The Career Advice Every PR Professional Needs with Steve Dunne

This is a Viva PR podcast. I didn't start down this path to coming to PR. You've got to do a lot of this work in your early years. You've got to be mentally, mentally tough and resilient. I suddenly had a thought, which was, hang on, this is my moment. Respect is not about your age. It's really about people seeing something of value in you. You've got to manage your own career. People say, "Well, we promote your brand and we do this." I actually think we're all about third party endorsement. I feel like I'm on a free training session. Welcome to PR in the real world. Our guest today was told by British telecoms aptitude tests that he should never be allowed anywhere near wires or electricity. So he was put in the press office at the edge of 16. By the edge of 24, he was running corporate communications for what was then Britain's second largest company. Steve Don has since led PR for the likes of HSBC and South Africa, no ways. He's trained hundreds, if not thousands of PR practitioners, and built a career on based on one piece of advice from a mentor that changed his life. And today he's talking about that, but he's also talking about how to build credibility. And why in his view, PR is one of the toughest professions out there. Plus, the one habit, he'd give every communicator he could, starting Monday. So Steve, thank you so much for joining us. You started in comms at a really tender edge, just 16. Just tell us about that start and guess what it taught you and how those formative years shaped the sleeve of today. Okay, and first of all, thank you Tony for inviting me on this world famous podcast. I've heard a lot about it, so I'm thrilled to be finally given my chance to get on it. So thank you very much to both of you and your colleague Daniel. You were always top of the list, Steve. You were only top of the list. Just never available. But it's great to be here. So to answer your question specifically, like I guess many of us in this profession, I didn't start down this path to come into PR. In my school years, there was no mention of PR. It wasn't a profession. That was particularly talked about in my particular school. So I didn't know of its existence. Nowadays, people are much more conscious, even if you watch the news that there is big PR machine and lobby groups that are working morning, noon and night to put out stories. I think even the average person in the street would know that. But in those days, it wasn't really mentioned. So I had a typical dad who was a builder, who's a carpenter actually. And he just wanted all his sons to have apprenticeships. That's what he wanted. So university was never mentioned, neither at school or at home. And so I went for an apprenticeship of British Telecom. And I was 16, so I was straight out of school and went for an apprenticeship at British Telecom. Now they took on hundreds and hundreds of young people all the time, every sort of take every year. And I went for an apprenticeship and I could quite easily have ended up being an engineer. I could have quite ended up in an account or in customer service or wherever it might have been, because I'd never heard of PR. But as it turned out, they did all these various tests and I'm very grateful they did. So it was everything from sort of brings myers and your personality right through to your ability to be numerous and everything else. So I reckon that took about the best part of the day. And the result of that findings from them in my case was that they kind of discovered that, and I agree with them on this, that I should not be allowed anywhere near wires or more electricity or any kind, because I'd be, I'd be a danger to myself and other people. - You would be both. - Yeah, well they did do those. They discovered that I had two traits, two sort of skill sets really, which I never gave a thought about, but they did appear to make me slightly stand out against other people. The first was that for a 16 year old, English was always my best subject at school. I was always very imaginative. I had a good grasp of grammar. And that obviously stood out. So they took that to one side. And then the second thing was very serendipitous really, which was that at the time I was doing my Gold Duke of Edinburgh award. And part of the unit was to, I don't know if they still do it today, I imagine they do, but they probably don't call it what we called it, which was community service because they have some sort of connotations these days. But you did community service. And my community service element was I went to Royal Free Hospital in North London. Some of your listeners and viewers may have seen it. Be aware of it. Massive Hospital in North London. And I did hospital radio. And so I did a little magazine show on a Sunday afternoon. And I had one big sort of a plus going for me, which was that as it is today, the Royal Free Hospital is smack bang wallop in the middle of locks of very important politicians, constituencies, Kierstammer, our Prime Minister, Sikir is, that's his local hospital, because he's the MP for Camden. So that's his local hospital. Back when I was a youngster, our Prime Minister was Margaret Thacher and she's in Finchley. And that was her local hospital. This was the days before streaming. So I know that might be hard to imagine for some people, but we didn't have a lot of choice in media. And so I don't know what the numbers were, but there was access to 1500 or maybe 2000 people in beds who really didn't have a lot of choice on the Sunday afternoon, but to listen to a 16 year old interviewing people. And so I interviewed a lot of celebrities, people like Glenda Jackson, lots of politicians and media as well, because hamstered and high gate nose areas were a bit of a media hub as well. And this was in the days of the launches of breakfast television and stuff like that. So it's a very exciting period. And what that did was it gave me a very good new sense. I could know when I was being spun. I knew what the essence and the seeds were of a great story. I kind of really understood what my listeners wanted to get out of a program. Why? Because I would go on the wards before and tell them who I was about to interview and they would say, well, make sure you ask this or whatever it might be. So British Telecom took those two things in and took me on board and put me in the press office. So I did a, I didn't do a PR apprenticeship. They didn't exist in those days. I