Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Heather Adams. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Heather, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. Other times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed.

In 2010, I was laid off from a job where I had been for the better part of a decade leading a team and an area of the business where I had worked my way up in the company and felt like I was an invaluable part of the company. I remember it so vividly because I was the head of publicity across the company and I was working with our biggest marquee brands and authors that we represented at the company. I had been in New York that entire week and I had taken our whole publicity team to pitch our latest catalog to major national media outlets. We were going back and forth all over Manhattan from one major outlet to the next.
I landed a six week appearance on The Today Show for authors of ours that were a husband and wife duo. Then, I also secured a PEOPLE Magazine cover story for another author of ours on that trip. I remember that so vividly because those are huge wins for a publicist. And I was really, really excited for the authors that we were serving. I came home on a Thursday and walked into the office on a Friday and they let me go.

Because my job is so much more than just a running to-do list of tasks and I had been there for so long and those people felt like my family, not just colleagues or teammates, and I had sacrificed my own real family at home (my husband and my two boys) for the company, I went through all the stages of grief. I was really hurt and frustrated. I was angry and thought, “I’ll show you.” However, years later, I realized at the end of the day, it was a business decision. It wasn’t personal. We had been through a really terrible recession and it was like a sharpshooter taking people out for two years, a little at a time. You’d go into the office one day and 25 people be laid off and you go into the office a few weeks later and 100 people would be laid off. For two years it was like that and I was just in one of those rounds of layoffs. I thought I had survived and made it through round after round after round.

I remember thinking, “What in the world am I going to do? I am so good at this job. I’ve built a lot of relationships and a network in the book publishing space, what in the world am I going to do?” My husband, Matt, said to me something that to this day, I look back and I think it was the catalyst for so much change in my life. He said, “I don’t want you to take your next step out of fear. Fear that we can’t pay our mortgage or that we can’t feed our children.” Our boys at that time were 1 and 3 and we were definitely a two-income household. I loved working, I was good at it and I wanted to work. He said, “You have built this beautiful career for yourself. Rather than going and allowing the job to determine what quality of life you get left over in the spaces, go determine the quality of life you want first and build the job around that.” That was such an important thing for him to say because it gave me so much freedom and permission to dream.

I learned two things out of that layoff. I learned, number one, the value of relationships. I got laid off on a Friday and on Sunday, that same weekend, our number one competitor’s CEO called me at home and she said, “We’ve heard what’s happened. We need someone to come in and overhaul our publicity department. We need help with acquisitions and mainstream media relations and we need somebody who can build intention and strategy into our publicity efforts. We want to build a world class team. And we think you’re the woman for the job.” That opportunity came as a result of my relationships in the industry, not just in my own company. I experienced first hand how the power of relationships can play out professionally for your benefit.

The second thing I learned was how to advocate for myself. For the first time I really did that in my career. They flew me to their offices in Michigan. I met with their team. I said, “I love your people. I love the authors that you represent. I can do this job in my sleep. But I don’t want to move to Michigan. I want to stay in Nashville. I am not willing to be a full time employee. I’d like to do this on a consultation basis. Here are the things that I’m good at that I can be responsible for, where I can bring you a lot of value.” I advocated for those priorities for me, as well as the pay…and they agreed. It was the first time I really learned that when you have a solution to someone else’s problem, they are willing to pay for that and they are willing to work with you on what you need in order to be successful for them.

I started consulting, building, training and leading that team and working with the company doing really good, meaningful work. I did what I was good at and what I loved and they were willing to accommodate my requests. And that ultimately was helped me change my quality of life..

