We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Meghan Kelleher. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Meghan below.

Meghan, appreciate you joining us today. Any thoughts about whether to ask friends and family to support your business. What’s okay in your view?

It’s funny – my friends and family knew I’d start a business before I did. I can see now how many breadcrumbs there were leading up to me founding my company, but I kept ignoring them. It was months later I realized why: my friends and family were all-in on me and what I could build. Me? I wasn’t ready to bet on myself.

It was actually when visiting a friend that I decided to start consulting. My friend, Lindsay Gaspar, is an incredible stage performer who has been all-in on her career since I met her in at Penn State in the choir. She invited me to join her in Alaska on one of the cruise ships she was performing on, and while she had rehearsal one day, she told me to wander and go see the glaciers. There I was, staring at this white backdrop that looked like a blank sheet of paper… and I realized I wanted something different and to try something new. When I came back down to meet her, I told her my realization. I remember saying, “I want to go out on my own and represent all the brands I love while being able to put my life first.” And I’ll never forget what she said: “It’s about time. Here are a few people I want to introduce you to that I think can help.” She was already willing and able to help and I hadn’t event asked. All I had to do was share my vision and she rallied behind it.

So I got off the ship, flew back to the East Coast, and sent an email to rally 55 friends and family behind me, telling them what I wanted to do, what I was looking for, and then offered to help however I can… even if they couldn’t help me. 51 people responded with encouragement and multiple people connected me to potential clients. Within a week I had our first true client lead and I started the business 30 days later. That one email led to all of our new business for nearly two years.

I love helping help others — it’s the nature of a publicists job — but I’m not naturally great at asking for help and asking people to support our business. Over the past nearly six years, I have found when I share my business or share my needs and then ask “any ideas?”, it’s my way of signaling to someone “can you help?” And overtime, it’s become so much easier to do.

So the TL;DR — people in your corner want to help you and are more inclined to bet on you than you are to bet on yourself. Invite them in!

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

I’m Meghan Kelleher, the Founder & CEO of Corner Market Communications, an integrative communications agency that specializes in results-driven storytelling for packaged food brands that typically can be found in, you guessed it, a corner market (or bodega for New Yorkers). Previously MKTC, Corner Market works with some of the most iconic brands in your pantry and helps startups become those coveted products, too. We’re known for our scrappy, nimble approach to communications and how seamlessly we can move from strategy to execution within the same sentence. While media relations is our core service, we also support our brands with influencer relations, event planning, crisis management, content creation, executive positioning and other services centered around storytelling.

My personal path to PR was unconventional. I went to Penn State with every intention of graduating with a vocal performance degree, specializing in opera. My dream was to be one of the classic singers on broadway who blurred classical and pop music. But my parents, being wiser than me, told me I needed a second degree in business so I had something to fall back on. Along the way, I ended up falling in love with PR and advertising for the same reason I loved stage performance: it’s all about the story.

After graduating from Penn State with a degree in PR, I moved to NYC and began my career working for two of the best agencies out there (Coyne PR and Access PR). Through their support, I learned to love telling every element of a brand’s story and enjoyed “the game” of uncovering new stories that were yet to be shared.

I moved from agencies into a company that quite literally changed my path: KIND Snacks. I started at KIND when it was known as “the nut bar at Starbucks” and for 3+ years, I worked alongside brilliant teammates to build what is now truly a household name. At KIND, I continued to hone in on my love of storytelling and uncovering the untold gems, particularly having the chance to work directly with the founder, Daniel Lubetzky. He taught all of us to challenge assumptions and to act as owners of the company. But the thing I took away from KIND was the culture. It was — and still is — a team that celebrates working together, celebrates big and crazy ideas and celebrates small acts of kindness as much as big wins.

After KIND, I jumped to Google to work on Waze as I wanted international experience. After a few months, I was tasked with managing the day-to-day communications of 16+ countries including app updates, voice prompts, local campaigns, data reports, and more. We were a small and scrappy marketing team and as a result, I was able to work on things beyond PR, growing my skillsets to include partnership marketing, internal communications, social media, and more. It was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career.

I left KIND to join hello products before starting my consulting business in July 2017. After experiences in agencies and in-house roles at big and small companies, I realized I had a unique perspective to PR and storytelling and could help startups by being a “strategist who executes” and by continuing my obsession with results-driven storytelling in a way that was flexible to their needs. Within one month of deciding I’d do this, we had our first client (MealPal) but two months later, I was introduced through my sister to a former business school friend who changed my career trajectory and our agency’s trajectory in a monumental way.

