by Lesley Gold

This is a love story.  An unlikely love story.  I fell for the wrong person, moved to the crazy part of the country (ask anyone on the East Coast), and dove headfirst into the boom right when it all went bust.

When I started dating my husband Scott, people used to ask if my parents minded that Scott wasn’t Jewish. I’d reply: “He’s in the middle of a divorce, has three kids, is almost ten years older than me, and he’s from Texas. The Jew thing hasn’t even made the list.” Scott was definitely not a fan favorite among my family or friends. He was not the obvious choice for the next rung on the ladder of my life. Betting odds were against us getting married.

We even tried breaking up, only to end up back together. And in the process, we realized that even if other people didn’t believe in us, something much more important was true: we believed in each other.

Six months after the wedding, we started our own business – SutherlandGold Communications. And eleven years later, we still hear the same response every time we meet someone new, “I can’t believe you two work together. I could never work with my spouse.”

Marriage is hard. Building a business is hard. Applying logic to this, should result in the equation that hard + hard = harder.  Fortunately, I have never been much of a mathematician. For all of our married life, Scott and I have worked side by side, drove to work together, and even shared an office together, until recently. Running a business can be equal parts exhausting and exhilarating – and ours has been no exception. There are days you can’t get out of bed and days you never go to bed. There are times when you think that you are the smartest person on the planet and days when you’re racked with self-doubt. There are days when you ask yourself “why am I doing this?”

And every day you come back to yourself with this answer: “You’re doing this because you’re a believer. You believe you can change the world. You believe that what you do, you do better than anyone else.”

Scott believed in me. In turn, he has converted me into a believer. Together, we have built a business that I believe in and am committed to. I believe that every day I can do better on behalf of my employees, my clients, and myself.  Every day, I believe that I can push myself – and my team – to be better than we were the day before, to achieve the next in a never-ending series of audacious goals.

Scott and I will always be partners. But a few months from now, I will take the helm on my own as CEO of SutherlandGold. For the first time in our history, I will run this company without him. Thankfully, I have a tremendous team filled with the drive, dreams, and commitment that make good companies great.

While Scott may no longer be with the company, I know he will always be my side, and in my corner.  Through some serious ups and serious downs over the past 11 years, we’ve accomplished some great things together. The greatest accomplishment of all has been our two children Tucker and Lila. Their sheer awesomeness overwhelms us every day.

Scott’s next venture (more on that later) will ensure that there is always a Sutherland and a Gold tending to the things that matter to us most. Scott will now have more time with Tucker and Lila to cheer them on, laugh with them, splash with them, hug them, yell at them (sparingly, but as needed) and all-out enjoy them on a daily basis.

I’m sure the next few years will bring many new accomplishments and surprises for both of us. For now, I take great pride in proving the naysayers wrong. We have and always will have a great love story.  Thank you, Scott, for believing.

by Scott Sutherland

We’re celebrating the 11^th Anniversary of our firm this month. As we turn the corner on our first decade at SG, we’re also announcing some exciting changes at the firm. My wife and business partner Lesley will be taking the reins as CEO. Current VP Julia Vinyard has been named President of the firm.

As for me, I’m going to be starting a new consulting practice next year. I’m looking forward to going back to my roots of working closely with seed stage startups that need senior help in building out their marketing and communications plans as they bring innovative and groundbreaking new products to the marketplace.

I went to Lesley several months ago with this idea of her taking charge of the firm while I shifted my focus to a new venture. She and I both agreed that this change in leadership of the firm was needed and important. We’ve been very fortunate over the past decade. We’ve built this agency from a company we ran out of our living room, into one of tech’s leading agencies. We now have 40 extremely talented and energetic team members at SG in offices in San Francisco and New York. Yes, we have definitely come a long way.

And the agency is much different than what we started with. We’re at stage where we need a single voice speaking for the company and a single leader at the helm to run things. And it is clear to me that Lesley is the right person for that role.

There are also personal reasons we want to make this change. The last 11 years of working together every day have been the best years of our lives. But being business partners as well as life partners has its challenges. I am really grateful to Lesley for agreeing to start this business with me and for all the years of support, encouragement and hard work! And I want to show that gratitude by being the most supportive husband and partner I can be. But I can’t really be that supporter every day if we’re both working so hard at building SutherlandGold. My new venture will provide some flexibility for me to do more to support Lesley and to play a bigger role in taking care of our children. I am really psyched about that.

I’m looking forward to helping Lesley and Julia add to the senior team at SG. I want to help them find new people who can deeply support their ambitions and abilities to take SG to the next level.

I won’t be going anywhere any time soon. I’ll continue my current role at SG as long as I’m needed to support all the clients whose accounts I currently work on. But Lesley and I are also excited to start this transition in our business and in our personal lives. I want to thank everyone at SG and all the totally awesome clients that we work with now and have worked with over this decade plus. If I haven’t reached out yet to thank you personally and share my excitement about what’s ahead, you’ll hear from me soon.