did a marketing apprenticeship and I spent my time in the British Telecom press office, which was a big press office. So we had about 14 or 15 press officers and they were pitching, don't forget we were the second largest company in the UK and they were pitching morning, noon and night to all kinds of media from international media right through to sort of local papers in Scotland and everything in between TV and radio. And I made the tea and I did the filing and biosmosis. I accidentally learnt stuff. So I went to college one day a week and then came in and started to pitch to the media and all the rest of it. So that was the start of my career. And the big thing I would learn from that, which I would urge anybody and it doesn't really matter where you are in your career. The big thing I learned, I was very fortunate about it, was I had a really cracking mentor. She was a lady which in that period of the 1990s, it was still a little bit of a male dominated world and she was a very senior manager. So she was a tough cookie, but she was what I would call a warm dominant, which meant that she, you know, you didn't muck her about, but she was very conscious of bringing people through and that sort of stuff. So she took me under a wing and one of the things I would all say to people is if you can get a mentor, get a mentor, and if you can be a mentor, be a mentor because they're both very, very rewarding. And I'm now obviously more of a mentor than a mentee, but I would say that was a big, big take. You ended up from BT. Very quickly going into some kind of high powered worlds. How did you shine as a teenager and develop that kind of confidence to take on roles in your early mid-20s, which would be daunting at any kind of age, I guess? Yeah, and I mean it was daunting. I mean British telecom wasn't quite so daunting because I was there eight years before I became the head of Corporal Combs. So I'm it's still fairly young, you know, 24/25, but I had kind of grown up in the place. I knew how it worked and it was basically all I knew at that time. It was a little more scary going to the banks. You know, I went to the Midland Bank, which became HSBC and then South African Airways, which at the time South Africa was right in the under the microscope of all the media because Nelson Mandela had taken over the country in terms of winning an election. So they were probably slightly scarier than being at BT. I knew my way around BT, but the key for that was that I had grown in confidence and it would probably be a theme throughout today, but I had developed an expertise and when I developed a particular type of expertise very quickly people didn't really see my age. They kind of saw me as someone who kind of knows what he's talking about and that's and maybe we'll come on to that in a moment, but that was one of the things I learned is that respect is not about your age. It can seem it, but it's not about your age. It's not about your gender, it's not about your sexual orientation, your nationality, your colour of your skin, your creed, your culture. And so one of my tips I would give to people is work on having value. And that sounds like a throwaway line, but there are ways to do it and maybe we can discuss that as we go through today. It's interesting that idea of developing an expertise. Where did that come from? Well, it again, like a lot of things in life, was a little bit of an accident and serendipity kicking in. But one of my jobs when I was a 16 year old apprentice was to attend every morning what we called a news meeting and the news meeting was where the head of news, which was a very, very scary guy, and around about six or seven of the press officers would sit around the table. And clearly our head of news was next newspaper man. So he ran it like an editorial morning conference meeting. All this I didn't know, of course, but that's the way he ran it. And it was the times, but he sat on a slightly higher chair than the people around the table. So psychological, I guess. And my job was to sit sort of in the corner by the water cooler tower and take the minutes of the meeting. That was my job. Every day, I would take the minute of the meeting and then I would go back to my office, put it all in my computer and whack it around to everyone in the press office so that everyone kind of knew and there was an official record of who'd said what and what the action points were. And so it was a pretty intense job. I had to have it out by a certain time and it had to be accurate and all those sort of things. But I was okay at it. Pretty good. And then one day I came out of the meeting doing what I usually do was charging back to my desk and who should be coming towards me. But my mentor, the lady I was talking about earlier, she was the director of Corporate Coms. And she was walking towards me with her with her on to Raj. She was at an on to Raj and she stopped as we were coming down the corridor right in front of me and said, I'll stay there, where are you going? And I said, well, I'm on my way back to my desk and she said, and where have you been? And I said, I've been in the the news meeting. And she said, what do you do there? And I said, well, I take the minutes and I go back to my desk, write them up and then distribute them so everyone knows what they're doing. And she said, oh, right, good. And then she said the question which kind of flamaks me where she said, and what do you get involved? And I said, what? And she said, do you get involved? And I said, in what? And she said, the meeting, do you get involved in the meeting? And I kind of looked, and I must have looked at her finally because I went, no, and she said, why not? And I said, because I'm the apprentice of 16, you know, I don't know what these guys know. And she said, and that's where she said the line, it doesn't matter about your age. She was kind of in her general way, so don't hide behind that. And she said, it doesn't matter about your age, it doesn't matter about your career, your career, and all the things I've just said. She said, what respect comes from is people seeing something of value in you. So you've got to have some value. So that's exactly where that came from. And of course, I'm still looking at her. Blankly, this is all going over my head. And then she said, well, I said, how do I do that? And she said, well, you've got to be the go-to person for this. And I said, what's it go to person? And she said, well, you know, you're the expert. And if