Company: Winger Marketing
Owners: Karolyn Raphael
Year Started: 1986
Employees: 1 – 10
In this episode of An Agency Story, we sit down with Karolyn Raphael, owner of Winger Marketing, for an insightful journey through the evolution of her agency and her own career. Winger Marketing, originally a small PR firm, has transformed under Karolyn’s leadership into a full-service marketing agency. Her story begins with a passion for theater and performing arts, which unexpectedly led her into the world of public relations. Karolyn’s early experiences, including running the radio news line at Indiana University, honed her storytelling skills and ignited a passion for PR, ultimately shaping her career trajectory.
Karolyn shares candid lessons from her transition from employee to owner of Winger Marketing, including the challenges of updating a legacy business to meet modern needs. From the days of standing at the fax machine at 6:30 AM to today’s digital-first strategies, she reflects on how the industry has changed and the adaptations required to stay competitive. A particularly fascinating part of her story is the evolution from traditional PR to integrated digital marketing, driven by shifting media landscapes and the need to demonstrate measurable value to clients.
Listeners will enjoy hearing Karolyn’s humorous anecdotes, including a memorable moment when a client’s phone rang during a live TV appearance. Her honest insights about the pitfalls of being the bottleneck and the importance of replacing yourself as an agency leader provide valuable takeaways for both aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs.
Karolyn’s philosophy of continuous learning and her commitment to balancing growth with quality service stand out as key themes of this episode. Her approach to embracing new technologies and training her team reflects her forward-thinking mindset. As the conversation wraps up, Karolyn shares her thoughts on the future of Winger Marketing and the delicate art of scaling a high-touch, customized service business.
Tune in to this episode for a compelling look at Karolyn Raphael’s journey, filled with practical advice, industry insights, and a few good laughs along the way. Whether you’re an agency owner, marketer, or someone curious about the dynamic world of PR and digital marketing, this episode offers plenty of food for thought and inspiration. Don’t miss it!
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I’m your host Russel. In this episode, we’re joined by Karolyn Raphael, the dynamic owner of Winger Marketing based in Chicago, Illinois. Karolyn shares her journey from aspiring theater performer to PR guru leveraging our storytelling skills as the backbone of her success. Here, how she transformed Winger Marketing from a small family owned traditional PR firm into a full service digital agency. Tune in for an engaging conversation on navigating change, the power of continuous learning, and the lessons she learned from taking over at legacy business. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Karolyn Raphael with us here today with Winger Marketing. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Karolyn.
Karolyn:
Thank you for inviting me.
Russel:
Lots of great things I know we’re going to talk about, but if you don’t mind, start us off. What does Winger Marketing do and who do you do it for?
Karolyn:
Winger Marketing is a full service marketing agency with expertise in public relations. We primarily serve B2B companies and also a number of healthcare organizations. That’s where we dip into the B2C arena if we’re talking to patients, um, or working with hospital systems. We’ve been around since the early eighties. Started out, bread and butter, PR, that was it, and have really evolved over the past 30 years to be a full service global, uh, firm that’s, uh, serving various sizes of businesses and various industries all over the world.
Russel:
Wonderful. I imagine there are no shortage of amount of stories and experience baked into that time frame that you mentioned that we’ll certainly get to a lot of. But before we get to all things agency, I’m just curious, what was young Karolyn thinking she was going to do for her career, life, et cetera? What did that look like for you?
Karolyn:
It involved, um, a lot of musical theater. That was my, my passion. I guess first it was dance and then I realized, oh, I could dance not just, you know, a ballet where you’re, where you’re in a corps. I really grew up performing, was really involved with speech and debate, involved with theater. I pursued a theater degree and a telecommunications broadcast degree at Indiana university. That’s really where I fell into the world of PR. I was awarded an internship to work at the news bureau and wound up running, because the producer quit midway through my internship. I wound up running the entire radio news line for the university for their news bureau. Thankfully that, paved my way through college, but it also initiated me in the idea of, storytelling to promote people, things, activities, research. At the time I think I thought I was like a hardcore journalist, and I even made myself like a little press pass, and I would get into all the press events at the university, like when Bill Clinton came to speak, or Spike Lee. Lots of fun things, but the reality was I was doing PR for the university. We were promoting our professors, their research, and in the meantime, just really that kind of excitement of being there at a press conference, I think lit a fire for me to explore the world of public relations.
