We were lucky to catch up with Jo Trizila recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jo, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
In 2016, after running my public relations agency for eight years, I decided to change how we practiced PR. In fact, I turned our practice upside down. For the past eight years, TrizCom PR’s slogan was “we get you in the news, or we keep you out of the news.” About 90 percent of our efforts were based on earned media. Our job, or so I thought, was to increase awareness and consideration. And, of course, awareness and consideration meant a lot of different things to whoever you asked.
It all started with one particular B2B partner. This partner hired us under a 12-month PR retainer. We worked directly with the CEO. Our mission was to get them in as many publications/outlets as possible. They dangled a carrot and said, if you can get us into XYZ trade publication, you will have hit the holy grail. Being the competitive person that I am, I got excited.
We were successful. Over the course of a year, we were able to land this partner in more than 150 different outlets, including quite a few tier-one publications like TIME, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Huffington Post and Forbes. Then, just into our eleventh month, the holy grail happened. We were able to pitch and secure a placement in our partner’s number-one publication. Not only was it a four-page spread, but it was also on the magazine’s cover. For non-PR folks, the cover story is really, really difficult. I was on cloud nine. I knew, without a doubt, that our contract would be renewed for another year. Heck, I had basically already spent the following year’s retainer; I was that confident. Until I wasn’t. You guessed it. Our contract was not renewed. After I calmed down, I took the CEO out to lunch to hear his rationale.
What he told me during our breakup lunch would change the trajectory of TrizCom PR. He said, “Jo, the media coverage you and your team have been able to secure for us has been unprecedented. We have never had this much coverage. It has been great. However, I wasn’t able to track one single sale as a result of the great coverage.” I sat there, really wanting an afternoon glass of wine, thinking, “Well, you didn’t ask us to do your sales – you just wanted to be in as many publications as possible.”
After thinking about this conversation for a couple of weeks, I knew we had to change. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I had to find out how we could go from “awareness and consideration” to “ROI and sales.” I researched night and day. I talked to as many people as I could. I finally had a plan. However, about 80% of the team totally disagreed with the plan and swore up and down PR could not be responsible for sales. I listened to their arguments, and ultimately, we agreed to part ways. It was a pretty ugly time.
Our transformation from 100% earned media to about 20% earned media has been gradual – but worth every penny. Our team believes in our model because we can prove our ROI every single time. I have yet to find another Dallas-based PR agency that does PR the way we do it, measures it the way we measure and produces the results we produce. And, it’s not just me. Prospects and partners tell me this all the time.
Would I do it again? Heck yes, I would, in a heartbeat.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
To say I am passionately driven is an understatement, especially as a communications expert, speaker and consultant. Operating on a few hours of sleep each night, I run two public relations agencies with a specialty in crisis communications, serve as an appointed city of Dallas Arts and Culture Advisory Commissioner for District 12, serve on two boards and two advisory boards, devote time mentoring young professionals and am a full-time single mom to my sixth-grade daughter Kate. But, most notably, my perpetual curiosity and competitive nature enable me to play big. And, I always, always plays to win.
After graduating from the University of Texas at Arlington School of Liberal Arts with a fine arts bachelor’s degree in theater performance, I pursued my Master’s Degree of Fine Arts from Wayne State University in Detroit on a full scholarship. Following Detroit, I returned to Dallas and spent many years with the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, the City of Irving, Irving Arts Center and the Dallas Regional Chamber before opening my award-winning public relations and crisis communications firm, TrizCom PR in 2008.
Leveraging over 25 years of building and leading integrated and strategic public relations operations for a vast array of companies—over 200 brands ranging from billion-dollar corporations to non-profits to startups have turned to TrizCom PR for strategic counsel with their internal and external communications.
I steadfastly believe that much shall be required to whom much is given, and I never stop at just the bare minimum of what is needed. From pro bono work to leadership, I have danced on camera for pediatric cancer, worn red noses for hunger and had an ice bucket poured over my head for ALS, to name a few.
