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Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising nationally syndicated programs. With a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more, the show showcases individuals who are realizing their dreams and helping to make our world a better place through technology and innovation.
Welcome to building the future hosted by Kevin Horick. With millions of listeners a month, building the future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more. The radio and TV show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full showtimes, past episodes, or to sponsor the show, please visit buildingthefutureshow.com.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. Today, have Donna Laughlin. She's a storyteller and founder at LMGPR. Donna, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me, Kevin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm excited. We're finally doing this. We've known each other, what, probably five, six, eight years or so. I've had a number of your clients on the show over the years.
Speaker 2:And you and I, I think, have talked about doing an episode, but we're finally doing it. I'm excited to have you on the show. So welcome.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you so much. Dozens of clients have been on your show, and I think your children were infants.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Probably we probably even knew each other before I had kids. So Well Very cool. Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. Maybe before we dive into everything you're doing, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.
Speaker 3:I grew up in what I call the Cotswolds Of San Jose. It's the pin drop of Silicon Valley when when, San Jose was actually rolling foothills of not ships and semiconductors, but apricot, cherry, and vineyards.
Speaker 2:Very nice. Beautiful area.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It looks a lot like Tuscany, believe it or not. And the land is probably as as expensive and premium. But Sure. When you know, at the time, defense companies, HP, Atari, you know, Intel, you know, some of the the legacy companies now, You know, we're absolutely there amongst defense.
Speaker 3:But my playground was actually publishing and, in the in particularly community newspapers and printing because that's the dynasty that my family actually that was their gold rush.
Speaker 2:That's cool. Very cool. So you went to university. What did you take and why?
Speaker 3:I took communications journalism K. And as an undergraduate. And then once I got my my thirst and and, literally, I started recording when I was eight years old with the family papers. And
Speaker 2:then That's cool.
Speaker 3:By the time I got to college, I had ten years of experience, which is kind of funny and precocious as I was. And then that led to, you know, working, doing internships with the Washington Post, and I did Reuters. That's cool. So I had a lot of a lot of, you know, professional experience that took me a good seven years that you know, given my career, and then I actually bounced back in to California and went to UC Berkeley and got my master's in the Jace School, Jay.
Speaker 2:Cool. Very cool. So walk us through your career up until kind of founding your own company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I was a journalist first, and I was, you know, business and economics primarily, which sometimes led into innovation and technology. Before I I came back to United States, I was actually with the BBC. I was a business and and and tech reporter. So I worked in some major markets.
Speaker 3:I worked in in DC, Chicago, New York, and then London, and then I came back for school. And when you come back to Silicon Valley, you're pretty much saturated by, innovation and technology or pharma. And so I was drafted into working for, a technology book publishing company at first and edited something like a 80 books my first year, and I didn't find that terribly challenging. It was great for beefing up on your editor editing skills and then and really establishing the Chicago Emanuel style, which is the the moniker for that. And then I was recruited to a a tech company at the time that was still fairly small called Three Com Corporation.
Speaker 3:The Palm Pilot was kinda, like, all the rage. So that was my first introduction to working for a company. From there, I went, from consumer electronics to networking, cybersecurity, infrastructure, bigger, you know, data center enterprise place. And then we had a thing called the .combubble followed by a recession. And that's when I actually decided maybe I should come out on my own.
Speaker 2:Okay. So what made you decide to do that kind of during that period of time? Because a lot of people were maybe getting out of tech.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Risk challenge or reward. Yeah. I had a moment, which I actually call the $5 and a half a tank of gas moment, where I was working for a very well funded company that lost a a big chunk of their funding, and they needed to downsize. They also were asking for volunteers, and that was my moment where I had to say, you know what?
Speaker 3:Maybe I actually should be I should do take my napkin that I had a business plan on on how to create a PR agency for emerging tech companies, companies that were not in the the Apple, the Googlesque, you know, size, but were, angel funded and and maybe, you know, friends and family funded, but needed to have, you know, some nurturing and and just jump start them. And so I thought about that, and so I decided I would take the package. And the $5 and a half to take a gas moment was literally is when I I took the check, looked, opened up my wallet to put the check. I had a $5 bill. Went to my car at a half tank of gas, and I thought, wow.
Speaker 3:Did I make the right decision? And I literally just drove straight to the business office and got my business license. And when I walked in and I saw this giant roster of all the things that I didn't do, such as barbershop, nails, mechanic, you know, just all types of jobs, and there was no category for public relations. There was there was, specialty services, and and, and so I was a little puzzled like, you know, what do I do? And so I wrote down my name and and started a business and $50.
