be on Good Morning America chose not to be because he said, I need to be in the Gulf with the government for the next few weeks, so I can’t go to a taping of Good Morning America. But he did get a lot of pick up, and it was kind of quirky. I also had a customer in 2006 who created Hypoallergenic Cat, and it got picked up as Time magazines, Invention of the Year and probably over a couple of hundred publications picked it up. Discover Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Everybody covered it. It wasn’t all favorable. A lot of it’s like, Should we be playing God? Should we be making animals in a laboratory? Have we gone too far? That being said, they did millions and millions of dollars of reservations where people were paying a deposit towards having a Hypoallergenic Cat created.

That’s definitely pretty bizarre and crazy at the same time. But I could definitely see it’s kind of one of those things negative versus positive with either one media media. So there’s going to be a fall out of some positivity by default, just the rule of numbers. So I think in that you named a couple of big names in researching you a little bit. You had an opportunity to work on Squatty Potty from Shark Tank as well, right?

Yeah. We work with probably about 30% is what I see. About 30% of the people who appear in Shark Tank use us. The producers of Shark Tank advised them to do a Press release before their episode errors. And afterwards. And they mentioned he releases by name. Usually I can’t say that on my website. I can say that here, but I did reach out to him, and I appreciate it. But they said that no. If you wanted to mention Shark Tank by name, you would be paying a lot of money to be able to do that. So that’s the unfortunate thing. But yeah, manscape Squatty potty. There’s just a long list of them who work with us. Squatty Potty does a lot of releases occasionally with us. They sort of go in cycles, and when they do, they do a lot of releases and they’ll take a little time off and come back. Landscape tends to be a little more strategic where they do at least two or three a year as well as everything else they do. They both do a lot of viral advertising and a lot of social media as well.

So with your particular service, I’m thinking that if you have clients on this magnitude and they’re reoccurring clients, that there should be a peak result after you do what you do. And is that something that you have enough case studies to back up?

Right? Yeah. We actually have a higher end program where we handle the strategy, and we developed the stuff for the customer. And everyone that enters the program gets a level of media success by usually month six and always within a year, we had a client come in that does carpet in New Jersey, local carpet company. I told them point blank. I don’t think this is going to work for. But they said we’ve got the budget and I’ve been told to do it. So they did it. And on month five, we were touching base. We had done five releases, nothing. And I just asked him. I said, Who’s your real enemy expecting it to be? Another local carpet company. And it was Home Depot and Lowes. And they said the big box home improvement stores are kicking our butt. They say they put mediocre carpet in. They put terrible padding in, and they use pickup contractors, and it’s never the same person. It’s whoever is the cheapest at the moment who just shows up at your house and installs it. And so we did a Press release about them as a local carpet company competing against the big box home improvement stores. We didn’t mention them by name, but we talked about the difficulties of that, sort of like a David and Goliath approach, and they got phenomenal pickup floor and trading publications. I didn’t know existed, came out of the woodwork and covered them. And one of them said that they got more positive feedback from readers on that article. Then they’d gotten over the past year on everything. And so it turns out that marketing was a vacuum in their industry. Nobody was really talking about marketing, and nobody was talking about marketing against these big guys and how difficult it is because they win so many of the bids. And so they got local media pickup. They got some national media pickup, and they got a lot of floor trade publication pickup, which they continue to do so. And after a while they would go into a job and say, here’s a book of all our press clippings, and they would just have the person thumb through it. And they’d say just to let you know, we’re not going to come in as the cheapest, but we use quality padding. Our people are career people that work here. The same person who puts down your flooring is going to be putting down floor, probably in five years, unlike the other guys. And we pay health insurance and retirement benefits. And we stand behind our product. And we recognized nationally. And nobody else around here can say that they used to try to come in under Home Depot and lows. They used to try to come in as the lowest, and they started winning more bids being 20% higher. And that was like a huge burst for them. And a real positive way to use those media clippings, because appearing in a floor in trade publication doesn’t help you with your customers because your customers aren’t there. But you can package that and share that with the customers the way they do. And they call it brag book, where they just sit and go through page after page of all these media mentions that they have.

It seems like that’s a whole another business like sub unit itself. I mean, you guys can essentially say, take all these clippings, all the articles that you ever been publicized in, and you can kind of create a brag book for them. It’s kind of going to be like a line add on item to kind of sell and promote as Ironically.

If we try to do that, we get in trouble with Copyright. But if the end user himself does it or we help them by pointing out where the links are and have them correct it. It sort of more falls and fair use for you to grab it for yourself. But that is something that we’ve learned over the years where we’ve been contacted by some people about clippings that we have and things like that.

So that’s weird. I mean, it comes into the copyrighting segment of it once it’s the least of the public and all you’re doing is resourcing the service. How does that Copyright infringement?

Because they believe that they control the Copyright and you should only be able to view it on their website. You shouldn’t be able to take a picture of it and share it with someone that now they don’t get the benefit of the ad they don’t get and stuff like that. So it’s not too bad in in the UK, it’s horrific. Everybody who shares Clippings and if they put them on their own website have to to pay a licensing fee to an organization that is in charge of just licensing for every media outlet. So if you got picked up in a UK publication and you put a screenshot on your website, you will just get a letter in the mail saying you now £1500. And here’s how you can license it in the future and only pay £400 a year for as long as you keep it up or something like that.

That’s definitely crazy. I mean, just going inside the legalities a little bit. I mean, like, what kind of business structure do you have? Are you an S Corp. C Corp. Llc.

And I’m an LLC, but I elected S Corp. For tax purposes. That was something that I was advised over the years to do. So I think this is predominantly like an S Corp from a tax standpoint.

So with that, I mean, obviously there’s many tentacles to just publication in general, and you’re in a particular niche publication. So what systems do you have in place to help manage your clients and manage the distribution of the channels that you’re working with?

So we use Help Scout as sort of a ticketless system working with the customers to the customers. It looks like we’re just responding through email, but on our end, it’s all through a ticket system where each editor gets assigned a customer and they’ll only see that person going back and forth. So it allows them to have an individual experience where they’re working with one person during the duration of an order. And then we send everything over electronically through PR Newswire through our special channels that we have and APIs that we have with them, and then they do their distribution. And then we also do our email sends online through a portal. And we have someone who just specializes in doing that.

Nice. So I think you alluded to this earlier and we always hear about someone being perceived to be an overnight success. Somebody may hear this episode and like, Where’s this guy been? Like, did he just pop up on the map? And it sounds highly successful, but in reality, it probably took 20 years to get there. How long did it take you to get to currently where you are?

It took me probably. Well, right now I’m on track to do 6 million a year in revenue. Last year was about 5.7 million in revenue. The first five years of my business, I didn’t make enough to live off of it. So I was working another full time job, the telecom company for a couple of years and then I had another business that I had started that was an email delivery. So he releases was part of that. But I did email delivery of email newsletters on all different types of content. I had Poma day, I had horoscopes, I had all this stuff, and then the dot com crash happened and that business was doing about 500 $1,000 a month in advertising revenue, and it went to zero. And at that point, I had e releases, which was doing about 3000 a month in revenue, and it continued. So the consumer side of the newsletters dried up completely. But e releases had some life to it. So I just focused all my energy on it for the first time. And I took almost every dollar that came in and reinvested in advertising, promoting, doing blogs just hustling. And it grew. And at a certain point, I knew I needed an employee, but I was afraid to hire an employee business go down and then I have to lay them off because it was like it didn’t seem very fair. So when I finally did hire an employee, I really should have already had hired them six months before, but I was slow to it. And then we started adding more staff as we continue to grow. It was very with most years, we only grew about anywhere from ten to 17%. There was one year that we grew like 25%, but it’s mostly been incremental and small like that. And we’re still growing at that clip about 10%, I think right now. So it comes with a headache for someone who started a business because they wanted to have some independence. You lose that as you start adding staff and employees and procedures and things like that. But it’s your creation and you’re drawn to it. And I love it. I love the excitement of it like something I’ve created has a life of its own, and it has to be managed a little bit. And I feel like I’m up to the challenge of doing it and getting in there. I love the marketing of it. That’s my real thing, the marketing of it and the strategy of trying to make my customers do better. And that’s why the PR strategy that I’ve been working on lately. I’m really excited about because I really feel like it solves a problem with my customers who don’t see positive results because they’re not really doing the strategic stuff that they need to do and analyze their market and find the real opportunities that are just sitting there.