Russel:
I will say just the world of marketing and probably especially even more so on the PR side, there’s just so many neat perks that come along with them it seems like maybe compared to other professions out there. It’s always great to hear their stories. Obviously you found your passion, you’ve done really well with that, but any part of you missed the dance or the musical theater side that you wish you could have pursued?
Karolyn:
I guess I’ll confess when I moved to Chicago after college I was a member of a theater company. I did go tour all throughout Europe with the International Theater Festival and I made about 13, 000 dollars that year. I think I was working like 12 side gigs. At a certain point, dreams are great, pursuing them are, is awesome. When you give it a shot and you start to see like, hey, I’m actually really pretty good at this storytelling thing. There’s a better way for me to do this and I get to have weekends free, evenings free, you know, most of the time. And, make more than a poverty wage. I think sometimes necessity experience and just life will pull you in the direction you need to go. But, uh, no, I don’t, I don’t miss it. I still remain involved with the local theater company here with my, my daughter. She’s involved. Frankly, I feel like the work we do to tell our clients stories so often end us on television or on the radio or in a podcast where we’re doing essentially the same kind of performance that you might do on the stage. It gives that same thrill.
Russel:
I love that, and I’m glad it didn’t fall in the woulda, coulda, shoulda category. You tried it, it wasn’t a fit, but you were able to parlay that and leverage that experience into what you do today. I’m sure there were some good memories that came from that. Maybe not a crazy long career. I know you work for some, the university you’re saying and sounds like maybe another agency and were gathering some experience.
Karolyn:
Yes. I did advertising. Advertising was really not like I thought it would be. I had this vision of the Agency D or Division D. I forget what they were called 90210 Heather Locklear. I’m probably dating myself now. But that was my vision of what an agency life could be like. I did work at Grey and what I found out I was doing is mostly like negotiating budgets and doing a lot of math. That’s not really where my specialty is. My skillset is not, you don’t think you’re really going to really need those math classes when you say I’m going to be a theater major, I’m going to be a journalist major, whatever. As a business owner, you need those math classes. You need to know how to read a profit and loss statement. I still think I gleaned some great, experience working at an ad agency. It was that experience that said, hey, I think this PR thing might be a little more fun and also involve, my creative side.
Russel:
That definitely sounds like a lot better avenue for a born performer, it sounds like, that you are. You decided to make a transition to what sounds like a little known PR firm called Winger PR, I believe. We’ll get more to about, to where all this comes together down the road, but, I guess you explained what you were looking for and accomplished. Why was it this company that stood out to you?
Karolyn:
The owners, it was a family run company. I remember when I met the owners I was about 25, 26 years old. I thought, wow, this is quite something. We were on Michigan Avenue right downtown in Chicago on the 36th floor, beautiful views, and the work that was being done was exciting. We were on the morning news show all the time with our clients and I thought, I think this is something I could really do and do well. And these two, they look a little old. I think they were in their mid fifties at the time. I don’t know. They were not that old. But I thought to myself, if I hang on here long enough, maybe I could run this business someday. It was this little nugget in the back of my mind that was there but then, quickly evaporated the minute you dive in and you’re doing data entry, making media lists because this was long before they had databases online, of journalists to, to pitch. You had to come in early and get on the phone. I loved that because the firm was small, I had the opportunity to learn every single bit of the business. For some people, having a role at an agency, they’re very much in their lane and they have their job, their responsibility, and then, they’re assigning tasks to others. At a small firm, you don’t have anyone else to assign it to. I recruited some interns during the summers, but this was really, make it or break it. You were totally accountable. You could not hide in your cubicle and think, nobody’s going to notice if I don’t send anything out today. This was show up, make a difference and I loved it.
