In Business Q and A

Solveig Thorsrud, President of The Firm Public Relations and Marketing

Interviewed by Phoebe Sweet / Staff Writer

Solveig Thorsrud is president of The Firm Public Relations and Marketing. Photo by Richard Brian

When Solveig Thorsrud was just starting out in public relations, she jotted some notes about where she wanted to be in 20 years.

Today she says she's exactly where she hoped she'd be.

In 13 years the president of The Firm Public Relations and Marketing has taken the agency from a one-woman show run out of her home to a local competitor billing $1.2 million. She has thirteen employees, posh new feng shui-friendly offices and a distinguished client list that includes Trump Towers, Boyd Gaming, Starbucks and Blockbuster.

And with a young son and a nearly 19-year marriage, Thorsrud says she's found personal success, too.

Thorsrud says secret for professional success is described in her company's tag line: strategic approach, remarkable results.

"Strategy is very important to us," Thorsrud said. "Some people just want a bunch of press. And that's not the right client for us."

Thorsrud says The Firm is results-orriented, which is why her company has so many long-term, high-profile clients.

She sat down with In Business Las Vegas recently to talk about how The Firm has grown and changed in 13 years, what she has planned for the future and why smart business are love good PR.

Tell me about your life before The Firm. How did you get your start?

I've been in PR about 23 years. I know I look very young. I started when I was 4. (Laughs.) I started my career when I was in my early 20s. And I've been doing it here for a long time in the Las Vegas area.

I worked for For Rent Magazine, which was one of my first jobs, and freelanced for Las Vegas Magazine. I wrote copy and took photos. And then I went to work for the Sahara Hotel as their director of advertising and PR at a very young age. I think I was the youngest director in town at the time. I think I was 23 or 24. And then I went to work at R&R (Partners) and then a couple other small places and then started my company in 1993.

I've heard you say that you always knew you were going to start your own business. I'd like to hear about that family inspiration that you had, and then about your big decision to start The Firm.

I knew I was going to have my very own company at a young age. When I was younger I sold cinnamon-covered toothpicks in school. I always has some kind of scheme going on when I was in elementary school, junior high, high school. My father has his own company; he was an engineer. My grandfather owned a lumber company and hardware store, and my aunt followed in his footsteps. My uncle on my mom's side has his own ad agency. My mother's British, so his agency was in England. And I was very fascinated by the whole industry and followed a lot of what he did.

I always knew I was going to have my own company, but I probably determined it was going to be PR when I was at the Sahara Hotel. I realized this is what it was going to be.

And then I worked at R&R. And working for R&R was a great experience for me, but I realized that I'm a better employer than an employee.

Tell about some of your mentors.

I'm very fortunate to have had some amazing mentors. One of them is Sig Rogich, who is an icon in town. I worked with him at R&R Advertising many years ago. He sometimes refers business to me. And also Billy Vassiliades, who's the president of R&R, and I sit down with him probably once a year or every six months and get some advice from him.

I have quite a few. A lot of people at R&R. It was a really great experience for me, working there.

Why did you like the Sahara so much?

The Sahara was a great experience. I was so young and pretty stupid, so I didn't know what not to do. I just put it out there and they let me figure everything out. When I started there they gave me a big pile of stuff and said figure it out. I was too dumb to know that I couldn't do it, so I figured out a way to do it. I worked with a lot of the casino people and this was back in the '80s so it was still very much a man's world back then. I was this young girl, bright eyed, Shirley Temple, but I think they placated me and went along with whatever I asked them.

I was able to do some really neat promotions, really cut my teeth in the industry and do a lot of fun things. And I've worked with a lot of entertainers.

Then when they promoted me when my boss at the time, Laura Herlovich, left, I had been there not even a year. She left and they promoted me to her job and I was like, whoa. I think they paid me $25,000 a year. And I was thrilled to make it. And so that was a really great experience.

Tell me about some of The Firm's specialties and about some of your big clients.

We work with Trump International here, the Las Vegas project. Boyd Gaming is one of our clients. Starbucks. Sullivan Square, which is a high-rise condo development project going up with Glen, Smith & Glen Development. And then we also work with Blockbuster, which has been one of our clients for almost 14 years, as long as I've had the company. And Primm Valley Resort is actually one of our oldest clients. We've had them almost 14 years. We started with them when they were owned by the Primm Company and have been sold twice now and are owned by the Herbst family and we're continuing on with them.

We're doing some project work for Valley Technologies, American Medical Response, Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada - because we have a health care practice as well - and we're doing some project work for Spring Valley Hospital. We do construction and development.