The other thing that I think is important to share that came out of this failure is that it was the first step in building a business, moving me to become an entrepreneur. I have now built a seven figure business.
And it all came as a result of that layoff. That was the catalyst. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back that led me to this place where I sit now. I don’t know that I would have done that on my own had that not occurred. It was just the push over the edge (out of the nest, if you will) that I needed in order to be able to go on to do great things on my own. By taking the sweet spot of what I’m good at and what I love and marrying those up and operating out of that space, it led me to build Choice the way that I have. I’ve built an all female team where every woman has a voice at the table, where quality of life is prioritized and where there’s a spirit and a community of collaboration and not competing against each other. Those are all things that I learned because of that change where failure was a catalyst for growth and turned into something really beautiful.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Heather Adams is a 25+ year publicity and communications veteran. As the founder and CEO of Choice Media & Communications, Heather leads Choice’s impressive all-female team as they serve preeminent voices in publishing, lifestyle, entertainment, business and faith-based arenas. Choice is known for working with high-profile clients that are both soulful and interesting. Heather has previously served marquee thought leaders and change agents including Ashley Flowers, Jen Hatmaker, President Jimmy Carter, Marcus Buckingham, John Maxwell, Robin McGraw, Max Lucado, Lysa TerKeurst, Bob Goff, Dr. Mark Hyman, Tyler Merritt, Candace Cameron Bure, Emily Ley, Ernie Johnson, Jr., “The Bachelor’s” Sean Lowe, Latasha Morrison, Sharon McMahon and Charles Koch. Heather has played an instrumental role in launching more than 100 New York Times bestsellers and has secured clients’ coverage in a host of major, elite national media. You can see Heather’s work and clients featured in outlets like “The TODAY Show,” “Good Morning America,” TIME, The New York Times, People, ESPN, ELLE, Southern Living, USA Today, Forbes, “60 Minutes,” and so much more. She personally has been seen in Working Mother, Create & Cultivate and appeared on “The Tamron Hall Show,” and “The TODAY Show,” where she also serves as a contributor to Today.com. Throughout her extensive 20-year book publishing career, including leading two different major publishing house publicity departments, Heather has successfully negotiated exclusives, embargoes, first serial rights and network packages, as well as provided expert communication strategy and relationship-based service for her clients. She is the host of the Make Me Known podcast where she teaches entrepreneurs her best communication strategies and lessons. Heather donates her time as a 24-year advisor to Alpha Omicron Pi, where she mentors college women, as well as serving National Angels and the University of Georgia Journalism School Alumni Board. She is wife to Matt and mom to teenage boys, Dixon and Thackston, who keep her thrilled and busy cheering from the sidelines of a baseball field or basketball court.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

In March of 2020, I had just returned from a media trip in New York City with our client, Jen Hatmaker. As COVID-19 spread, everything was shutting down when we were on that trip. Broadway canceled their season and shut down. The NBA canceled the rest of their season. Media outlets that we had meetings with were saying, “Can you meet me at a coffee shop?” “You can’t come into my office any longer,” or “Can we do this on Zoom?” Once I came home and was with my family, the world shut down. I remember sitting in the bed with my laptop on my lap, talking to my CFO. I remember saying to her, “What are we going to do? This is crazy. All these things are shutting down. Should I be concerned? Are clients going to be worried? How should we prepare?” She and I started plotting and planning for how the business could be impacted.

We started coming up with ideas and that transitioned to the team and I started to discuss what ways we could serve our clients. I shared with the team that I wanted our reputation on the other side of this to be where we helped when people were hurting, even if we didn’t make a dime off of it. I want to be known for helping people in need, even if it’s not profitable to Choice at the end of the day.

During that time, I was getting text messages, calls, DMs and emails from friends of mine who owned businesses or their family members owned businesses.
A friend of mine who owns a dermatology practice sent me an email saying, “I don’t know what to do. The people that work for me are afraid to come into the clinic and take care of patients. How do I make them feel safe? How do I assure them when I don’t even know that it’s okay for them to come to work?”

Another friend of mine whose husband owned a construction business sent me a text message and said, “My husband is panicked because he’s worried he will have to lay off people. He doesn’t know how long this is going to happen. He’s worried about all this money that he’s outlaid on homes. How can he talk to his people when he doesn’t even know? What are the ways he can help people?” Even the local barre studio where I exercise reached out wondering, “How do we reassure people that it’s safe to come in and work out? How can we care for our people?”