I mean, that brings me the two additional questions. I mean, one of them, you were saying that you got to 5 million and you jumped to 6 million, and anybody that gets to the 5 million point is kind of like one of those kind of with hangers, right. You kind of get stuck at 5 million. And then once you break past the 5 million and 10 million, 20 million and so forth.

For me, it was 2 million. I got stuck at I got stuck at 2 million, and I think I went from 2 million to 1.9 to 2.3, and it just seemed like I was just treading water there for a little bit, and it took a while to get to 5 million. But I feel like things have been progressing. I definitely I felt like I was turning at 2 million, and that was really difficult. And actually, I think I was considering even selling the company then because it just seemed like I couldn’t find the answers to get me to grow out of that space. But eventually I did. And some of the things that I did was try to examine. I’m a new customer of releases. How do I convince you to do a PR campaign and not just one press release? Because at one point of my new customers only did one press release, and that was it. And we talked to them and they say, yeah, I gave it a try. You seemed like a good company, but nothing happened. And I’m just like, yeah, but that’s not a PR campaign. So we send suggestions to customers on what their next press role should be. That was one of the things that we do for all new customers. We say here are some ideas that we came up with analyzing you and your industry a little bit. And so we give them that that idea for what might be a compelling idea for a Press release and something that’s a little more strategic. And then we give them some advice on how to better write and just make ourselves available to them. And we’ve increased it before. I think around 20. Some percent of customers will use us repeatedly. And that’s what moved us out of the $2 million range. It doesn’t seem like a lot. That’s still a lot of people that are not using us more than once. But I just come to recognize that when it comes to marketing, there are a lot of people that are looking for the one hit wonders. And they’ll go and they’ll say, I’m going to learn Penter today. I’m going to give it a try for a couple of weeks, and then if it doesn’t do what I wanted it to do, I’m just going to move on to the next shiny object. And so that’s where press releases for a lot of people fail because they don’t commit to a PR campaign. They just try one single release, and it’s quite possible that they could get some real meaningful media coverage and have a meaningful outcome. But they just got to put that strategy in there and try a few different approaches.

Very, very, very interesting. So in what you just said, right, if you can travel back in time and change one thing on this journey, obviously, you had the 2 million struggle, then you got to the 5 million, and now you’re on upward climb. What’s one thing that you would change in that formula to do everything all over again?

I think trust my employees sooner. I spent four years, and I really felt like I came close to having a heart attack with hiring employees, trying to have the best employee micromanaging every phone call and saying, this isn’t how I would have handled it. And I had an HR professional in the UK who specializes in hiring, who is in a mastermind of mine. And she spent some time with me and analyzed everything. And she says, Mickey, I’ve interviewed all these people. They’re very competent, they’re very smart. And she says, but they’re afraid of you. They’re not happy here. So they’re not going to be around very long. We had a very quick turn over. Most people stayed one to two years, and she said, you need to just trust that they’re going to get the job done, and they’re not going to handle every conversation the way you would handle it as the boss. But they’re not going to handle in a way that you’re going to lose business. And so I I just got up one day and told the staff I wasn’t coming into the work anymore and that if they needed me, I would be available at home. And that was in 2015, and it was the best thing I ever did. The business just grew really strong after that. And the same staff that were there when I left are still there. And so some are going on eight years, and they’re happy and they’re able to do their job without me breathing down their neck, saying, That’s not the way to handle it. You should have used this closing statement. You should have done this, that and the other. So it’s just real people doing real experiences. And I found that, you know, I’m not surprised that I’m a bad boss because I went in business because I didn’t like being told what to do by other people. But I do feel very fortunate that I finally woke up and realized that I don’t need to be in the day to day operations of that business. I put someone in management who’s a warm mother like figure who gives encouragement and somehow finds a positive way to make corrections and get stuff on track completely different from my style. My style is to be a little bit more critical and just upfront. And so that’s the big thing I would have done is save myself a lot of grief, save my staff. A lot of grief. I think of all the people I lost over the years, the were probably great employees, and I just sort of rushed him out the door. That’s a big acknowledgement for me that as great as a businessman as I am, I wasn’t a good employer. And so that’s something I wished I had learned, because I definitely feel that you’re only as valuable as your staff because they keep the lights on. They keep things running. They save you from a lot of the headaches. They allow me to focus on marketing. They allow me to build out the master classes for strategy. They allow me the ability to focus on what I want to in my business, and they’re handling the day to day stuff.

I mean, some of the elements of what you just sounded like you was kind of describing Steve Jobs to a certain extent, right? Trying to find that balance and equilibrium between being an overhanging boss and being more of a subjective boss. So my next question is kind of like, obviously, like you said, you’re a great business person like you’re, very business savvy. You’re very well aware of your business. Did that come from an entrepreneurial background? Any family members in your history? You’re an entrepreneur?

Yeah. My grandfather was always running businesses, and he would get tired of them and move on to something else. He had a restaurant. He owned an ice house where he sold ice to grocery stores. He had a clam house where he bought and sold clams. He’d get a little bit of everything and he would do it for a few years. He’d lose interest, he’d sell it and move on to something else. He had a Marina and a motel. This was a guy who I just was enamored with because it just seemed like he was always doing cool stuff. And as soon as it got tiring, he would just move on to something else. I guess I’m a little bit different because I like the challenge of growing the business and I want to keep seeing it succeed. And I’ve had ebbs and flows over the years, one point where I considered selling the business, but for the most part, I feel energized by it, and I keep wanting to get in there and make things a little bit better and improve the bottom line and just grow.

It’s very interesting. How do you currently juggle your work life with your family life? Your work life balance?

Well, I generally try to give myself off on the weekends and make myself available for family there. And the same thing with evenings, usually at 07:00 or sooner, depending on how tiring I am, I will just take a break and go watch TV and hang out with family and stuff like that. It’s hard because I am a 60 hours a week kind of guy, so I am up and working usually from six or seven in the morning until around 07:00 at night, at least Monday through Friday. And occasionally I’ll have a project that I’ll work on on the weekend, but it’s one of those things that I have to fight and carve out time for. I’m a poet, so I still tried to write of four or five times a week. I like to meditate. I use an app called 10% Happier I tried meditation over the years. It never worked. And then I tried this one and it gives you these introductions and they walk you through it. And they basically explain, you’re never going to have that calm place in your head where you’re just going to an out for ten minutes. You’re always going to have bots that invade you. But the thing is you just have to channel back to the breath and get back on focus, and it’s like a muscle. The more you, the better you get. And so those are the types of things that I do. I need to exercise more. And that’s one of the things I keep saying I’m going to work on. But every time I get started, it’s always a back injury or knee or something like that that prevents me.

it’s funny that you broke up because just just hearing you speak and just getting to know you a little bit better. It just seems like we share the same commonality. It’s kind of like going to sleep is only something that we do because we have to do, not because we want to do it. So to kind of turn off your brain, I would think would be really difficult for you to do that at any given time in that what is your morning habits? Your morning routine look like?

So I get up and I start brushing my teeth and running a bath. I love a hot, warm bath. In the morning. I put all the soaps and good Smellies in there and then I make a cup of coffee and I take it in and I just sit in the bathtub and just then out a little bit. It’s not really meditation, but it’s pretty close to it. I just feel like I I’m settling into being awake and also in a way, just blending in with the heat. There’s just something magical that happens there. After that I get up and I usually either meditate or write, depending on how I feel. Some mornings where I’m feeling really good, I’ll meditate and then all right. And then after that, I’ll go in and check my Google ads, and then the next thing I chose, 5 hours have passed.

I was say, after you take a hot bath early in the morning, not at night. I mean, how could you even continue your day after that? Like you just don’t want to use one lounge at that point.

It’s not me. I feel like I’m ready for the day. I feel like I will wake up and I feel refreshed. But I don’t feel really relaxed. And so the bath really just anchors me for the day.

That’s definitely the person I’ve heard. It is definitely interesting thing that I’m about to try.