you're an expert in something, people won't care how old you are. And if you think about it, Tony, you know, if you were in a meeting, and we were all in a meeting around the table, it's a high-powered meeting, but one of the people in the meeting had brought their young say six-year-old boy or daughter with them, and son of daughter. And that child is on their Nintendo playing a way with their headphones on. But you've heard that that child is pretty good with computers. And your laptops playing up. I don't think it would be beyond you to lean across and say, I don't suppose you know how to boot this up to you. I don't think you'd care that the child was six or seven years of age. So I'm still staring, but will do the better. And then I said, well, how do I become the go-to person? And she said, well, you know, find something that you're the expert on. And I'm still floundering around. And she said to me, look, be the go-to person on the media. She said, the media works to a formula because they can't start a fresh edition of the paper every day. They don't have the time to do that. So there is actually a formula to how all the media work and your job is to discover it. And so I went back to my desk and over the next start, I don't know, two weeks or so. I read every newspaper that we had, and we were at the press office. So we had every media in the world. I read all the newspapers and I didn't do it the way we do it in PR, which often is like, well, you know, so and so is in this paper this week and these are the people that are being covered. My job was to find out why the Daily Mail ran this story on page three and the Daily Express ran it as a nib on page five or why the Times ran this story as a big splash on the front page and the Guardian never covered it. And I did that through all the papers. And then one day, again, I kind of have these timing, but one day, I just saw it. It was a road to Damascus, you know, I suddenly saw that there was a formula. I thought, oh my God, there's a formula. And then I spent a few days predicting and I got it about 80% rights and everything else. And anyway, I didn't know what I was going to do this information. And this suddenly skill set that I had, but I went along one day to the meeting that I was talking about, the news meeting. And it was the day that changed my life. So I can actually tell you the details of it, which was I was sat in a corner taking the minutes and they were debating about opening a new, very swanky building in the center of London, which was state of the art. And it was a big, big flagship building for them. And they were debating getting a royal to open it. Now, this was the times of Queen Elizabeth herself, Prince Philip, and then Charles, our King now, was the Prince of Wales. And they were mooting and debating about all these various characters. And they came to the conclusion that it was too much of a hassle. Senior Royals, you know, two or three years to get in their diary, security and vetting is absolutely intense. So they kind of shied away from it. And they decided to go out with a junior royal. And they came up with the name Princess Michael of Ken. I don't know if she's still with us, but Princess Michael of Ken was the name they came up with. And at the moment, they said that and they all sort of concurred around the table. I suddenly had a thought, which was, hang on, this is my moment, this is it. And before I could even think about it, I'd put my hand up. And the head of news whose eye line I was in took absolutely no notice of me, but I kept my hand up. And I could see him sort of talking to somebody and then looking over and then carry on talking and looking over. So clearly I was grinding on it. And I think he might have thought I wanted to use the rest of something because he said, what is it? What is it? And I said, I have my hand up and I said, the independent and the guardian won't run that story. And there was silence. I mean, a deathly silence. And then he looked, he had half moon glasses, which I don't know if you have a sense, they're pretty scary. And then he did something that absolutely terrified me, had me trembling because he went, what? I was absolutely frightening. But I stuck to my guns and I said, the guardian and the independent won't run that story. And he said, why not? And I said, because they've got a no royal policy, they don't run superfluous stories about the royal. So you're not going to see them covering a royal opening a supermarket. That's not what they do. And he then questioned me and I must have had something about me as a 16 year old because he said, well, what's the queen dies? And I said, well, that's a different thing. Had to stay. It's a different thing altogether. Anyway, he didn't do a thing. He just carried on with the meeting as if I hadn't spoken. And the next day I did it again on something else. And the next day I did it again. And I always knew I'd cracked it when one day he was really lambasting one of the press officers and then suddenly went, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on. Steve, how will the daily Expresser on that story? And he meant it. And from that moment on, I became, I was called at the go-to guy. but it's the go-to guy which meant that lots of press officers, I don't forget I'm 16, 17 and these guys are in their 30s, so they're double-wide age, but they didn't have a problem, they would come to me and they would say, in your view, how do you think the mirror will run this or how do you think such and such will run that? And of course now I knew I had a technique, I grew it and got to know more about TV and radio and I could tell you what was a news-night story and all those sort of things and predict how it would run and 80% of the time I was pretty much there or thereabouts and that is what gave me the kind of solid cornerstone to grow in my career really and now I recommend it to everybody, I say to them, whatever you do, make sure you go to person, you know, it can be anything you want, you can be the go-to guy on social media, on AI, on media and how it works, it doesn't matter but just get yourself that grounding and that kind of facilitated a whole lot of things and eventually when the director of Corporate Comm's retired she jumped me up a couple of ranks and that took over the job. It was a while back but even now looking back, you know, there must have been a few eyebrows raised that this young 20 something was, you know, taking on one of the biggest