Jeremy Weisz 10:37
So in the future, do you think you will go to like more institutions? Or you’ll kind of just keep it the way you’ve done it?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 10:43
I wouldn’t rule it out. But I don’t think that it’s — I don’t think that it’s like, it just depends on…
Jeremy Weisz 10:49
Sort of strategy to go after. I had Cheryl Contee on it was interesting interview of Impact Seat, and that’s what they were doing. They were looking at funding, more minority female-owned businesses.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 10:56
Impact Investing is so important. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 11:09
Yeah. So that was interesting to hear a conversation that she was saying exactly what you were saying basically is like, even when she went into boardrooms, to get money, she felt discriminated against because of gender and race.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 11:24
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s crazy, even like in purchasing an asset. So buying a building that houses, our head office, women have to produce more paperwork, have more co-signers, and like, and I mean, we had a ton of money to purchase. So it is a massive problem. And I think I know this from my Smart Cookies days of really focusing on financial literacy for women. This is just not a conversation women are having, though women are much better investors, our track record and our the way we manage money, we’re not risk takers. So I think that’s very much been our pattern is like, we’ve self-funded, like, we have done the bulk of it ourselves. And I look back and I’m like, why money was so cheap. Why on earth did we like tie up our own money to do that? But yeah, so I think that it’s just really important that you are surrounded by the right conversations, the right people, and then that we push for that better access, because women are damn good with money if you ask me.
Jeremy Weisz 12:29
Yeah, Cheryl told some kind of crazy stories about being discriminated against in these boardrooms, real specific examples. So I encourage people to check that episode out. But we’ll talk about how Talk Shop Media evolved, but you mentioned failures. We have to dig into that. I mean, I had Thomas, he founded Republix. And he grew his agency through acquisition to 38 million in like three years. But he was talking about it and his background came from the act. That was his background and act of doing acquisition. So like that was what he did before he had his agency. But he talked about, like, even knowing what he knew failures that occurred. And so yeah, I’d love to hear what you learned from some of those.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 13:29
Yeah. So I think the biggest thing for us was really, we sometimes if we found something for a great price, like, I was so proud of myself, one of the deals we were doing, it was like, they were sort of dragging their heels back and forth thing on in Canada. There’s like a tax exemption that you can get if you do a share sale versus an acid sale. And we were like, we are not doing a share sale. So like, if that’s what you want, that’s just not happening. And so that prolong the process anyway, the pandemic hit, and then they were suddenly like, just kidding, everything’s fine. You can have like, let’s just sign and we’re like, no, no, no, you’re like, heavy to hospitality, and like retail. So like, we’re gonna just take a beat while the world is closed down. And then by the time we reconnected, they had lost 80 plus percent of their clients. So I mean, we picked that bullet. Oh, man, totally, totally. And like my lawyer said, you could do this deal on your credit card, if we’re just doing the baseline sort of math that they had outlined. So we were like, great, what a good deal. Well, it was a terrible deal, they were not profitable. We rushed due diligence. So we ended up inheriting, really a team up there that basically said, like, we got them and then found a team of unpaid interns in the closet that we’re like, we wouldn’t obviously do that. And so then you’re like oh my god. So we really ended up when I did a, we did a hard push probably five years into our business of really zeroing in on profitability and EBITA, and it was like, up, down or out. So up meaning like, we have to up their retainer down as and we reduce the amount of time or out as in, they just, we can’t make money on them. And they have to go and it was shocking. We went from sort of a sub double-digit profitability number to 30% in a year. And it was like, didn’t compromise on service didn’t compromise on quality, just like actually measured what we were doing. Anyways, and so that actually ended up costing us a ton of money. And we did that deal also on just the premise of like, oh, well, we’re acquiring great talent. Well, the talent all friggin left, because they didn’t subscribe to how we did, and it wasn’t they didn’t like it, it was just like, well, they should be able to spend unlimited amounts of time doing influencer mailers. And we were like, no, that’s not no, we’re not gonna do that.
