Stephen: This is your host Stephen Sargeant around the coin podcast. We have an amazing episode in store for you. Rachel Pipan from maneuver.con. She's just an amazing PR specialist, but also very thoughtful about what companies need to, especially the startup founders that, listen to this podcast in the payment tech, crypto and web three world.

What you need to do to attract top journalists, top media outlets, and more importantly, craft your message in such a way that's gonna go far beyond the investors that you're initially looking to attract, all the way to a broader audience and your total adjustable market. That's tan, by the way. I learned that the other day, anyway, this is such a great episode. Rachel breaks down jurisdictionally what's working, specifically what's working with her clients and the ROI that they're seeing, and how to stay away from maybe some of those expensive PR agencies. That aren't turning the results that you need, even though you're giving them a lot of moolah.

These are the episodes I love because I think it's helping educate a lot of our listeners on not only what they can hire in terms of a PR agency, but she also leaves a amount of great tips on what you can do your own without her services. Please listen to this episode. If you're looking to sell anything in payments, tech, crypto, or web three, this is a great PR episode to help those founders in need talk soon.  

This is your host Stephen Sargeant around the coin podcast. We actually have back-to-back episodes where we're going to be talking PR, marketing, all in the Web3 space. We have Rachel Pipan here from Maneuver. Rachel, tell us a little bit about you, the company, how you got into PR, and then we're going to go deep into your background and get some of the good insights from you on how all of our founders in payment, tech, crypto, Web3 can do a better job of like putting out their message.

Rachel: Awesome. So great to be here. Thanks for having me a little bit about me and how I came to this space. I know we'll go into background in a second, but yeah, I run Maneuver, which is a boutique agency in Europe. I'm American and we all operate in the U.S as well. And we work with startups and founders who are not yet ready to have a full marketing department, have a full communications department.

They look at salary ranges or they get proposals from agencies and they're like, my investors will kill me if I do this. So we come in, act fractionally, and just start some kind of an engine. Something to start getting some attentions or getting some visibility. And my background is in crypto, but we also do emerging tech.

So I think we have a nice superpower of helping really visionary people explain what they've done that's so groundbreaking. In language that, yeah, their investors care about, that their customers understand, and also that journalists and other, let's say like legitimizers can also get behind.

Stephen: I love it. Let's, let's dive right into it because you talk about agencies. Some of these PR agencies, I have people coming to me from a marketing side like, Hey, we just spent 20, 30, 000 a month. We got in a couple articles and, you know, our traction hasn't changed. Like, where did our money just go? Talk to me about, you know, companies that have maybe experienced that and then like, what would you be able to provide that they couldn't get from these, you know, really expensive and high end PR agencies?

Rachel: Yes. What I like to think about is, you know, the first time I went to like money 2020, like a really large, great conference and you walk through the space and you see these great buildups of, you know, Visa and MasterCard. And you're just like, wow, I'd like that company looks so professional. Like my, should my company do that?

And what you need to understand, what I think a lot of founders don't know is the percentage that you are paying for PR, that you're paying for marketing, or that you're paying for that sponsorship at that great conference, it needs to be a small percentage. Right? So these really big name, amazing PR agencies are great when you are Coca Cola, and when you are Circle, when you are Visa, when you are MasterCard, because, yeah, 20, 000 a month, 30, 000 a month, that's such a small percentage of your overall budget.

But when you've just raised, You've raised 5 million, 10 million, that 20, 000 retainer is too high. And also, don't think that you're crazy, right? You are not yet a Coca Cola. You are not yet the NFL. You don't need to be spending that kind of monthly retainer. Go smaller. And that's like, you know, where we came in.

We, I started my company because People were asking for PR support and PR advisory, and yes, some of them had come from using larger agencies and weren't pleased with the results for the amount of money that they had spent. And I often still have this conversation to tell them, you spent the right amount of money to have an agency of that caliber and locations, whether they have a location in London, New York, and Singapore.

You spent the right amount of money, but it wasn't the right amount of money for you. And therefore, the results that you're getting, you want to be in the front page of the Financial Times. for spending 150K over a couple of months. They were never going to do that because to them you actually haven't spent that much money.

Stephen: And I think that's a good yeah kind of level setting the you know, the x it's always hard when you're The expectations are high and you're investing. And also I think people that do that have a sense that this is going to be my big break. And I think just like any successful entrepreneur, it's never the big break.

It's like a series of small breaks that kind of compile themselves together. They're like, Oh, if I, as a podcast, if I interview Elon Musk, that'll be my big break. Yes, it will definitely boost me. But like, I remember the people that used to that interviewed. Sbf before he went to jail. I remember I don't even remember her name to that point, right?

Like, she, at the time, you probably couldn't touch her. You probably couldn't afford to have an interview with her. And now I can't even remember her name. Whether she still does TikTok or YouTubes. So it's never that big break. Tell me like, what are the fundamentals they have to even start thinking about?

So like, hey, we have a little budget. We are in payments tech. A little bit in web 3. Like, did we just launch an NFT project? Do we just give away all of our tokens and that's what's going to bring in, you know, all these people into our community. What are some of the things that you see that have been beneficial?

And then what are the things that even maybe you've tried with companies that are like, you know what, this doesn't really work that well. Or they're not going to get the ROI. This is something maybe later stage that might be useful for them.

Rachel: Yeah. Two things that work for companies when, you know, you're, you're younger, you've newly fundraised, or you're not yet like a humongous, well known household name. The first thing is focus your efforts on business development. Get customers, get partners who are willing to put their name on a press release with you, right?

Like if, if anything, even if you hire the greatest PR agency in the world and you say, I want to get news or I want to get on this amazing podcast to talk about what we do, the much easier way to do that is to say, and because we work with United Nations, because our product is used by MasterCard. And like, yes, those are very large names.

You can start smaller, but just slowly getting some of these proof points. That is what makes you a story. It makes you more than just somebody with a dick. Somebody with a product who, you know, nobody knows about and is using. One of my favorite companies that I've never worked for, but I've just followed them since I got into the space in 2016, is Chainalysis.

And that's what they did. They got into an accelerator. Run with other great, other startups were in it. It was, I don't remember who it was backed by, but it was, you know, had a good reputation. And after that, they slowly just started signing MOUs. With partners and just having a few of these like press releases that they wrote, they didn't get much pickup, but I slowly started to tell the world like, Hey, people are taking us seriously.

So get customers and have some kind of, you know, uptake before I start trying to do like boil the whole world with PR because any PR agency worth their money will tell you, we don't have anything yet to say. And if you don't yet have those customers, you don't yet have those partners and you still want to get some attention.

Find some numbers and statistics analysis does this really well, but so do other companies, which is report on something. How much TVL do you have locked? How much has your sales of your NFT increase of the last, like, six months, capture that increase, capture those numbers, and then put them into a report or just pitch them and share them with journalists.