Thanks again for such an awesome 11 years!

by Lesley Gold

Every now and then a woman comes along who speaks the truth in such a way it reminds us that great advice isn’t always recognized or appreciated when given.

Here’s the most recent bit of advice that came to me via that viral delivery service in the sky: email.

“Please don’t even think of coming into work with jagged half peeled off nail polish. The fact that I have to keep telling people how disgusting it is is somewhat shocking. If you must, buy yourself a bottle of generic remover for a dollar and keep it at the office. Also, makeup and lipgloss/stick and an overall polished look is requested (read-required). Be smart about your appearance. You work in PR. Market yourself. It has been proven to be a key to success.”

This pearl of wisdom was sent from a female PR agency CEO to her entire staff via email. It was then forwarded across the country to my inbox. My gut reaction was horror and outrage.

What would Sheryl say?!

Who’d want to be in a Lean In Circle with this gal?

Then, I laughed. Despite the irony of a PR professional being so excruciatingly tone deaf, the career advice she provided was actually kind of right. Appearances do matter, in most workplaces.  Marketing yourself is key to success.  I, for one, recognize how fortunate I am to work in technology, where fleece is mandatory and showers are optional.  But the tech industry’s lax hygiene standards are definitely the exception, and not the rule. Young employees, it would seem, need to know the rule.

The signal-to-noise ratio on the women workplace conversation is so out of whack that it’s hard for those who need it to take away simple, practical advice on career management. There are people out there who want to be part of management, not part of the movement.

And to them I say this: ignore the hysteria. You might find more guidance in the hysterical.

When asked by a woman seeking to establish a career as a Hollywood director, Tina Fey recently gave 5 tips for surviving in a man’s work world (I paraphrase):

1. Your job is not to prove women can direct.  Your job is to be a great director.  That will prove women can direct.
2. Wear a bra all the time, even if you think you don’t need to.
3. Don’t eat diet food in front of other people – it weakens you.  If you need to eat a Lean Cuisine, do it alone.
4. Crying, if authentic and warranted, is totally acceptable.  It scares the sh*! out of people, too.
5. Talent is not sexually transmitted, so don’t sleep with talented people thinking it will get you ahead.  Sleep with people who are nice.

Now this is practical, easy-to-follow wisdom which rings true with me, partially because of my own personal family lore around women’s workplace issues.

My mother loves to tell how she became a minor cause celebre in her local circle when she was denied a judgeship early in her legal career. It had been reported that she was a liberal and a feminist. She embraced the liberal term. But to this day claims she was incorrectly labeled a feminist based on a bad bra and poor choice of knit.

In fact, most of the practical, hilarious, spot-on career advice I’ve ever received came from my mother.  I don’t think she’d mind if I shared it, but I will do so with this caveat: feminists should stop reading now.  At this stage of my career, these are now self-evident truths, but they are not politically correct. These rules push me forward. They keep me motivated. They work most importantly when work is hard. And one thing women know is WORK IS HARD.

And these rules make me smile. Because most days, I don’t have a problem leaning in. But, I do have a problem lightening up.

My Mother’s Rules for Women Who Work

1. If a man opens a door for you, walk through it.
2. Never give up an advantage in the name of equality.
3. Don’t let the sexist piglets get to you. (Said when I was six.)
4. Don’t let the fuckers get to you. (Said last week.)
5. Always say yes when someone asks you to dance.
6. If you do one thing in your life, have kids.

by Scott Sutherland

Summer is officially here. And for many firms this is a time to slow down and take a breather. But we don’t know the concept here at SG. For us, slower months mean more opportunities! And the great people we have here at SG have capitalized on the slow summer month of June to absolutely crush it for our clients.

One of our newer staff members was updating our Media Results archive and just had to point out the amazing clips we’ve accumulated this month for all our clients. For Brightcove, 23 pieces of coverage on a single day for a product launch! For Stitcher, a coveted Wall Street Journal review of its groundbreaking mobile app.

Here’s a recap of results in June:

I was talking to a potential new client today and without even asking us, he’d set out to talk to about two dozen current and former SG clients who we’ve worked with over the past two years.

He said one of the more consistent things he heard from these clients was that “the team at SG are fighters. They never give up.”

I love that our startup clients that are battling on so many fronts to succeed see us as fellow “fighters.” But it’s not just persistence that leads to success. You’ve got to have the right people who, just like our clients, get up every day plotting  to win.

So we’re very proud of the SG team of “fighters.” And we’re looking forward to working out butts off for our clients in the coming “slow” summer months.

Find links to a sampling of our top media results from June, here.

Velti’s CMO, Krishna Subramanian, recently gave Forbes five reasons we can all be confident that Facebook can and will convert mobile into opportunity.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The biggest challenge for the majority of consumer-focused Internet businesses is monetizing the exponential growth of their mobile users. Facebook is the most used app across both the iOS and Android platforms – you can bet they will not allow that powerful opportunity to slip between their fingers.”

Learn the 5 Ways Facebook Will Turn Mobile Risk Into Reward from the full article, on Forbes.

