Well-Placed PR Worth the Price

A few months after launching his online technical-employment business, Matthew Hollingsworth encountered an enviable — but problematic — situation. Job hunters were flooding his Web site with résumés, but his company, Cincinnati, Ohio-based TechEmployment.com, had yet to attract high-tech employers interested in hiring these candidates.

Hollingsworth, 32, needed to get the word out about his new business — and fast. But money was tight: Hollingsworth had quit his full-time job at a technical-staffing company and was trying to stretch the $250,000 he had acquired from venture capitalists. And he knew effective advertising wasn't going to come cheap.

Based on a positive experience with a management-consulting firm that helped him turn his disorganized ideas into a coherent business plan, Hollingsworth decided to bite the bullet and outsource his marketing work to a PR firm.

Hollingsworth now says he wishes had hired the PR firm even earlier. The firm, Symphony Communications, gave good advice — advice that, in the end, more than paid for itself. Symphony’s first suggestion: Spend less money on formal advertisements, and instead let the agency send out press releases to news services.

"I learned that if I place an ad in a magazine, it can cost more than $10,000, and readers can gloss over it because it is seen as an ad," Hollingsworth says. "But if we do a news story, we are providing information for free and it is seen as doing something for the community."

The PR firm also had the advantage of extensive press contacts. Hollingsworth pays the firm about $2,500 a month for 40 hours of work, and he reapd the benefit of having 20 employees at the agency who know about his company and look for opportunities for press coverage.

"I think we would have grown a lot slower if I hadn’t hired the PR firm," Hollingsworth says.

Next on Hollingsworth’s list: contracting with the PR firm to develop the look and feel of his site. Already, Symphony has created the distinguishing purple "T" seen throughout the TechEmployment.com site. In the meantime he’ll be telling his fellow entrepreneurs about the benefits of outsourcing.

When Hollingsworth passes along advice, he's quick to encourage entrepreneurs to resist the temptation to hire internally too early and instead consider outsourcing the work.

"Outsourcing allows you to afford a higher level of product than you could afford internally," he says. "You should carefully evaluate who you are going to use, but you always have the freedom to stop using their services — something you can’t easily do internally."