That being said, I am known for also taking an evening bath on occasion. So I love taking a bath or something about water that I just love nice.

So you’re into publications you’re into literature, poetry without assuming anything. I would then say that you’re a pretty average reader as well. Is that good assessment?

It is. I don’t read books as much as I should, but I do read a lot of stuff. I subscribe to the Apple News app and signed up with all the publications I want, and I follow Inc magazine and Fast Company and also stuff. I have some interest in science. So I’ll follow some science publications and things like that. I’m not really interested in current events because I kind of feel like the stuff that you read that stays with you and is timeless is not the stuff that’s generally part of current events, and people get drawn into that, and they agonize over politics and stuff like that. I just try to try to stay away from some of that got you.

So with that question on this podcast is giving the opportunity to kind of create a book club. And I’ve always asked this question. It’s kind of like, well, on your journey, there must have been some book that inspired you, and it must be some book that you may want to recommend for entrepreneurs following in your footsteps. So I’m gonna actually the same thing. I mean, what books have you read on your journey to help you get to where you are and what books would you want to recommend now that you are where you are?

Well, one of the books that everybody recommended a long time ago was Dell Carnegies How to Make Friends and Influence People. Something along those lines. I read that I really liked it and that sort of led into Napoleon Hills Think and Grow Rich. And I thought it was a little it didn’t resonate with me, but I felt like over the years I appreciated it more after the fact. Maybe it was the style of the writing, but I just didn’t connect with it. But I found myself keep going back to it over the years saying, oh, yeah, that reminds me of that. And so I do think it was a little bit more influential than I gave it credit for initially. And there’s been a lot of stories in Inc magazine, especially, I thought does a really good job of describing the startup experience. I found myself reading stories about people working out of the garage and stuff like that for me. When I started my business, I didn’t have any real money. And so I paid $120 for a domain name for two years through Network Solutions. I paid for a web host that was $6 a month, and I pay $29 to something called multi cards that would do credit card processing for you and that was it. And the rest was just me, my database of journalist and me going on to bulletin boards and talking about my products and services. And then I started advertising. Pay per click became a thing. And I think at the time, it was go to dot com or Overture and that opened a new Avenue for reaching people. But it doesn’t take a lot of money to start a business. Sometimes we’ll get a phone call from someone and they’re like, I got a small business administration loan for $25,000 to create a gift basket company. And I just gave $5,000 to a merchant company to do credit card processing. And I’m just like, you don’t have to do that. And they’re like, and I’ve got these lawyers set up to turn me into an S Corp. Or an LLC Corporation. And I’m like, you really don’t have to spend that kind of money. I didn’t bother incorporating until my business was, like, five to seven years old because I didn’t have anything before that. I was broke, and it’s like someone sues me. I’m just closing down the business and filing bankruptcy. It wasn’t much I could do. And it was only about five to seven years were in where I felt like this is something that I should start protecting myself. It’s beginning to generate some real money. And I always advise people don’t get seduced into feeling that you have to do all these crazy things to start a business. You can just sort of just go out there and put your shingle out there and get started without spending a lot of money.

Yeah, definitely. I definitely agree with that. I mean, at this point, I mean, obviously you have a lot of systems in place, right? So what software are you currently using in your company that you would not be able to do what you do without?

Well, it’s a custom program back in that we have we have our ordering system, that’s all custom program and allows our Editors to log in, pull releases all the materials together. And so it’s a custom solution. I wish something off the shelf would have worked, but we looked at some shopping cart solutions, and it just didn’t do what we needed to, because there’s some complicated stuff that has to go on. We have to do a word count when you upload a word document to determine because the news wire charges based on words and stuff like that. It’s a little complex, but it works. I mentioned before Help Scout, which is a great ticket list system. I recommend that really strongly for anybody who wants the appearance of just responding email, personalized email back and forth without having a ticket number at the top. It’s really cool to have this ticket list system, and it just everything is handled in a platform that’s scalable. So as you add additional people, you just add them to it and they become part of the process.

That definitely sounds like a very solid system, but it seems like you have a kind of duality system, like you have some custom software, and then you have some off the shelf stuff working together. So I take it. You have a lot of API integrations going on as well.

There is a bit yes.