Russel:
There’s nothing like a very small business environment to really prove your metal per to speak. Just this idea of, yeah, there’s nowhere to hide. It will be instantly obvious and which is the great and challenging thing about a small business. But going back to that little idea in your head that you shared about maybe this could be yours someday, that opportunity came about. How did that happen?
Karolyn:
It made me a believer in this whole idea of manifesting your future. Not to sound too, wishy washy about things or, I don’t know what the word is. It just said to me that when you have an idea and you think about something that has power, right? The law of attraction. Eventually, I moved up. I was promoted. At a certain point, there was no one ahead of me. I started at the bottom. I had been there for about six years when I was named Vice President. Life moves on. I got married. I had a child. I took a very small maternity leave of four weeks. While I was gone during those four weeks, I came back and the Wingers said to me, you know what? We don’t want to do this anymore. Me being gone, I think it just was a realization that this industry had really changed in the last few years. It was just when social media had come out. We only had one dial up connection for the Internet in the office, and you would hear people yelling back and forth, the five of us. Are you online? Are you online? Taking turns to check email. It was really starting to quickly change. This was when I came back, they said, yeah, we don’t want to do this anymore. We’re going to retire. We’re going to sell the business or we’re just going to turn off the lights. It’s up to you. At that moment with an infant and my husband and I being new parents that was a really big opportunity and a really big decision, right? I knew I was going to go back to work, but I certainly didn’t think I was going to go back to work and start running a company. I don’t even think I knew what that meant because it’s one of those things. You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re sitting there and you’re in it. We said yes. My husband and I said, yeah, we want it. We made a deal. We bought the business from the Winger family. Then we had a very lengthy transition. There was a period of time where I felt like I was still trying to prove my ability to really run the shop. During that transition, part of the deal was to keep Mrs. Winger on the roster and she got to continue to counsel her beloved clients. It’s an interesting scenario when it’s a family business and when it’s a small business, the way it was. It’s someone else’s baby that you’re taking and saying, well, I’m going to go take it down this new path. Eventually I did. We took ownership in 2006, officially, and really started shaking things up immediately in terms of adding staff. Adding actual systems, like a computer system that was interconnected so that people could share files. Very basic things that, before this time, were just being done on individual siloed computers. Payroll was being handled out of a large checkbook with a ledger. We had a lot to do to bring the business up into the 2000s and really start to digitalize the work that we were doing. It was a game changer. Big time.
Russel:
I have no doubt. Even just from the perspective for other owners listening out there. Obviously you were bringing a lot of change to the table, probably had a high motivation to do so, you’re now sole owner of the business. When you think back upon before you actually took over the business, did you feel like you had the power to do that? Were you empowered to take on some of that change or was it just too much uphill battle? All that to say is what kept you from maybe carrying this business into the 21st century before actually owning it?
Karolyn:
Money. You need money to implement big technology and buy an entire, invest in a software system and computers that have a network, and having every computer online, not just one internet line.
Russel:
People are listening, they’re like, that’s possible?
Karolyn:
That’s possible? Like what? I know. It really wasn’t that long ago. That’s just how quickly this whole thing changed. I think what actually held me back from trying to make these kinds of changes prior to becoming the owner is, I was doing all the work. When you’re leading the accounts, generating new business, at the time we were still making press packets and folders and mailing them to media outlets. We had assembly lines going Saturday afternoons with, doing this kind of work. You get stuck in the weeds and I think that this is symptomatic of what happens to a lot of people who decide to put out a shingle on their own and oh, I’m going to build an agency and I’m really good at this work. That’s great, but you need to replace yourself. If I were going to go back and do it again, the thing I would immediately do is replace myself. I waited way too long to find someone to take on the day to day client hand holding that needs to be done in a high touch agency world where all the deliverables are custom. With that kind of work comes you gain a lot of experience. You have a lot of knowledge. You want to share it. Nobody can do it as well as you can. I think what most entrepreneurs and most people who start to build an agency believe and it’s hard to step away, stop being the bottleneck, replace yourself, keep your hands out of it, let other people mess up, let them learn. I didn’t know what it took to run an agency. I thought I was running the agency because I was doing all the work. I had no idea there was all this other stuff that happens behind the scenes, that I needed to worry about health insurance. I still have to go on, I just saw a note from my lawyer. I have to go on and name a recipient or a beneficiary of the business. There’s a new law in Illinois. Who knew that this kind of stuff happened all the time?