Speaker 3:And on my way from the business license office, I still didn't have a the plan in my head. I was just kinda going through the velocity of, you know, change. And I called a venture capitalist. I called a reporter that I had been working with very closely over the years, and I called my my former employer. And by the time I got home, I had three prospects, three opportunities.
Speaker 3:And the next day, I had deposited $20,000 of new business in my bank account, and I never looked back. So I realized that the, you know, the dashboard is bigger than the rearview mirror, and that was the moment where it says, you just can't look back.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's that's really cool. So you've been doing this for twenty plus years now on your own. How has the the kind of industry changed to what it is today? And and then let's maybe dive into kind of what you're doing now and and kind of how it's evolved.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when I started, I think the in the Silicon Valley to San Francisco, which we're just gonna describe the San Francisco Bay Area as one big, you know, valley. And, you know, there was a lot more meetups and just more energy and and startup culture and accelerators and and coming out of the the, you know, the dot com bubble and the recession, there was just always, you know, the persona, the Silicon Valley constantly reinventing. But I also had a lot of clients that were coming from out of the country, South America and India and Asia, Korea, different parts of the of the world. So it wasn't always just Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3:It was the Silicon Valley mystique, which is you hire experienced in the brightest in certain categories. So what's changed is the not the process of PR, but it's changed is the the, the types of companies. So, originally, I was working with, like, cybersecurity and enterprise and storage and, SaaS, you know, type companies. Then those technologies started evolving and going into places called our smart home and then our smart cars and then even smart tractors and other, you know, smart vehicles. And so the innovation and and technology that were siloed started, you know, being emerged and and developed into all the things that we know and love, whether they're in our pocket or our our home.
Speaker 3:Right? As I always make a joke, we said, our home, our home, our pocket, our house, or, you know, the rocket, whatever. Wherever we are, I mean, we have this all this access. In the past few years, there's been more on, you know, deep learning and, you know, LLMs and then, the wunderkins of, you know, I think I call it the bookends of AI between NVIDIA and and what's happening with, you know, chat, GPT, and OpenAI. I've been in that I've been working with with AI generated deep learning, smart learning companies for more than ten years.
Speaker 3:So to me, it's not new. And I think that's one of the things that I pride myself in is being able to work into really advanced technologies before they become popular. So once they become popular, it becomes really saturated. And then what happens is you have to actually you determine how do you stay relevant, how do you actually, you know, ensure that you saw the skin in the game. And as I think that's what the biggest changes in the past five years is the accelerators and the think tanks and all the inertia continues to happen, but the VC culture has changed as well.
Speaker 3:So a lot of the silver hair people that I've been working with over the years are now retiring. You have more women in venture capital. You have younger, you have entrepreneurs that are going from having worked in companies now going into the VC arena. And so I think the the texture of of entrepreneurial and venture capitalists have changed quite a bit since the .com.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So I think a lot of people maybe don't fully understand what kind of PR is and and how it can actually help their business. And I've said this a million times before, and I'm sure you agree, is the tech is the easy part.
Speaker 2:It's like the sales, marketing, PR is the the hard part of it. So do you wanna walk us through kind of what you do and how you've worked with companies and how you help them? Because that's, I think, the real challenge with a startup.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, taking a tech, you know, innovator's a brilliant idea and deconstructing it to actually tell a story is typically where I start. So oftentimes it's a whiteboard or it's a napkin, right, conversation. And so I call it the alphabet soup. You know?
Speaker 3:It's like you put all the acronyms and you put all the tech in in the science, but oftentimes, the the engineering invent you know, inventor or cofounders of the company are so close to the innovation technology that even if it's purposely built to do something versus, you know, built and then applied to something, they often lose sight of their authentic, you know, what I call the the big moment, the moment when they actually decided to put all their chips on the table to actually make that decision to, you know, create something and take the market. So I kinda have to go all the way back. And sometimes I go all the way back to, like, well, did you play with Legos? Did you play with Lincoln Logs? Were you into Tetris?
Speaker 3:Were you you know what was that moment that you actually decided to study engineering and electrical? And why did you wanna put you know, create something for aerospace, but you actually, you know, spent the last twenty years in automotive? Or if you come from automotive and now you wanna create robots. Like, what Understood. So the big problems out there solving in the real world scenario is really important.
Speaker 3:So I kinda look for the thread that I can pull all the way through and then go back and and once I deconstruct it, then go back and and then construct the story that's going to be relevant, that is actually going to be purposeful, and it's also gonna allow them to be the authority.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 3:And being the leader in telling that story.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think even just some of the companies you've passed me over the years to interview, they're doing something that actually has never been done before. Right? Which is a whole another level of complexity because that's really hard, like, to try to teach people about something new that they didn't even know existed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You can't copy. Yeah. So that's and that's that's the fun of a science and and and technology to me is that if you look at you know, let's use Popular Science as an example. I've had a number of companies on the cover of Popular Science.