comm's jobs in the Contra. Yeah, and it probably was at the time but if they did say that, I didn't see a lot of evidence of it, they didn't say to me but yeah, I guess you're right but by that time I'd grown my skill set so I was pretty much, I had a level of expertise and of course don't forget, my age helped me because and I always say this to young PR people, you've got to do a lot of this work in your early years because when you get to your 30s and 40s, you've got other commitments in your life, you might be a family man, you might be or family person, woman, and motherhood, you, you know, you get a more gauge, you've got all those sort of things and then you can't spend the time developing your career but in my late teens, early 20s, my career was pretty much my life outside of my present wife but I spent a lot of my time and I've got passionate about it as well, again you've got to have an interest in it, you know, if you're not interested in AI, it's going to be pretty difficult to be, you know, passionate and an expert but I was passionate about the media to which I am this day, you know, to this day so that's how it works. So I didn't really experience it there at BT. What inspired the move to the world of banking and later into airlines? Well, both of those were more money. That's the fault. That's got to, you know, you've got to say that. So I wasn't necessarily looking to move on from BT apart from the fact that I didn't want to be a single company person. I always felt and I always recommend that people get a number of employers and if you're in-house, try and work in agency for a spell or if you're agency, try and work in house for a spell because that makes you a more rounded professional. You get to see and understand all the different facets. So I was a bit facetious in the money. I kind of was in the market at the time for, well, you know, I've done a long time here at BT now. I think I've done about 11 and a half years at the end of it and I really need to think about somewhere else. But at the time, HSBC, when I was at BT, BT was Britain's most hated company and it was mainly because what we had was the old problem. We'd been privatized and we kind of built up expectations of the public and then could deliver it. We had all sorts of strikes and industrial action and there was a fight for the who had the right to manage the company. It was all great PR for me, you know, great coverage and great experiences. But we had the mantle of being Britain's most hated company and what I've learned over the years is that the baton of being Britain's most hated company doesn't get dropped. It just gets passed to somebody else and Middleton Bank had taken over the baton. So it was Kelvin McKenzie, I don't know if you remember, yeah, yeah, yeah, some of your people were world, some of your people weren't. But Kelvin McKenzie was like the editor of the Sun at the time, which was the world's most successful news player. It's hard to believe that now, but it was. I think he had eight or nine million readers at the time. And he christened the Spritten's most hated company and I got more than the occasional bashing from Kelvin on the phone because people's phone lines weren't being delivered or whatever. But obviously the baton was then passed to Middleton Bank because they got themselves in all sorts of financial troubles. And they were very clever. All they did was look at who was ever the last most hated company and they raided the PR department because we knew how to get restore a reputation. And so what took us two or three years to restore a reputation at BT took about a year and a half at HSBC. It was Middleton Bank and then HSBC eventually took it over and I was part of that. I moved into selling off the businesses that they had when they acquired Middleton Bank. So again, it was just been approached by somebody who offered me a challenge that I thought was, you know, a nice meaty challenge really. And then with SAA, they were going through a period where for 20 or 30 years when apartheid was in, they could predict to a person how many people would fly on a Monday Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday, Friday to South Africa. And then when Nelson Mandela was freed, there was all sorts of rumors of civil war and all that sort of stuff and they couldn't give away seats. You know, if I said to you, you want to go to South Africa, so it's all nice, but rough. And that's when I joined them because they decided that we're about to go into a new era and we definitely need to have experienced PR people about and that's more or less how I got there. So all about telling a new story for that brand and helping share that narrative there. Yeah, and also changing perceptions. That was probably the big thing. You know, it's a very white dominated airline. It had the spring box as its logo, which was associated with the white rule. So we oversaw a change in the logo and more diver, way before DEI was as big as it is today, but we went down the diversity route, you know, bringing in more of the sort of indigenous population of South Africa. So there's a lot of work being done all over the place. And then South Africa suddenly, after about two years of not being ever given tickets away, became the place everyone wanted to go to. Absolutely everything. So we had the rugby world cup. We had, you know, it just went bonkers. And then you got to manage that because suddenly you don't have enough claims to service people. So it's all about expectation management really. You come across really well, you're great storyteller and full of confidence, but I was just wonder at any stage whether you kind of suffered from imposter syndrome at any points in your career where you were kind of like looking in the mirror thinking, "Oh God, yeah, I forgot into this." Yeah, and I think it'd be quite unusual, you know, you have to admire someone who doesn't gain imposter syndrome at any particular time, particularly when you make a shift and you're, you know, you're going up a rank or you're settling into a new leadership role. And that was why I was becoming a leader. And I remember seeing, you know, my first couple of days in BT, even though I've been there a long time, and I had an office that, you know, St Paul's was my backdrop. And when he slid up at night, it's magical, I had big chair and, you know, big swanky desk and I had a secretary which was amazing. And I sat there thinking, "Any moment now, the chief exec's going