Jeremy Weisz 16:07
I like how you said that you thought about it. I love to know how else you found a best integrate. But you said, you kind of categorize up, down or out? Yeah, yeah. What else helped the methods when you do integration with a new company?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 16:27
I think, it really is up to the owner, most places don’t want you to meet the team until the deal is done. When the ones where we have met the team, and they’ve been really transparent, it’s so much more seamless, because they can come in, they can tour your operation, they can ask your team, we’ve really tried to just do open doors, I think the other thing is to not just immediately upon acquisition be like, well, you work here now. And this is how we do things and everything that you’ve worked on, doesn’t exist anymore, it’s like we really try to give a six month period of like, you have some awesome processes. Let’s see how you’re doing this. And let’s like, we don’t change a thing. In some cases, we’ll actually like the one that I think was the most successful, we had them continue to operate under their old company for about three months, and then made the announcement. So they were like, technically under our roof, but we didn’t publicize it. And then by that point, we had really worked out sort of the back end of that, and the team was able to integrate. So we still operated like we had, you know, all hands meetings together, we have like a weekly sales meeting. So they were part of that. Yeah, that probably went the best. And then I think, yeah, just the more you can spend really getting to know the individuals too, I think that they just sometimes become an afterthought. And for us more often than not the people piece is really the most important piece, they hold the relationships, they hold a lot of like the key information that you bought. So it’s really important that you like know who you’re, I feel that way about, like there’s not a single person in my company that I would know their name or what their parents are doing or like we really pride ourselves on knowing our team.
Jeremy Weisz 18:17
Before we hit record, this is kind of you were saying, from a talent perspective, you take a little different approach. Right some people chase awards, talk about your approach on talent.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 18:30
Yeah, yeah, so we’re always ranked like a top 100 employer and we really realized from our clients that what matters the most is like we’re looking at, oh, yeah, there we are.
Jeremy Weisz 18:43
If you’re listening the audio I am pulling up the talkshopmedia.com website we’re on the careers page but keep going I’m just gonna…
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 18:50
We’re overhauling your website but it’s careers page. Yeah, so we really made a pledge to have the best talent which means to get the best talent, we’re competing against tech companies and we’re head office in Vancouver we’re like Lululemon is a massive employer here so we had to be very competitive and so, that really meant not just being values based but showing up and giving our people what they wanted that was more time off much better maternity parental leave we’ve really invested in justice Diversity, Equity and Inclusion we call it Jedi. We also have sort of an in-house entrepreneurial we call it InResidence where we both invest in and encourage our team to help build businesses that we can take a bit of an equity stake in and really but do it still having like full-time employment. Yeah, daily.
Jeremy Weisz 19:51
I want to talk about the InResidence for a sec because I read that and I found it very interesting, but maybe let’s pull out you know, we’re looking at the Talk Shop values here, right? Get it, seek solutions, keep good company pursue bright ideas be business-minded. wonder which one just to talk about one of these and how that came about?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 20:11
Yeah, it’s interesting we distilled down because we were like I was a lot we actually distilled it down to four probably the one that everyone knows Forget it or like knows within Talk Shop like the top one they would all say is get it, get it. It was interesting as a polarizing one, some people felt like oh, it really like it’s a competitive sort of pushes like hustle culture. I like the double entendre I like those, like go after it, but really where it came from was we need to be able to understand complexity and nuance quickly. So I can meet someone and be like they have get it like they are picking up what I’m putting down. They’re quick learners, they can read the room, they ask the right questions, they ask questions, like, it’s pretty shocking to me, how many people are just listening to sort of have something interesting for them for their chance to talk not to listen to understand or ask questions. So that is probably our top value. And then yeah, we refined those five down to business-minded. So that’s like, we really have to have sort of an enterprising mindset, we are hired nine times out of 10, because businesses are trying to grow and we have to understand how their business operates, how we support that care wildly is sort of where we’ve merged a couple of those values. So that I think is what sets us apart is, like we not saying knowing everyone’s name, but really having meaningful connections with one another, I am the most proud probably anything that we’ve done of like, there are lifelong friendships, people are in each other’s weddings, there’s kids that are born that we have close relationships with, it just, we were we’re very caring when it comes to and I think carrying in that we do sweat, the small stuff that how you do anything, is how you do everything. And so we don’t want to do things incorrectly, we really want to be thoughtful. And then the final one is seek equity. And that is really just about this pledge, we have to just continuing justice, seeking justice, through work in equity, diversity and inclusion. And that’s…
Jeremy Weisz 20:31
It looks like, these are pictures of your space. Right? Is that right? Like, yeah, this is really cool. So there was actually like a get it.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 22:41
Get it was, yeah, our boardrooms are named after our values. Yeah, it’s a very values-focused company. And we created those initial values, and then went back to the team and said, look like, this is where some of all of our parts so like it, what are their, seek equity was one that was added care wild, there was one that was added. So, so yeah, we’ve definitely made it a representation of everyone.