Russel:
I love you sharing the lessons learned going from employee to owner and even some of the hindsight there. When you think about that and where you’re at today, if you were to either set someone else up in your same shoes to eventually take over the business, I think a lot of agency owners talk about this idea of wanting someone else to, whether they’re going to sell it or not, take some leadership and accountability in running the business. How would you set that person up for success, the Karolyn of 2024?
Karolyn:
That’s a great question and a really tough one because I think every person approaches their work life balance differently and they approach their, the way that they delegate, the way that they lead a company in a different way. But I think the idea of embracing leadership immediately and frankly faking it till you make it. If you don’t believe you’re really ready to lead and I don’t know that I thought I really was ready to lead. I was a brand new mom. I’d been in the business for about 10 years total between, my advertising and PR work before I became an owner. There’s this tendency to hold yourself back because you have a little bit of this imposter syndrome or you just don’t know what’s expected. The beauty is that you can help create what people should expect from you. That’s based on how you show up. I’m not saying that you need to pretend that you’ve got it all handled. We make a big deal of, be human, you need to take a day because you’re having, a hot flash or whatever, I don’t know take the day. But you can’t, let everybody in. Don’t let everybody be your friend thinking that way you’re going to get everyone to really love working at your agency and you’re so much fun and this agency is so much fun. I think people want leadership, they want direction, they want opportunity. Having sort of a playbook for what you look like as a leader doing that work initially or while you’re taking on this role, because sometimes you got to build the plane while you’re flying it, it’s really important. That’s something that I frankly wish I would have done a little more of at the onset. We had other challenges like setting up infrastructure, that would happen at a brand new agency. You suddenly have to have subscriptions to tools and services and, fire insurance and all these other things that you didn’t ever think about before you were sitting in that owner’s seat.
Russel:
As you’re describing it, made me think of my own agency journey. One, just the navigation of leadership manager. I think that’s another aspect folks don’t often think about, the second you hire someone and you may or may not have had that experience previous in your career, it’s like getting married to someone and taking on stepkids. You’re now inherently thrust into a role that you maybe hadn’t thought a lot about or planned for, but perhaps setting other people for success you’re going to have to naturally go through that trial by fire a little bit. But we always made it a big focus to give people, incremental steps into leadership. Take on this little bit. Help define their strengths and, who they want to be as a leader in maybe smaller doses. Today, you’re technically not a leader and tomorrow you are. Not to say roles even define whether someone can be a leadership or not but very fascinating, walking through that process that you went through. Let’s switch over. Again, very fascinating story, how you came to the business and all the things you had to go through. But you also mentioned here another big shift that sounds like it was occurring in a similar timeframe and was probably a lot longer tailed evolution. Moving from PR to the more modern world of digital marketing. Why make that decision? That could be obvious, but let’s assume nothing is obvious. What was that transition like for you?
