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

Nancy, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

Generally I like to live my life with no regrets, and turn every decision into the right decision through subsequent actions. However, if I could go back, I would’ve started my business later after getting work experience at a larger company like a major label. Actually, after 4 months after I started Fancy PR (I was still interviewing for jobs at the time), I did get an offer from a major label and ended up turning it down. At the time, things were really picking up and I was on track to make more money as a business owner than if I had taken the label job. In retrospect, I think I missed out on the camaraderie you get from working in a big office.

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?

I’m a first-generation Chinese-American. I grew up mostly in Austin, Texas, but my family moved around quite a bit, so I also had brief stints living in Colorado and Kansas. I pivoted from consulting to the music industry a few years after undergrad at a time I felt like music was the only thing that was truly bringing me joy. So I moved to NY, struggled for longer than I expected, and at this point I’ve been running my business, Fancy PR, for 10 years! In the past decade, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and help break so many wonderful artists like SOFI TUKKER, The Beaches, Saucy Santana, and more.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

I pride myself on paying people (employees, contractors, outside vendors) on time, but there was one time where I was unable to make payroll and it was really a lesson on how to manage a business. My business manager suggested we reclassify a contractor as an employee, which I immediately was like, “of course!” What I didn’t accurately anticipate and also wasn’t fully communicated to me is payroll taxes. My business manager and I unfortunately had not budgeted for that, and so when payroll came around, we didn’t have enough money to run it. What resulted was a week’s delay in payment, which I know can be excruciating for the person or people on the other end. The lesson learned is always to have more than you need in your bank account, and to do the math. Absolutely do detailed projections.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

I managed a remote team for almost two years and I found it to be important to inject fun into our meetings – virtual games, chatting about what everyone is doing over the upcoming weekend, etc. This helped create greater camaraderie within the team. I also scheduled weekly one-on-one meetings with every employee to make sure to give them the space to bring up any comments or concerns about really anything.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fancypr.com
• Instagram: retroglo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancylu/