Shownotes
For Laura Love of GroundFloor Media, transforming a business starts with strategic communication. She likes to think of her and her team as storytellers, and how they tell a company or an organization’s story depends on the audiences they want to reach and the tools that they have in their arsenal. They can tell that story through video, by talking to the media, or by putting that CEO on a panel and having them tell the rest of the world what they do. The point is to make the impact and create brand awareness for the company. On the flip side of that, a big part of their agency is focused on crisis and issues management, which means keeping a company out of the news, or minimizing the impact of something that could be perceived as something negative that they have to face. Laura shares her thoughts on how they handle everything, from media relations to thought leadership to crisis and issues management.
Laura Love GroundFloor Media Founder, Synthesizing Strategic Communications, Digital & Social Media Strategy, Crisis Communication & Reputation Management
We’re incredibly fortunate. We have Laura Love who’s a guest on the podcast. She is the Founder of GroundFloor Media and the Co-Founder of CenterTable. Laura, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.
GroundFloor Media is a strategic communications company that I started sixteen years ago in my basement in Boulder, Colorado. On that side of the agency, we handle everything from media relations to thought leadership to crisis and issues management. Our clients range from everyone from Children’s Hospital of Colorado to Noble Energy to Tennyson Center for Children. Our sister agency is an agency that we started about a year and a half ago, and the name of that agency is CenterTable. That’s the digital arm of what we do on the communications side.
I’m familiar little bit with some of the entities that you described. We have some level of common ground. Both of us have spent a little time back in Tennessee. You at Vandy and me as a wannabe Vandy yet at the time. Segueing a little bit and looking about what you do within your agency, and folks get confused when they hear about what you do. When you’re working with a client, what types of things do you bring to the table for your client that moves their needle or causes a transformation for their business?
It’s funny that I’ve been doing this for a long time now and my parents still don’t know what I do. What we like to say is that we’re storytellers. How we tell a company or an organization’s story depends on the audiences they want to reach and the tools that they have in their arsenal. If a company comes to us, they have a challenge. They want to launch a new product. We can tell that story through video; we can tell it by talking to the media, we can tell it by putting that CEO on a panel and having them tell the rest of the world what they do. The tools that we have to help shape that story and share it have grown since even I started the agency sixteen years ago. The point is to make the impact and create brand awareness for our company. On the flip side of that, a big part of our agency is focused on crisis and issues management. Sometimes, it’s keeping a company out of the news, or minimizing the impact of something that could be perceived as something negative that they have to face.
I think about a typical business owner, and most business owners are looking for more clients, more revenue. What’s the most common question, desire or misunderstanding that you hear from a new customer to your firm?
Our favorite one used to be, “How soon can you get us on Oprah?” That’s usually when we exit stage left. The misconception is that public relations equal sales and that isn’t always the case. It certainly can help, but public relations are about brand awareness and communicating with your key audiences. It doesn’t necessarily always result in sales.
I’ve heard brand awareness, and for a lot of the folks out there going brand awareness, Coca-Cola comes to mind. In a market like Denver, when you’re talking about brand awareness for a local company, what does that mean to you?
Strategic Communication: Public relations are about brand awareness and communicating with your key audiences. It doesn’t necessarily always result in sales.
It doesn’t matter what it means to me, it matters what it means to that company. Every company has a different audience that they want to reach or a set of folks that they want to reach. We try to design custom programs that relate back to that particular audience. For some clients, it’s how do they impact the community. Bellco Credit Union has been a long-term client of ours, and one of their big goals is to give back to our community and they do that in a variety of ways. Our work with them is helping to develop and then amplify the programs they do, whether it’s with a marathon, a parade or an opening of a new branch and they want to give back in a non-profit in that community. It could depend on the company and how they want to reach out to the audience.
Starting from your basement in Boulder, take us back to that timeframe. As you’re busy starting your company and you’re looking out on the landscape and go, “I have to go look for customers and clients.” If you can, compare and contrast that to now.
It’s interesting because I never anticipated starting a company. It wasn’t a goal of mine. I’ve never had a business plan. What happened is I moved to Colorado to be the Director of Marketing for a technology company. It was a fabulous company and the CEO is one of my friends from Vanderbilt. The company couldn’t get Series B financing, and we ended up having to shut our doors. I had purchased my first house. I was getting married in six weeks, and I got laid off. I say that with a smile now. There were a few moments of tears when I first found out, but looking back, I’m grateful it happened that way.
