Interviewee Name: Mary Schnack
Company Name: Mary Schnack & Associates
Website: http://www.maryschnack.com
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Mary Schnack: I was born on a farm in Iowa, played basketball in school, and was a
journalism major in college. I was a practicing journalist for eight years before I went into public relations. Now I have my own public relations consulting business. I’m based in the Washington DC area after living in Los Angeles and Arizona for almost 35 years. And I also travel around the world doing speaking engagements and communications training: Business communication training like PR, media training, crisis communications, and branding at conferences, and seminars that are particularly set up for a business audience or for women’s groups.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Mary Schnack: I love it that I don't have a typical day and that keeps it really interesting. I generally work pretty long hours because I enjoy the work I do. I usually meet with somebody for one of the meals and write during the day. At night I might be going to a movie, having dinner with friends, and hopefully I’ll have some time to get exercise in. And the other thing I want to add to my day is I want to do some meditation.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Mary Schnack: Oh that's a great question. I think I motivate myself by doing for others. I get really excited when something happens for somebody else. It’s great when something happens for me too, but maybe a tool that I taught them, a communications tool had a positive effect, or somebody has grown their business, or somebody found a job, or a kid had his success in school. I like to hear about other people’s success and that maybe I was a bit of an inspiration for that.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Mary Schnack: Well for one thing I hate to go back and look at things that way, I'd rather look forward at what I'm going to do and change moving forward. However that's also a pretty easy answer for me. When I started my business, I would have had a business plan based on financials that would've been a roadmap as much as a marketing plan. I think I went more by marketing than by finances and what I've learned over the years is how much you have to manage your business by finances as well.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Mary Schnack: I think the importance of inspiration, being inspired and inspiring others. I went through my seventh cancer surgery this year and it really threw me into a depression. I guess it took seven times to get me down but what it took to get me out of that and like your earlier question what motivates me and really taking a look at that, so I think being inspired and being inspiring.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?
Mary Schnack: Without a doubt that would be social media. Social media has changed public relations and has changed outreach. And at first when it was happening, I thought, “Thank goodness I'm older and I don't need to learn that.” Well wrong, but it's been fun learning it, and it reminded me how much fun it is to learn new things and to incorporate the new ways of outreach. And now that's one of the areas of specialty for my business.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Mary Schnack:
- One big threat to my business is the recession and people having a lot less money to spend. The way that I’m handling that is by getting out there networking at an accelerated frantic speed. The more people I meet, the more people I touch, reconnect with, the better it is.
- A second threat would be my seventh cancer surgery. It's really hard to be getting a trajectory with your business and then be out of commission for one to two months and then emotionally what that does to your energy and your motivation, so that makes it hard. What I've done for that is like I said looking at inspiration, what inspires me to move forward.
- The third thing would be the fact that I moved. I moved from the west coast to the east coast. You know a move is always difficult and costly, but I always look at this as the reason I moved is to be in a more vibrant business environment. That's why I'm here and of course it is true there is hardly a place more vibrant than Washington DC. Sometimes you just have to keep reminding yourself why you have done the things that you have done and that's what I think sometimes I’ve had to do with the move.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Mary Schnack: What is unique, are three things: One is that you have fun working with us, we don't believe in real serious business. Of course business is serious, people want good customer service and to get their money’s worth, but you might as well have fun while you're doing it. And number two is that I think we are very creative, we think out-of-the-box, even though that statement think outside-the-box is not creative, but we are very creative and we don't look at the standard way of doing things and that's why we were one of the early adopters of social media. The another thing is that we really believe in working as team, we don't believe in working as a vacuum, and I believe team work is the basis of good business, so those are the three things I would say.
Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?
