For 35-year-old Cunningham, who talks constantly -- if somewhat hyperbolically -- about "redefining PR," that presented problems. "Ever since I got into PR, I've wanted to make it not such a sleazy business," she says in her calmly intense voice, "to make it important to upper management in a company." A good PR agency, she contends, moves information in not one direction but two. It explains the client to the marketplace, but it also unearths and describes the marketplace's perceptions to the client.
"Clients almost always hire public-relations people because they're not getting enough press or what they're getting is bad," says Cunningham. "They want you to just change their image.
"We, though, will go in and talk with people in the client company and outside it -- a good example is what happened with IBM and the OS/2 account -- and discover why it's getting bad press: it's been late on deliveries, say, or its customers can't stand how they're being treated, or it has a bad product."
At that point, Cunningham says, a good PR consultant is in a very unusual situation. "We've spoken with all of the company's various publics -- the financial community, the press, industry gurus, competitors, customers, and even the client's own employees. We've heard unedited comments about the company -- what amounts to thorough market research -- and we can help identify the real problems inside the company." Step two is to explain them to the client. ("The real PR is figuring out how to get clients to listen to us; convincing them to make changes is the bulk of our work.") Only after the fix has been made, says Cunningham, can an agency take step three: persuasively communicate the improvement to the outside world.
To perform all those functions effectively, though, Cunningham's employees would need the skills to execute a research-intensive approach; broad knowledge of the high-tech industry in which CCI specializes; and an in-depth understanding of how a client's business works. It would take time for employees to acquire those attributes, which meant Cunningham would have to persuade them to stick around.
Cunningham tried to figure out why people think about their agency careers in ways that hurt their companies. She looked at herself. After stints as a journalist and then as a PR rep in Chicago, where she fell in love with the computer industry while working on the Atari account, she had come to Silicon Valley in 1983 to work for Regis McKenna, the high-tech PR guru who helped position and introduce Intel and Apple. Mc-Kenna assigned Cunningham to the Apple Macintosh account six months before the product's January 1984 introduction, and she ran it for two years, working directly with Apple founder Steve Jobs and growing her staff to a dozen people.
When Jobs left Apple, in early 1985, however, things changed for Cunningham. McKenna brought in a new person to be a fresh contact with the changing Apple team. At the same time, Cunningham says, McKenna was shifting the focus of his firm from public relations to marketing consulting. She approached him about starting her own satellite PR firm on a 50-50 basis, but he wasn't interested. So in September 1985 she left -- cordially, with McKenna even sending her two small Apple development companies as starter clients. Within a few months Steve Jobs called Cunningham from his new company, NeXT Inc., and asked her to handle the PR on a suit filed by Apple.
Thanks partly to the stature of the NeXT account, a steady stream of clients came to CCI. Within a year Cunningham was busy enough to pick and choose her clients, taking on a smaller number of prestigious companies that believed in her philosophy of PR. Today CCI's staff (which now numbers 59 employees) services just 17 accounts -- yielding an employee/client ratio of three to one, compared with the one-to-two or even one-to-three ratios common in the industry.
What had Cunningham wanted when she was an up-and-coming PR rep working for others? The chance to make more money, to take more responsibility, and to grow her own business -- she had wanted to be an entrepreneur. So at the beginning of 1989, as Cunningham's work force reached 20, she began dividing the people who worked on accounts into teams, each with its own profit-and-loss responsibility. Those groups, run by Business Unit Directors, or BUDs, would get bonuses driven by their own profit margins: they'd be mini companies-within-the-company. She figured that one day the groups might even break off into satellite firms.
But with the people Cunningham had on staff, the system didn't work -- or it worked too well; it's hard to tell which. The rivalries destroyed companywide cooperation. People at CCI today refer to the BUD period as a time of fiefdoms, unpleasant competition, and bad attitudes. Lisa Goldman, who joined the company in 1988, says that "one BUD would have a staff that was 100% busy and couldn't finish its work, and others had people sitting around. People weren't willing to share resources, because it took away from their potential profitability."
"I discovered that not everyone's an entrepreneur," says Cunningham. "I thought everybody wanted to start a company, because that's what I'd wanted to do. But I was wrong."
In less than a year -- by the time Cunningham returned from her European vacation -- it was clear the system wasn't helping to create the company she'd envisioned. Nor was it making her very happy.
"The end of 1989, into 1990, was very turbulent," says Allison Hopkins, the fourth person Cunningham had hired and now the company's human-resources manager. "But Andy started to become stronger about the decisions she'd make. She became more willing to say, 'No, that idea isn't going to work,' or, 'Yes, we're going to do this.' "
Cunningham, with the help of Hopkins, outside board member Mike Gullard, husband Rand Siegfried, and Ron Ricci (who'd joined the company in mid-1989, bringing an equally strong ideal about culture), began implementing what felt like fundamental and radical changes. Every one of them was focused on keeping and nurturing the kind of talented people CCI's growth, even survival, depended on. Cunningham's ambitions: To provide, inside the company, the sort of career ladder that employees usually traded agencies to climb. Also, to help CCI associates grow as managers and PR consultants, to achieve the sort of stature that would earn client reliance and eliminate the need for Cunningham's personal involvement.
