What 23 Years in PR Taught Me About Building a Business
On March 10, my company, Vorticom, Inc. turns twenty-three years old. That milestone carries a bit more meaning when you consider the odds. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, only about half of small businesses survive five years and roughly one-third make it to ten. When a company crosses into its third decade, it has already outlasted most of the businesses that began the journey with it.
But the story of how Vorticom began doesn’t start with a carefully crafted business plan. It begins with a moment in Toronto that showed me exactly what kind of company I never wanted to build.
The Office That Wasn’t What It Seemed
The year before I launched my own firm, I accepted a position with a Canadian public relations executive who wanted to establish a New York office. On paper it sounded promising. He hired me to lead the effort, and I spent about six months working to get the operation off the ground.
Early on, he flew me to Toronto to visit what he described as headquarters to meet the team. When I walked into the office, something felt off almost immediately. People were sitting at desks, but the place lacked the rhythm of a functioning agency. Phones weren’t ringing. Conversations about clients weren’t happening. The atmosphere felt strangely still.
Eventually the truth surfaced. The people sitting at those desks were not employees. They’d been hired temporarily to fill the office so I’d believe the firm had a much larger staff than it did.
It was one of the most surreal moments of my professional life. I stayed several months after that, trying to see whether the situation might stabilize, but the experience left a lasting impression. Watching someone stage an office to manufacture credibility clarified something for me. If I ever built my own firm, it would never rely on illusion. There’d be no inflated headcounts, no staged offices, and no pretending to be bigger than we were.
The Interview That Made the Decision Final
After leaving that situation, I explored other opportunities. One of them was an interview with one of the world’s largest global PR agencies, a top-five firm whose name carried enormous weight in the industry.
By that point I was not new to the field. I had built teams responsible for millions of dollars in billings and had led significant client programs. I arrived expecting a conversation about ideas, strategy, and leadership.
Instead, the executive who came out to greet me looked exhausted and dispirited, as if years in the corporate hierarchy had drained the enthusiasm from her work. The tone of the meeting made it clear that the conversation would revolve around what I could do for the organization rather than what we might build together.
Standing there in the reception area, I had a quiet realization. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career interviewing for permission to do work I already knew how to do well.
The experience in Toronto had already planted the seed. That interview confirmed it.
I walked out knowing that if I wanted autonomy in my work, I’d have to build it myself. That meeting became the last job interview I ever took.
The First Client
Vorticom didn’t begin with a grand launch plan. Like many small businesses, it started with a single client.
My first client was a small real estate company that brokered introductions between homebuyers and licensed real estate agents. They paid me what could only be described as slave wages. But it was my first client as an independent publicist, and I was determined to prove that I could deliver results.
So, I did what many entrepreneurs do in the early days. I overdelivered to the point of absurdity.
Buying my first home in New York City had been a major milestone in my own life. I had spent months studying the market, learning the differences between co-ops and condos, tracking neighborhood trends, and understanding how buyers navigated the city’s complicated real estate ecosystem. By the time I landed that client, I already understood the industry far better than most outsiders.
Instead of pitching routine company announcements, I began spotting emerging trends in the housing market and turning them into media stories. I pitched reporters about shifts in buyer behavior, neighborhood demand, and the experience of first-time homebuyers navigating Manhattan real estate.
Those trend stories landed coverage in The New York Times, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal and generated dozens of interviews across nearly every local and national television network covering housing and real estate.
The retainer was tiny but the results weren’t.
That campaign proved something important to me. When you understand an industry deeply and can translate its trends into stories that matter, journalists listen.
That lesson became one of the foundations of how I’ve practiced public relations ever since.
The Partnership That Helped Sustain It
No company survives more than two decades without support. In my case, the person who helped steady the ship is my husband and business partner, Ron Thompson.
Ron has been involved in the company’s evolution since launch, helping navigate decisions that range from operational strategy to long-term planning. Entrepreneurship often requires making decisions that affect both professional and personal life. Having a partner who understands the stakes and shares the vision has made the journey far more sustainable.
The Structure That Keeps a Business Alive
One of the earliest lessons I learned is that longevity in business requires infrastructure. Many entrepreneurs start informally and worry about the details later. If your goal is to build something that lasts decades, the foundation matters.
That means registering the company properly, protecting the brand through trademarks, and establishing separate financial accounts for the business. Clean accounting and disciplined financial management may not sound glamorous, but they are often the difference between a temporary venture and a durable enterprise.
What Twenty-Three Years of Work Looks Like
Since founding Vorticom in 2003, I have remained directly involved in the work itself. Over the years I have written and placed more than one thousand bylined articles for executives across industries ranging from energy and mining to security, biopharma, healthcare, and technology.
In addition to those bylined articles, the firm has secured thousands of earned media placements across print publications, online outlets, syndicated platforms, and broadcast networks. Many of those opportunities have included national television interviews on outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News and Fox Business.
I have also personally managed more than three million dollars in client advertising spend across platforms including Meta Ads Manager, Google advertising systems, and X. Understanding how earned media and paid amplification interact has become increasingly important as the communications landscape continues to evolve.
Adapting Through Decades of Change
The communications industry has reinvented itself several times since I launched Vorticom in 2003. I began my career sending press materials by fax and overnight courier. Email pitching eventually replaced those methods, followed by search-driven newsrooms, social media amplification, and now artificial intelligence tools that are reshaping how information moves across the internet.
The tools continue to evolve, but the fundamentals remain constant. Effective communication still depends on judgment, timing, and the ability to recognize what makes a story meaningful. New technologies can accelerate the process, but they don’t replace the human instincts that guide successful media relations.
What a Business Makes Possible
Entrepreneurship is often discussed in terms of revenue growth or company valuations. For me, the most meaningful outcomes have been personal.
Through the stability the company eventually created, we were able to purchase real estate and build a home base in New York. We were also able to send our son to private school from the age of two all the way through college graduation at twenty-two.
A business, when nurtured over decades, becomes more than a professional endeavor. It becomes a foundation for building the life you want.
Twenty-Three Years Later
Looking back, the staged office in Toronto and that final agency interview turned out to be unexpected gifts. They clarified something important about how I wanted to build my career.
If you want independence in business, you must create it yourself.
Twenty-three years later, Vorticom is still here. The media landscape has changed dramatically, but the mission remains the same: helping smart leaders tell stories that matter.
In business, survival is the first victory. Building something that thrives for more than two decades is something rarer.
And for that, I remain deeply grateful.