Nice. So final words of wisdom. Let say I’m an entrepreneur and I hear this story and maybe I like writing poetry. Maybe I just want to get into some kind of form of writing. And I’m hearing what you’re saying. I want to follow in your footsteps and they say I’m 20 years old. What words of insight would you give to me to influence me to continue on this journey?

Well, I would say learn a skill and back it up with writing. I think that I’ve recommended some people in the past. Search engine optimization is an opportunity where you can learn, use your writing as well as adding some strategy behind it so that you’re helping people develop content, that it should be relevant to the search engines. And you’re looking at things like keyword density and you’re wanting to appear natural. But you’re not necessarily trying to game the system. And also there’s the opportunity for getting links on other people’s websites by providing them an article or something like that. I think that just writing as a writer, it’s really difficult to make a living because you run the risk of being a commodity. We have press release riders that we use, and we pay about 50% of what we used to pay. And the reason for that is over the years, the market has said that people are willing to write press releases for less money. And so we were constantly being introduced to writers saying, I’ll write a Press release for you for $125. And I’m just like, wow, we’re paying someone $200 to write a release, and they’re not as good of a writer as you, and it’s come down even a little bit more than that. You do run the risk of the commodity if you’re just a straight writer. So I would say, add something to it. What makes you a little bit different? You might be a funnel writer. You help write content for funnels, pick a niche and pick something that fits with your personality and be the writer in that space because I think that those are the people that people aren’t going to go for. The lowest price person. They’re going to say this person are really funny. Nominal traffic funnel content writer. And as long as it seems reasonable, you’re going to use them, you’re not going to say, Well, I’m going to try and find someone who can do it for, like, 20% to 30% less. The same thing with a really competent SEO guy. If you have a really good track record for helping improve someone’s SEO, then you’re going to get business and you’re going to continue to get business.

Nice. So I’m going to pull one of your pre generated questions. And I’m picking this question because I think my audience would get a lot of value from it. And it was number four on your question sheet about how to get regular local media coverage without spending a dime.

Right. So we get inquiries all the time saying, I have a release or I want to get a release out locally, and we always tell them as much as we love money, we don’t want to take your money. In this case, in a local media market, there’s probably less than ten people who would write about you. And I’m, including TV and radio as well. So figure out who they are. It’s probably a local newspaper might be a minor newspaper, maybe one or two business, public locations or business magazines. And then there might be a couple of radio or TV programs that occasionally interview or profile or spotlight a local business and then figure out how to reach them. And for a radio and TV, it’s a Booker or a producer. And for the journalist, it’s usually the writer themselves. And you can just call the newspaper and say, I’d like so. And so’s email address 90% of the time. They’re going to give it to you. If you feel a little shot or you don’t want to do that, there’s sites out there that you can go to. That if you have the person’s name and the organization, they’ll tell you the email address, and they’ll usually give, like, ten or 20 emails free a month or something like that for doing something like that. And like I said, once you have those ten contacts, you don’t even have to write a Press release. You can just reach out to them and just say, hey, my name is so. And so I’m with this local company. I’m doing something that I feel is really relevant to your readers because and then just share it with them. And in addition to that, if you see a trend in your industry or you follow a competitor in a different city and you see a story about something that’s a cool angle. You can then circle back to them and say, hey, I’ve been seeing a lot more activity about this subject in my industry. I thought you may want to cover it. Whether it’s you that gets covered or not, you can be valued as an asset to them, so that when you do next have a newsworthy event, they’re much more likely to cover it. And we’re talking about sending four to maybe eight emails a year to these people. So it’s not a lot of work. And I always say for local media, you’re going to do the best job because you’re a human being, and it’s easy to form a personal relationship with someone who’s local, you know, the same sports teams. You know, what’s really going on in your city, and you can actually read their stuff and say, hey, I really like that article I saw that you you did about X, Y and Z.

Nice. I think that’s definitely an elegant way of just reaching out and making it more of a person to person versus a B to B situation. Yeah, an online, obviously, you’re a big marketer and you have multiple different platforms. How can our audience find you on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth? Yeah.