Karolyn:
One of the biggest Influencers in making that switch, it was multi level. When I think about why did we start providing our customers with more than earned media? The obvious is the changes that happened to the media industry, right? Fewer reporters, fewer news sections, fewer readers. It’s gotten really bad now, but the ability to place good articles, high quality news feature stories there just weren’t quite as many of those opportunities. Social media is becoming a thing, your customers wanted you to start doing this for them but they didn’t want to pay you any more money to do that. It was like, well, don’t, can’t you just fit it in? Can’t you just add it into what you’re doing? This really led me to start to reevaluate, how do we account for our value? How do we account for our time? What deliverables, I really wanted to make sure that we were working with companies where we were moving the needle. PR is one of those tactics that doesn’t always have a straight line between, oh, you placed this story in the New York Times, the phone rang and you made a sale. You don’t always have a linear journey for your customers to make a sale based on something they read in the paper. This is brand building. This is word of mouth. It’s building awareness. That is also very hard to measure. We have two, two obstacles now. Media is shrinking in terms of availability for earned media. There’s more and more moving to paid content, sponsored content. And then two, how do I measure and track this? I really wasn’t very good at looking at the reports and seeing, oh, we’re over on this client, we’re under on this client. As I progressed, I, I started realizing, oh my gosh, I’m leaving so much money on the table. How are we doing all of this work and not charging for it, or why? It really made me look at, how do we create renewable income every month, the retainer? Have real measurable goals around that retainer. Does that mean a portion of the time is going to earned media? A portion is going to social media? A portion is going to thought leadership creation or awards or digital content, again, that can be measured? Really leaning into, are we moving the needle for the customer? Because it’s great to get your name out there, but if it’s not moving the business forward in a measurable fashion, then I felt like we weren’t doing everything we could as an agency. It needed that multi pronged approach, and while I could partner with other agencies and say, they’ll do this and we’ll do that, that’s excessively expensive for your customer. You either need to add talent that can handle the new things you’re talking about, like making a strategic marketing plan like going onto the back end of a website to add content or create content making sure it’s search engine optimized. It was a different skill set of people. Also I think I started to see a real very clearly how well these pieces worked together and how much of a difference it made to both the bottom line of our customer, but also, like, we were making the CMOs at these organizations look like rock stars. When you can really show data that says we, we have all these eyeballs, we had all these visits, we had all these transactions, it’s very difficult for them to say, you’re not valuable.
Russel:
I think this is profound, you’re talking and thinking about the world like this in mid to late 2000s, when, I just consider that the wild, wild west of what the heck is digital marketing and this whole world anyway? Really just fundamental concepts that I think are important for all agencies today. Are you moving the needle? Are you being successful? Are you creating value? That’s the question we need to answer first and foremost. I only have the experience of starting a business in that era so that’s all the world I know. Making a transition like that, seems all the more difficult. I’m curious, you were alluding to some of these things earlier and, having someone that didn’t really work in the career field pre digital era. For the younger listeners out there, I’m just curious more of those, what are those rigors of how things had to be done in a pre digital era that would just sound ludicrous in 2024?
Karolyn:
Okay, you needed to be at the office at 6:30 in the morning to stand at the fax machine to make sure that your media alert was getting to the news desk and half the time it was busy. I might get in at 6:30 in the morning, if we had a really big issue or a really big, if there was a press conference or something. I’ve dealt with everything from flesh eating bacteria to mercury spills. Crazy stuff that wasn’t, I mean, I didn’t carry a beeper. Cell phones were new, right? You carried a cell phone, but really that fax machine? That was the lifeline to get to the news desks. Even just delivering beta tapes to television stations. I remember flying out to New York City and literally running between stations trying to get b roll onto the 5 p.m. news. There wasn’t a problem getting into these stations, you just walked in. That was very different. You didn’t have to be on a list, you didn’t have to show a driver’s license, you just got in the elevator and took your beta tape up to the newsroom. That was fun, because then I knew what all the guys behind the desk looked like and they, oh, hey. It was just a very, it was very different. In some ways, I miss that personal interaction that we used to have more of with media, with our vendors even. With so many folks working from home the guy from Stan’s Donuts doesn’t show up on a Friday morning with donuts for the team to talk about the new software he used because nobody’s in the office on a Friday. Just doesn’t happen.
