We were lucky to catch up with Melissa Grady recently and have shared our conversation below.

Melissa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Asides from majoring in Communications + PR, I took a series of internships to really find which style of work and setting I thrived in. PR is incredibly broad – you can be in-house, agency, public affairs or media-driven – so I diversified my internships from in-house to corporate to boutique agency setting to find what I liked. I eventually found that a boutique agency was the right fit for me. I quickly realized I not only liked working alongside the decision makers internally but also directly with the owners or makers on the client side.

PR really is a community-based job. So networking not only on behalf of your client but your workplace is essential to a thriving career and campaign. It’s something I wish I realized earlier in my career, but when you’re green, you’re focusing on getting the actual workflow down (how to pitch, how to build a media list), so networking is something I really advocate for in my team and still for myself. Not just building a relationship when you need something, but creating meaningful connections that can really benefit both parties throughout the relationship.

Melissa, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m the Vice President of Resplendent Agency, a boutique PR firm based in Austin, Texas, and Richmond, Virginia. We’re an agency that prioritizes story-telling and brand-building on behalf of our clients, servicing food, beverage, hospitality and travel industries, as well as non-profits that relate back to our mission. Our services include Public/Media Relations, Marketing + Activations, Community Relations and Organic Social Media, where the goal of each service is to really expand the reach and audiences on behalf of our client.

I’ve been with Resplendent collectively for seven years where I started as an intern and worked my way up over the years servicing clients but also helping shape internal processes within our agency. While our brand has evolved over its decade of existence, client services is at the heart of everything we do. We have been fortunate to take on clients that are truly passionate about their craft and are shaping the industry they are in, so it’s easy for our team to mimic that passion and advocate for our clients. We help them hone in on their brand and drive external communication of their story to their current audiences while finding new communities to support them.

Our agency has high work transparency and team touch-point, where you’re in constant communication with the account team while knowing exactly what we’re doing (and why). We’ve learned transparency is key to building trust with our clients who have hired us for our expert opinion. We’re not going to tell them what they want to hear, but what they need to hear to have success within PR or Social Media. This is something I’m most proud of within our agency because it’s really something we had to learn and overcome as a team – it’s easy to get caught up in going with the flow at times, but sometimes that’s not the best, most effective way to create a successful campaign, and most times, that is not why our clients hire us.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Client relationships are one of our top priorities at Resplendent and something we really had to explore early on as a team to find what works best for us. Being honest and upfront, and oftentimes overly transparent, with the client is really key. They might have a big hair-brain idea for their brand that they’re incredibly passionate about, but you know it’s going to be a flop because the proper foundation isn’t in place – it’s our job to tell them that (delicately!), and help build towards it. There’s nothing worse than putting in hours of (wo)manpower and time on something you know isn’t going to work – the end result shows for it and if there are no results because it was launched too early or there wasn’t a clear strategy, then it was a waste of our time and their money.

Not every campaign or idea is going to yield really high results, but it’s our job to call on our experience to know what’s going to work for certain clients and what isn’t, and that’s exactly the type of information we like to share with clients. Sometimes, it’s a tough pill to present and swallow, but ultimately it shows care from our team and mindfulness of their investment in our agency. Resplendent Agency tends to service local, small businesses, and as a small business ourselves, we know the investment their making into our team is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Something I’ve had to unlearn along the way is PR (especially agency life) is not a textbook, precisely outlined job. As publicists, we wear many hats and have to learn/know various different skills – everything from effective communication to media to how to secure muralists for a neighborhood art activation. The industry is really experience-based because no client is the same. And I’ve been fortunate enough in my career to service everything from a restaurant grand opening to the launch of a product, and even a legislative campaign. While the foundation is there, each client is going to have different goals and objectives, and you have to tailor a scope of work and strategy to meet those benchmarks and expectations.

We don’t have a cut-and-copy PR package for our clients or prospective clients. Because we service a few different industries (food, beverage, travel, hospitality and products), we really customize each campaign for the client, outlining results they can expect and the tactics we take to achieve those. We treat our accounts as a partnership. The most successful accounts are where we build a high trust factor with the client and we work together to achieve results.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.resplendent.agency
• Instagram: @melgeee / @resplendagram
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-grady-resplendent-agency

Image Credits
Megan Bucknell Resplendent Agency Mackenzie Smith Kelly