SutherlandGold’s VP of Digital + Content Tara-Nicholle Nelson waxes poetic in Forbes on the inevitable “impostor” syndrome that goes along with making big changes in your business and career – and, notably, how this relates to the discussions happening around women in tech. Here’s an excerpt:

In Silicon Valley, there is a movement of genteel outrage and increasingly organized action growing around the issue of diversity
in tech (or more accurately, the lack thereof).

Last year, Soledad O’Brien provoked much dialogue with a segment of her Black in America docu-series devoted to the dearth of African-American tech entrepreneurs. More recently, the New York Times chimed in with a smart and hopeful piece on the successes that are being made in another tech-and-diversity issue: the decreasing numbers of women who code. READ THE FULL ARTICLE

By Scott Sutherland

Our client Pebble, a company that is creating an e-paper smartwatch, is full of great stories. The company now holds the record for largest funding pooled on crowdfunding websiteKickstarter. The perseverance of founder and CEO Eric Migicovsky in the face of rejection from VCs is a classic tale of never giving up, and trying new avenues when traditional doors have closed.

Even more interesting than the amazing crowdfunding numbers – $6 million from more than 45,000 backers in the first two weeks – is the opportunity unveiled by the attention and support of future customers. Aside from the money, Kickstarter has enabled Pebble to do an amazing thing: assemble a community of highly engaged evangelists before they’ve shipped one product. This feat alone is quite amazing considering it can take months or years for most brands to achieve this kind of attuned following.

The community of evangelists is important for Pebble because like the iPhone and Android, the smartwatch is more valuable when more developers create customized apps for it. Without this proven crowd of evangelists on Kickstarter, it would’ve been much more difficult to get developers interested. The backers on Kickstarter will now form the community that builds the apps for Pebble or requests apps to be built. In addition, Pebble has created a special offer for developers who back them on Kickstarter: early access to the SDK and a prototype watch delivered in August.

Crowdfunding not only supplied Pebble with the funds to get off the ground and ship the first round of smartwatches this fall, it also created an immediate sounding board for collecting ideas, feedback and soon actual apps that will run on the watches. It helped demonstrate real demand where traditional investors were not willing to risk money to find out whether that demand really existed. In many ways, the community is even more valuable than the investment funds.

45,000 people can’t be wrong.

To read more about Pebble, visit Pebble’s project page on Kickstarter.

Also, check out some of the coverage so far:

• Pebble Watch for iPhone and Android, The Most Successful Kickstarter Project Ever (Forbes)
• Pebble Watch Touts ePaper Screen, Bluetooth Apps and High Demand (Time)
• Forget the money, Kickstarter turns Pebble into a platform (GigaOm)
• Pebble Smart Watch Raises Over $3M on Kickstarter After Asking for only $100K (TechCrunch)

A client of ours - Blue Jeans Network - is disrupting the video conferencing space with technology that makes it easy as pie to video conference anyone anywhere. As a true testament to their own technology, they actually used it in the hiring process with a candidate who was located in Kenya. They ended up hiring her without ever having met her in person. Stu Aaron, Chief Commercial Officer of Blue Jeans, gives all the details of the experience in an article he wrote for Recruiting Trends to show recruiters the benefits of simple video conferencing in the hiring process. Read the full article here.

RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal shares his thoughts on leveraging social data to power the Intelligent Web and why he thinks that any ad tech companies not doing this will soon be irrelevant.

“The online world is witnessing an amazing change in how people consume and share content. Yet the potential for using social-media data in advertising is largely untapped. Advertisers are still largely invested in display advertising, a medium that in due time will produce diminished results because it is based in static, old data.

“The social Web is the way of the future. It’s where you’ll find consumers most of the time. It’s where we will learn more and more about what they are interested in, what catches their attention, what compels them to share. This real-time medium not only creates an expectation of instant information and content, but it generates a vast amount of data about what interests and engages consumers right now.

Read the full article published in AdAge here.

What’s my story? I was very much the typical born-and-bred American girl. I grew up in the suburbs with two brothers, went to school in California, and just was always kind of itching for more. I just picked up and moved to New York last year and now I’m living out there and loving that.

My speciality is the consumer tech space — I’ve always worked in consumer tech, which is SG’s bread and butter. To people unfamiliar with the tech and PR worlds, I would describe my job as helping companies establish their presence and voice among consumers.

Current Obsessions? I love to eat food and drink wine so in New York there are many opportunities for that since there are about a million delicious restaurants. One of my favorite places to eat right now is this restaurant Torrisi, which has an amazing, decadent pre fixe menu. It comes out and you’re surprised because you don’t know what they’re going to be serving that day.

I also eat popcorn like its my job. I eat popcorn every day. I put Sriracha on it.

What’s the future of PR? I think the messaging and strategy part of PR is consistently overlooked and is going to become much more important. Especially in the consumer tech arena because there is so much competition and overlap in different services and offerings. In order to  differentiate yourself from other services that people can lump together you have to focus on the messaging and strategy — so I think that will become an important part of what successful companies will do well. People sometimes forget about it, but it’s really the foundation of a brand.

A good story should always leave you wanting more.