Jeremy Weisz 23:08
Talk about the in-residence program, and why you decided to do that, because it’s a bit of a commitment. Right. And, yeah, I was just talking about that program. And why you started it.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 23:22
Yeah, so it came from the belief that there are a lot of budding entrepreneurs with really great ideas within our walls. And sometimes what holds them back is the idea of like, the left to like, give up my, I did that, like lifting, let’s Cameron, and went out on my own, but we think you can do both. And so we really wanted to try and create space where we can carve out time for somebody to support or support them to create their own business and launch that. And then also, in that freeing up their time, there’s a bit of an investment in that business itself. And we have all the skills you need to, to run a, certainly to launch a successful business. And I think you can learn a lot through how we’ve built our business to so mentorship is obviously part of that as well as our we’ve got a really robust network of whether it’s VCs or other people with like, specialty and e-comm, or whatever it might be. The other piece that sort of we and we’re still like, working on the mechanism of this, but is also we work with such fantastic companies, some of which are like going public, or there is a opportunity to own a small stake in that company. And so I think it’s very motivating both for our clients and for our team to be like, hey, now I worked on I’m not saying we do this with Snowflake, but we worked with Snowflake, which is a data warehousing business and it’s just like if you knew that your work where you’re getting them lots media coverage and sharing their incredible technology with everyone is supporting their stock price are helping, you’d be even more motivated if you had a piece of that. And so we really believe in that. And I also, as I mentioned, financial literacy is a thread that runs through my life. And I think it’s really important for people to have multiple revenue streams, I think you have to. And so being able to give them an opportunity to gain wealth through investing is something we’d love to do more.
Jeremy Weisz 25:32
What would an ideal scenario in-residence program look like? Like, would they still be working, let’s say a talk shop media, but also like, what do you envision?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 25:44
They’re so wildly successful that they love the business that they’ve built, and they transition out of the role, and we can sort of see that horizon coming. We haven’t gotten there yet. I think the uptake has actually been surprising. They’re there, people will love the idea, but actually taking that leap of bringing something to market, we’ve done two small ventures one was a daycare. The other was we got more of a training business and yeah, like learned a lot. But yeah, I’ve been surprised at people’s appetite.
Jeremy Weisz 26:20
Yeah, I think it takes shape in so many different ways, because everyone’s different. So but an ideal scenario, someone’s coming in and working there. Maybe they have this other thing that they want to pursue and then Talk Shop will provide advice and maybe some funding.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 26:37
Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the thing. We’re sitting on cash. So we’re, like, very bullish on putting money into things if we feel like it’s the right model.
Jeremy Weisz 26:47
Talk about how’d you make it first to 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 26:54
This is a good story. So okay, so when I applied, so if I was 23, when Smart Cookies, I think I was maybe 20. I think I got hired. I was a very mature I kind of blew through I didn’t go to traditional university. I went to like a technology school sort of blew through like a broadcast journalism program. Landed in like a really I did my first job was marketing junior mining companies, which ironically taught me about invest like, yeah, like penny stock investing. I think it was like 19 day trading silver companies. Which if I had held one of them now, it’s a copper company that I held back then at like 20 cents, it’s now worth like, hundreds of dollars, I was like that I would have paid for everything. If only I had known. Anyhow, so yeah, from that job saw I had met a guy at a party. His name’s Christopher Bennett. And he worked on 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And I just remember him loving it so much. And there was a, I wanted to sort of move from marketing, which was not my favorite to, like, not my favorite, but like I really love journalism, and I love writing and to more to PR. And so I want to integrate junk. They did these group interviews. So it honestly was, I think, brilliant, it would be harder to do them now. But back then, so they rounded up the top eight applicants, I think there’s probably seven or eight of us in a room. And it was Cameron, who’s the I think he was the COO, or maybe not, he was an ops. And then I think it was actually Christopher and so they go around, so they just sort of rotate. So they may be asked 12 questions, and they rotate their way around, what’s the top media coverage you gotten? One of the final questions was like, what are your salary expectations? And so I was in a room with like, professional, like seasoned PR folks, or comms folks. And so at that, I mean, this is probably the early 2000. So they were 80, 100. And I probably was making sub $40,000 at the time, and I was like, I can make $45,000 I will. Anyway, so then I was like, well, I can’t, if everyone’s saying 100 Like I should I can’t I need to say like 50. So and then one of the questions they asked was like, who do you think did the best in this interview? And I was shocked at how many people said themselves and I was like, well, first you’re gonna say yourself like, you should. Anyway, so everyone said themselves. And so then I also knew this is funny too about like reading the room. So I knew one of the girls you can, Cameron is very expressive, so you can read him like a book. And I could tell that he had a connection with this woman, they’d gone to high school together or something. And you could tell he just thought she was great. So I was like, well, they’re obviously gonna hire this one. So or he likes her. And I said, oh, I thought Lindsey, like she didn’t actually have a superstar. But I was like, Lindsey, we had a lot of good points and I just like I chose her anyway. So they hired us both.
