My friend Erica is living her dream.
She is the president, CEO, founder, head publicist, and sometimes-secretary of Erica Taylor PR, a fashion and lifestyle publicity firm that she started close to a year ago. To date she has over a dozen clients from LA to New York, three weeks ago she hired her first, full-time assistant, and just last week they moved into their very own office space on Broadway in Soho.
Now Erica is a smart and talented publicist. Prior to starting her own firm she worked for several big-name shops covering a range of clients. She threw herself into the New York media scene like the best of the aspiring Samantha Jones’ learning the names, faces, and e-mails of all the key players and up-and-comers. New York PR girls can have a reputation for being party-ers with inflated power, but Erica never left a party without a stack of new contacts and three pitches in mind for the next morning.
All of that is significant to why she is a success, but none of it was the key to her leaving the comforts of a working fax machine and health insurance for a start-up she ran from her closet-sized apartment. She is lucky to be so talented, but talent didn’t make the decision for her.
You should know that Erica is not bank-rolled. Without poo-poo-ing their accomplishments, many a business-owner-at-26 had a hearty gifted check to get them started. You should also know that Erica didn’t have a particularly helpful chunk of her own money saved up to take the leap. She got herself to the point where she could handle a month or two of rent – at the most. And to make matters all the more terrifying, she left the comforts of an established name in the midst of a national economic melt-down.
- “Seriously – how did you do it?” I asked her over brunch a few weeks ago. I was expecting her to say that a loving grandparent slipped 10K in her bank account or that she signed one, major client buying her time for the rest to trickle in.
- “I set a date,” she told me, “I told myself that by X date I was going to lose my job and so I had to be self-sufficient by then.”
- “But were you going to lose your job?”
- “No.”
- “So you pretended your way into preparing to run a business?”
- “Sort of. I just set it in my head that I was going to be out of a job on X date and so I did everything I could while I was still at my old job to get myself set up to run my own.”
- “And what if you didn’t hit your date?”
- “That wasn’t an option.”
- “But it was an option…”
- “Not in my head it wasn’t.”
And so, as planned, on X date Erica left her job. At the time she had a few projects lined up to keep her a float for a month or so, but she lived in constant fear of not making rent after those projects came and went. That fear made her get up at 6am and work until some friend called and said, “enough already, time to eat.” Slacking off meant Ramen noodles 3-meals a day. Sleeping in meant having to cancel her gym membership. Being slow to answer emails meant clients went elsewhere and Erica went back to someone else’s firm having to admit she couldn’t make it on her own. To her those things weren’t unfortunate – they weren’t an option.
It takes a little bit a crazy to have that kind of ambition – the kind that comes with will power and work ethic and sacrifices that most people wouldn’t be willing to make. But that’s not what Erica credits with her ability to take the risk and not turn back.
“I started with all these fears in my head,” she told me, “that I would have to move out of my apartment because I couldn’t afford it, that I would have no spending money to actually live my life, that no one would take me seriously…”
(Note: Money fears and personal fears. Remember those for later)
“But for every fear I came up I was able to find an answer: My apartment was expensive, and I could move somewhere more affordable if it came to it. I lead a comfortable life right now and could absolutely stand to live off way less. I have been in PR for four years and know exactly what it takes to be a good publicist. So then it became, what’s the absolute worst thing that could happen? And I decided that absolute rock bottom would be if I had to leave the city and move back home with my parents, but even then I knew my parents would take me in, and I’d just have re-group and go back to a firm, so that wasn’t even that bad…”
Erica had a stronger desire that most, so for her it was worth the risk that rock bottom might happen. To her not trying was more of a risk than trying and failing. And so she jumped because the “what’s the worst thing that could possibly happen” didn’t seem all that bad in the end.
There’s a lot I admire about Erica: she has a sharp and clever approach the insane world of PR. She’s grounded despite her insane ambition. She would never put her career before her closest friends or family. But the thing I admire most about her is that she refused to let irrational fear get in her way. She knew she could do it, but more importantly she laid out all the traditional fears that people have about this kind of career change and saw them for what they were – fears. She wouldn’t have died if she ate Ramen for a month straight. She could have survived in Queens versus the cushy West Village. And if worst came to worst, she’d even live through the shame of having to say, hey, I tried, and I couldn’t make it work.
She refused to take no for an answer from herself without an incredibly compelling reason, and as a result, all she heard herself say back was yes.
You can google Erica Taylor PR to get in touch regarding any public relations needs. Trust me – she’ll work her ass off for you, because it’s her ass too.
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This is such a fantastic story! I’m about to move to London to try and find work in PR and that’s exactly the type of mindset I want to go with!