Speaker 3:And the reason, you know, that their Popular Science type stories are a wire type story is because it's such a breakthrough advancement in in, you know, in either way, does it make a difference? Is it medical or it's, automotive or what category is being able to actually have something that's not a me too product. So being the the I call it you know, you go to Apple and you have the Genius Bar, I feel like I'm always working at the Genius Bar because I have access to so many brilliant people. Yeah. And it's my responsibility and a lot of fun in the process of actually helping that genius really shine.
Speaker 2:No. Okay. That makes sense. So walk us through somebody starts working with you. You you do this initial session.
Speaker 2:Then how do you work with them kind of ongoing in the weeks, months, years to come?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So one of my proprietary things I set up, was really based on being a journalist prior. Sure. There's a lot of PR people that actually kept roots in journalism. But one of the things that I used to do every day in the newsroom is I would actually look at what was the other industry news that's happening, who's writing about what, what are the trend stories that are happening, being able to tune in to what's relevant in the news versus what is just kind of noise.
Speaker 3:And every as digital digital airways have gotten more crowded, it's harder to do that because we have access to so many sources. I look at the things. So I can't control the industry news, the world news, or, some of the trends necessary, but I could chime in. And then the product and corporate news, company things, things I own, I can, you know, create stories around those. And then there's another category, which is basically either the challenger or the disruptor kind of stories.
Speaker 3:So the first thing I do is is take the general thread story, and then I actually depopulate it and turn it into other stories. So what is the company culture and story? Why you know, who are the experts within the company? What are the trends that are happening? So if you look at AI, there's artificial intelligence, you know, in business.
Speaker 3:There's AI for consumers. There's AI in medical. There's AI in in lots of different verticals. And consumers in general don't know what, you know, where to go. The enterprise is trying to figure out, you know, what to do.
Speaker 3:And so as a AI authority, one can actually help, you know, kinda tone down the the dial, tune in, and share wisdom. So looking at all the stories that can be created, what I call the narrative story engine, then I take that content, and I I put it up to to market. So first, I usually start with the market analyst. So, you know, so most people are familiar with the Gartner's and IDCs and the Frost and Souls, but there's a lot of other smaller independents. Test drive the message.
Speaker 3:See how it sticks. Get feedback. Test it with your with your partners. Test it with your customers. Create a customer advisory council or a feedback loop.
Speaker 3:Then we go to the media. And I see. What I'll do with the media, I'll go to my my friendlies, I'll call them, and test drive and give them advanced, access, you know, to if it's a new company. And the cycle typically is anywhere from three months to six months depending on the launch of the type of product. If it's something that's industrial hardware, it's gonna be probably pretty further out.
Speaker 3:If it's software or something that's more app or service driven, sometimes it's a quicker road map. But my goal is to start getting the company out within the first month talking to media and curating stories that are gonna, you know, give them articles that they need for either funding or extract partners or to track users. So it's really tailored to what the business goals are. Okay. It's not just write a nice press release with a pretty picture and post it out of the wire.
Speaker 3:It's really geared toward what is the business impact that they need to help make. So that's the general, you know, premises of being able to do that. Then there's product reviews. Then there's, you know, trade shows. There's off sources.
Speaker 3:No. Then it comes down to content. You know? So there's earned, there's owned, and there's sponsored content. Earned content is what I get the I I still get the biggest thrill, and and I squeal when I get something that's in Wall Street Journal or, you know, Wired, you know, Wired Magazine or Today Show or CNN or something because that's not pay for play.
Speaker 3:There are lots of things that you can't own as a company, newsletters, your website, your you know, if you have a corporate podcast or your blog, those are all own content things. And then they ask their sponsor. Sometimes it's appropriate to do sponsored things. So that could be anything from doing a satellite, you know, media tour, or it could be, you know, taking an ad out in the Wall Street Journal that that has your manifesto manifesto, you know, challenging the industry. But in general, publication like Wall Street Journal doesn't do pay for play.
Speaker 3:It pays anything sponsored other than advertising. So the other key component is really understanding not just working with the sales and marketing component of the business, but typically work directly with the C suite directly so I know exactly what is happening and when be the pulse of PR for the for the company. And always make sure that we're ready to adjust and align and and be agile because the market changes, dynamics change, products sometimes don't work as advertised. You have new competitors. And so it's always, as I say as a pilot, because I fly, is your situational awareness is so important in PR.