It was in April of 2001, and I got married in June. Went away to our honeymoon and came back and thought I had jet lag. I didn’t have jet lag but I was pregnant. About four months later, my husband lost his job. It was right after 9/11, and as you well remember, people are laying off people left and right, and our daughter was born six weeks later. As they always say, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Truly, I look back and I didn’t get on the internet to search on how to build a business or start a company. I went with my gut instinct. I knew that I knew how to do communications and dove right in. If I compare that from 2001, seventeen years later, they’re still the same passion, same energy and same drive. There’s a little smoother cadence to the rhythm these days than there was back then.
You started and for a period of time you were the business. You’re knee deep in doing the business. For you now, what’s the difference? Are you in the business still or are you on the business?
I share that with a lot of entrepreneurs. It’s the moment when you shift from working in the business to working on the business. Probably, I’m 70% working on the business and about 30% in the business. I can only do that because I’ve hired such amazing people that quite frankly are much smarter than I am, and I learned to get out of their way. I come in and I think about the growth, the vision and the culture versus the day-to-day operations.
There was a time where you were in the business and you made a conscious decision, I presume, to go on the business. What was that decision process or thought process? Self-generated or did somebody push you that way?
I’d say there were two catalysts for that. The first was a group called the Entrepreneurs’ Organization that I joined about thirteen years ago, and it’s a peer-to-peer group that are all business owners, the nutty entrepreneurs. It’s a confidential group but they gave me feedback, where my strengths were and how I could best grow the business. If I truly wanted to scale it, I had to stop doing the work and I had to start hiring people who could do the work so I could go grow the business. The second piece of it was you start to figure out where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are. My weakness is on the operational side of doing the work that needs to get done. I can sit all day long and think about creative strategies and big ideas. I can go get involved in the community and help solve problems for them, but if you’re the client, you want to hire my team to get you the results. It was that awareness of knowing your own weaknesses and being able to hire for those weaknesses that was the shift for me.
The thing about owning a business is you have to put your ego aside.
You look up in the mirror in the morning and you’re in charge and you go, “If it doesn’t get done, it’s my own fault,” and then when you start putting the team on board, then you’re responsible for their livelihood and their payroll. If you’re looking out and there is another creative person out there that’s thinking about going down the road of starting a business, is there a piece of advice you might offer?
Probably a lot of pieces of advice I would offer them. The thing about owning a business is you have to put your ego aside, and you have to realize that even though you’re in charge and even though ultimately, at the end of the day, it falls on you, you’ve got to have a lot of trust for your team. Let them do their job. If you can’t trust and you can’t let your ego go, it probably isn’t going to be a fun ride for you. It’s going to be a long ride.
With the current dialogue about women and workplace challenges and so on, do you think, looking back over your career, that being a woman running your business was a benefit or a challenge?
I had this discussion with one of my forum members the other day. It’s so funny I said, “I feel a little bit offended. I don’t think I was ever sexually harassed.” “Wait a minute,” and she looked at me, I was like, “I’m serious. I don’t think I was.” The funny thing is I never even considered gender in the equation. My dad’s an entrepreneur. My mom, I grew up with her telling me, “You can do whatever you want.” Never ever heard, “Because you’re a woman or because you’re a girl you can’t,” and so as I built this company, it was never about, “What can’t I do because I’m a woman?” it was more about, “How can I create a culture and an environment that other working moms, mostly moms, could thrive?” where they weren’t stifled by the workplace politics and the rules of a typical work environment, but we could create a new environment where you could be a mom, or be a dad, and you could still have a career that you loved. That’s what we set out to do.
You and I think about that and for the audience they’d go, “That sounds like what I want to do,” so what does that culture workflow, what does that look like?
It’s something that we take a lot of pride in. We’ve won Outside Magazine’s Best Place to Work in America for five years and twice at number one. That’s not a marketing program. It’s truly the things that we’ve put in place and it’s multidimensional, but it starts with our values, so we hire for values. When I say that, for us, it’s passionate collaboration, it’s integrity, and it’s mutual respect. When we’re hiring somebody, it is a peer environment, so we hire and if somebody has a red flag, we listen to that. Anybody in this organization, everyone has a chance to interview somebody, and if anybody has a problem, we’d listen to it. Everybody’s bought in, and we certainly look at the skill set but when I meet somebody and I go out and interview them, I look at a couple of things that have nothing to do with their resume.
I rarely look at their resume. We go out to lunch or to breakfast and I watch how they treat the wait staff. Do they write a thank you note? How do they treat a receptionist or a front desk? She is the heartbeat of this company. How do they treat her when she walks in? I try and look at the person, and I ask some questions like, “What do you do if you had six months and money wasn’t an issue?” I look at how they give back, what community involvement do they have, and how they spend their free time with their family, whether they have kids or not. When you’re hiring for values and you’re hiring for a human being versus the skill set, it does change the dynamic, and it starts creating and building out a culture that then we put programs in place to support that culture once they’re in.