Jeremy Weisz 30:03
So what did you say for the salary expectation at the time?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 30:06
Oh, I said, 50. And so I’m sure they were like, well, we can get two of them for the price of what everyone else wants. So yeah, but you know what, that was a good. Two things I took from that hiring two people. We were so competitive with each other. And she was like a ski racer, like a professional ski racer, but she like was very just a competitive personality. And I am too so and I remember being like, I can write like, she wasn’t you might outwork me, but I will outright you. And so yeah, we really, it was good. So I mean, they got a very hard-working team, we really set the I think, set the stage for performance within that company.
Jeremy Weisz 30:48
What else did you learn that work in there and from cameras?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 30:52
Oh, my gosh, um, I think one of the things I still do to this day we do the call like goal setting and review, GSR, we do a GSR at Talk Shop. It’s just such a simple but important process of asking, like, sort of three main questions. Yeah, like, where do you want to grow? Where do you think you need to improve? And then what can we do to get you there are kind of the main themes. And we really do we like, we use this great technology called Bamboo HR. So it’s like you can do all of it. It kind of keeps it all centralized in the cloud. I would say the other thing, they do those huddles, I would say, definitely taken the huddle model.
Jeremy Weisz 31:41
I saw on your page even on the splash page, it says daily huddles weekly creative sessions quarterly halls, and then sun shines.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 31:50
Yeah. Yeah. Sunshine is straight out of like the sorority system, which is sort of like a shout-out. It’s like the idea of catch people doing things, right? We’ve morphed that too. I kind of went back into our we have a managing partner. So one of my partner’s kind of runs day-to-day operations. And she was on a mat leave. So I took over and I started doing this thing called fan mail, which was more because we don’t get a lot of exposure. I work at a Vancouver, we have team all over. And so I really wanted people to know like I see you, you might not be in my day-to-day, but like I see you beyond a sunshine of like, hey, this was something nice. It’s just like a small, something that they’ve done. So we do fan mail as well. So it’s every Friday, there’s like a recap of yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 32:37
We’ll go into some of the evolution of Talk Shop. But I have to ask, where does Oprah fall into this whole scheme?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 32:44
Yeah. So Oprah I was working at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And this is a good story to you. So they it was like So Brian student was the founder, I think they’re now Oh, two E’s. And so it was like his goal in life to be on Oprah and Ellen. And so I was always the sort of the hack of those shows is they have a page, like deep in the bowels of their website that are like upcoming segments. And so what I realized is like, oh, if you just start to like, reply to the posts, you have a much higher than it gets read. And so, you know, it was like, Oh, is there a garage makeover? We could do, I negotiated the whole hoarders relationship, like it was like, it was cool to help them with some of that stuff. And so anyways, it was surfing Oprah. And I think while I was doing that, I came across this, like, do you have a story about the debt diet, and I had seen an episode of back in those days yet, just like TiVo the show, because we’re working. But I’ve seen it and it was really sort of foreshadowing the 2008 recession, just saying, like, everyone is living beyond their means. This is what you need to do. It was sort of like an eight part, whatever. And so I was that person, I was like, 20, in my early, early 20s. And kind of blown through school, I felt very, like, I missed my childhood, I missed my young adulthood and so how I was gonna make up for it was just like, have fabulous life have an apartment and nice things and like, just be so well dressed on my little $50,000 salary that I could not afford half of my life. And so I wasn’t in like, an obscene amount of debt, but I wasn’t, I was spending more than I was making and I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. And I just sort of knew deep down it was like, not feeling good. And it was like, problematic in my relationship. My husband’s very frugal. So he was like, what is this like? Great. So anyway, so we started to do we being a couple of girls from 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and then a couple of other friends. Were like, let’s just work through this like