Speaker 3:And just a couple years ago, I finally realized, I think, why I became a pilot because I've always been situationally aware of my surroundings when it comes to news and tuning in. And it's like the RCA Victor dog with the Yeah. Yeah. With the little megaphone is always listening in. That's why my logo is a is a is a fox.
Speaker 3:The ear is up because he's in in tune listening, you know, to what's happening.
Speaker 2:Interesting. No. I I % agree. I I think and and that's like well, we're kind of in a weird spot in tech and kind of right now, I think everybody would agree with that. So where do you see where we're at?
Speaker 2:How does AI play into that or not play into that? Like, kinda where are we at, and what should companies be doing right now?
Speaker 3:So for me as an individual, artificial intelligence is, I'm gonna say, is a little bit of a muse, almost like a court gesture. It's kind of fun to play with. It's like first time I played, you know, FarmVille with Zynga. I was very curious, like, how is this gonna help me? And there are some tools out there that, you know, generate AI tools and some visual genotype tools that are fun.
Speaker 3:Are they replacing how I write my content and how I create my pitches and and, you know, papers and things for my client? No. Or but I do think that they're actually helpful as when you get stuck. There is such thing as writer's block, and I use it. I'm writing a book, a PR book, and I get writer's block sometimes.
Speaker 3:And I and I'll ask all this I don't Google's not gonna help me, but the Muse can help me. Right? On the enterprise side of things, I think that there are a lot of tools that I'm seeing that are that are AI generated. So in in terms of data and the things that we're seeing with, you know, companies like Neural Magic is actually company I'm working with, which is actually working with really deep content and data and working with, you know, partners like Akamai and Cerebus and really big players in their own right and helping them navigate the enterprise for the the Forbes, you know, 5,000 companies. Sure.
Speaker 3:Artificial intelligence being used for customer service and customer care is something we've actually had for a while. Maybe it just wasn't called AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Always I I look at AI as being you know, it's like we always have to be always intelligent. To me, AI is almost like that responsibility. When you get a driver's license, you need to know. You have you have the permission to drive, but you always need to be aware. And to me, AI, it shouldn't be, you know, the the the, the dragon, you know, that ate your lunch type thing.
Speaker 3:It should be something that the same way cybersecurity and risk and content. My biggest concern about AI and the enterprise personally is is and it goes for any innovation technology. Innovation and technology in the right hands is a great thing. Innovation and technology in the wrong hands can be detrimental. So when AI is being used by cybercriminals or AI is being used by any any any criminal type of activity or impostering or, anything that is, within that category of cybercrimes, not a good thing.
Speaker 3:And so I think that's an area in the market that we're gonna see more tools and and successes in in in deploying. But I think the younger generation that grew up, you know, Gen z and then and younger, the they've always been connected and always on.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And the snaps Snapchat and, you know, communities and worlds, I'm beginning to just talk and hear from parents that they're very concerned about, you know, AI, you know, avatars and AI stuff. But it's very gamified and has that you know, I'm gonna say I was almost gonna say Game of Thrones, but I meant game you know, that digital game avatar that that that kids are attracted to.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So parental controls that we used to have to fight for for Internet, on ramp Internet and social media, I think is gonna become a bigger, bigger problem, you know, with AI. But I think AI in the enterprise is really where, you know, businesses today should start educating themselves and determining, do I use certain AI tools in sales department, like, you know, a CRM, or do I use AI in micro service? How much of how is it gonna help me with my CapEx and my OpEx versus I'm just gonna replace everybody? I think there's so much FUD in it that everyone's gonna be replaced. And my joke is AI can't do your PR, but I can.
Speaker 3:And but I'm gonna use AR AI as a means to just maybe challenge and and help me create things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I the thing that I struggle with with AI is it's the same with, like, being on the design side. Right? It's like, are you worried about it? It's like, good luck getting a client to tell a computer what they need when they can't even communicate to a human being what they need to replace you.
Speaker 2:Right? And even if that's the case, if everybody has that new baseline, you're gonna be no different, and you're just gonna get lost because there's no creativity in that. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's like drawing. Yeah. So if you give two people, you know, Harold and Purple Crayon as an example, we all get, you know, Purple Crayon to draw. I'm not a very I I can't draw well at all, so you're gonna get stick figures.
Speaker 3:You might be a really great drawer, and you're the same tool, and you can create, you know, a fabulous, you know, mural. And then another person comes along, and and they say, well, you know, I'm gonna take it to the next level. I'm gonna make it three d. Yeah. And that's a little bit like the AI, you know, toolbox, you know, for the everyday, you know, consumer is that we might not all be able to use tools.