I admit my ADHD life thrives in unorganized chaos. I always seem to have 25 things going on simultaneously; my phone has more than 15 apps open, and I tend to work on three or four projects at once. Of course, one might get overwhelmed with so many endeavors, but I love juggling multiple balls. I never miss a deadline and always strive to produce results.
I often get asked how and why I started TrizCom PR. Opening the doors of this agency almost 14 years ago looked quite different from what the doors look like today. I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it if anyone would have told me that I would resign from the Dallas Regional Chamber—a job that I loved—in the morning and find myself sitting around a board room table at Texans Credit Union as a crisis PR consultant that same afternoon, I would have laughed.
Doing something like that seems outlandish. Walking away from a job takes a lot of courage. Every obstacle you could think of stood in my way to prevent my success: I had never worked in an agency, had never worked for a for-profit company, had no idea how to read a balance sheet, had only two months’ worth of savings and more.
Looking back, I might’ve been crazy for my decision, but anything is possible when you have the drive and passion. I never really thought about what I didn’t have or what I couldn’t do. I just knew that I loved working with the media, and I was pretty good at it.
I had a computer, an email address (does anyone remember AOL?), a landline telephone and a BlackBerry as old as this might sound (don’t you miss those phones?).
I literally took the door off my spare bedroom and placed it across two end tables for a desk, changed my landline answering machine message to my company voicemail, learned what a 1099 was, powered up my then 5-year-old laptop computer, turned my Deskjet printer it into a copy machine, and used my AOL address as my professional email.
I opened my agency at the height of a recession. I didn’t have a name for my company or a business plan. There wasn’t a domain or a website yet, and heck, I wasn’t sure what the going rate for public relations consultancy even was.
For many, this might not seem like much. For other small business owners, I’m sure they can relate to that startup struggle. I had nothing, but at the same time, I had everything, and that’s all you need to spread your wings and fly. Having just one business that needed PR help meant I was in business, and it was enough to kick-start me on a long, continuous journey.
Fast forward 14 years and TrizCom Public Relations is going strong.
Personally, during this time, I became a mom to my daughter Kate 12 years ago, moved to the suburbs, transitioned from a sporty coupe to a soccer mom SUV. I’ve given a commencement speech to a crowd of 10,000 at Globe Life Park for the University of Texas at Arlington. I’ve joined a PR collaborative, PR Consultants Group, so our partners could have PR representation in 50 different cities. I’ve watched my team get married, have babies, and mourn losses. We’ve had three different office addresses (not including our work from home time), three websites, opened Pitch PR for press release distribution packages, experienced every type of media monitoring software imaginable, solidified our procedures and processes, changed our focus from being very media relations-focused to now using data and analytics to drive our decisions.
We have worked with some fantastic journalists on stories for Good Morning America, The Today Show, BBC One, Reader’s Digest, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, People magazine, the AP, and on and on.
Over 150 companies have trusted TrizCom PR to represent their brands ranging from B2B to B2C, for-profit and not-for-profit, legacy brands to startups both large and small.
Then there are all of our crisis communications partners. The issues we’ve worked on, well, you name it, we’ve probably handled it before. I used to say we are unflappable and that nothing surprises us anymore with the range of crisis cases we’ve worked on, but that was also before COVID-19. The pandemic has been eye-opening, to say the least.
While the road has been bumpy at times – heck, who am I kidding, I’ve had to move boulders three times my size, it’s been a journey. I’ve been able to create change, and I’m very proud of where we have been and where we are going. And, of course, having a rockstar team that supports all of my crazy ideas sure helps a lot too.
Have you ever had to pivot?
In 2016, after running my public relations agency for eight years, I decided to change how we practiced PR. In fact, I turned our practice upside down. For the past eight years, TrizCom PR’s slogan was “we get you in the news, or we keep you out of the news.” About 90 percent of our efforts were based on earned media. Our job, or so I thought, was to increase awareness and consideration. And, of course, awareness and consideration meant a lot of different things to whoever you asked.