They're not going to write about it immediately, but the likelihood is higher that. This journalist who's writing about NFTs will go back to your email and think, Oh, this, at least this collection has actually seen their numbers go up in the last six months where others have gone down. I can use that.

And I think what we see in both of these cases is you have to be bringing something to the table that's helpful to the press. And it's not just helpful to you. You're proving that you can do something, that people are interested, and you're giving them data. You can not just saying, please write about me.

I'm amazing. You'll get there. We need to build up some foundations first. Yeah.

Stephen: advice, you know, I mentioned chain analysis probably 40 times a day when I'm talking to people because that's one of my clients were a training partner for them. And to your point, it removes a lot of like the credibility because like if an 8.

9 billion company at what at some point is willing to work with this agency to, you know, create content, then at least they've done some bedding, you know, enough for the rest of the industry. Right. I'm curious, you know, where are you seeing an ROI like what it's so hard even from a marketing agency standpoint to show people like, Hey, you know, we did the chain analysis podcast.

They got 100, 000 new, you know, LinkedIn followers because we've been putting out so much content from the guests of that podcast. How do you translate what you're doing into like ROI when you can't guarantee certain, you know, views or impressions. How do you commoditize that or how do you, you know, create those metrics for your customers?

So at least their expectations are at least a level set before going into whatever campaign you're running for them.

Rachel: Yeah, the way we approach ROI and PRXPR is different, you know, as you know, different than marketing. You don't always have those trackable links to say, yes, this person read this article in this newspaper and therefore became a customer so they can prove that this is working. So much of PR has, is binary and it's correlated.

So the first thing we always look at and what you should be looking at with your PR agency or your PR freelancer, your PR consultant, or your in house communications hire. Did we make progress this month? Did we get an interview? Did we go on a podcast? Have we met more journalists? Even if we just met them for coffee and talked to them about our field.

Like, has something happened? I think we get so Especially when we hire an agency, there's a lot of management of an agency involved. Ignore the glossy reports. I don't care if they're 70 pages long and look gorgeous. Be like, what new thing happened this month? How have we made progress? Who are we in touch with?

And then the next thing you can look at is, and is that the right opportunity? Is that a magazine that my customers read? Is that a podcast that they would find legitimate? You can slowly start to filter down from there if what you're getting is good. The first thing is, has anything happened? Because if you know that you're getting more interviews, and you know that you're getting, you know, your op eds placed, and you know that you're building this relationship with journalists, you should then be tracking that against your customers, against your deals, and against your investment.

Your investor that, in that new round, may never tell you that they saw you on this amazing podcast. But they might, and we've actually had a client that said, you know, one of the reasons we got an investor is because there were a lot of podcasts for them to listen to. So we were able to sell to them before we were selling to them.

So I think it's you both say like, yeah, have, have we been present and visible? And then are we seeing like any kind of deal uptake in the latter end of it, like three to four months on? If no, then yeah, you might be getting the opportunities, but they're not landing with who you need them to land with.

Stephen: Awesome. It's funny and this is why I brought you and your company on because, you know, we get approached by a lot of agencies and everyone's probably like, oh, you know, all the PR agencies, they're the same. They're just gonna reach out to the podcast and like There's an art to that. As someone that's, you know, taking a lot of inbound from PR agencies, you can see, like, which ones have actually listened to the podcast, which is all, you know, always important. Like, you know, I know want your customer on your podcast but you know, maybe listening to an ep I'm not saying, you know, you have to listen to all 500 episodes. But having a sense of the podcast, but more importantly, to your point, you actually showed value. Like, Hey, this is why I think this would be a good guest.

Not like, Hey, this person can talk about this. We know you need to talk about this. They're like, hey, you just talked about ABC, but you know, there's a XYZ that's also being talked about in the industry And I think that's what you, McAlina, I believe her name is, and your team did so well is like approaching it from like a thoughtful Like, hey, these are the people that we actually think, we have lots of customers But these are the people that we actually think would add a lot of value or they're fun or they have a cool story Whereas I think the rest of the pitches are like, hey Insert name of last podcast that we just posted.

Hey, we saw you posted about ABC. We also have a client that can talk about ABC. And it's like, well, if we just had a podcast on that topic, the last thing we do is want to have exactly another person talk about the exact same thing. Where, how did you, like, how do you instill that in your team as well?

Because I don't think this is something that you can just like You know, PR is just like hustle, maybe numbers. I think that's the thing, like, just put out to every podcast and see who, see who responds. How do you instill, like, hey, let's just take a little bit of extra time, adjust our approach to get better results?

How do, how do you put that through to the rest of your team?

Rachel: At Maneuver, we call it pitch like a human. And I, the first thing I do, especially when we have someone new start, I will do a number of exercises, but one of them is like, Hey, write a pitch to me. I run a podcast. I'm a journalist. Write a pitch for this client that you've just, you know, learned a bit about and they write it.

And then I had them call me. I was like, call me on my phone and read that to me. And then you immediately see this, like, I don't want, I don't want you. This sounds weird. I'm like, that's because what you wrote is salesy. You wouldn't say it on the phone. So why would you say it in an email? No one's going to like reading that email.

It feels like you are the person that runs, like walks into a dinner party. Like I'm amazing. No one likes that person. People like people who bring something to the table, literally. So just trade it. That's our ethos and I tell them a story. I used to pitch journalists in a terrible way and I got told off by one who I hadn't, I hadn't done my research.

This was brand new in my career. I was just being told like pitch 200 names and I did and I sent something completely, you know, unpersonalized and I got owned for it and I should have been and I remember it to this day. I'm like that feeling drives me and helps drive my team cause I make them go through a little mini version of that when I have them pitch me.

But it's, we also know that taking the time works, so it's like pitch like a human is just, it's, of course, it's the ethical thing to do. It's nicer for you as a podcast host to get an email from someone who's actually listened to your podcast, groundbreaking, but it, if you're going to spend a couple of hours trying to get your client somewhere, at least try to make it work.

And I think that's the difference again, between. Our agency and some other agencies, and we don't report, say, well, we reached out to 200 podcasts. We say, well, we got you on two podcasts. We're not judging ourselves by how much outreach we did and how many hours we spent. We're judging ourselves by what we actually accomplished.

And the best way to do that..

Stephen: And for the audience I think why that resonates is because now I don't even, like, We don't even like look at what you're sending us because you know us, you know the podcast, you sent us great guests, you're coming on and like educating our audience, like everything that passes through now is going to be automatically approved because we're like, hey, they know our audience, they know that person's like sounds great, and I know they're a new client for you, but like, I think it's that, but it's a new client for you, but you know that that person won't fit well on this podcast.