The beginning hiring mindset when you were early on in the business and the mindset today, did you always hire this way or did you evolve to this thought?
I’ve always hired this way. A lot of our team members, and we’re almost 40 strong now, they had been referrals. I find that your best team members come from other people who know how you operate and know that somebody could fit into this environment. Our environment isn’t for everybody. We have a hard time attracting people that don’t see life as a work-life blend. We’re pretty strong on this idea, this concept of a blend not a balance. For some people, that doesn’t work.
Workaholics have a bit of a challenge with it.
Don’t get me wrong, we have people that work around the clock, but they also go out and have a life and they’re not afraid to be authentic about their lives. To us and to the clients, they’re not hiding. If they take a phone call from a chairlift, they’re telling you, “I’m going to pick up your call but I’m on a chairlift in Winter Park.” “Thanks for telling me.”
From my sense of that, a great deal of what I synthesize doesn’t come to me necessarily at work. There’s a great deal of value, for me it’s when chill time or getting away. The shower seems to be a favorite spot but hard to write stuff down in the shower.
Every year, we commit to an offsite. For the past probably seven years, we’ve utilized outward bound professional facilitators, and we get the team away and we spend the night overnight. We have invested in a program, many of your audience may know, called Emergenetics. It’s a program that looks at how you think and how you behave. We put our teams together based on this profiles, and when we go away for our offsite, we use those in team building and trying to figure out what’s working and then where could we still improve? Some interesting programs have come out of stopping and listening to the other team members talk about what could be improved and being open to the conversation.
As an aside for the outward-bound experience that you have, what’s the most challenging exercise?
I hate the high ropes course. My business partner, Ramonna, she loves these darn things. Makes me crazy, but we have to do those, and then the trust exercises, I’m like, “I love you guys, I’m not sure I trust you to catch me right now.”
I think about rappelling and heights. It’ll level the playing field.
We always walk away knowing that people have your backs. It’s good to get out of the office and work on things that are important. One of my favorite initiatives that came out of that was we sat around and talked about the things that were challenges. What kept us up at night? Several of our team members who are working moms said, “Sundays are hard for me. It brought back the college feeling of I have to start school tomorrow and got so much to do, and I’m overwhelmed,” and they said there’s that Sunday night blues where you’re, “I got to do some stuff,” and that feeling of walking into Monday, already feeling icky. We came up with a program called Zero Entry Monday, and our office doesn’t officially open until [11:00] AM on Monday. It doesn’t mean if the client needs you or you need to attend a meeting outside of the office, you certainly should, but it gives people permission, “Go to the grocery store, go work out, go do something on Mondays,” so when you walk in, you’re in a good place. I don’t know that we would have come up with that had we not taken the time away to think about what wasn’t working.
We’re going to shift gears a little bit. This is the quiz phase where I get to ask you all kinds of questions. For you, the most recent book or perhaps the most influential book that’s altered your perception on being a founder of your company or how you run your company.
I have this horrible habit of reading two books at the same time at all times, which I’m not sure I’d advice for anyone. I’m reading True North by Bill George. It’s a lot about following that internal compass to become this authentic leader, and until you become the authentic leader, you can’t truly become into your power. I love that one. The second one that I’m reading, and it’s interesting because they go hand in hand, is a book called Falling Upward, and it’s about spirituality for the two halves of your life and how you go through some hard times early on, but you wouldn’t appreciate your proverbial second half of your life unless you would hit rock bottom. They speak to me in that spiritual sense and from the business sense. I love them; I keep reading them so I must love them.
What failure at the time, what apparent failure, has served you or your company best or set you up for future achievement?
I say all my failures have, and I’ve had some big ones, and I’m grateful for them. I used to describe my life as a beautiful train wreck until somebody told me I couldn’t do that because it sounded terrible. I still like to describe it that way. I’m a single mom of three kids and my divorces have been some of the hardest components of my life, and yet looking back, I’m grateful that I went through it because other people, especially in this organization, go through hard times. What it’s allowed me to do is have a lot of empathy for them and a lot of grace which I know that had I not gone through it, I wouldn’t have that same level of compassion that I do now.
If could teach a course or share an insight with your very best friend or a colleague that was starting a business, what would it be and why?
As an entrepreneur, I would teach a course called The Art of the Blended Life. As entrepreneurs, especially when you’re young and you’re starting out and you’re trying to...
