Andrea Cunningham faced the same problem most service companies do:how do you keep, and grow, your only real asset -- the employees whose talents determine your fate? She even knew how to solve it. Eventually
At 10 o'clock on a cloudless Monday morning in October 1989, Andrea Cunningham -- just back in the office from her first vacation in the four years since she'd launched her 24-person Santa Clara, Calif., public-relations agency -- sat down with the deputy she had left in charge during her absence.
Cunningham had been gone three weeks, and she'd needed all of them. She had phoned the company daily, of course -- at the insistence of her number two, who now sat facing her. And she had read suitcase-loads of business books -- despite the ostensible diversions of the French countryside where she and her husband had bicycled and the Italian farmhouse where they'd later lodged. But even if the trip hadn't taken her as far from Cunningham Communication Inc. (CCI) as she might have hoped, it did help her restore some of the energy -- not to mention perspective -- that had dissolved over the long previous year.
True, CCI appeared to be doing just fine. It was one of Silicon Valley's hot agencies, boasting clients such as Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, and software mammoths Borland International and Aldus Corp. Billings had reached $3 million -- well beyond the boutique status most PR shops never transcend.
But Cunningham herself was fried. The company's clients still relied on her, personally, to deliver most of the advice and insight they'd hired CCI to get, and her supply of hours and ideas was exhausted. In her own mind she'd failed at delegating, failed at nurturing talent, and failed at creating the sort of caring, growing organization she'd been so hell-bent on building in the first place. The two people she'd hired to comanage the company "hated" each other, fighting openly despite her efforts to keep peace, and the people she'd promoted to manage accounts had made little progress convincing clients -- or other CCI employees, for that matter -- that much could be done without the hands-on presence of Cunningham herself. As 1989 dwindled, CCI, for the first time in its history, was about to post an unprofitable quarter, and Cunningham considered giving up.
Maybe an outsider should take over, she thought. Maybe only a new president could figure out how to leverage Cunningham's competitive strategy -- which rested on a "redefined" concept of PR -- and grow the company beyond the work load Cunningham could personally carry. "I felt torn up," she says quietly today about her impulse to step down. "But I just did not think I could do it anymore." Still, by the time she returned from Europe, she felt better than she had in months.
Then came the Monday-morning reentry.
She had given her deputy a list of things to do, "and lo and behold, he had done none of them." He didn't even mind telling her so. While Cunningham was away from CCI, it turned out, he'd fomented a mini-insurrection -- at one point crumpling up Cunningham's written mission and vision statements and throwing them on the floor in a managers' meeting. "We're going to start over," he had told the assembly. "I'm running the show now."
Cunningham listened as he reviewed the disregarded task list, and, she now recalls, something snapped.
" 'Now let's talk about you,' I said. And he kind of looked at me funny. 'I want you to leave the company, and I want you to leave right away.'
"He was floored. Finally, he turns around, grabs a pad and pencil, and goes, 'OK, start.' He was going to sue me for wrongful firing."
He didn't, in the end. The two managed to curb their hostilities, and the parting proceeded smoothly. "But," Cunningham recalls, "that was definitely the moment I said to myself, 'OK, I'm back in charge again.' I finally resolved to figure out how to do this, how to manage my company -- or I was going to be in worse trouble than I already was." It was time, she decided, to trust her instincts about what her company should look and feel like, and about how to attract, keep, and nurture the kind of employees that could grow CCI.
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Nearly every convention of the public-relations industry would seem to undercut Andrea (Andy to most people) Cunningham's strategy for how CCI could offer superior, and competitively differentiated, PR services. Like that of most service businesses, CCI's fate rests on the quality of its employees. But for Cunningham's particular strategy to work, she needs to do more than make high-quality hires. She needs to keep those recruits around long enough not just to learn CCI's tactics but to earn and keep the client confidence that CCI's approach depends on. As elementary as that strategy sounds, in the public-relations business, it's practically revolutionary.
The typical PR professional's résumé looks like a primer on corporate ladder climbing. The trouble is that each rung tends to be located in a different company. "The PR industry is very unstable," says Michael Busselen, currently the PR program manager at $400-million Cadence Design Systems (a CCI client) and formerly a staffer at two large California PR firms. "People switch agencies every year, year and a half." Nick Sturiale, a former Hill & Knowlton employee who is a four-year CCI associate (the company doesn't use titles, a stance that amounts to industry heresy), seconds Busselen's notion: "People will jump jobs every two years to get a $5,000 raise." Maura FitzGerald, head of CCI's East Coast branch, in Cambridge, Mass., attributes some of the frenetic mobility to burnout; most firms, she says, throw new hires immediately into five or six accounts and have them writing press releases and meeting clients without guidance from above.
Agencies are plagued -- as are service companies of all kinds -- by high client turnover, too. "I know some agencies that turn their account base every few years," says Sturiale. Taken together, he says, the job hopping and agency switching result in PR work executed by "really inexperienced people who don't have command of their client's business, or even of business issues in general."