And I think that builds those relationships of trust where it's like I trust that you're going to send me your top people and you've proven it over and over again. I think that's what companies need to do. I think they've gotten to this point of like just mass amounts of quantity. And it is a lot of quantity out there you have to put out there.

But like if you just tinkered and added a little bit more quality you just have to put out less you're going to get more returns with less.

Rachel: Exactly. And everyone has a better time at work and your clients are happier. And I think a question we get asked a lot and a question founders should ask when you're interviewing an agency, especially a PR agency, is like, who are your relationships? What media do you know? Like, can you get me into TechCrunch tomorrow?

And our answer is always very honest, which is we do have relationships, but they're working relationships. This isn't someone I can pressure, like you must take this person because I, you know, remember how drunk you got at your birthday last year. It's. We have a working relationship where you trust the people I'm going to send you and I'm not going to send you garbage.

And you can always make new relationships if you treat people with respect. Because I think as well, when you pay an agency, pay a PR agency, you as a founder, like, you feel like you're paying for results. And you are. But that PR person is reaching out to someone. For a free opportunity. Like this is your time and hours in preparation.

It's a journalist time and hours. It's their editors hours, reading a story that they write. And you're asking for all of that from them for no money. So again, it's like, what are you bringing to the table that actually makes it worthwhile? At the very least, make sure that the agency you're paying to try to get that opportunity for you isn't just showing up again, like at a dinner party, straight into that editor's inbox being like, this person is amazing.

Oh, did you want to say something to me? Oh, is this your birthday party? Oh, okay. Well, I'm just going to continue talking about myself. I think that feeling of, would you call someone and talk like that? Even if you can't afford an agency yet, you're a two, three person shop, but you want to get press. Just reach out to that journalist and email them like you would call them.

Stephen: That's awesome. I love that. Talk to me about the state of PR today. Like, what are you seeing out there? What's working for your clients? Is there topics? Are like, hey, you know, the news outlets are willing to talk. Like, I got a couple messages from Fox around, like, hey, like, especially now, like, they never messaged me over the last five years, I'm assuming, during the Biden administration.

But all of a sudden now they're like, hey, we want to talk crypto and DeFi. What is hot topics? Or and then to that like what our clients bring into the table for you They're like, oh this makes them an easy easy push through that, you know, journalists happen to love or podcasts happen to love.

Rachel: What is big right now in media for crypto is and has always been market moves. Money moves. If you are someone that can speak to why you think Solana went up by 15 percent yesterday, or why, like, we saw such record ETF inflows and outflows two weeks ago, if you have an opinion about that and you have, you know, the professional experience to which someone should listen to your opinion, That has always been interesting.

People have always wanted sources to say Bitcoin's going to go up to X, and this is why it's gone down to Y. But this is getting even more pronounced, especially with a friendlier crypto administration. There's a lot more market moves. There's a lot more interest. And we know that these stories, whether they're on Bloomberg or CNBC or Coindesk or Cointelegraph, we know they're getting clicks.

People want to be reporting on them. They're performing well online. So being able to share your opinion about why you think the markets are doing this has always been valuable, now it's even more valuable. And to say something interesting and original about it too. I think where sometimes founders can go wrong, you're very busy.

You're going to go online, you're going to share an opinion, you're going to reach out to a journalist, and you're going to share what you saw somebody share on Twitter this morning. If they've seen someone share already on Twitter this morning, then it's not original or interesting. You just take a minute and think, well, given my unique background or my unique company's background, what can I share about this that maybe nobody else can?

That's going to continue to be interesting. And now there's more top crypto assets than just Bitcoin and Ethereum. You could be quoted in CNBC tomorrow by talking about a meme coin, if indeed your background is somewhat in meme coins. So you don't also have to think, well, I'm not a Bitcoin maxi, so what can I bring to the table?

Now you can be sharing opinions about, like, any number of digital currencies, which is quite cool. And on the flip side of not market news and not, like, price movement news, it's, I think, all about big partnerships, right? Now crypto has It's gotten, it's like badge stamp of approval in a lot of jurisdictions.

We have Micah, of course, in Europe, being able to tell journalists and editors how your partnership with a normal company, a normal institution, a normal government agency shows growing adoption of technology. Great. Because that story isn't really about you. It's about how the country I live in, Spain, or the Netherlands, or the U.S., is slowly warming to these technologies, is slowly warming to these platforms, and how in 5 to 10 years, there may be 25 plus crypto ETFs, whereas now we don't have that many. It's finding a way to insert yourself into like, the growing trend story. And again, getting a partner, getting a new customer, who is one of these more recognizable names.

Is a great data point for a journalist or an editor to say, Oh, this specific company and partnership could be the beginning of a much larger wave.

Stephen: I love that. Is there any like news I you mentioned TechCrunch and all the top, you know News outlets especially when it comes to crypto and like kind of like this TradFi meets crypto the Bloomberg's of the world Is there any, like, interesting things that you're like, Hey, this podcast is, other than this one, obviously, around the coin.

But is there any, like, hey, these are up and comers. They may not have the audience yet, but it's like an engaged and fun audience, and people love doing these type of projects with them. Is there any of these, like, you know, needle in the haystack, under the radar places that you're like, hey, our clients love going on this, or love doing this, that you can share with us?

Rachel: I'm excited to get more people excited about Substack. All right. So some of the journalists that we would have killed to be interviewed by or have their attention at all when they were at. The Wall Street Journal, or Coindesk, or et cetera. Now they have substacks. They have their own little media outlet, and because of their impressive background, they have thousands and thousands of subscribers already.

One of the amazing journalists at Coindesk, formerly of The Block, Callan Quinn, who wrote that great Justin Tron banana story, she just started a substack. Like there's, now you don't have to just go to the media outlet. You can actually go and find these really amazing journalists. And I, like, there's so many of them on Substack that I wish I could shout out more, but I have to say, if you are a founder in crypto and you want to start getting more attention, or you wanted somewhere else to tell your Substack.

Get on Substack, start reading what other people are writing about, especially these ex journalists. And then same, same rules apply. They're not going to write a glowing story all about you. But find a way to be valuable to them.

Stephen: Does Substack have the ability? I know Medium you have the ability to like leave comments and really get, you know, the attention of the author. Does Substack have that same ability? I don't, I'm not on Substack that much to be quite honest.

Rachel: Yeah, so when when Twitter slash ex was imploding, you know, one of the times it was imploding, they introduced notes and re stacking, so kind of like commenting and retweeting. So yeah, you can go read a great newsletter edition from one of these journalists and then share it. Comment on it or even like re tweet, re stack it.

And so there's just a great way to like get the, into their notifications. Cause you can engage with their content in a lot of different ways. Or you can, you know, go share it on Twitter, X, LinkedIn, where they still are. And tag them there too. Yeah,

Stephen: Medium. Cause like if you really got to that article, you probably worked hard to get there and really interested in the author. And it always feels good like if you could just leave a note like why you found that interesting.

