I am always astonished at the ways some company owners squander their money. I'm not talking here about Donald Trump-type megalomaniacs, but about otherwise perfectly sensible men and women, chief executive officers who blithely sign over a $5,000 public-relations retainer each month to Grabbit & Runne, public relations consultants, in the hope of seeing their names in the pages of magazines like this one.
If that describes you, I've got some bad news -- you hope in vain. Besides those jovial lunches with your account executive, later added to your bill, what you are buying is mostly paper, stamps, and a lot of unreturned telephone calls. The barrage of press releases and personal queries launched by most PR firms on behalf of most clients is strictly high cost and low impact. Watch any reporter toss the phone messages into the wastebasket after lunch, and you begin to appreciate the swelling numbers now employed in the U.S. public-relations industry. For most of us, public-relations material is clutter, a dim roar of white noise in the editorial office.
Don't get me wrong -- I understand why companies are eager to break through that wall. Nothing buffs up a company's image more than a positive story in a newspaper or a magazine. Unlike paid advertising, media coverage has public credibility, offering a potential boost to a marketing effort, an aid in negotiations with customers and suppliers, and a public pat on the back for employees. The problem is that most PR agents have no more idea of how to get into INC. than the average goat knows how to pilot the Concorde.
That's why I was so surprised when a public-relations campaign led to January's story on Koss Corp., "All the Right Moves." In more than five years at INC., I'd never written a piece that had come from a public-relations agent. Nor had I ever heard of Richard Roth or connected him with the company Primetime Publicity & Media Consulting Corp. What caught my attention was the letter itself, the single smartest pitch thrown my way in those five years. And what kept my attention was a campaign so smooth and professional that I never realized how thoroughly Roth had anticipated my every move.
A good PR person like Roth can break down the barriers between executives who feel reporters are demanding, hostile, and ignorant, and reporters who complain that businesspeople are evasive, secretive, and unable to tell the difference between puffery and news. The best PR people treat the executive and the reporter as if each were the client, recognizing both to be equally necessary for success even if only one is paying the bill.
Such paragons, unfortunately, are rare -- I count six among the hundreds of PR types I've met over the past decade. Few, it seems, have ever read INC., or have any idea of what we write about or who we write it for. They haven't figured out that merely dubbing someone an "entrepreneur" does not necessarily make me want to meet him, or that calling a company "fast growth" does not mean its story is dramatic or instructive. But still they call . . . and call . . . and call.
Richard Roth, bless his soul, called, too. But only once, and then late in the day. He got off the phone in less than two minutes and sat down at the typewriter.
His letter was a model of the genre, carefully targeted and personal, right down to the typo that showed he had written it himself. It was short: eight brief paragraphs, half of them only one sentence long. "I believe Koss Corporation's roller coaster fight back from bankruptcy would make compelling reading for your audience," he began. Then he reeled off a half-dozen potential angles, any one of which could have come out of an INC. editorial conference: a chance "to peak [sic] inside a company that has gone from being nearly the best to being nearly bankrupt" or "a story about restructuring and refinancing." There was a family angle, a succession angle, and a transition angle, if that's what INC. was interested in. "I can make available to you all the important members of management," Roth concluded, "and any other information you might need."
A specialist in the business press, Roth had come to public relations in his forties, after one career teaching writing and a second in radio and TV news as a reporter and assignment editor. Roth knew no one at INC., but that was not crucial. "The only detriment is not knowing the editorial policy," he explains, "or what the magazine has done over the past year. If you understand who its audience is, and what it creates for them, you're 75% of the way home."
Roth, who had started working in January 1987 with Michael Koss, the newly named president and chief operating officer of Koss Corp., approached the assignment as any journalist would. He pored over the old news clips, the annual reports, the catalogs, and the advertisements. Then he interviewed all the principals by phone, some as many as half a dozen times, trying to see where each person fit, looking for the patterns and themes that would connect the numbers, the personalities, and the culture he found. From the start, it was clear to Koss and to his father, John, CEO of the company, that Roth spoke the language of business but retained the inquiring mind of a reporter, always probing for fresh details and revealing anecdotes.
In July, Roth sent his letter, and the story looked as if it would be a perfect fit for me. Besides having a special interest in family businesses, I had been looking for almost a year to write about a company coming out of bankruptcy. But even after a staff reporter confirmed the facts in Roth's letter, I had three problems to solve before I could actually fly out to Milwaukee.