Russel:
It’s fascinating. We can set more boundaries today because we have so much more tools at our fingertips to work smarter, not harder versus, it sounds like going back then, you had to throw time at, in order to be effective and get the job done. As you said, you have to stand in front of the fax machine. You have to drive these things around. There’s no click and done component.
Karolyn:
There’s no schedule it and walk away and come back and get a report. That wasn’t possible.
Russel:
What a world. All this technology has also made things, as much as it’s allowed us to be smarter, not harder, certainly hastened us, but it’s great to take a walk back in time. We’ve gone backwards. How do you describe where the business is at today relative to how far you’ve come?
Karolyn:
We’ve quadrupled in size since I took over the agency. There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is diversification of what we do. Two, at one point we had large advertising clients, even, that would come to the table with, 250,000 dollars worth of spend, you’re taking a percentage of that. That was easy money, but it was another stream of revenue that’s dried up. You don’t have as many of the clients, no one’s sitting at home watching TV at 8 p.m. on a Thursday. You’re not trying to buy, time on national slots that cost a lot. You can buy time on Hulu just through some of these digital tools and you can be on television and it’s not that expensive. The profit margins there dried up. We had to look at how do we continue to do good work for companies that are doing good work in the world? Because that’s what we want to be known for. We do not want to do smoke and mirrors. We do not want to be just, hacking marketing and just saying, oh yeah, we’re doing great marketing for you. We really want to move the needle and do it for companies that are doing good work. What that means is we had to reevaluate and I really took some time and started thinking about who was our ideal client. Growing that from really small businesses, which God bless them. I love them and I am one of them and I feel this need to support small businesses, but it’s very difficult to grow an entire company around the needs of other small businesses when you’re doing custom work that requires a lot of handholding. Because those are the clients that every dollar is like a drop of blood to them. Every dollar really, really matters. We moved our target into the B2B world with more enterprise companies talking about how we can perform as an extension of their own marketing team. Or, believe it or not, a lot of these enterprise companies, big companies, they don’t even have a real marketing department. They might just have one person and they outsource everything. We’ve become the outsourced marketing department for many of these organizations. That costs something. The rate that you sell those kinds of services at is much different than the rate you sell to a small company. And then you have to get comfortable charging your value. I think that’s another thing is, we tell this to our clients, you can’t compete on price. We know that, but yet there is this temptation I think sometimes I’ll just drop it another 500. I’ll drop it a thousand and see if they’ll sign. That will bite you in the butt. That’s my quote.
Russel:
Price game will bite you in the butt. To the whole point, that’s advice we always know and hear quite a bit, but, it can be sometimes a harder thing to follow or it takes work, like you’re saying there to, talk about your value, showcase your value, make it, communicate that in a way beyond just words. We’ve gotten past, present. What does the future hold? What does the next 25, 30 or more years look like for Winger Marketing?
Karolyn:
I don’t have a very good crystal ball. I think there is a tendency, or perhaps there is this potential for, oh, what’s the word? It’s like stasis where you’re just trapped in this motion, this wheel of you’ve progressed and the wheel is turning and to crank it to that next level, what does that mean? What does that need? How do you do that? One of the things we’ve always been committed to as a firm and one of the values, core values that I talk about with my team during our Monday meetings is continuous learning. This year, that has been really, the key to our team building, to why I think we’re still very successful in a tight market right now where a lot of folks are cutting their marketing budgets. We continue to look at new technologies. We spend an hour once a week, filling each other in on, hey, I took this webinar and I learned these are the, these are, prompts you should be using with AI or, oh, did you know that if you’re really polite to your AI and you tell them that it’s a really important article that you’re working on and it’s going to mean the success of a company if it’s done very well, and then you thank it. Your AI will give you so much more and so much more content than if you’re rude to it or if you don’t thank it. These little tips that we all take away from these sessions. Everyone on my team is responsible and has a budget to do continuous learning to engage in associations or webinars or, content that keeps our skills really sharp. I think the future, without having to, again, cut our rates or do more for less or do more for the same. I think what we can do is we can continue to improve our processes, leverage technology and bring those learnings to our clients who probably don’t have the time to investigate it. This is an industry, you gotta be on your toes and you gotta stay sharp and you gotta stay engaged, or you are, you’re irrelevant. You’re still standing at the fax, right?
