Q&A: Jason Brown, Founder, Public City PR

I am a publicist in Metro Detroit. After working at variety of larger PR firms in town, I launched Public City PR in October 2008. I saw a need for a PR firm to service small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs. I started with no clients and no revenue, just an idea. We’ve grown to a 20 client roster with two employees.

My background is in journalism, I graduated from Michigan State. I was freelancing for community papers, then got in to radio worked at WJR as a news producer. I was working public relations from the other side of the spectrum by interacting with public relations professionals. I knew how to write and I heard their pitches a million times, so I made the switch. I have been working the last 12 years for a variety of larger PR firms.

I’m passionate about my family. With so much of my extended family spread out in Florida, Israel, Australia, New Zealand; my family is very important for me and to take time with my wife, daughter, and baby on the way.

I’m passionate about my work. I’m not a 9-5 guy, I’m more of the 7am-11pm type, but when I get home until my daughter goes to bed, I try to minimize it. It is easy to be passionate about my work because I only take on clients whose product I believe in, and do whatever is possible to raise their visibility.

I would go to meetings with bosses and we would meet a great client, nice people. When it got down to budget though, it was not cost-effective. They might have been able to dedicate $1000-$2000 a month to public relations, but we had minimums to meet and had to turn them away.

I opened Public City PR because I saw an opportunity to help entrepreneurs, offer them somebody with many years of experience, but not force to pay agency rates to do so. For less than $100, I started the company. I reserved the domain name, and recruited a friend, Rachel Tucker, to incorporate the company. As it turned out, I was right.

There were companies who hadn’t thought about public relations in a long time because they didn’t have budgets they thought they needed. In about 4 months, I had 6 to 8 clients up and running.

I faced questioning and healthy opposition from family. I grew up entrepreneurial, and understand the risk versus reward trade off. I laid out my business plan, and my wife and I gave me six months. I left my previous job with no clients, but it surprisingly was not very difficult to find new ones. I took the price down to a level companies could afford, and targeted an untapped market.

Did I face opposition from friends? Some thought I was a little crazy. They wished me well, but assumed I would eventually find a job somewhere. I counteracted this with aligning myself with partners to complement my skills set. I had friends pitch in to help with the accounting, and brought on a new team member, Monica Luoma in October 2009 when the company was ready. Then in September 2010, hired Sara Bloomberg to also help our existing clients.

In two years the company has truly evolved, and I have received some amazing feedback. The Detroit Regional Chamber recently named Public City PR as company “On the Rise” for 2010. That brought some sense of validation.

Now that we’re at 3 people working of the company, I am exploring the idea of office space. The business tells me when it’s time to grow. I’m not looking to add staff, if I don’t need it. If we grow, ’ll bring on talented young professionals, but I never intent to employ more than 5 or 6 people. We are a boutique company that does solid work and gets paid for that solid work. Who knows what the future holds? But that’s the vision today.

I was born and raised in Southfield, and never really considered leaving. The rest of my family moved elsewhere, but I enjoy it. There is a lot of positive things happening here, and maybe because we have experienced hard times you really see the positive in people. I have met more people in the last two years with incredible stories than I had ever imagined, and have been taken aback by their willingness to help others. Public City PR grew from word of mouth, and I think that is unique to the climate of Michigan.

More than anything, I choose Michigan because I am proud of who my clients are. They took a chance on me when they didn’t know what the company was capable of. They liked what we said we could do and we followed through. We are able to offer little to no promises; with PR you cannot promise you will get a client on the front page article. If you want that – that’s called advertising.

Don’t be afraid to pursue your idea. Not every idea is going to work, but don’t be afraid to pursue it at full speed. The key to this area’s future is get your experience and knowledge from companies, take that knowledge, and turn it in to your own thing.

I love the four seasons. I love when fall comes around, I really look forward to MSU football. In the summertime, it’s all about visiting Metro parks. With my 3-year old, Eliza, I have found myself reconnecting with childhood memories or finding new things about Michigan that I didn’t know existed before.