During this particular season, I was getting call after call, text, DMs and all of these things from people that didn’t normally do business with Choice, but just knew me as a communications professional. So, I started advising them. I’d guide them on the talking points to say to their team and their clients. We wanted to reassure any stakeholders.

As I was preparing this communication, I realized, this is how we can help at Choice. It’s not just people that are friends of mine that happen to own a business that need my help and advice. There are a whole lot of people out there that need this counsel and information because we’re all in the same situation right now. We have to reassure people that they can still do business with us. However, we didn’t want the optics to be bad. We didn’t want to be obtuse and not pay attention to what was going on in the world and asking people for money at a time when everything was shutting down around us.

So, we developed the Choice Collective out of that need. We said as a team, these are people we would have said no to because their platform isn’t big enough. They don’t have a compelling message to sell to major media outlets. Or they would have said no to us because they couldn’t afford us. But, they had a very specific communications need that we could solve for them. We could bring value to them in that particular instance and situation.

We offered the Choice Collective at a very accessible price point. We didn’t stop there, though. If someone could not afford it and needed to attend, we did not charge them.
There were some people that paid and some people that didn’t during that time frame. I wanted to be known for serving entrepreneurs and business leaders with love and care. I wanted to jump into the trenches with them. I was walking through very similar experiences on my end. The difference was I knew how to communicate internally and externally and they didn’t.

I look back and that is the year we doubled Choice’s business and revenue. It was a huge catalyst for growth at Choice. Because we started serving a client that we had completely ignored, because we didn’t think they needed us or we couldn’t help them until we took a totally different perspective and approach. We changed the way we were looking at how we could serve.

We realized small businesses need our help in other ways than just the two or three ways we were currently offering. It opened my eyes to a completely new way of taking care of clients and serving them beyond what we had been doing up until that point. It took a pandemic for me to realize it and it absolutely changed the trajectory of Choice.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

My entire life I have been called bossy, assertive and even a bitch for being direct. I was never seen as having great leadership potential, the command of a room or having influence over people. It was always communicated to me in a negative light. As I was growing up from a young child all the way into my professional years and career, I was pitted against other women in a competitive way.

I only saw one seat at a table for a woman on the executive leadership team. I was vying for that one seat and determined to go after it. I wanted to be that woman in that seat and I felt like I had to take every woman down in my path in order to get to it. I wanted to be first. I wanted to be best and I wanted you to know that I was the one that had done it. I look back now and realize, I should have changed that mentality so much sooner.

Had I linked arms with other women, we would have had more seats at the leadership table. If we hadn’t been pitted against each other, I wouldn’t have to unlearn what society had conditioned me, and other women, to believe was the only way I could be successful as a female in business was to take other women down in my path. It pains me now to look back at how I behaved and what I did in order to advance myself professionally.

But the good news is this: what was once your downfall can become your hallmark. I now serve as a megaphone for women. Whether it’s clients, women in business, small business owners or the way I run Choice and lead our all-female team, it’s totally different than what I had when I was coming up through the ranks. We even built a female entrepreneur and leadership conference for women called the Choice Summit. We celebrate women in business all the time. That is what our job is and what we’re so good at. That came as a result of a lot of hard lessons learned and also the changing of a narrative in my head.

I am sad to think I behaved that way, but I am so grateful that now I know better and do better. To quote Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” My whole goal is to be allies, not competitors, with other women in business and to link arms with them so that we can move forward together, widening the path and changing the business experience for the women who are coming behind us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.choicemediacommunications.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heatherdixonadams/ ; https://www.instagram.com/choicemediacommunications
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/choicemediacommunications
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/choice-media-&-communications/mycompany/
• Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/make-me-known-with-heather-adams/id1570346321