Speaker 3:And is that and and I think playing with them, I played with the number. I'm like, well, it does deliver what I ask for, but not necessarily in the way that I would. Know? So then I realized a little I have to give a little more detail. I have to be a little more direct.
Speaker 3:I have to be more instructional. Then I get a little worn out, and then I'm like, okay. I'll just do it myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. No. That's that's totally fair. So I wanna dive a little bit deeper into and you don't have to name company names, but can you maybe give us some examples of things that people can do, whether they're enterprise, just starting out as a brand new startup, or kinda somewhere in the middle?
Speaker 2:Because, like, it seems like people are seem to be cutting back on sales and marketing, but I think you really need to be spending all your time on kinda sales marketing and PR right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I don't do vanity PR. And and so I think that's the first thing is that I really focus on strategic, you know, communications that help businesses grow. And so we'll just start there. So if you're an early stage company and you need to start come, you know, come out of stealth, then the things that I help with are literally the brand positioning, the the story, your product, you know, your your corporate counsel, your customer counsel, things that might seem more traditional marketing, but yet they fall into PR because then I can run with those.
Speaker 3:If you're a more mature company and you actually already have a product to market, but maybe you haven't gotten gotten the public relations, the level of public relations, you know, that are actually helping, you know, close sales. And that's always my measure. If I can actually create content that's gonna help the sales department close something. Right. Knowing that a PO came over, right, or a partner came through.
Speaker 3:And so the a more a more mature company where public relations should be doing is continues to help them to grow their business. And the the name of the agency, LMG, stands for leadership, momentum, and growth. So I typically work in each one of those stages with some companies I work with over a seven to eight year period, which is a long tenure. Sure. And it's actually helping establish, you know, their leadership, their authoritative voice, and as they get their product to market or the service to market, and it's kinda building momentum.
Speaker 3:The growth phase is probably the longest haul. That's typically when you're you're going to, you're probably on on series b, maybe even series c, and you're gearing up for an IPO or an acquisition.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And I've worked with every stage. I think Nightscope Robotics is an example. I think they've been a guest on your show as well. Is that they're a company I started working with as an accelerator and worked with them all the way through the IPO. Damon Motors in Canada is a company that I literally launched in a in ten days heading into CES twenty twenty, and they gave me a call and said we're going to CES.
Speaker 3:And I said 2021. They said no in ten days. And I left. And I said, okay. I'm there.
Speaker 3:So the the pace, you know, of PR sometimes can be fast and furious, and other times it can be you know, I would say it it's kind of like planting seeds and you grow it over time. What not to do is to not do PR. And I say that is when companies absolutely have no public relations and and so give me a worst case scenario. You have a lot of social media. You have a lot of social chatter, but maybe it's the wrong chatter.
Speaker 2:And you
Speaker 3:have nobody monitoring the airways, and you got disgruntled customers, or you have a product that doesn't work. Another key component of public relations is actually creating what I call crisis prevention plan or communications prevention plan so that you actually have a game plan. What is the protocol? Who actually what are what are the corporate messages? Or the messages to the customers, to the employees, to your partners?
Speaker 3:What if it doesn't work as advertised? Yeah. What if the stock market goes down? What if the market collapses? Oh, and what if something really horrific happens such as there's a war and you're and the majority of your team is is working and functioning and engineering or building in one of those war zones?
Speaker 3:And that unfortunately has happened to me back to back with the two existing wars that are going on. So it's the agility in which to be able to respond and act. And then there's the, you know, other part of which is corporate communications, which oftentimes I work directly with the, the people and culture or human resources groups to establish protocols there as well and communications so that the company culture is one in which everybody's on point. Everyone has the same you know, who you are, what do you do, and how do you do it depending on the roles in the company. But when it's an external spokesperson, you know, typically, it's gonna be somebody in the the top three three in a C suite.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. No. That makes that makes sense. So you have a podcast.
Speaker 2:You mentioned a book. What are they about and kind of where can when are you expecting to publish a book?
Speaker 3:Well, the book I shared with you my $5 and a half a tank of gas story. So let's just start there. The book basically is how to actually to figure business with unlimited stories for it's really for entrepreneurs and tech innovators and, you know, geeks. And I classify myself in there as a geeks as well to basically the the the playbook to successfully launch your company. And so a lot of lot of small companies can't afford an agency.