to walk past my office and say, what's that kid doing?" sat in there. And that took a little while to get used to. And when I went to HSBC, I remember very clearly, and it was about a year down the road, maybe a bit longer, where I suddenly thought, you know, I'm on top of the job now. It took a little while to do that. Again, what I would say about managing that holding post-acindral is tiny, tiny little things that cumulatively add a lot. So the first one is, if you've got an expertise, believe in yourself as the expert, keep building that all up. Another one, I don't know if you can see it, but in my office, I've got lots of these, this is quite a big office. I've got lots of these frames behind me. All those frames are press coverage and press trips and events and conferences that I've been responsible for. So keeping what I call a victory log is really important. And that, by the way, is important every stage of your life, because even, you know, when you've run four companies, you still think, I don't know if I'm up to this anymore. And then you look at anything, you know what, I've done so much. Maybe I, maybe I can pull this one out of the back. And so having that sort of belief, having a track record that you keep track of, you know, and keep current and can access, understanding what you stand for. So I wrote down what I wanted my leadership style to be. I wrote down what I believed I stood for. And by that, I meant ethically what's right and what's right. wrong, what I prepared to do, what I'm not prepared to do, what my red lines are and so on. So I was building all that up. Now a lot of this was taught to be by mentors. So it wasn't me just suddenly being this genius that suddenly comes up with it. It was a lot of really experienced people saying you need to have a victory, log. You need to write down what you're all about. And even down to people saying, you know, what kind of leader do you want to be? And so another thing I did was I looked around at leaders and managers that I admired and took some of their traits. And you can't always take all their traits because you're a different person. And some of their styles wouldn't suit me and vice versa. So I took, you know, if I saw, you know, if I was working for you and I saw a trait that I think, wow, you know, the way it's only handles that, it's really good. I'm going to take that. And so I'm kind of in a way, particularly when I got to the end of my days at South African Airways, I was in a malgommation of lots of different people's styles really. I think one of the things I reflect on, I took away some, I'm not going to be like that person. Oh yeah, absolutely. There are people that are, you know, to be kind, they're walking, walking fine fields and investors, you know, I mean, a lot, you know, the worst part is the bullying. You know, I've met a lot of bullies in my time. And you've got to know when to push back and you've got to know when to let it slide and things like that, you know, and also it all comes back to believing in yourself, you know, just because someone bullies you, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. And it's like, you know, when you pitch to the media, you know, you'll get rejection. That doesn't mean you personally are a knitwear or, you know, you're not good enough. It just means that that particular story isn't for them. But it's amazing how very quickly you can start to take things personally. So you kind of got to guard yourself a steam. I would say put a, put a, a fence around that and guard it with with your life because the minute yourself a steam goes, then it's like a domino effect, you know. Yeah, I mean, you've talked about mentoring all the way through this. This, that's been the thread already. I mean, and our past across the countless times that I've attended your training sessions, I've had many of the team here at Viva over the years. How did you get involved in mentoring and training people? How long has that been part of, you know, you kind of portfolio? Well, I've been doing that for a long, long time. And again, you know, I can't tell you I sat down and mapped this out because that would not be the case at all. Two things really kind of started that training and training is the thing I really love. I love that more than anything else. And for a whole myriad of reasons, which I can tell you in a sec. But there was two incidents. One was when I took over as the head of PR at British Telecom. I went to the retirement function of my mentor. And I remember saying to her, I didn't put in for her collection, you know, departments would collect, yeah, presenter with, I don't know what it was, a cut glass to canter or something. And I said to her, I don't want to put in, I didn't want to put in for your collection because you meant so much to me, I want to do something personally for you. So what would you like? And I'll always remember it. She just looked at me and said, just do some, just do for other people what I did for you. And so that really sort of stuck with me. I mean, what she did, I was a bit rough around the edges when she first took me on, but she must have seen something. Yeah. And she decided and she was that tough laugh, you know, it was that warm dominant person because she would tear me apart as quick as bolster me up. So I very quickly learned how to tow the line, but she grew me and she would stretch me and she knew how I ticked. And so I learned then you've got to understand the motivational fuses of different people because everyone's so different. She taught me how to build a team which is she was said to me, don't build a team in your own image, you know, because 11 great goalkeepers doesn't make a great team. You need a blend. And that was because I'd complain that she treated two other apprentices differently to me. She was very kind with them, always stroking them and everything. And with me, I always thought she was a bit tough and a bit hard. And when I asked her when we were taking over, when I was taking over a job, I said, you're always tough for me. And she said, well, she said as a manager or a leader, you've got to be chameleon. And she said, you had confidence in abundance. You didn't know what you didn't know. And so you had to be kept on the tight leash because you'd do a lot of damage if you were allowed to run loose. So I had to keep you very close to me. But the other two didn't have that confidence and they needed it reinforced and they needed to be stroked and they