Ruth Atherley runs AHA Creative Strategies with her husband, Paul Holman. The boutique public relations firm has two permanent employees and uses a stable of trusted contractors with expertise in areas like speech writing, video and website design.
“We’re lean and mean when we need to be, or we can ramp up,” Atherley said.
Atherley has learned from experience that owning who you are, rather than obsessing about what you’re not, is key to winning contracts.
Several years ago, Atherley was pitching to a large client. She knew she was up against two much larger public relations firms. In the pitch, she spent a lot of time explaining how her firm would compensate for being small.
AHA didn’t win the contract.
“As I walked out, I thought, ‘This is all wrong. … I spent all this time explaining who we weren’t; I didn’t explain who we were,’” she said.
Now, the firm focuses more on selling the benefits of being a small and “virtual” agency that can add the unique skill sets needed for each project by contracting on-tap specialists.
“It’s so much better,” Atherley said. “We use the words ‘small’ and ‘boutique.’ … Since we’ve embraced who we are, we’ve [gotten business from] referrals and people talking about us. We haven’t had to work that hard at getting out there.”
On crafting a flexible skill set: “We had an employee decide to leave and another one left soon after, and we started talking about how we really don’t want to have to take every client that comes along. … We thought, ‘What if it was a virtual agency?’ I had some senior colleagues who were contracting out, and we could never employ them full time, but their expertise is always good. … What we were also finding when we were smaller and trying to add staff was that you had a team of people, and that was the skill set that you had. And now we can sort of expand out.”