little booklet. They had the Oprah show had done and so we had done really well we had like pay down a bunch of debt more like I sold my car we move, I just tried to do a bunch of things to like cut expenses. And my big thing was like, I don’t really want to, I want to make more. I feel like I’m not the best at spending less, but I can earn more and be better about how I spend that. And so anyway, so I wrote in and like I said, I’m a good writer. And so I wrote put my PR hat on. And so it had been months and months and months. And the Oprah show called me at work and I’m like, oh my god, I got them. I finally got them on Oprah. And then she started to talk about the debt diet and the Smart Cookies, which we had just sort of called our group Smart Cookies. And I was like, oh, anyway, so then long story short, they had us out that the funniest thing with that show, too, is they, for regular people like non-celebrities, they kind of trick you because you would just spiral if you knew you were meeting Oprah. So they were like, okay, surprise, we’re gonna fly. You guys all out to watch the show get taped. Oh, they had flown a producer out and we had taped a little like vignette, like a two-minute video thing. And so we were just going to fly there, sit in the audience get to watch our little vignette. And then the day of they took us into the greenroom. And they’re like, well, Oprah might like maybe ask you guys in the audience, like about your vignette? Okay, so let’s just practice like if she asks you and then they started, like the sort of media training us and so she’s like, do it again, but like, tighter say it’s, less words. And so anyways, we go out and sit in or like in the front row, and they do the first segment, she does that whole show, like live like, just reads it off a prompter. Like it’s coming out of her brain, but it’s on the teleprompter. And so then they cut for commercial. And they put up like five stools, and then she’s like, okay, Smart Cookies, come on up smart.
Jeremy Weisz 36:56
You didn’t have time to freak out.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 36:58
You just sort of like blackout in your own mind. And, yeah, we had a good interview, and the rest is history that from that show, and at that time, I think it was a 42 million households like, your brain can’t even process those kinds of everybody’s…
Jeremy Weisz 37:15
That led to TV series books also.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 37:18
Yeah, we got to let agent. So Richard pine shout-out got us an incredible deal with Random House. We wrote two books with them. Got a TV series that eventually ended up being on the Oprah network as well. And yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. In doofus is just being money experts.
Jeremy Weisz 37:43
For Talk Shop media. What was the first milestone? I know, you mentioned you landed a big client?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 37:49
Yes, it was a yeah, probably winning. So the bees, International Realty Canada was really our first national international client. And they had like zero confidence in earned media and PR at the time, they’d sort of blown through individual publicists. And yeah, I think a lot of people this is where business-minded is really a value is like we know we have to move the dial like, people are not going to pay you if they’re not seeing a return. And so, you know, we really took the time to understand what was important to them, they were very clear, we’re not in every market, we’re not like RE/MAX we’re operating in the top tier of luxury real estate, we really need to sort of own that area. And so one of the big things we help them with is creating like, you own data, you own information, like if you are the source of really solid information that the media want, there will always be this like symbiotic relationship of them wanting to talk to you and vice versa. So we started doing these, we called them the top tier reports, which were really looking at what’s happening in the luxury segment in Vancouver and Calgary and Edmonton. I was in Canada at the time. And that just started to generate a huge amount of coverage and sort of put their CEO on the map, put them on the map, and we were doing I mean, one of our old values was being scrappy, but we did it in such a scrappy way where I mean now the data is so much more robust and we’ve been able to kind of grow with them and supporting that but at the time you know, we were sourcing like MLS data with overlaying or things and just really trying to obviously have good information but do it in a way that was not what didn’t cost them anymore. And I think they appreciated that and then as they grew, you know art we started to grow with them and yeah, it’s been as long as Talk Shop has been around. They’ve been a client of ours and we just adore them.