We have a new show at the Riviera called "Ice."

We have Nevada Public Radio, Galleria at Sunset and Global Gaming Expo, which is the largest gaming expo in the country. That's usually every October or November. We've had them for about five years.

And Sence, the European rose nectar drink. And then also the Henderson International School.

Those are our core clients. We do some project work for other clients as well. We have some very good clients. We're very fortunate.

Speaking of Trump for a second, The Firm has fifteen seconds of fame on national television recently. How did that happen?

You know, I was surprised. I was watching (The Apprentice) with my husband and all of a sudden I heard Trump say, "What's this 9933 number?" And I was screaming, that's our number! And the silly woman, one of the contestants, mistakenly had put our number as the right number (on her brochure) for the Trump Towers. Our number is on their Web site because we're their media contact. But hello, rule one, you always call that number to check.

So they went back and he told her to go back and call the numbers. And the camera shot them calling and you hear Melissa, our director of operations say, "Hello, you've reached ... " and they bleeped out The Firm part, but you hear, "public relations and marketing." And then she was fired consequently for the mistake she made.

Would you have fired her?

Oh yeah. If he hadn't fired her I would have been a little disappointed because it's Trump. He had to do it.

Tell me about what sets The Firm apart from other public relations firms in town. What are your specialties, and how are you different?

We focus on travel and tourism, health care, construction and development, luxury and then trade shows. Those are our five focus areas. And really what makes us different - a lot of PR firms do the same thing, basically - but it's your approach and the people that work there.

Our tag line is "Strategic approach, remarkable results." And that really says who we are and what we do. We go into a client and strategy is very important to us. Why are you doing this? Some people just want a bunch of press. And that's not the right client for us. We want to have thought behind what we're doing and what the end result should be, then really put together a plan on getting there. And we have some amazing people who work here. Our staff is very experienced. It's a very senior level staff. They're very well-trained in all those areas. It's just a good group of people.

And also we've had clients for so long, too, that they know that we're part of the team. And we come to them with ideas and we really want to make them succeed. There's nothing more exciting than when a client comes to me and says, "Our numbers are up because of you." We love that. It's such a great feeling.

Tell me how The Firm has changed since you started the business.

Well, it's obviously evolved. It was me in my house 14 years ago. And I was only in my house a couple months because I'm a big talker and I like to have other people around me. So I immediately hired somebody and moved into offices. We were in the same offices for about 13 years. As we expanded we just kept buying the next space over and adding to our space.

I think we've become more sophisticated in what we do and our methods, more targeted in terms of knowing what we're good at and what we're not good at. And not trying to do what we're not good at. And trying to work with the kinds of clients we want to. And also realizing the kind of staff that's the best fit for us. That's important to us, because you want to have longevity, but you also want to have a great team that works together well. I think we've matured in that area.

How much has The Firm grown since you founded it in terms of staff and client billing?

Well, when we started out it was me. I think the first year I billed maybe $50,000 and now we bill about $1.2 million. So we've grown. We now have 13 employees.

Did you know from the beginning that you were interested in growing the business? There are a lot of one-woman, boutique firms in Las Vegas, a lot of strong women working in their homes. Did you know from the beginning that that wasn't for you?

I'm not a good person on my own. I need to have people around me. I need to brainstorm and work with people and come up with ideas. I like that interaction. I didn't really determine what size I wanted to be, but I knew I wanted to be bigger than one person.

For a long time we were around 9 people and that was a good size, but then we started running out of room. And that my chance to say, "OK, we're buying our own office space. We're going to do it. We're going to make the space the way we want it to be." And I set in my mind that we're looking to be around 30 people and about $3.5 million a year. That's my ultimate goal. And I don't know what's going to happen after that, but I'm sure I'll set more goals. Hopefully in the next three to five years we'll be there.

We talked a little bit about this, but tell me about the decision to move into the new office and how it has affected the business.

You know, it's been great. We were in the process for two years before we could get into the office because there were delays with the developer and that kind of thing. We moved in in August 2006 and I really think it's elevated our company. Not only from the standpoint of the morale in the office, because it's gorgeous office space and you want to come here, you're excited to be here in the office. We have natural lighting, live plants. It's beautiful. But I think also our clients look at us a little bit differently. For a long time I had the belief that people don't care what office you're working out of and that's true to some extent. But when you're meeting with new clients and they walk in and see, wow, these people are for real. I think it's really helped our company as well as how our clients view us as well.