needed to be given time. And that's what you have to do as a leader really. So yeah, all that kind of helped me put what I am today as a leader and a manager. So that was the first incident, right? So I decided I'm going to give back the way my boss Vivian told me to do it. So I thought I've got to give back. But that laid in the back of my mind for several years. I didn't instantly go out and start training. And then the second one was pure access, really, which was I'd done a big presentation to the whole of South African Airways, which was several, what, a couple thousand people, I guess. And so I'd done these big, big presentations. And one of the girls who was in reservations, I was going up in the lift one morning. And she said to me, I thought your presentation was really good and, but yeah, very, very complimentary. And then I said, Oh, great. And then she said, my husband runs a, is the principal of a college, a marketing college. Would you come in and do a talk to the students? So I went in and did a talk to the students. And then that must have gone down well because about six months later, they asked me if I'd like to do night classes, actually lead them from the front about PR. And it was what we called a cam diploma at the time. So I started lecturing. And then people then started asking me, would I come in and train their company and kind of went that way really. So I'd love to say I had a plan. But again, life doesn't always do that. You said earlier that you're not training is the thing that you really love. Why is that? What, what do you get out of it? Well, you make, I guess it must be like teaching. I'm not a teacher, but it must be like teaching. You probably, Tony, can remember the names of some of your teachers from when you were very little. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's the kind of impact they made on you. And you can get a bit of a thrill when later on in your life, you bump into one of your teachers at the local supermarket and you'll say, Oh, hello, Mrs Willoughby. And she probably doesn't know you from Adam because you were seven when she saw you. But you never forget them. And that's the kind of impact they make on your life. And in training, I see that as well. I can see, you know, I do a course called Pitching to the Media, which I think is one of the tough courses for youngsters because, you know, we're, we're terrible as an industry and that we just give people a mailing list and say, right, get that story pitched in. And then they get rejection and they get, you know, some journalists can be a little bit, a journalist generally a nice, but you can get the old one that can be a bit cruel. And you get down because, you know, you can't get the story of fly and your client or your boss thinks it's the greatest story since sliced bread, but you look at the thing. I'm not sure that's a great story, but I've got to pitch it. And you might not have even been involved in the development of the story. So you're really just pitching a press release in front of you. And then I take them from that at 930 in the morning and we have them by four o'clock, 430, literally wanting to bang their bosses door down and say, can you give me something to pitch? And that is just the most amazing feeling, you know, when you turn around six or seven individuals, some of whom are confident and some of whom have never done pitching and some who've done it and they've had their fingers burned and really don't want to do it again. And you kind of, you kind of transform them, you know, as pure individuals. And I do the same with account management and account directorship, you know, account management when you step up to that, it's the biggest leap you make in your career because suddenly you've got clients at you, you've got suppliers at you, you've got the media to deal with, you've got to manage up, you've got to manage staff, everyone's looking at you, you're in a gold fishbowl. That's quite a big leap. And so giving people the tools to deal with that and the confidence, I think is tremendous. And again, some of these frames, you won't be able to see it, but some of the frames in this room are emails and letters and posts from X and LinkedIn of the people saying what an impact you made on them or how they've been promoted on the back of something you told them. And that's, that sounds right, but it is kind of priceless. It's not about the money of those. No, not at all. You've said previously that you regard PR as one of the toughest professions out there. Can you explain to kind of viewers listeners why you believe that and what is it about the industry that you think people don't understand? Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, let me put a caveat which is I wouldn't do anything else. This career has given me fantastic opportunities and I've been to places and events and met people that have been fabulous to do that. So it's a fantastic career. When I say that it's a tough one and possibly the toughest, I mean it. And I mean that as a PR person, whether you're in agency or in-house, and they are kind of different sports in subtle ways, like rugby and in a rugby league, they kind of look the same, but they're a little bit different. What you've got to be is resilient. And if you think why, it's because the first thing is we're dealing with the media. We're dealing with a media that is handling millions of stories and you've got to get your more precious little story in there and you get you know, it's a minefield, you get rejection and all that sort of stuff. And whether you get that rejection by email, by silence, nothing coming back or by someone on the phone or an exhibition or whatever it might be, it's pretty tough to deal with that kind of dealing. The second is that you've got clients if you're in an agency and if you're in-house, you'll have client departments that think, we should be getting coverage for our latest sales acquisition or whatever it is. And they can be anything from levels of expectation, always being high to giving you a bit of a hard time. You have to manage up because you'll have people like you and I Tony who can imagine drive our staff bonkers because they'll hear me in a meeting say to a client, yeah, we can do that for you. And they're sitting there thinking, oh, crikey, hang on, I'll be with you. And you have to explain them well, we work on different axes and I've got to payroll to me, I've got to pay the rent, I've got to do all those