Speaker 3:So the the playbook is basically designed to help them get a start and focusing on earned media content and all the different components that I talked about. The currently, I have a newsletter. While I'm writing the book, I created a newsletter that's on LinkedIn called PR Pulse, which is basically a weekly newsletter. And each week, I address a different topic that that's that a company needs to understand and learn in order to be successful and and build and grow their business. So this week's topic was on how to create a perfect review.
Speaker 3:Last week's topic was, you know, on partners, and I touched, you know, video and all the different components. The podcast, the Before It Happened podcast, my inspiration during the pandemic was to create a narrative story podcast that really the 10% were my clients, and the rest were just really amazing people that I've met at conferences and different places. But everything from the inventor of the super soaker to the inventor of the sports bra to the the the creator of of of Pong, to food and and science engineers and agriculture space and so many different market market topics. But the whole purpose of the of the series, and I have more coming out, is really to take that back end story going back in time the same way I do with creating narrative. What was that moment in which the visionary actually decided to put all cards on the table, you know, mortgage their house, sell their car, trade down the dog for a cat, and basically say, you know what?
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is my before it happened story. And and some of them are really amazing stories. One one of my favorite ones is a food scientist who was an aerospace engineer, and he decided to leave his very coveted job in aerospace at Boeing to create vegan cheese.
Speaker 2:Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 3:And, you know, a couple of that, we know with, you know, aerospace engineers and and that are actually, you know, doing advanced things in in aerodynamics and and space, robotics, and things. So I think myself as always having the front row seat to the next science fair and being able to have these conversations. So I love science and tech. I was, you know, always in science fairs, always competing. And I think STEM education is, you know, something that's always been part of my life.
Speaker 3:It wasn't called STEM. It was just called math and science.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I was always a little dumbed down for me. I, you know, it was it was literally I was told by a math teacher when I think I was in sixth grade, girls don't do math. And that really struck a chord with me. I was like, well, why don't girls do math?
Speaker 3:And and when my father taught me to fly, I was about 11, 12 years old. I was beginning to fly very frequently with him, and I could apply science and I can apply math and physics to flying. To me, that was just the freedom of, like, STEM gives you the freedom to actually look and think differently. And then apply that, you know, with music and art, you get, you know, STEAM Yeah. Which is great.
Speaker 3:And so I'm a huge advocate of that for, you know, the for kids. And and Totally.
Speaker 2:And What an odd thing to say to somebody, like and, like, stupid. Right? Like
Speaker 3:Well, I went back I went back years later, and I said I went back years later. The teacher was retiring. And I said, oh, by the way, I'm a I I do in a I do for a living, I do public relations and innovation and tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's like, math does matter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. Interesting. So I I'm curious.
Speaker 2:We're kind of texting a like I said and, you know, it's like it's kind of in a weird space. Where do you think we're going from here? Do you think we're just kinda leveling off from COVID? Do you think people over hired to validate make their companies more valid, and they're just kinda bringing things back down to a realistic level? Like, where are we at, and where do you think we're kind of going?
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think one of the the things that I've noticed in the past few years is that we've kinda come back to basics. Yeah. In a sense. So that we're not it's not an all you can eat buffet when it comes to marketing budgets and all you can eat when it comes to, you know, big conferences and shows.
Speaker 3:It's more more selective and more focused. So it's think about all the things that you can do in house and the things that you can't do, you know, in in house. So, typically, my clients, I'm I'm, like, the in house agency. Right? They they don't have they don't have anyone that does strategic, you know, communications PR.
Speaker 3:And so I come in, and I'm like special services, special forces to, you know, some degree. So although budgets can be tighter and smaller because they're not spending big, verbose amounts of money, you can actually do a lot. I mean, some people ask, what is you know, if you had $20,000, would you rather blow it on a, big jumbotron and, you know, someplace at a show, or would you actually rather get, you know, a few dozen articles that actually can help your sales organization or your partner programs and things, you know, fuel? And so when it comes to building a voice or building a brand, I think this is really about being hyper focused on how you spend your money. You don't need a hundred thousand dollar PR budget.
Speaker 3:You don't need a $50,000 PR budget. There are a lot of things that you can do in in a small scale that can, you know, move the dial and make impact. But there are still a lot of really big PR agencies. I'm a boutique, but there are a lot of big agencies that operate very traditional even after the pandemic with seven layers of I know I'm getting in trouble here, but, like, taco, you know, taco dip. And and so you have junior people that are doing a lot of the work, and you have the senior people that go to the meeting.
Speaker 3:My clients get me a % of the time. I and I'm writing. I'm pitching. I'm training. I'm, you know, I'm I'm really involved.