Rachel: like highlight it. Share the quote, which I think Substack also has, which is

Stephen: nice.

I love the, yeah, the share the quote is pretty cool. You mentioned Justin's son and Tron and the banana. We saw recently a crypto exchange, you know, talk about donating 100, 000 to, to Ross Albright after being pardoned. What are your thoughts about this as like from a PR, a lot of this seems like very PR originated.

Like I don't think they, they needed Ross to get that money, Ross to get that money that badly. Obviously he has money, but it was more of like a PR stunt. What are your thoughts about these that kind of like have the dichotomy of like, Hey, you're going to appeal to some of your customers, but like for a crypto exchange to send funds to a darknet market operator when you have to do compliance and like file reports against your customers that sent funds to that darknet market.

What are your thoughts on this? Is it one thing that they could have done it silently? Do you think, hey, any PR is good PR, which is like the tagline of the PR agencies. What are your thoughts?

Rachel: I think when we see movements like that, crypto exchange, you know, donating money to Ross Ulbricht or you know, Justin eating a banana that, you know, has been a very, very expensive banana. When you as a founder are looking at things like that, say, should I be doing that? Is this like the really the way to get attention?

The first thing to filter for is, is there already a big name in that headline? And usually there is, right? It's Kraken. It's Tron. So, it's going to be really hard for you to ever replicate that. Because in both of those cases, you know, for whatever reason that they did it, they were already most likely going to get attention because they are so big.

They are so well known. We're talking about the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. So, On the flip side, I don't know that those things were necessarily done for PR. Kind of goes back to that conference analogy. You're walking around a gorgeous, glitzy conference, and you see someone who's probably spent a million on their setup.

But to them, a million isn't that much money. It's just something that they do. And I think, when I see stories like that, I think, It does get a lot of attention. But it's also just something that they do. And because they are now so large and well known, They get attention for it, but they would have gotten attention for nearly anything that they did that day.

I will say, however, in both those cases, there could be great upside. Right, you don't need to give money to Ross, unless you're trying to pull away very crypto native, maybe early big holder whales from another exchange to yours. And if that, if you get one or two of them to switch, you've already made back your money.

And I think that's the other thing, too. Not all of these PR moments are geared towards everybody. There could be a very specific business development reason, and it doesn't need to be that large, and we may never know it. I can't prove that's why they did it, but if I was their PR person and they told me that was their end business goal, I could see that being one of the pieces of advice I give.

Stephen: I love it. Have you had people that come to you in like, more of a PR emergency? Like, more of like, damage control versus like, Hey, we need a good story. It's like, hey. One of our founders has just been accused and usually sexual assault is the thing that will get most people to MeToo movement in trouble or like Embezzlement something of that like kind of hard to deny that that happened, but it's enough to ruin your reputation by the time You know everyone figure out what's what like you have no money in your defy initiative or protocol What do you do in those cases of damage control?

Do you take on those cases or is there any suggestions where people are like hey? You know, our competitors giving us bad PR because they're saying this about us. Like, how do we handle that?

Rachel: Exactly. I think in PR, there's two, well, there's more than two, but there's at least two types of crisis. There is We have a bridge that is at risk of crumbling, and we know about it, it continues to be an issue, we've tried things, and now we know that it's getting more dire and we need help, and there's an avalanche, where overnight, within a few minutes, suddenly everything changes.

We only do avalanches for people we already work with because it takes a long time to get up to speed, and we also we know that they either did or didn't do it. We don't have to spend time, you know, we can, we aren't hired guns. Like I do want to know if you embezzled from all of those people before I'm going to take you on, because I'm not interested in lying to journalists.

It goes back to having a good working relationship. But we do often get hired by people who have the crumbling bridge where we have enough time to do our own due diligence, but who have, they've tried fixes. They know their competitors are talking shit. Maybe they know that there's just new stuff out there about them that just isn't true, and they just haven't had a good way to get rid of it or to combat it.

We can definitely work with that. But yeah, on our side, there are great crisis PR firms. They're quite expensive, they're the ones that get hired by the people that, you know, most need them when something bad happens, and they're great for that. And I think if you're really, if you have that large of a crisis and that much money, that's who you should go hire because that's just, that's not our game.

Like I said, it's just, I don't like lying to journalists, so I make a practice not to do it.

Stephen: Yeah, it's not worth it for you long term, I'm assuming. Now, whether, you know, you're based in Spain right now, I think you were in the Netherlands before and you were also U.S. Born, I believe. What, talk to me, you probably travel around for a lot of conferences as well. Talk to me about the different communities, what you're seeing, you know, is certain things working in the APAC region or in Spain that like just wouldn't, would die in the U.S. if we try to do it. And are there certain arbitrage like, hey, this TikTok thing is working in the U.S., but they haven't even, you know, looked in Bulgaria, we would dominate out there. Maybe talk to us about some of those arbitrage plays that maybe some of these founders can do by focusing on a certain region versus maybe the biggest region or the best region.

Rachel: I think one of the best things that founders can do to leverage different, like, geographies to get good PR attention is get smart on, then have an opinion about what's happening in another jurisdiction. And so, for example, a couple of years ago, everyone wanted to move to Europe. Everyone was coming to Europe, Europe with Micah.

It was the best place to be if you were a crypto company, like the U.S. You know, we're just not really not sure. And so we got a lot of like in, inbound requests saying, well, we want, you know, start getting attention in Europe so we can make the market case to go to Europe. I was like, but are you following any of the news trends here?

Do you, have you read the regulation? Do you, what, what new and original thing can you say? And they were like, oh, well, we, we haven't done that yet. I was like, that's fine. But you need to, because of course it would be great to have an American voice speak to how you see this regulation playing out in Europe and how you think it might influence companies coming over from the U.S. But you have to own your geography and then get smart on the next one. And now, that situation has flipped. Now a lot of the big developments are happening in the U.S. And if you are in Europe, even if you're not European, but you have a European footprint, you can be the person opining about what's happening in the U.S. But you need to stay smart on it and bring a uniquely European perspective. I think that, especially between Europe and the U S because we had Micah and now we have everything happening every half second in the U.S. now. There's nice comparisons to be made and it's just, it's nice that it's flipped.

I will say like, we don't do as much on like TikTok and like social media. We do a lot of executive thought leadership and presence, which. Still is really linked in like you can have a tick tock. Yeah, but link linked in is where it's at. We do a lot of B to B as well. So maybe that's why. But anything you can do on tick tock, you want to do videos with taking your takes on the market that day.

You can do it on LinkedIn. You can even start a Especially in LinkedIn. That's my whole game. Like, my whole selling point to everyone is like, take the things that you find exciting on other platforms, put a professional spin on it with some thought leadership, and you'll dominate on LinkedIn. Because you know people are watching it on other platforms.