How do you attract top-notch PR professionals, and how do you keep them?

We have some traditional and nontraditional methods on how we attract them and I'm not going to disclose them because obviously that's the big No. 1 thing people have to do is attracting top talent. Especially for PR firms, but for any business, that's critical to the success of your company. It's something we do continually. We're always recruiting for the right person for us.

But how we keep them I can share with you. We have a lot of different programs in place to help bring up morale, provide education. We have a wellness program. The wellness program we established formally in January, but we've been doing these things all along - providing healthy snacks, we do lunchtime walks, we bring in people who talk about meditation or nutrition.

And also we provide a lot of educational opportunities. We have what we call "lunch and learns," where we'll bring in industry experts, locally or nationally, to talk about anything from how to pitch the media to presentation development.

And we do some fun outings. It's not all about business. We do some fun things, too. We're going to do a bowling outing. We've done pumpkin-carving contests. We've gone and seen shows, gone to movies, and all kinds of fun stuff. We celebrate people's birthdays. We do whatever we can to keep people going. We're always surprising them. They work very hard.

What are you looking forward to in someone you're hiring?

We look for a lot of things. One, that they're a news junkie. You have to be interested in the news, or you shouldn't be in PR. The news junkie part is important to us. Obviously that they're bright, that they can write. A lot of people are coming out of schools these days and can't write. And that is a tragedy. It's horrible because writing is such a lost art and that's what you have to be able to do to convey your stories. And they have to have a good sense of humor, be nice people. We don't need people who have attitudes. We all work together. We have very much a team environment here. That they like fast-paced work environments and that they're interested in things outside of work as well. We try to encourage people to leave here at 5 or 5:30. Unless there's a client that needs it, we really don't encourage that.

Any advice for someone starting out in the industry?

You know, it's a great rewarding field, but you've got to love it. Because it can eat you up. When you spend your heart and soul promoting your clients and trying to get their stories our, you have to really enjoy that. And starting out in PR, there's not high pay, there are long hours, you start out at the bottom so you won't necessarily have client contact. Some agencies in town will let junior people do that kind of work. We don't do that here. We make sure there's a senior person on the account. So you have to be willing to do that.

A lot of people coming out of school want to run the company right away. And that's great ambition, but you have to have the experience to be able to back it up. And also, in interviews I'll have people come in for interviews in jeans, smacking gum, silly things. You have to dress professionally and be professional and know how to write.

Do you still see a lot of companies who look at PR as the first thing to go when times get rough? Or do you think people have become more savvy about that and realized that PR is a necessary part of their budget?

It's still mixed. Sometimes you see that happen. The construction and development industry is hurting right now a little bit in town. We've had several clients who have said, "we have to cut back on our PR or advertising because of where the market is." So we still see some of that. But then other clients are more savvy and understand that PR is relatively inexpensive compared to other ways to get your name out there. So they continue even in slower times.

Do you belong to any national organizations that you think really impact your business?

Yes. I actually founded an organization called PR Consultants Group in 1999 with two other PR people, one in San Diego and one in Phoenix. And we started the group because we thought it was important to have people in local markets across the country. And these are very high-level people, people who have 20, 30 years of experience who either have smaller companies or their own company. What's great about this that pretty much no one can offer is that we can call (on that network). We do national outreach for our clients and if I have an event going on in Chicago, which I do in June, I have someone on the ground there that is very experienced that I trust that can help me with some logistics I might not know, not living there. She knows the "in people" and who to talk to and how to get things to happen much more effectively than me calling from Las Vegas. It's been amazing for our clients. And also being able to share best practices and have someone to call in other markets - because we're in every major market - has been great.

And then we were also chosen four years ago to by Manning Selvage & Lee, one of the leading global PR firms in the world, to be their Nevada affiliate. And that's been great. It was very much an honor. But it has also been great to have peers across the country with other affiliates that they work with. They're usually larger companies. We're probably one of the smallest that work with that group. And again, sharing best practices. They will use us for some project work for different things. We did a project for them with Heineken. That's been really a great eye-opener, too, and we go out once a year to their conferences and learn about different things. And we are also able to use some of their resources, some of their research. They're a huge company and I don't have the kind of research. So we get some great resources through that.

What advice do you have for business owners who are thinking about launching a PR program?

You know, do your research, obviously. Number one, do you have the budget to hire somebody or do you need to do it yourself. You can do it yourself. It's going to take a lot more time and not be quite as effective, but you can do it. Do your research, get books. There are tons of books out there on how to do things and determine what the results are you want. Because people say, I want a PR firm, I want to do this and we'll say, "Why?" What's the strategy behind it?