things. But they've got to manage up. They've got to keep my expectations as much in check as everything else. And they've got to manage, you know, we're all very competitive in PR in terms of the coverage and everything. So, and you're getting it from all sides, you're getting it from clients, you're getting it from staff, you're getting it from bosses and maybe just that general competitive feel. And then finally, of all the disciplines in Markhons, we are the toughest because your story could be quite literally the best story your client has ever had, very, very newsworthy. And it gets crowded out of the news agenda where it's if you're an advertising and you sign off the advert, it more or less appears on the day we said it would and it looks exactly like that. And you know, I've lost count over the years of my clients saying, well, Steve, you know, we did this media training and I did my three key messages and we've got a fantastic interview there, but they covered the story in a very bizarre way, you know, and you've got to kind of explain that. So, I think it's of all certainly all the Markhons, it is the toughest job of all. And there's another aspect though that really frustrates me and it was touched on by Lucy Eastop in one of our recent episodes that everyone in an organisation is a comms expert as well that, you know, we're faced with, you know, trying to get stuff out the door and signed off by people who for whatever reason will always take our advice. Oh, not so. And it is weird, isn't it? And it's very peculiar to our industry because, you know, we got a new kitchen at home and at no time did I ever feel like leaning over the plumbers shoulders and saying, you know what, I think you've got a little too much flux in that solder there. And it wouldn't hurt the need to do that yet, you're right. So, no knowledge will rewrite your news release. But there is a solution to that, by the way. Yeah, go ahead. Which I pass on to to anyone who wants to hear it really. Key to being a successful PR person and dealing with someone who's asking things that are out of, you know, out of the expectation levels or they think they can do it better is to look at yourself as a coach. And therefore you coach your client and you find that very rarely to people argue with a coach. So, one of the things that I always do is I will say to when I'm training people, for example, I will say to them, what's PR? And I've had very experienced people on courses where I, they'll say, well, we're a PR agent. I said, what's PR? And then they get all sort of tongue tied as to trying to explain to me what they do for a living. And I say, well, you need to have a, like an elevator pitch, you need to, in two sentences, tell me what you do for a living. And don't hide behind phrases that engineers and commercial people and people that are not PR people don't understand. So, don't be talking to me about reputation until you, until you tell me what why reputation is important, which is to give you a second chance, right? And if you boil it down because people say, well, we promote your brand and we do this, I actually think we're all about third party endorsement. It's getting an influencer or a media person to tell you and you respect them to tell you that this company I promote is great. And if you can say that in a sentence, people start to understand where you come from. And then when someone says, well, I'm disappointed with the story, or can you get me on the front page of the sun, which I've often had people say, I will, I never say no, you never say no to a client, right? But I will say, yeah, of course, we'll, we'll have a go at doing that for you. Do you know how many press releases the sun gets in a week? And the client will never know that. And you say whatever the figure is, let's say 60,000. So, so they get 60,000 press releases a week. So we've got to be 59,999 times better with our release. And what you're doing is you're giving the client a sense of context. And you say to them, you know, when your story goes to the media, it doesn't get looked at by one person. There could be as many as 14 people that look at this story and they'll each try and add their little bit to it. And so you start to coach the client on how long things take to do, how difficult it is to get into a program or a media outlet. And then the last thing to do is to celebrate it. Because I think we make this job look easy, right? That's almost every PR person. We make it look easy. And you know what's not. Getting your story onto the one show on BBC Tonight is a pretty big deal the matter you are. And yet a lot of us will ring up and say, oh, I've got you on the one show. And we put it down. And what happens to the client? They think, oh, well, it must be easy because Steve's not made a big deal about it. Whereas I would say, you know, this is fantastic. I would send it over a bottle of champagne. This is a big deal. They think, wow, it must be a big deal. So it's about coaching your clients. And I think that's where you can start to get rid of that. Everyone's a PR expert because you can very quickly show them they're not. But you do it in a nice way. I'm actually educating my client. And I would say that nine out 10 clients, eight out 10 clients, they take very well to them. That's brilliant. I feel like I'm on a free training session here. This is excellent. I'm sure lots of others listening will as well be getting lots from this. You've obviously dealt with lots of agencies and individuals over the years. What where do we get it wrong commonly? You know, about training and developing our people in PR. What are some of the kind of typical issues that you come across and they can we put it right? Well, the first thing I would say about training is you've got to say, I mean, sounds right, but you've got to look at it as an investment. One of the very first things I would say is that if I take my dad, my dad was a very skilled carpenter and he started work at 14. He's 86 now, but he started work at 14. Well, there's only one way to hang a door, right? You can hang it whatever way you like, but there's only one way to hang a door. He learned that at 14. So basically, he went through his career, not having to learn very much more. He learned it in the first two or three years of his apprenticeship and then that was it for the rest of his career. In PR, as you will note, only what worked last year might not work this year and what's working currently might not work next