My two cents on Cuban’s sense of PR firms for start-ups

After six years in Corporate America, eight years with medical and technology start-ups, and another six as founder of a boutique medical/technology PR firm, I know with confidence how much PR counsel puts start-ups on the map. With the economy in flux, layoffs and the reality of today’s business climate, I predict more and more entrepreneurs will be born.

Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, is not exactly a fan of the mix of ‘PR Flacks’ and start-ups who hire their firms, as he notes in http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222524.

I’ve worked with start-up CEOs in their first years of commercialization that have the foresight to do PR.  PR created a name and a sustained brand for them. PR got them Series B-D investments after their initial rounds. PR led them to several potential acquisition suitors. PR made them proud of the venture they started. In fact one medical start-up in Denver I worked with went from $100k in revenue to $6M in two years with PR successes such as appearing on CNNHeadline News and in US News & World Report, and letting its hospital and physician customers speak on its behalf.

Here’s my two cents on Cuban’s sense:

The pubs our clients read are the most relevant to their companies and the industry. Of course we want them to appear in these publications/blogs. Their current and potential investors and customers also read the same ones.  Whether start-up, mid-size or Fortune-ranked companies, teams are lean and mean these days. Our clients already have a “full time+” job with little time to do PR on their own. There’s nothing better than a client telling us their customers sent them notes after reading about them in a pub or when the phone rings to request an RFP because they were highlighted in an article that the lead just read.

Good PR consultants build relationships with reporters/citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers). We earn their trust and respect to be able to show them  some cool, innovative things and other angles that they have not yet thought about. And most importantly, they too have “full-time+” jobs.

My philosophy is to ‘unleash’ a prepared CEO or CMO on the media once we guage the media’s interest in a credible storyline. We always assume reporters will use the execs who we work with and the third party sources that we have carefully cultivated for our clients and who know these industries well.