Mary Schnack: I don't think they have great customer service for a long-term client. We want to be new and fresh every day, and so what if you’ve been our client for two years. We’re doing the things that have been successful and hopefully will remain successful, but we also want to look at what’s the new, fresh approach we can take as well.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Mary Schnack: I needed to be flexible and I needed to look at the reality of my situation. I lived in a beautiful resort community Sedona, Arizona, and as wonderful as it was to live there, the reality was if I wanted to grow my business again it wasn't going to happen from that location. I couldn't sit there and feel sorry for myself, I had to look at how I’m going to move on and create a good life for me elsewhere where I could also grow my business.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Mary Schnack: I'd like to think I gave myself the big break by applying things I learned to present-day situations. I would say one of the biggest breaks I had was in starting my business in 1992. I had worked for eight years at two hospitals in Los Angeles, and we handled a lot of crises at these hospitals. Well we handled a lot of crises in that if there was a train crash at LAX the victims would come to our hospital. When there was the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 the most famous victim Reginald Denny the truck driver came to the hospital, plus 99 others the first night. We were one of the busiest hospitals, and I was able to take what I had learned in journalism and make it be very successful as far as outreach for the hospital in those crisis situations. So when I started my own business, I had this very strong reputation for the work I had done, and again it was to move ahead on the successes that I had had. What have you done, and acknowledging what your successes are, and how you can use those as a platform to keep moving up.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Mary Schnack: I don't think anything is a failure, I think everything is a lesson, and we can learn as much, if not more from the tough lessons as we can from the bigger ones. When the dotcom crash happened, overnight we lost $20,000 to $30,000 a month in revenues. Literally we lost that much within 30 days. You want to make sure that you never put too many eggs in one basket, that you can be spread out so if one type of business goes away, you have other types of businesses to back that up, and that you’re always looking at the next piece of business coming in. And you're always looking at how to satisfy your current clients. Like I said before, do not take them for granted, and figure out how you can move on and continue to build business.
Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?
Mary Schnack: The hardest thing I'm going through in my life is cancer and having it return so often. I don't think there's anything I can to prevent its reoccurrence, but what I must do is keep up on my check-ups, keep up on my exercise and healthy eating, and my positive attitude and live as good a life as I can, but not be in denial, and to know there is a possibility that it will come back again and what I am doing about that.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Mary Schnack: One of the toughest decisions was I had a business partner in Los Angeles and I had to decide whether to stay with the partnership or not. We knew we had a few years age difference so when my daughter was graduating from high school she was just getting engaged and ready to start a family. It was a very hard decision to break up the partnership, but our lifestyle goals were not the same any more. There are positive things about being in business alone, but on the other hand it was good having a partner to work with and to grow together.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Mary Schnack: One is definitely the cancer and I’d say two becoming an entrepreneur and three is my daughter.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Mary Schnack: Definitely my daughter! She is 28 years old now, and she has some learning and emotional disabilities but she is basically living independently, and that’s been a lot of work and a lot of direction, and a lot of heartache, but she is extremely happy and that's definitely the thing that I’m proudest of that I raised her to be independent and not to lean on her disabilities as a crutch.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Mary Schnack: Mentors influenced my life and continue to influence my life. I have two or three probably more different mentors that I work with all the time, and thank goodness I have those sounding boards, the people giving me advice. I would say they’ve had a great influence both in living my life personally and businesswise.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Mary Schnack: I continue to receive messages from them. One of the first messages I received was to continue to learn, to continue to expand. With something like social media, you think, “I'm too old for that, I don't want to deal with that.” We have to continue to learn, and continue to be educated, and grow as people, and grow as businesses, and it’s also a lot of fun.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Mary Schnack: My one piece of advice is to really look at your successes and let people know what they are, and that doesn't mean sitting back and bragging about yourself. But it does mean sharing your wisdom, and having people understand why you are sharing that wisdom because you have that experience. When I do my speeches overseas, we also hear this in the United States, but when I do my speeches overseas even more so, “My culture doesn't allow that, I could never do that.” And my response is “By you sharing your successes there might be a 10-year old girl out there that hears your story and says, ‘Wow, I can go after my dreams.’” And what a shame it is if you miss the chance to inspire that 10-year old girl.
How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let's keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Note: Mary died from cancer over a year ago.