Russel:
We don’t want to be standing at the fax machine. This makes me feel a lot better that I do have conversations with my ChatGBT. I am polite. Although sometimes when it really craps the bed I do, I do get a little stern too, but we have a relationship, I’d like to think with me and old ChatGPT. Very fascinating. Definitely agree with that approach. Got to keep learning, got to stay ahead of the curve. You’ll never know where that might quite take you. I guess the last question I have for you, Karolyn, is are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Karolyn:
I love that question. I think it’s a little bit of both. I don’t mean to answer that way because I can’t make a decision. Although I am a Libra and apparently we can’t make decisions. My father was an entrepreneur and I will tell you that my husband is an entrepreneur. My best employees have also come from families where someone is an entrepreneur. But I also very much believe that entrepreneurs can be made. I actually feel like I’m a little bit of an accidental entrepreneur because I didn’t start this company. I was there. I was contributing, I was growing the company with the original with the owners, the founders. I grew into those entrepreneurial shoes because I had to, that was survival, right? So it depends on, do you want it? Do you have to have it? Because, you know, sometimes it’s a hell of a lot easier to go get a job and show up and clock in and have the security that someone else is worried about making payroll. I think it’s more about being someone who’s willing to make hard choices and who feels some sense of a mission. Not just, I don’t want to work for someone else, but something about what they’re doing as an entrepreneur or as a business owner has to be done, because no one else is doing it the way that you could do it.
Russel:
I love that. It’s heck of a lot easier to go get a job, that’s for sure. Gotta have some of that risk reward mindset of what we put into this as entrepreneurs, but great answer. Love it. Thank you for sharing. Speaking of which, if people want to know more about your story and Winger Marketing, where can they go?
Karolyn:
They can go to wingermarketing.com. They can go to LinkedIn. We are in the midst of our own little rebrand. There’s that saying that the cobbler’s children have no shoes. Go to the website, fill out the form or give me a call. You can always just pick up the phone. I love picking up the phone and talking to people. I don’t know about you, but most of my phone calls are sales calls. That’s not all that, that much fun anymore. That’s where we are. Wingermarketing.com.
Russel:
Awesome. I noticed you didn’t drop your fax number.
Karolyn:
I’ve discontinued that, Russ. Thank you.
Russel:
Thank you so much for being on the show today, Karolyn. Thank you for taking us back to the future in so many different ways and how you run your business. Great reminder and to be thankful of what we have today and appreciate those that forged the path for us. Thank you for taking the time to share all that with us today.
Karolyn:
I really appreciate you inviting me on the show and what a great, podcast you have. Thank you for including me and I’m happy to share my story and give back what I can.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Karolyn:
We were working with these really cool guys that had started up a show in Chicago and we were promoting the show. We were at WGN channel 9. Chicago’s number one morning show. My client was on the show and I was so excited that he was going to be a live guest. He gets on the stage, they mic him up. He goes onto the floor, he’s talking to the reporter and all of the sudden his phone rings while he’s on live television. He answered it. He said, yeah, dude, I’m on the show right now. It’s live. Because apparently somebody was calling him to tell him that they saw him on WGN. Lesson learned. Please remind your clients to turn off their ringer and give you their phone when they’re going on to a live TV interview. I couldn’t have predicted that that call would have been answered. I’m just really happy that the producer kind of forgave me and my client for that little incident. Everyone had a good laugh.
Russel:
That sounds like almost a viral moment potentially. One of the producers might have been upset. Maybe it worked out the better, but leave no detail to the imagination is my takeaway there.
Karolyn:
Oh my God. The devil is in the details for sure. Especially in this business.