Stephen: And I think people are just like, the, you know, LinkedIn has changed a lot. It's also very hard though, like, for me to go on TikTok now, it's like, okay, like, I don't even know what to do, or what buttons to press, or what, you know, should I be doing this dance, or like which new song to use. But like, LinkedIn is so hard, because so many people are now driving to LinkedIn, it's like, the algorithms are just, you have to really put out thoughtful content.

And you have to spend a lot of time building meaningful relationships and that's really hard for people that are looking for a quick ROI on LinkedIn. Because they'll do it for a couple weeks, they'll get a little traction, and then they look at their, you know, bank statements and they're like, Hey, we didn't settle, we didn't build any more revenue.

Not realizing, like, those people that are liking, had you started a conversation with them in their DMs or sent them other thought leadership, that's what led to the revenue. So that's super interesting. But you're in Spain now, and everyone seems to be coming to Spain and Portugal. All I hear is about Malarga, this, and there's a couple other places in Spain.

Marbella, you know, everyone's talking about those. Is those the new crypto hubs? Like, and then, if so, tell me why you believe that people are flocking to these areas.

Rachel: Hugely. So I think we had, we saw a lot of crypto companies, people go to Lisbon and Portugal when they had all of their digital nomad programs. And then even when I was there for Web Summit a few years ago, like the tension was there, Portugal wasn't big enough, Lisbon wasn't big enough. There was like all this influx of people and there wasn't enough room and space for them.

I imagine Spain looked at that and said, we can do that. Yeah. We have Madrid and Barcelona. We have all these other cities, including Valencia. Our companies here are part of a startup regime that's trying to bring more deep tech, emerging tech, including Web3, blockchain, crypto companies to Spain and to the region for employment and GDP growth.

And you know what I think is really nice about Spain and the reason I think it's seeing so many companies migrate from other places in Europe and the U.S. Is that there's room. Right. There's you're not moving into like an overcrowded, busy city where people don't want more expats. You are not taking a taking jobs away.

You're not taking houses away. You're just there's room to scale like quite literally and figuratively. And there's support from the government to be able to do that. And I especially think the chapter we're going into with crypto and blockchain now Fast, sustainable scaling is the name of the game. So if you're going to have a footprint in Europe, it needs to be somewhere where you can like basically facilitate that.

And I think Spain is just one of them. And all of the programs that are launching are such a huge part of that. We still have an office in it, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Netherlands is also great for this, you know, right across the pond from the UK. But also, you know, a country that it doesn't have like as much of the room.

We, we just wanted to scale. So we could also be somewhere with room.

Stephen: And the beaches. I don't feel like, you know, Spain has a lot more beaches. Fly me out, man. You can see my lips are chapped here in Toronto. It's cold. You know, I need to come find, figure out what program that is and tell them to send the private jet for me.

Rachel: I know.

Stephen: Preferably. What are some of the challenges in, you know, you're talking about having multiple offices.

Your boot and your boutique you obviously have strong probably connections back in the U.S. As well. What are some of the challenges you're going through as like an entrepreneur and business owner? Because you also have to hire talent, you know, from different regions it seems like. And PR is one of those tough things I feel like.

You don't really know how talented someone is until they start working, right? Like,

Rachel: Yeah.

Stephen: Talk to me about that. Talk to me about being a business owner, an entrepreneur, and, you know, the challenges that you see, especially from a PR standpoint.

Rachel: I love being a business owner, and I love being an entrepreneur. And I think, had we done this podcast even six to eight months ago, I think the biggest challenge I would have faced, yeah, would have been culture. It's so hard to recruit from the existing PR, content, comms, marketing world. And not inherit bad habits so much of this, all I've, I've emailed a hundred people, I'm done.

And you're like, but nobody responded. So you're not done. And then again, it's like, and I get it cause that's also how I was trained. It takes a lot to break that. And so when I think about culture, it's, it's hard to find people who want, maybe who are comfortable with the failure. Because if you spend more time on a pitch to someone, you're like, you're a really good fit, and they still don't answer, because that happens all the time, it hurts.

It still happens to me, you're like, oh man, really? I spent, I spent like 15 to 20 20 minutes on this, like it, it was perfect and it was good and it just didn't work out. Whereas I think if you're just blindly sending off emails that like AI helps you write, like you don't really have to care as much. And so what was hard, hard and continues to be hard is like we have that culture, like we're going to do it right.

We're going to spend the time and we're going to be humans. But the small print there is even when it sucks.

Stephen: Yeah. So rejection you feel a little bit more personally, whereas like, yeah, I'm just firing out copy and paste, I could care less whether you respond or not. My job is to fire out copy and paste. So if you spend half an hour, 45 minutes listening to episodes, taking notes it hurts that much more when you don't get that response, even though you have a higher percentage of getting that response, you still have that percentage of no's that are definitely going to happen regardless of how good you do it.

Rachel: Yeah, and I think it's something one of our first ever like culture mission statements was assume chaos, not malice, because that's what a lot of it is. It's not that a journalist or this podcast host just doesn't want to respond because they hate you, but it's making the decision every email and every day to say that person is busy, not..

Extremely

Stephen: busy, by the way. Just extremely busy. Especially like, I guess for me it's hard because PR, like, you know, hosting this podcast is not the thing I do all day, every day. It's a good portion of my time and I love it. But I'm also like, hey, I like the experience too. So when you guys reach out to me, I'm like, of course, like, I'm gonna make room for you.

But like, I still have to go through the copy and paste to still find what would still be a good guest despite the copy and pasting. So that takes a lot of time.

Rachel: And it's still free, like at the end of the day, and this is, this helps as well, but this kind of is what it means about getting comfortable with failure. At the end of the day, our job is to infringe on somebody's day who has a boss, but also maybe a family and a dog and things to do. Something to do that they need to get paid so they can go get groceries and go on holiday or whatever and say, I know you have a to do list, but what do you think about adding this person to it?

And that's why you have to bring value because then it's not oh, can you do this thing for me? It's no, I'm actually like trying to help you but at the end of the day We're just asking we're asking for people's attention and their time which is expensive and irreplaceable. So You have to get used to that.

And I think that's hard to find in like from a traditional background. But one of my great, I have an amazing employee. Her name is Michalina Misha. You met her. She sent that amazing pitch to you. She didn't come from traditional PR. She came from marketing content, but she's just a human being who's like, what would I want to get?

What, what, what would make me want to have somebody on my podcast? What would not irritate me if I read, opened it in an email and she took to it like a fish to water. And she's now like, I just, I cannot say enough positive things about her, but she emails people like a human. I would wish every startup founder would have somebody like her as their first communications hire.

Just please don't take her away from me.