Just look for e releases as Twitter releases. I think if you do a search for e releases on Facebook will come up same thing with LinkedIn, our websites, releases. Com and I have that free mastermind class, the video training on PR strategy at Releases. Com plan that’s P-L-A-N and again, if you have any problems or questions or you want to talk to someone, just give us a call. We have no sales people. It’s all Editors, and they don’t get a Commission for trying to upsell you. So if they feel like press releases aren’t going to work for you, they’re completely empowered to say so. We only want to work with people that we feel we’re going to be able to do some real success with with that last statement that you made.

I mean, if you had to paint a picture of your ideal customer, what would that demographic or that individual look like?

Startups? I think that’s why so many Shark Tank people work well with us because they understand they have a really good understanding of what’s compelling and interesting. A lot of startups are generally doing something a little bit different than everybody else. That’s why they’re on Shark Tank. They’re not like the same sort of cookie cutter business. They’re doing something a little bit different and startups because they’re having to differentiate themselves. They understand how to get that across to the media. And they also understand that one press releases in a PR campaign. So they’re more committed to doing a series of releases, understanding that some are going to work and some aren’t going to work.

So you’re talking about just general PR campaign. What consistency of releases? I mean, are you talking about every 24 hours, every 72 hours every week?

No I think for small businesses, if you can afford it, try to do one release a month, and if you can afford that, it’s not in your budget. I would say, at a minimum, try to do one a quarter. And I have some people that loosely follow that the average three or four releases a year, and they do see results as a result of it. The more you get out there and the more industry trade publications see your name in a headline when they’re looking, they’re more likely to say, oh, yeah, I remember them. I saw them a few months ago, but this one looks a little more interesting. I’ll finally click through and learn a little bit more and then hopefully that could result in an article.

Nice. So going into, like, a bonus question, right. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why? Well, with one of those questions that you kind of like all the other questions, you just you just know the answer and this one, you just kind of have to think about it a little bit.

I would have to say, I’m going to be honest here. And it’s like I would like to spend 24 hours with my father. He died when I was young, and I have a lot of good memories, but I would love to talk to him as an adult and just have a natural conversation and talk with him. I would be curious what he thinks, how my life turned out and how things are going. And I was leaning towards a celebrity. But I was like, personally, that was who I was drawn to when you first asked.

Nice. So going into closing, I mean, on this journey, this conversation questions may have come up on your side that you may want to ask me. So I always give whoever I’m interviewing opportunity to interview me is any questions that you would like to ask?

Well, marketing, what do you feel is the future or trending right now in the marketing area, I’ve been told by a lot of people that I need to get into video and YouTube and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean, to answer that, I think video is not new, right? It’s been around television and advertising has been around post radio, so that’s always going to be here. But it’s figuring out new alternatives to video secondary to that, something else that I’ve been looking into, and I kind of I thought it would have been a little bit further along by now, but it hasn’t really peak, because I think people haven’t learned how to really utilize it. And that’s kind of voice like talking about Amazon devices, Google Devices, Siri. And having these devices kind of market for you based upon what users are using them for. An example of that would be if I’m constantly asking Siri or Alexa to do something in particular by default. The algorithm then should present an Advertisement. Who me based upon what I do now, what I have heard on these devices lately is, hey, your printer is running low on ink. That’s kind of like the ongoing marketing. We realize through our network that your printer has been running prints for a certain period of time, and they’re low on ink and time for you to buy a replacement. But how can we take that and expanded more into what you’re doing? How could you and say, hey, here’s a general update of your reach this week or the day the last 24 hours we put this newspaper article out. This is your reach. This is your staff. This is your analytics that should be delivered verbally instantly just by talking to a device. And I’m thinking that’s the next generation we just got to get people used to talking to a device talking to an artificially intelligent individual.

Very cool.

Well, I definitely appreciate your time. I think you definitely delivered a lot of Nuggets and a lot of insight for somebody to kind of really think about, like, not necessarily the cons, but all the value add that delivery and e newsletters and giving people a definition of what you do and how it can be fruitful into your credit. I mean, you’ve been working with people with Shark Tank, so it’s definitely proof in your pudding, and I definitely commend you and thank you for coming on the show today.

You’re welcome. Thanks.

Great essay. Grant. Over and out.