Jeremy Weisz 39:57
How did you attract them initially?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 40:00
Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 40:01
Like, now you look at the site, I can pull it up. But like, you have Starbucks you have all these big companies then you didn’t?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 40:13
Yeah, yeah, we didn’t, no God, we were like a car dealership. And no, not exciting clients. You talked about this earlier in the show, like relationships are everything. And I think that that was how it came through is a friend of a friend knew me. She was I think our VP marketing. And she just said, hey, I’ll give you guys shot. Normally, this goes to the big firms. But I think you’re scrappy, and you guys would do a good job. But like, we won’t even commit to a three-month engagement like this is one month at a time kind of thing. We’re like, great and bulk of my clients are like, if you tell me I can’t do something like watch me dedicate the rest of my life to proving that I can do it. So I think that that in a weird way has been super motivating is just yeah, getting to get in there and prove them wrong.
Jeremy Weisz 41:06
Here’s the Sotheby’s one you can see here. Really? I mean.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 41:11
When I read the impact reports, it’s like 30 million impressions. And yeah, like we do an adequate valency value. And yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 41:21
That’s amazing. Talk about the evolution. So like, you start off in born of PR.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 41:27
Just PR yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 41:28
How did it grow? How’d the services go from there?
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 41:31
That’s a great question. Let me think so at that time, so it was PR and PR was like, it was fine. It was lucrative. But social media really came on the scene. And there were, it was just sort of fractured. It was like the big agencies didn’t even necessarily believe that this was going to be a thing. So they weren’t doing a very good job. We weren’t totally sure how to do it, and then use these smaller little social agencies start doing it. And then it became just like a requirement, like our clients were like, We’re gonna spend money on this. We need blog writing and somebody to manage our Facebook community at the time, I think it was sort of like Facebook and Twitter. Right started. And we just started to see that that was what our clients needed. And in the very beginning, it was like, I would actually say, up until the last maybe six, maybe, yeah, five to six years, like we were doing social like organic social, with like, this is just a because we need to retain the client, we’re not really making a lot of money at it. So we’re going to keep it relatively smallish. And so we had, yeah, really up until I think 2017, like dual hires, like a PR person that then flips into a community manager. And that wasn’t great, because like…
Jeremy Weisz 43:01
The cross-training.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 43:02
Yeah, it was a lot of cross-training. The skill sets are different. Now I look at our digital team, and I’m like, oh, my God, they’re like, savant, like they’re so technologically sophisticated. And our comms people are way more. They’re writers. And so they’re not the same brain. And so it took us a while to find it. Yeah, it grew into it. We really toyed with acquisitions, I think I’m glad we didn’t, in the end, make an acquisition, we brought somebody in, who kind of she actually owned an agency, and was like, I have no intention of like selling it or growing it beyond sort of my clients. But she consulted to us on like, here’s what we think you would need. Yeah, so then we got who she’s now our VP. But her name is Kristin Lee. And she has done an incredible job of building out that team, which now is yeah, like a solid 40% of our revenue. And they’re just doing like their ability to hone in on data and insights and make really strategic recommendations because they understand data is just like it’s world-class. It’s so good.
Jeremy Weisz 44:13
Katie, I know that you have some crazy stories from your journey from what you’ve helped clients with. But so I want to talk about, there has been data breach stuff you’ve worked on, there has been death stuff that you’ve worked on. I don’t know which one you want to tackle first.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 44:29
Data Breach is interesting. Well, and it’s interesting because I mean, we use the blanket term data breach, it was actually like a ransom attack. And so very large public accounting oceans I have to be to protect the privacy of our company. And I probably can’t even say the type of industry anyways, but it was public world. And at the time, this was happening all across the country. And so I got the call that they were pretty sure there had been this attack and nothing was working so right from their phones, to their email, to their payroll, they couldn’t pay their people. And so what started happening is like, speculation just runs rampant. And so then people were like talking to other people, and now it’s on Twitter. And now it’s on the news. And so once it’s in the news, it’s like trying to pull that back is reel it back in is really, really hard. And so it was really fun. It’s sort of you sort of enter like, like a special SEAL Team Six, like you come in, it was like me and the lawyers and the insurance company. And you just have to lay it down. Like, nobody speaks on this without like the expressed approval of like, we have to contain this. So in that instance, because there was already information that had gotten out there, we were like, well, would we have normally talked to the public about it, especially when, the biggest thing I’ve learned, through working with lawyers on these kinds of things is just like you, and in general, as a good law firm speaking immediately, like, Don’t speculate unless