Stephen: I was like, and I don't know if I messaged you directly or I just probably messaged her directly and said like, thank you,

Rachel: That ended up on our Sparkle channel, Stephen.

Stephen: same old requests and like, copy and paste, not even like, just copy and pasting from whatever bio that they had from somewhere else, I was like, man, that one felt good, And to the point where I messaged her and like, hey, like, it started interaction because you want to talk to more people like that because you're like, oh, it's interesting.

You're adding value like you must really a believe in your clients that you're like, hey, I want to spend this much time on the front end. But then even for me, it's like learning from a marketing specialist like that, like, oh, that's the way I want to be able to communicate to others as well. So it reminded me, like, make sure you take your time when responding to people like that and let, let them know that, hey, like, this was really good.

Cause I think, you know, sometimes it goes, you do that and you're like, people are like, oh, that's great. Like, let's get that guest on. But it's also nice to tell people like, hey, that was great. Like, just so you know how good that was. That felt good for us.

Rachel: Please send me more emails like this.

Stephen: to your point is like with the advent of AI, and maybe I'm going to send this back to you, like, I love AI because I'm like, Oh, like lazy people are just going to do even lazier things.

Or people that have never done anything are just going to do lazy things. Well, I'm not worried about those people. The people that I'm would be worried about from like a competitive stance, they're already competitive. So you're just going to leverage AI to do more competitive things. What are your thoughts on that?

Because I feel like you're like, Oh, more AI, even better. I can get more personal and get more, get more notice. What are your thoughts on that?

Rachel: Completely. So we, we, we use AI and it's great, especially writer's block. You don't have a job where you do a lot of writing, whether you're helping other people write things or just writing emails. You have to give you something and you edit it totally. It's easier to edit than it is to write from scratch.

But in terms of it from a competitive standpoint, yeah. It's never been easier to like prove that you're a human being writing an email, not just in tone, but in factual accuracy. And I know, of course, all of the models are getting better all the time and we, again, we can use it, we use it for research and other things, but at the end of the day, it's still a human on the other side.

So the more that we can do to prove that we are human and that we're trying not to waste their time the better we'll be. Because I have found that like, especially when it comes to writing, a lot of the AIs are, are that person. Who comes to a party to talk about themselves. It's I'm thrilled to be.

I'm honored to be. And it's always, there's always an I. There's an I, there's a me, there's a we. Whenever we start training not just my own team on pitching, but we also train startups and their teams on pitching. So you don't have to use agencies forever. It's like, if the word I or me or the company name or this person's name are in the first two sentences, you've done something wrong.

Stephen: Or Delve. If you've used Delve. I don't know why AI is picking up on the word Delve so I've never heard anyone use it until AI so I'm not sure what trained that model. But the word Delve, Explore, Identify, all these words sound great but then like when you see them enough you're like, oh like, that hurts.

It almost hurts when I see a word like that like, oh you didn't do this yourself.

Rachel: And too many headings. It's like

Stephen: Yeah. Exactly.

Rachel: What?

Stephen: Many headings in that sentence.

Rachel: Like, you're not sending me a full, like, email of thoughts. You're like, and here is a new thought. But I'm not going to write a full sentence. Just a heading.

Stephen: It is too funny. Talk to me about the future of PR then, if we're talking about AI, like, or like, even how you plan to scale your business, or do you have any aspirations to scale your business, or, you know, the type of customer you're looking for, especially now. And then I want to go into like, what do you see as trends?

Cause you're in the Crypto Web 3 space, so like, Hey, was business as great two years ago? Do people always need PR? Or do you like, hey, people are like knocking down your door now, Like, hey, we need to talk. We need something. Everyone else is talking now. We need to talk too.

Rachel: The future of PR is the middle women slash men becoming even more invisible. And I think this is something that's been happening for a few years, but even when I was first working at big agencies, the big push was on owned media. It's like, you don't need journalists. You don't need this anymore. You as a company can have your own way of issuing information and you don't, you don't need anything else.

What that left out was, but these other things, these conferences, these podcasts, these media, they legitimize you. If you're writing about on your own website, how great you are, how legitimate is that? And we as humans want legitimacy. We crave that authenticity. And for a while, we've tolerated having people in the middle like myself or like Misha telling you how authentic and great this person is.

And that will continue to work for some time until we start outsourcing it to AI and all of that originality and authenticity and human connection and that putting people together just goes away. And then that's going to be a real death knell to PR because unless you're an agency that can prove you can help your client do this quote on their own, not just behind the smoke and mirrors of your email address and email signature, you're going to be screwed because you won't be able to command really high retainers anymore to say, Oh, well, we've reached out to all these journalists for you, like, but I haven't talked to anybody.

And I think also, I think clients and are getting bolder and I think they should be bolder to ask for. Show me what you're sending. Tell me who you're reaching out to. What isn't working? So I think what we're going to see is like, well, yeah, you're just you judging yourself on sending 300 emails. So when I say that the move of PR is for people like me to become more and more invisible, it aligns with what we were saying about linked in.

It's going to be you as a founder cannot just hire an agency. Yeah. To tell the world how great you are and then you just show up on a call say some things and leave You're gonna have to become an even more active participant in this process. You need to be sharing opinions daily online in a place where they can be found and suggesting, you know Topics or things that you can write about for a news outlet that you can go on a podcast for Because you are the only person that knows your unique blend of experience You are the only person that can pull that brilliant thing out of your head.

And until you are ready to commit some more time to doing that, you're just going to be throwing your money away on PR agencies, because they're never going to be able to do that for you. And that's what we see. We hear a lot of complaints from people who've gone to PR agencies before us and said, Oh, I was sold on the person running it.

It was going to be great. But then I got like a 24 year old new grad who knew nothing about financial markets. It's like, and so how is that person ever going to write an op ed for your executive? But it's also a little bit, I throw it back at them and say, it's a little bit on you. Why would you trust them to do that?

You need to be an active, you know, person.

Stephen: What made you think they could do that? I know that's what you paid for. What, what, what evidence gave you to do that? Other than you saw them at a party with a glittery dress, which is what a lot of great PR. I, I was in Dubai for a couple times. I saw one too many glittery dresses. I think I was like, oh, I think I'm too, I'm too old for this, mind you. It's time for me to go home. I thought this was a creator event. This is like, oh, a party party. Like, time for me to go home.

Rachel: It sells this idea that you can get all this success and you actually, you don't have to do that much. You can focus on scaling your business. And I, I really wish that that was true. And if you get a great ghostwriter who can be you, wonderful. Hold on to them. Most of the case, you can't find that.

So you have to be involved and you have to be sharing your opinions and it's better for you. One of the worst things that a founder can do is hire an expensive PR agency, pay them for five or six months, fire them and have no evidence of who they've emailed, who they've talked to, what they've sent, those relationships just poof.

