[caption id="attachment_170" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Fortune magazine, May 14, 2007"]
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Who’s your PR agent?
I get asked this. The answer is, I don’t have one. I’ve been very fortunate to receive local and national press recognition since I started my business (painting full time).
I'm so appreciative that I continue to be featured in the national media, most recently on "
Fine Living" and in "
The Wine Enthusiast", “
The Tasting Panel”, “
Practical Winery and Vineyard Management” and "
Fortune" magazines. This year my blue ocean business strategy was profiled in "
Career Renegade" by Jonathan Fields, published by Random House, a great book and a great guy.
And watch for me on
NBC's "In Wine Country" this season!
Why? I think there's two reasons. It’s not because I know how to write a press release or that I have a publicist or PR agent. I hold the intention that I will receive favorable press; call it a goal, law of attraction, or mindset. And when I’m interviewed I just tell the truth, I just tell my story.
Two weeks ago I received a call from a gentleman in San Francisco who said, “You don’t know me but I read your article in
Fortune magazine. I saved it and now I would like to commission you to paint my vineyard as a surprise anniversary present for my wife.” I love being part of these surprise plots. The article was entitled “The Practical Painter” and it was published on May 14, 2007.
It was a collector in Chicago who recommended me for the story, Carol, a real estate attorney. I received an email from the
Fortune writer, Anne Fisher, letting me know that she loved my work and my story but that she had one “iron clad” qualifying question, was I over 50? The answer was and is no. She said that her editor was requiring this because of their readership’s demographic. She had to pass. I wrote her right back and I politely insisted that she should do the story and that she should ask her editor again. Twenty minutes later she wrote me back to say that they had “changed the iron clad rule.”
I’m my own agent.
Maybe it’s helpful that I don’t know the rules?
Read the "Practical Painter, Drinking it All In."