It all started with one particular B2B partner. This partner hired us under a 12-month PR retainer. We worked directly with the CEO. Our mission was to get them in as many publications/outlets as possible. They dangled a carrot and said, if you can get us into XYZ trade publication, you will have hit the holy grail. Being the competitive person that I am, I got excited.
We were successful. Over the course of a year, we were able to land this partner in more than 150 different outlets, including quite a few tier-one publications like TIME, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Huffington Post and Forbes. Then, just into our eleventh month, the holy grail happened. We were able to pitch and secure a placement in our partner’s number-one publication. Not only was it a four-page spread, but it was also on the magazine’s cover. For non-PR folks, the cover story is really, really difficult. I was on cloud nine. I knew, without a doubt, that our contract would be renewed for another year. Heck, I had basically already spent the following year’s retainer; I was that confident. Until I wasn’t. You guessed it. Our contract was not renewed. After I calmed down, I took the CEO out to lunch to hear his rationale.
What he told me during our breakup lunch would change the trajectory of TrizCom PR. He said, “Jo, the media coverage you and your team have been able to secure for us has been unprecedented. We have never had this much coverage. It has been great. However, I wasn’t able to track one single sale as a result of the great coverage.” I sat there, really wanting an afternoon glass of wine, thinking, “Well, you didn’t ask us to do your sales – you just wanted to be in as many publications as possible.”
After thinking about this conversation for a couple of weeks, I knew we had to change. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I had to find out how we could go from “awareness and consideration” to “ROI and sales.” I researched night and day. I talked to as many people as I could. I finally had a plan. However, about 80% of the team totally disagreed with the plan and swore up and down PR could not be responsible for sales. I listened to their arguments, and ultimately, we agreed to part ways. It was a pretty ugly time.
Our transformation from 100% earned media to about 20% earned media has been gradual – but worth every penny. Our team believes in our model because we can prove our ROI every single time. I have yet to find another Dallas-based PR agency that does PR the way we do it, measures it the way we measure and produces the results we produce. And, it’s not just me. Prospects and partners tell me this all the time.
Would I do it again? Heck yes, I would, in a heartbeat.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
The average tenure of a PR partner is said to be between two to three years, yet we have a group of partners who have far surpassed that average. It always leads me to ask myself why, but this kind of tenure isn’t all based on ROI and analytics.
It comes down to a simple principle—we treat our partners like family. We have chosen our partners very carefully, ensuring that we are a good fit and a relationship that works on both sides of the table. When we sign a new partner, we celebrate a birth. When we lose a partner, we grieve. We do good work: we’re strategic, we take data and blend it with various types of media, and we use that to shift our strategies and tactics to benefit our partners better; we’re listeners, advice-givers, and experts who are still learning as we continue working. We strive to go above and beyond and always do the right thing. It may not always make the best business sense, but it will always be the right thing to do. We all sleep well at night.
It would be easy to say that there was a magic formula or some magic pill that’s made all of this happen. Still, somehow, someway, we have collectively created an agency that is collaborative, innovative and proactive, and, an agency that is fun, cheerful and dedicated. Just look at a few of our agency’s values, carefully considered and built based on the understanding and belief that we should always do our best:
• We are Steadfastly Committed :: We don’t have clients; we have partners
• We are Persistently Fearless :: We have the freedom to fail, pivot and try something else
• We are Passionately Driven :: We are an extension of our partner’s brands
• We have Disciplined Integrity :: Every single team member has permission always to do the right thing
• We are Boldly Motivated :: We stay hungry for more and always show initiative
• We are Deliberately Collaborative :: We know we are better when we leverage collective intellect
• We are Creative Trailblazers :: We challenge the status quo and dream big
• We are Trusted Counsel :: We communicate early, often and well
• We are Change Makers :: We strive to make a difference every day
• We are authentically Joyful :: We have fun while achieving results
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.trizcom.com/about-us?utm_source=trizcom+pr+byline&utm_medium=canvas+rebels+series&utm_campaign=March+2022
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=/trizcompr/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrizComPR
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jotrizila/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/trizcom
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TrizComm