Jan 3
Happy Birthday to us! It's been 25 years.
When we first started The Wilson Group with a $5,000 personal loan, a Spartan office and a whole lot of guts, I had no idea we’d still be in business some 25 years later.
Someone had mentioned we had to have a business plan if you wanted to start a company, so I spent hours and hours that turned into days and days slaving over what turned out to be a lot of wishful thinking. But when it was all over, we had a plan that we hoped would make us a premier firm practicing solely in the field of crisis communications and news media training. Unfortunately, it took more than a few years for that to become somewhat of a reality.
It hurts to say so, but when we first started in 1987, we had a difficult time turning down anyone who had the money to hire us. Although we did do a few gigs in crisis management and media training during those first few months, we also earned some rent money in traditional public relations…and even advertising. Not that advertising is a bad thing. It just wasn't the kind of business we had planned on starting.
When we did get a chance to conduct a media training workshop, we had no real program and no training materials such as a workbook. I still remember my business partner with his Magic Marker writing such words as "Control" and "Concern" on a borrowed flipchart pad. Those were the days before PowerPoint and we didn’t have the budget for a conventional slide presentation or a slide projector. At first, we hired someone with a camcorder to record the workshops. We often rented a television and VCR to play them back for critiques.
Ultimately, we hired an illustrator to draw some cartoons that would help add some zing to our workshops and we then went to a blueprint shop and had them blown up to fit on a flipchart pad. We individually colored each cartoon with Magic Markers. Unfortunately, the hand-colored cartoons would only last for 10 or 12 workshops before they became ratty looking and had to be replaced.
When the number of workshops we were conducting increased from the initial 10 or 12 a year to several dozen, we figured we needed to create a media training workbook. Our first ones were run off a copy machine and put together by hand as we needed them. It would be another 10 years or so before the number of workshops we conducted started approaching the century mark and it was evident we needed something a bit easier to distribute to our students. It was about the same time, the cartoons ended up on PowerPoint, along with video illustrations. You don't want to know how much we paid a hotel to rent a data projector for our first PowerPoint presentations. Eventually, we bought our own.
Somewhere along the line, the Sears camcorder we proudly bought sometime in our first year to save on rental fees became a little embarrassing and we purchased what we thought then was a state of the art Panasonic Super VHS camcorder. I think that was 1993. It lasted until we finally entered the digital age and replaced it with a Sony television camera in 2005, along with 21st Century lights and a real tripod. By then, our presentations were all included as part of PowerPoint. It was great to get rid of all those VHS tapes we used to lug around.
Crisis management consulting, which eventually replaced running political campaigns and occasional advertising projects, evolved over the years, but never really changed that much. If something worked in 1988, it was still likely to work in 1998 or 2008. You just had to adapt it to the current time and take in consideration how the media had changed over the years and how people had changed.
Social media and the Internet? I didn’t have a clue what they were when we launched our first web site in 1993. Now, we have three web sites and a forum and social media is integrated into our workshops. Today, I do interviews with bloggers and make sure our clients’ web sites are in concert with current issues.
When we first started our firm, a long business trip was driving from Columbus, Ohio, to Cleveland or Cincinnati. Somewhere along the way, we started traveling farther. At last count, we had done business in some 42 states, Canada and Mexico. We had chances to travel to other parts of the globe, but figured we were having enough of a problem keeping track of the business we had in North America.
Going back to 1987, we started out with just a couple of clients and a lot of high hopes. Since then, we’ve worked with a whole lot of clients – some of them dating back to those first few years we were in business. In putting together a business proposal the other day, I calculated we had done more than 160 workshops for one client, and well over 100 workshops for several others. Overall, we've conducted nearly 1,500 workshops over the past 25 years.
It’s not to say it’s always been easy. It hasn’t. We used to say – only half-jokingly – that we had to reinvent ourselves every January. Just because last year was great, didn’t mean anything about the next year. It seems like we’re constantly selling ourselves to new clients as well as those who have been clients for years. To paraphrase an old saying: We’re only as good as our last workshop or consulting project.
So it wasn’t exactly a picnic over the past quarter of century. We had perhaps as many ups as downs, but I know I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. At its best, it was a fantastic trip. At its worst, it still beat doing anything else.
Happy Birthday to us! It’s been a great 25 years for The Wilson Group.
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8:06 AM May 19