Speaker 3:And that's different, and that's a different approach. Will that work for a very large publicly traded company? Probably not. But it does work for emerging tech, you know, innovation companies that are, you know, going from stealth to what I call wealth, going going from stealth to, like, their IPO because I've been there, done that 500 plus times. And so I I know the the process and the steps to get there faster unless No.
Speaker 3:That's so expensive. Gas. Remember?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That's that's good. So I I I wanna dive a little deeper into I guess, I don't know what the term would be for it. Like, you're you work with a company.
Speaker 2:You're kind of inside them. You're basically, like, you you kind of, like, are an employee, right, in in that sense. But you're kind of just an outside voice as well, which I think can really it's nice because you're kind of brought in and you can kind of almost be brutally honest with kind of that c suite. Right? Where I think if you get hired into a company as an employee, sometimes you can't be as brutally honest sometimes and, like, you kind of almost, like, float under the radar a little bit.
Speaker 2:And but when you brought in as kind of like a consultant or, like, you're part of the team, but you're still kind of at arms length, you can almost be like, no. That's dumb. I think we really need to do this or that. Right? Where I think a lot of companies don't think about it like that.
Speaker 2:Do you agree, or what are your thoughts around that?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I feel I'm responsible to tell my clients what they need to hear, not what they wanna hear. Exactly. And I do say no a lot, and I actually will, in in a really healthy way. You know, my integrity and my number one priority is to actually help them be successful.
Speaker 3:But if I see something is not ready for prime time, something is not ready for review, or there is, you know, the a customer, you know, council member is is not really a great spokesperson, you know, for the media, or somebody or one of the company's spokesperson's not ready, you know, to beat the media or, you know, they need to be retooled or retrained. But it really comes down to being honest, forthright, and doing what's best for the company. I in in some like you said, I actually take the the I can leave the corporate culture on the table because I'm I'm I'm independent. And and maybe some of the things I have told clients over the years, maybe I would have gotten fired, but they they didn't fire me. They actually respected me even more by challenging them and say, I don't think we're ready.
Speaker 3:I don't think we can go to this trade show and demonstrate this product. We can't ship it out for product reviews. It's not it's not prime time. There's nothing you know, it's harder to say no than it is to say yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's my job to actually tell my client no, but find a better solution or a way to get there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I I think kind of because I think and we talked about this before we started recording is, like, my biggest problem with AI right now is, like, it's so overpromised on what it can do. And then when you actually get your hands on it, it's garbage. And there's been a few products over the last little while that that's been the case.
Speaker 2:And I think somebody like you being like, we are not ready. We are gonna get crushed if we release this. Not like, I think if some of those companies had somebody internally who was just like, we can't do this. They would be in a way better shape. They might not have even launched yet, but they wouldn't have got crushed immediately.
Speaker 2:That's my opinion. You could tell me what you think.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. I I actually have been I had the privilege to work, with Apple a bit. And one of the things that that was really true to the culture, at least when I worked there, was that the honest factor was, you you know, was key. I mean, Steve Jobs came back to Apple after an era where there were there was a lot of the honesty and, you know, the great you know, going back to its roots of creating great product experiences.
Speaker 3:But Yeah. I think there's just far more respect in building a relationship with the company, and it's a relationship is more than a contract. It really is to me, and it's more than a handshake. So as a consultant, you know, you're coming in for a short period of time. It could be six months, a year.
Speaker 3:And as I said, most of my clients are contracted for a year. And sometimes, you know, they reconnect with me after they raise more funding, they boomerang to me, you know, after they go through different stages. I also have another set of clients, which are, like, brand new emerging market players, and they are younger and leaner. And those companies typically I'm in even getting my hands, you know, really even more dirty. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But in in terms of sometimes I get involved in trade shows, and I get involved, you know, creating content for trade shows and channel programs and lots of places that most PR PR teams or professionals would be involved in. And I think where the industry is going, as I said, I think we're kind of going scaling back to experts. And with the talent shortage and people who have during the pandemic, a lot of agencies had to resize and restructure, disparate employees, people working remote, really focus, focus, focus. And I think where AI can come into play is actually just be another tool set, as I mentioned. It's just the purple crayon.
Speaker 3:It's not all the crayons. It's just a crayon that we can actually use. And I think there will probably be more tools, and we also have to be responsible in deciding what tools are best for us to use. And Totally. And we I think that's our responsibility as consumers is to know whether you're gonna adopt or you're gonna adapt.