And then if you do have a budget, sit down and figure out, what are the goals? What is your budget? And then talk to people, get referrals. Because there are a lot of PR firms out there, some better than others. And so it's better to talk to industry people or people you trust and find out who they've worked with, what their experience has been. Because every PR firm offers something different. And go from there.

And be up front and honest. So many times we'll get calls from people who say, "Well, I want to do PR for ..." And we up front ask, "what's your budget?" Because we have minimums that we work with as well as a company. We're unfortunately not able to take on someone who had $500 to spend. It doesn't make sense for us. And they won't share the budget with you. They know the budget. It cracks me up. And then they come back and they want a proposal. And we won't even do that. Because if you don't know your budget then we're not going to go there. We're not going to play that game. Be up front and honest. We have a certain hourly that we charge. And if you tell me you have $10,000 and I think it's only going to take $6,000, I'm only going to charge you $6,000. That's a good rules of thumb.

And then also, do reading to see what you're looking for. Because people don't understand what public relations people are. The think it's advertising, so make sure you know what you're looking for. We had an RFP that we did for a government agency that will remain nameless, and we went and met with them and they said, "yes, we want PR." And we asked if they were sure. And at the end of the presentation the guy said to me, "Where's our advertising campaign?" That's not a situation we want to be in. We don't do advertising.

Do you ever find that you do have to sell the value proposition?

Yes, occasionally we do have to do that because people don't quite understand. But once they get a taste for it, they love it. Because it can do amazing things for their company.

Have you seen a lot of changes in the industry at large since you started?

Well, back in the day, I remember when faxes came out. (Laughs.) The industry has changed dramatically. It's much more sophisticated. The Internet has played a dramatic role in the PR industry. There are a lot more avenues for you to be able to get your client's name out there, a lot more ways to do marketing and that kind of thing.

And also, even the respect for the industry has changed. There has always been bad press on PR and the Spinmeisters, and those people are still out there. But there is also a legitimate industry that is part of marketing and it can be very effective.

There seems to be a community of strong Las Vegas PR women. Is that a Vegas thing, or a PR thing?

I think there are a lot of women in PR, obviously. Across the country I deal with a lot of strong women in other markets. I think the industry lends itself to being more heavily dominated by women. And when you run your own company you have to be a little bit more on the strong side. So, it's great to talk to those kind of people because they're not afraid to share their opinion, they say what they say, and have a lot of energy. It's great to work with those women.

And there are men, too, in the industry. We actually have quite a few men who work here, so it's a good mix.

How does it work in Vegas, which is really a very male-dominated city in terms of upper-management in terms of the gaming industry. Is that a nice fit for you as a female head of a company?

I've had no issues with that. Back in the day, one story that was sort of amusing, we handled 7-Eleven for about 13 years. And one of the franchisees, we were at an event about five years ago, and it was Christmas Eve. And I didn't like to have my staff work on Christmas Eve. So I was going to be at this event and I got the flu. So I had to send my husband, who at the time worked here, out there. And he went out there and was talking to the franchisee, who said, "Where's Solveig?" And somehow it came up that I owned the company, which he did not know. He thought I was an account executive. So he was surprised that a women would own a PR firm. And that's really the only issue I've had with me being female.

Even when I was younger, working in the gaming industry as a female, at the time ... I'm sure if I looked back I would think, oh my God, there were so many sexist things that happened to me. But I didn't see that.

Was it an advantage back then?

It might have been, because I was young and naive. It probably was helpful. But I've been very lucky that I haven't had to deal with that.

Tell me about an accomplishment of which you are proud.

Personally or professionally?

How about both.

Well, personally, obviously that I have my son. We adopted. And it was a long road getting there. I was in the room when he was born. It was a miracle that we were able to have him in our lives. And I've had a successful marriage to my husband for almost 19 years. So that's a big accomplishment.

Professionally, that I've been able to sort of carve out this company into exactly want I wanted it to be. I looked back at some notes and 20 years ago I wrote down how I wanted to see myself in the future. And I got it. So I'm really fortunate. And that we were able to buy this office building and have the great staff that we have. And the clients. We work with amazing clients. It's so exciting I love working with smart people and we work with smart people all the time.

Phoebe Sweet covers banking and marketing for In Business Las Vegas and its sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun. She can be reached at (702)259-8832 or by e-mail at phoebe.sweet@lasvegassun.com.

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