year. So the very first thing we have to do is see that we live in a very fast moving industry that not just events, but techniques and tactics and strategies and audiences and perceptions and attitudes. They all change on a pretty, we're in a state of flux all the time. So the key is to keep current, invest, invest in your people if you're a leader. Look on PR not necessarily as an overhead. Clearly, it isn't overhead, but to kind of move it out of a sort of begrudging approach and get people to invest in your people. From a leadership point of view, I find that if you ever ask young people what they want most from their employers, you'll find training is very high up there, people want to get trained. So that becomes a big thing. And then the second thing I would say, and this is for everyone in PR, particularly young people starting out in this career, is always be responsible for your own management. One of the very first things one of my mentors said to me when I was 16 or 17 was she said, "My performance was below par and she persuaded me to go on do some other courses and stuff like that. And she said to me, "Look, I will help you grow your career. I will help you grow your career, but I'm not going to manage it. I don't have time. I don't sit there worrying about you at night. So you've got to worry about yourself. You come to me and ask for something and I'll support you. I'll pay for it. I'll argue with whoever I have to argue with, but I'm not going to sit and make it happen. You have to do that. I will facilitate it, but the spark comes from you. And I would say that to everybody, manage your own career. No one else is responsible for you. And I mean that in a as warm away as that sac does sounds cold saying, but nobody really cares. We're all wrapped up in ourselves. So manage your own career becomes a really, really important factor and see investment or training and development as an investment. And whether that means you invest yourself personally and that can be both in time or money or your employers investing in you. And that becomes important for, you know, if you ever go freelance, many of us freelance from time to time. Don't forget to keep investing in yourself then. I mean, I know that you're too busy, you know, making work and all the rest of it, but you've got to keep investing because things move so fast in this industry. You can very quickly become outdated. Yeah, no, that's it's a really good point. I mean, let's turn that around a little bit. How do you personally stay relevant? Because I'm assuming that the training courses that you were running 20, 25 years ago, you've had to adapt and change because of the changing media landscape. That's out there. Yeah. And you know, there's a massive difference between millennials and Gen Z. And just a huge difference in approaches. So one of the things I would say that's wonderful about training is it forces you to keep revisiting your training courses that you've written. So training courses I wrote five or six years ago, bear no resemblance to what I'm training today because, you know, language changes, methodologies clearly change, trends, cultures, you know, lots and lots of things change. So in a way, training forces me to stay current because I had to keep exploring what's in the market. Being exposed to lots of different people, you know, groups of young people and groups of middle managers and senior managers, that keeps me pretty current as well. And then the other thing, Tony, I would say is, and again, it's probably a bit of a cliché, but for senior people, and I find this very useful, is go back to the shop floor. You know, I still pitch to the media on a Monday. I still do it to this day and it keeps me sharp. And I know what I know when I'm talking to youngsters, I know what they're up against because two days ago, I was doing it myself. So, and also in this business, you know, we're dealing with very bright people. And they very quickly work out if you're trading on yesterday's stuff. They very quickly work that out. So you can't afford it anyway. So I keep current through a combination of all those things. It's been brilliant, I haven't seen you for this last but best part of it, I don't know. But if we could kind of close and wrap things up, if you could give every PR practitioner one practical hobby, something they could start doing on Monday morning to help them improve what would that be? Right. If it's one thing, I mean, you can think of lots of things. If it was one thing, I would say develop your expertise. So, you know, the risk of going back to be the go-to guy, I would say that would be the key thing I would do. And I would do that at all levels. You know, that is not just account execs and junior PR people in house. That would be right up to a senior level, is investing yourself, be the expert and know a subject really, really well because that's all about self-esteem and confidence and all those things. That would be my big sort of leave behind. There's lots of others, but that would be my big one. And would you apply that at the agency level as well? Oh, absolutely. And senior level in agencies as well. I would say be an expert. Because what that does is it leads into lots of other things. So, for example, I said, you know, be a coach, coaching your staff, because that's just as important. You get to one of the other big things that's difficult to handle for a lot of us is when we move up and suddenly we've got staff reporting into ourselves. And suddenly delegation is a real mental block because, you know, I was for long, long time, a very poor delegator because, you know, sounds crazy, but I never thought anyone could do anything as good as me. So, why would I give it to somebody else or by the time I've told them how to do it, I can do it myself. So, you kind of got to learn to let go and all those things. So, I would say it applies to absolutely every level really. A brilliant takeaway, a brilliant place to leave it. Steve Donne, you've been an absolute star. Thanks for sharing your time, but also thanks for sharing so many little hints and tips along the way and lessons learned. And being so open and honest, I think that's been brilliant. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, Tony. And thank you for having me on. Cheers. With your colleagues or anyone who'd benefit from the insights, we sure. Thanks again. And we'll see you next time for more tips, strategies and real world stories from the PR Frontline.