Go away by engaging in the process a bit by emailing these journalists that your PR agency tells you to, by adding them on LinkedIn, they know you, so you don't have to keep paying that high retainer for three years. The journalist will call you and if your PR agency is at all weird about giving your email address directly to a member of the press so they can reach out without them. They're weird about that run.

Stephen: Why? Why do you say that? Cause like, hey, if I'm a PR agency, I don't want you getting a hold and then, you know, probably, you know, trying to bypass me and then the messaging isn't right, you're just, you know, and then they're like, hey, why are you sending this, you know, founder to me, asking me these weird questions on, okay, it's, you know, 12 o'clock on, you know, the inauguration, I want to, you know, a 10 minute spot, like, I would still be very guarded about that too, as a PR agency, would I not be?  

Rachel: I think it's okay to be guarded about making sure your client will do a good job. If you think that your client will just take something and run and be completely inappropriate, then yes, you should guard that relationship for your, for your own protection. What I'm saying as a founder is that you should be wary if a, your PR agency, You will not ever make sure that that journalist can contact you without them, because what that means is their business model is built on you continuing to pay them.

Stephen: Gateway, yeah, they're the gatekeeper. I'm curious from a marketing standpoint. I think I get the same from you as like, Hey, we do very contextual content marketing and you know, I see a lot of PR companies. I'm like I don't think they know the subject matter, but they're really trying to get this message out there.

And I'm like, hmm, this company, yes, I'm more of like, hey, let's just put out a bunch of good content of what you're saying. And then like, let the people come back to you with what the message they took from that content versus trying to say, hey, this is our message, which usually takes longer, right? When you're trying to craft this beautiful message.

And it's like, why don't you just get feedback from the market of what your message is? What are your thoughts around that? Because I think you're helping companies craft their message. From them, right? You're taking it from them. But like, Hey, if they put more stuff out there, they'd probably be able to identify what their message is resonating with their audience as well.

Rachel: One of the best ways to get your core narrative, your company story done, confirmed, complete, is to put it out there and see what comes back, to see what does and doesn't land. What that, however, requires is patience from the person you're trying it out on. And so that's usually when they hire us. They say, we are going after really important customers and clients.

We need someone who can be our, our focus group, who knows what they already will and won't like. So when we first start doing this, we don't completely shoot ourselves in the foot. Customers are like that, and so are journalists. It's really not fair of you, again, to go to this audience, a group of people to say, I want to try out all these different messages on you and see which one lands.

Like, you're not paying them. They have a job. So it's, they hire us to get it to 90%. But I always say whenever we're finished, like, this is a living document. So as you go into these meetings and as you start getting more questions, you need to tell us what they are because we need to continuously update this.

Because for whatever reason, we might have chosen a verb or a noun that they just don't like and it needs to go, but at the same time, that process should not take more than two weeks. I think a lot of agencies and freelancers and consultants will say, well, after an eight week discovery and 20 hours of calls with your CEO who has better things to do, we will then provide you with half of the document that you then need to edit and review for after another eight weeks. Like it can just take so long and I'm totally in your camp on this. Write it, get it as good as you can, put it out there and just iterate.

Stephen: But to your point, you're adding the expertise because you've worked with a lot of these clients, you work with a journalist, you'd be like, hey, don't use this word, this is not the word, this is the word you tech founders use, this is not the word the customers understand. So we have to adjust certain parts of your messaging.

Before you start putting it out there, because let's face it, I work with a lot of tech people. Really smart, really genius, but like, awkward socially, awkward when it comes to, I've seen them on stages, I'm like, Why is that the person you put on the stage to talk? But like, that's the person that knows most about their product.

They don't have that person that can communicate it to the audience all the time.

Rachel: The word that all of us need to take out of our boilerplates and company websites is enable. Enable has a bad connotation. It's like one of those things where until someone calls it out to you to say like, do you, do you, are you an enabler? And then they say, oh..

Are

Stephen: you in an intervention? Where you're enabling this person to continue? That's where I, like, remember that show, Intervention? That's where I've heard the word enabled the most. My mom enables him and that's why he keeps on the, it's funny that you say that, like, yeah, that's the first thing that came to my mind when you use that word.

Rachel: Exactly. It's we filter for things like that. So that way you don't get that feedback back from someone you're hoping will give you 20 million a year.

Stephen: Talk to me, we were just on the podcast right before this with Diogo Web Diego Web 3 Marketer. He talked, A, about what you're saying, that messaging is so important and a lot of founders don't know how to communicate their message. And then what he said is like, look at their website. You don't even under they've basically included every SEO top ranking word into one paragraph.

What are your thoughts about that when you see a founder and you're like, I don't understand what you do and I probably should because this is my job to understand what you do. But I looked at your website and I'm more confused than I am and enabled infrastructure development of, you know, cross border web 3 decentralization.

You're like, sorry, do you guys build blockchains? Do you guys educate people on blockchains? How can you help those people that like went seo crazy on their website?

Rachel: I have a lot of patience and love for these founders because they are wearing 10 hats at once and probably at 11 p. m. They're like, this is what I heard about websites. This is what it needs to have. Otherwise I'll fail. And then all my investors will be really mad. So like, bless, you're doing a great job.

Keep it up. But what. What we should work on is that the first iteration of your story and website, this is what we say, is for that technical decision maker. Okay, it's for that investor who invests specifically in this sector and field, they know exactly the difference between your use, when you're using these different words and verbs, great. That was you and your baby step. You got your funding and now you need to strip it down. You've made, the technical decision maker has signed you off. From here the triangle goes up. Now you're getting broader and broader and broader and broader. So your story has to get broader, which means you've got to lose some worth.

You've got to be much clearer about what you talk about. So to those founders, I say, whatever your site looked like when you, you know, sexually fundraised or started your company, started recruiting. That was great. That was then. This is now. It will always exist in the internet archive. We can always go back.

But now, like I said, you have to start appealing to a larger audience and that audience includes. Legitimizers like journalists and event organizers and other people who don't live and breathe this space all the time. So they're gonna give you and your site a half a millisecond scroll. You have to speak to them immediately in that moment so they understand who you are and what they do. Otherwise, you're gonna just get put to the bottom of the pile.

Stephen: That's a great point. Very niche for investors because they know exactly what they're looking for. But once you get past that stage, you have to go broad to bring in a wider audience. I'm curious. You're, you know, I think you still advise for AZA finance. Elizabeth, we had on the podcast. She was amazing.

One woman Fintech of the year award or, you know, very similar awards to that. What's your experience been like? Because you're dealing with event organizers, you're dealing with companies that probably put a lot of founders that are probably male. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out of my way to say probably mostly the majority male.