you absolutely know with certainty, and even then do you have to disclose that, like, what’s the advantage of disclosing it. So they weren’t 100% certain, but they’re pretty certain that had already gotten out there. So it was really about controlling the message. So then we really worked in concert with those two other parties to make sure that the I can’t say that person’s name. But the person that was doing the briefings, they there was a daily briefing to media so that it was and that we really backed away from the like, this is a ransom attack, and neutralize the language into like, there’s been a breach and information breach. We’re still trying to figure out the severity of this. But this is what you can expect from us, and then really just meant making it clear that like, that we will be transparent. That’s it, we’re not hiding anything. People had a lot of fears about like, you know, they had their personal and financial information. Now, would that be shared? And so, yeah, we just worked. And really, were able to contain that in a way that took it from an initial freak out to like it barely made the news afterwards, because they were so transparent. And yeah, so I think, like the I was thinking earlier, like the rules for issues management, whether you’re working on a death or in something like that, where there’s like a ransom situation, or really, you need to have sort of a key team and a key infrastructure in place about how communication will roll, I would always err on the side of like, put nothing in writing, like, like, next to nothing, assume that everything that you write down, is gonna get flipped to the media or posted on Twitter, and that, yeah, just like, don’t write it down. In another situation I worked on where there was a very tragic death of a young person. And it was really, I mean, it was catastrophic in a sense, and it would have been catastrophic to that brand. And so the, the mission that I was working on was like, we just need to contain this so that it doesn’t become a headline news story. And so what we ended up doing was having, like, every single I said, we’re gonna have to, when these people come in, like, we’re gonna have a conversation with every single person, so that they like, yes, they know what happened. But you don’t want to find that out secondhand. But that they’re not seeing it in writing, that they know that there’s a point of contact, who will have an honest conversation, and that we’ve pre-thought through every possible question. And we have like, a significant response that we can give somebody who’s like, what happened to somebody I know, like, and again, like act with integrity and compassion, somebody died, like, that is not where we like, yes, we need to protect the brand, but we need to be human beings and acknowledging how traumatic that is. And so that also meant making sure the right resources were brought in place for the staff for the individuals that yeah, we’re in that space.
Jeremy Weisz 44:31
It was another book, maybe Katie’s, like the rules for issue management. But some of the notes I took here was: really control the message, create some kind of neutral language. So it’s not like over the top. Having a key team communications key, don’t put it in writing, actually, obviously, be human and have that conversation have a point of contact so people have that…
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 49:23
Pick up the phone and call them to that they know that somebody’s taking this really seriously somebody important is taking this really seriously. I’m sorry, I forgot what I was gonna say.
Jeremy Weisz 50:05
Well, as you think about that last question, because I know right at the time here, but it’s just mentors and some of the influence. I know you mentioned Cameron Harold, who are some of their mentors throughout your career. It could be mentors you actually were personally mentoring with or maybe it’s just, yeah, something like that.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 50:26
I have learned so much from people that I have mentored that it like it is equally, so rewarding and it teaches you so much. I would say so yeah. Cameron hired me. The I think inception, the idea that I was an entrepreneur and would one day have my own business. So I credit him with that. Judy Brooks who he actually introduced me to who, yeah, she is just one of the most unsung entrepreneurs in the game. She’s more than an entrepreneur. But she has an organization called Immerse Yourself. So she does immersions with we as mostly entrepreneurs, but really creates this connection to community with this, sort of like brain science, so understanding yourself. And then she has just been so supportive of me as like a working parent, as somebody who’s worked I’ve had many, many business partners. And so those often come with, like a, like a host of it’s like a marriage, right? So it comes with all kinds of challenges. And so she’s really been incredible at helping us navigate through that. So she’s, yeah, Judy Brooks is incredible. I had a financial mentor in very early days of, of the business name of Briscoe, who is also just one of the greats. And yeah, and she was one of those women who, you know, award-winning CFO and just an incredibly brilliant financial mind, but also made sort of sometimes the way that legal can sort of be overly complicated for a concept that you’re like, okay, this means this and that, she did that for me with finances where she just really was like you need to perform. This is what it performed, don’t get hung up on doing it perfectly, but it needs to tell us these things. So we know like, when will the money run out? When we need to do that? Yeah, she’s incredible.
Jeremy Weisz 52:19
I love it. First of all, Katie, I want to be the first one to thank you? Just thanks for sharing your stories, your journey, everyone, check out talkshopmedia.com and more episodes of the podcast and Thanks, Katie. Thanks, everyone.
Katie Dunsworth-Reiach 52:33
Thank you Jeremy. It was so much fun, I appreciate it.