Mike Messersmith had joined a little-known oatmilk company in the U.S. and asked if I could help him layout a go-to-market strategy for their first year. That company was OATLY and within three months of working with them, they were getting noticed by nearly every dream media outlet in the world and things took off. I was able to partner with a brilliant comms professional, Sara Fletcher, to strategize and execute an unconventional press strategy and for four years — until after their IPO — I was their only external PR person in North America. Working on a brand that grew to have a cult-following so quickly brought in more and more brands that I had dreamed of working with and I didn’t want to say no to them. So I started hiring freelancers and former colleagues to help me grow these brands.

Almost six years later, that venture has become Corner Market Communications with five full-time teammates, an intern, and a network of 15 freelancers we’ve worked with over the years. Our brand partners include Magnolia Bakery, Momofuku Goods, Applegate, Primal Kitchen, Saffron Road, UNREAL, Whisps and more — all brands my team loves and buys regularly for their own needs.

We have two rules when it comes to who we work with:
1) We only work with brands we love. Brands need comms folks who are true fans of the brands to represent them authentically to press, influencers and stakeholders. If we don’t love it, we don’t work on it.
2) We only work with teams and teammates we admire and respect. We want to learn and grow with these teams and become their advocates and cheerleaders as much as we are the brands. Having mutual respect and genuinely enjoying working together creates better work and better outcomes.

We’ve been able to do some amazing work over the years for so many brands and when I look back at all, I’m really proud of the brands we’ve been able to work with and the fact that our “clients” have really become friends. But the thing I’m most proud of is that I’ve been able to create work for brilliant women all over the country who love this profession as much as me. Being a freelancer can be a lonely road and we’ve been able to build a true blended team where everyone can celebrate their wins — for our clients and for their own — and ask for help. We had a full team dinner recently in New York and looking around the table and seeing everyone genuinely love being together and talking about all the fun we’re having… well, there’s nothing better. Truly.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Betting on yourself doesn’t come naturally to most people. When I first decided to consult, I was getting a lot of leads that didn’t pan out. I also had a lot that did but weren’t projects I fully wanted to work on but knew I needed a paycheck to make betting on myself “worth it.” So instead of looking at every odd job or unsexy client in a negative light, I started seeing it as an opportunity. I thought about it as the way I thought about internships in college: checking things off the list of things I can do but don’t enjoy. I learned a lot in those experiences and staying in it made me push hard for the brands I loved.

True resilience came for me, though at a time it happened for most people: 2020. As an outside consultant, I was scared we’d be expendable and be the first cost cut when businesses had to scale back. I was so worried I wasn’t going to be able to keep the jobs for the freelancers we had. But a freelance partner of mine reminded me that I had a crisis background and I started reminding our clients of it. Not only did we start helping with that, but most clients actually saw the value of brand awareness and keeping us in the game. Is crisis my favorite part of the job? No, but I am good at it and it has tremendous value — just like the odd jobs I did in the beginning. I put in the extra hours and time so my team of freelancers could focus on the fun things.

My last thought on resilience: when you own a business, there are about 90 hats you wear that you’ve never worn before. Balancing contracts, payroll, expenses, taxes, client communications, execution, marketing yourself, brokering partnerships, etc. It’s a lot and a lot you don’t know. Curiosity and a desire to learn has made me resilient and helped me push through to figure it out. Resiliency is the best fight against imposter syndrome as there comes a point where you acknowledge you know what you know and don’t what you don’t, but believe you can figure it out. It’s that belief — betting on yourself — that makes you dig in and make things happen.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Teammates and clients — current and former — have told me its our transparency and enthusiasm that sets us apart. We share everything with clients: media lists, pitches, influencer notes, Q&As, media feedback, creative ideas — literally everything we think about or discuss they have access to. I’ve had other agencies think I’m nuts for doing this, but having been in-house before, I always wanted to know what our dollars were paying for. Our partners can see everything we do and can access it all at any given time. It creates trust and openness that I’ve only seen as mutually beneficial since we began doing it in August 2017.

I also think our scrappiness and our responsiveness helps tremendously. We’ve always thought and acted nimbly. If a pitch isn’t landing, we try something new vs. continuing to push the same thing or we pivot to find a different channel to tell the story in. We connect on Slack and other channels with our clients to make it easy to reach us, answer questions, and handle opportunities quickly. We dig in and monitor what’s happening around us and jump on opportunities as we see them. It’s the hunt to uncover fun stories that makes things executing and we share all of this nimbleness with our brands and teams.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cornermarketcomms.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/cornermarketcomms
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/corner-market-communications/