Speaker 3:I personally rather get in and play with all the tools. Like any new technology. Get in and play with it. I have a huge vinyl collection as an example, but I also have Spotify. And I have a vinyl collection because after CDs came out, I decided I'm gonna go back out and buy all the vinyl that I never had.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. I'm
Speaker 3:very But I but I but I respect vinyl. And so it's very similar to PR is I like the old school traditional structural PR, but at the same time, I'm really happy that we are in the digital world that I could actually issue and reach more people, more editors, more content faster in the digital era than I could, you know, twenty years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's actually really interesting because I always say because sometimes, like, this show airs on f some FM stations, and people are like, why do you care? It's like, well, why wouldn't I care? Like, I wanna be on everything, new, old, and everything in between. Like and if something new comes out, like, I'd wanna have my content on that.
Speaker 2:Like, I don't care
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, if it's new or old. Like, I love vinyl. I think it sounds actually better than any of the streaming services. But, like, if but it's also about yeah. But it's also about kind of, like, context too.
Speaker 2:Like, sometimes, well, obviously, I'm not gonna bring a record to listen in my car. But, like, you know, if you're at home and you're trying to listen to music, it's to me, it's like, put it put it on the turntable. So I think shifting that mindset of, like, we need to do this one thing. It's like, no. No.
Speaker 2:No. We need to do what makes the most sense across all whatever mediums make sense to, like, get our companies out there. Right?
Speaker 3:Well, the cool thing is I mean, this show is called Building the Future, and I help build companies. We have to know where we've been in order to know where we're going. And that's that's the part that so many people don't I was talking to it was at the grocery store, and and this young kid had a he's I overheard a conversation. He was talking to his friend about, oh, he wanted a he wanted such and such a car, and, you know, he didn't want a a gas he didn't want a EV car. He wanted a a fuel car because he wanted to know the mechanics of how it worked.
Speaker 3:And and and I and I thought that was actually really good that he was interested in buying upcycling, something that was already available that you know? And he wanted to understand the mechanics. But to be honest with you, you really do need to understand the mechanics of fossil fuels and things in order to understand EV and friction and why it all matters. Right? You need to understand the manufacturing, the deconstruction of manufacturing to understand, like, why are we building microfactories.
Speaker 3:Microfactories. Right? Yeah. And so I spend most of my time in Silicon Valley and, you know, in the, quote, in the industrial4.o, but I also spend time in the Northeast in New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio, which is not you know, which is where the industrial1.org was created. And to me, that's fascinating because I, like I go to Carnegie Mellon, and I go to their Robotics Pavilion, and I see all the robots and things I've been working on for, you know, fifty plus years.
Speaker 3:It's not a new thing.
Speaker 2:Sure. That's cool. Yeah. Very cool. But we're kinda coming to the end of the show.
Speaker 2:So how about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, the podcast, and what's the book called, and when can people maybe potentially expect that? I get that it sometimes is under out of your control.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, IEI's not writing it, so it's taking me a little longer. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Donna Laughlin, l o u g h l I n. The agency is LMGPR.
Speaker 3:It stands for leadership momentum and growth. And I also my newsletter is on LinkedIn as well. The book, hope, is going to come out before the holiday season because I've already started book two, which is crazy. Book one is not done, but I started book two.
Speaker 2:I get it. I get it.
Speaker 3:And it will take take you on a journey from, you know, $5 and a half a tank of gas all the way into the future of the world of I call Barbarella, and, you know, kind of what the places in you know, that that will go. Innovation and technology is a foundation, you know, because has been really kind to me in my career, but it's also a foundation, I think, for learning and and understanding. Sure. You know, you read Ray Bradbury books or you watch science fiction and and movies, we are living. We're actually in that now.
Speaker 3:You know? It is the it is the literally the jets in the world.
Speaker 2:Very cool. I'm I'm curious. What's book two about then? Or do you wanna share that?
Speaker 3:Book two is is more of a it's it's a adjunct to the the playbook. It actually breaks it down into more of the deep narrative story, like how to write your story. Got And the principles, the fundamental principles, and everybody has a story. One of my favorite things to do is to go into a counter at any given restaurant in the world, and I've been to 81 countries, and sit next to somebody who that they have a story. And people I don't know what if it's just I have a face that people wanna tell me something, but I since I was a kid, that was my number one thing is, like, people's stories.
Speaker 3:I became a journalist because of that, and
Speaker 2:I Sure.
Speaker 3:And I stay in PR because of that.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, Donna, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show and sending me all your clients over the last number of years. And, you know, I look forward to keep in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Thank you so much, Kevin.
Speaker 2:Thank you. K. Bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. Please visit our website at buildingthefutureshow.com to join the free community, sign up for our newsletter, or to sponsor the show. The music is done by Electric Mantra. You can check him out at electricmantra.com, and keep building the future.