How do you balance like, you know, being a woman in the industry and then seeing more diversity as you're putting it through the journalists? How do you filter for that? Like, hey, this company's giving me the founder, the co founder. But now we're just sending, you know, 20 mails out of 23 to this journalist.

And, and then it's not, what are the journalists gonna do? Then we get to this media point where it's like, hey, the media, you know, what's being put out there doesn't look as diverse as the communities that we're playing in. I'm always like conscious of this too, being a male. What are your thoughts of how you're balancing all that? I'm really curious.

Rachel: One of the best things about owning my own business and being an entrepreneur and being an advisor in the seat that I am now is I have I've gotten and continue to get to say the sentence, You need more women. Period. Cause that's really, at the end of the day, like yeah, you can try to find somebody from one of these other departments you can put up and maybe they can go on stage and we can train them, but the easiest solution is just have better options.

And now I get to say that sentence and stop. And they nod and they say that's right. You're like, you know what, you're right. We need like, we're, we're hiring for this other C suite role. We need to be way more intentional about this, which is just great. Cause that is, that's just the answer. And so then when we are, we're blessed that we get to choose who we work with.

And so we also choose people who we work with where like, even if the people, the spokespeople putting forward are men, while they're still diverse. in their background in some way, shape, or form. Like, we've never put someone forward where I've had to be like, Oh man, I don't feel great about this. I think it goes back to that, that not, we don't hire avalanche level crisis.

We work with people that are good people who deserve the limelight. But to that point, we, the reason we work with who we do is, I can give that advice, and it's listened to. And again, you know, I think a lot of agencies are just an interest of just keeping you on the hook. So you pay the retainer for six months and the whole time they're trying to find other clients.

We aren't like that. I'm trying to spend less time on new business calls. It is in my best interest that your business does well. And I know your business will do well because you'll get invited to speak on more stages and be more highly, you know, applauded if you have Really strong, stellar women on your team.

So that's my business and PR advice.

Stephen: talk to me about that though. You're saying hey like we don't we're not trying to pitch for new business We're just trying to get high performance out of the business that we do have But some people might look at that like hey if we can get new business we get more revenue We can hire more people especially like this is a very project oriented business You kind of have to have the people there in place by the time you get that new business And you've been on both sides.

I'm sure you've worked for PR agencies or in the field where it's like hey We just got Throw out there, bring in as much new business that will cover us just in case this company goes elsewhere. Cause we're not that great. Can you tell people like why it's beneficial to do this and the success you've seen by doing it that way versus the other way?

Rachel: we have seen great success in scaling slowly. And that means we don't hire before we need to hire and before we're really sure that we can't handle it ourselves. And we spend the time finding the right people. And the reason we do that is because our business model is, is built that way. Our business model is built around people staying with us for a long time.

So we have more predictability and that's not the business model that every agency will have or wants to have. But what I can say is like, there is maybe not causation, but there are certainly correlation. And a business model that is driven on getting more and more customers and getting continuously growing and growing revenue while also trying to grow and grow team.

And you start using a PR agency and then you get a 24 year old new grad who doesn't know anything about financial markets is put in front of you. Like, I'm not saying that's just why, but it's not not a reason why. And I just never wanted to run that kind of organization. So it always meant that if it meant that we had to tell people we had a six month waiting list, we're gonna tell people we had a six month waiting list.

And we've yet to not have a waiting list, which is also a nice thing to have as a new business as a business owner, because I think as well, you know this, like you do your best work when you're doing your work, but the more time that you have to spend selling your work, your, your current customers actually pay for that.

They pay for you to have enough time to do that hour where you're not getting paid. And that's what I really didn't like about other agency models. And I saw it myself, like the really senior people weren't working on the account. They were doing the hellos, and then they were going off to sell more business.

Because in four months when that client got upset, they already had somebody else in the pipeline. I was like, but they may stay for longer if you just worked on the account. I don't And I haven't dug that much more into that business model because it just seemed kind of toxic and we didn't want to run that way, but it just is broken.

And I think it's really going to go out of style soon when PR people need to become more and more invisible.

Stephen: yeah, I agree. And for the same with us, like our business model is very much like, hey, if people don't want to work with us, that's fine. We're just going to put out more content to the point where they're like, hey, like, if I'm wrong, if I'm right, then the content will prove itself. I don't have to pitch you on new business.

If, like, and it usually works because the more content we're putting out there, the more time we're spending working with our clients putting out content, the more companies are like, hey, I like what you did there. I don't have to go sell them about what we do. They know what we do. They see it every single day, so.

Rachel, where can people find you? Are you just living on LinkedIn? Do you still moonlight on Twitter a little? Stay away from crypto Twitter too long?

Rachel: So you can find me on Twitter at Maneuvre but really truly I'm a LinkedIn girlie Rachel Pipan. Maneuver.co not .com. And we also, I have a sub stack and we're experimenting with blue sky. So I'm scared too.

Stephen: Interesting. It's funny, because I pitched you on an idea, like, why doesn't more You know, PR agencies have their own podcasts and they wouldn't have to pitch other podcasts. But I think the debate was like, well, they were just putting on our own clients And then it might like people aren't going to listen to it as much because it's more like biased to the clients we're working with But I still think there's that interesting thing where like these conversations right here with your clients and then Companies obviously that aren't your clients that could potentially get their clients understanding what their issues are I still think that's a good idea have yet to see a PR company do it But when it's done when we do it i'm going to circle back to this podcast and be like, this.

Rachel: I told you so

Stephen: Huh?

Rachel: I told you so. It's like,

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah the I told you so episode

Rachel: Totally. I think you're totally mark my words.

Stephen: Yeah

Rachel: Totally right.

Stephen: Rachel, this is always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you for just having a thoughtful agency. Like, I can list literally you and then maybe another company. I think Serotonin was really good when we dealt with them. It was just like, oh, it's nice to talk to real people that really wanted to see fun things happen.

And it's like, obviously this podcast isn't free, and you know, some companies make donations, and some companies we don't, like, hey, we just want your guests. We could care less about the donation. I think it makes a difference. For companies that are listening out there, of like, hey, why do we need a PR company?

I think this is the reason why. Because I think it makes a difference and overall gives you a feeling and then we're recommended I think you sent me an email about our client chain analysis and like it's like this Constant like adding value and like oh, I have this subsector that I know about like, oh, I know the chain analysis team Let me message them So I think there's that that unification that only a PR company could bring you because they're just seeing so many things in the industry That going out on your own, I'm always big on like just pay for the coaching and you know, condense that time And then afterwards if you're like, hey, it doesn't work out At least you paid for who you thought could get you to the next level And I think you guys have done a great job of doing that

Rachel: Thank you.

Stephen: Awesome until next time hopefully we can come back and then maybe next year we'll talk about predictions for pr going into 2026

Rachel: Love it.

Stephen: Talk soon

Rachel: Bye.