April 1, 2026 – Double-Up Money Mastery Gary Ashworth and Junipr PR Samantha Flynn 

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:26 Jim Beach : Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups Radio. Thank you so much for being with us on April Fools. That is a fun day, and I hope no one has gotten you and made you look silly. Yet we have two fantastic guests today, both actual entrepreneurs out there, executing in their fields, growing businesses to employee, multiple employees and multiple exits. Our first guest, Gary Ashworth, has had multiple million dollar $20 million exits. It’s an amazing story in multiple industries. And so just as impressive as you could get, you know, that’s what we all want, the ability to go out there and in any industry, just start a business and walk away, 10 years later, five years later, with 15 million pounds. Gary’s gonna show us how. And then Samantha Flynn is with us. She built Juniper PR to, I think, 12 employees, which means she’s just knocking it out of the ballpark based out of the Chicago air and Philly offices, just doing an amazing job. And she’s going to tell us how she did it. So, fantastic guests, great stories. We’re going to get started in just a second. Thanks for being with us. April Fools, introducing

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2:20 Jim Beach : We are back on April fools and excited to welcome our latest fool, Gary Ashworth, to the show. And of course, he’s not a fool. Listen to how rich he is. He is the double up guy. I’ll explain what that means in a minute. He helps ultra high net worth entrepreneurs become that. He has had multiple exits himself, including a recent 15 million pound exit. That’s right, he comes from the UK. And listen to this. This is so impressive. He has helped at least a dozen people become millionaires himself. His latest book, he came out and became a best selling book on on the first day, is called double up Money Mastery, and it hit the New York hot new releases list on the first day. His passion is helping you become wealthier. Wow. Gary, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

3:11 Gary Ashworth : I’m really good. Thank you for having me on the show. Jim,

3:15 Jim Beach : That’s great. Is the UK celebrate April fools the same way we do here in the States.

3:19 Gary Ashworth : Yes, I think we play the same pranks. And yeah, there are odd news items that come out that catch people away. It’s great fun.

3:27 Jim Beach : It is, as long as you’re the one doing the jokes exactly and

3:31 Unknown Speaker : Not the butt of the joke. Yes,

3:32 Jim Beach : Yes. All right, tell us about some of the businesses that you have done. I mean, you’re all over the place. You started your first business at 21 and it listed on the London Stock Exchange. You don’t get more successful than getting a listing and then it sold for three years later. Pretty impressive. Walk through the list to tell us sort of your history. A little more detail.

3:54 Gary Ashworth : Well, I will. I set up my first business actually was a recruitment business, and recruitment was hot at the time, and I suppose the first thing that taught me was that it was a lot easier to ride a horse in the direction that it’s going. If you can catch a technology that’s that’s doing well and on the increase, then that’s half the job done for you. So accountancy recruitment was, was what I started. I did float it on the stock market. We did a little bit of a buy and build, learn how to do some acquisitions, and then we finally sold it for 10 times the float price. That was when my trouble started, really, because I thought I was invincible, I thought I could do anything. And I soon made some terrible errors and invested in some businesses that I shouldn’t have invested in.

4:39 Jim Beach : Ooh, tell us about that. Well, for your honesty, well,

4:45 Gary Ashworth : I’ve made so many mistakes. In fact, the book I’ve written, double up Money Mastery I wrote in service to my 25 year old self, the sort of bull in the china shop, Gary full of passion and not much idea. So when I. When I sold my recruitment business, there was another public company in trouble, so I did a rescue rights issue for a chain of restaurants. I knew nothing about restaurants. I thought I was an entrepreneur. I could do anything. So I bought this. We subscribed for some shares and a friend of mine and himself, and pretty much within two years, we lost the lot. We lost absolutely everything we we closed down the unprofitable restaurants. We didn’t know anything about the food margins or drink margins, and true restauranters Were looking at us from the sidelines and they were laughing at us. So one of my first lessons was that don’t fall for that shiny object syndrome where you just want to do something that’s exciting. Stick to what you know. Stick in your lane.

5:48 Jim Beach : What, what would Did you not know about the industry? What was your restaurant failure?

5:56 Gary Ashworth : Well, we there’s a lesson for banks. Actually. I don’t want to say, Never trust the bank, but the business had quite a lot of debt when we first invested in it, and we spent a year and a half just paying down as much of the bank debt as we could. And I think there’s a lesson for all entrepreneurs here, because the moment the bank thought that they would get their money back by throwing us on the rocks, that’s exactly what they did, and they put in administrators and sold the business underneath us. The thing about bank debt in the UK, and it’s probably the same in America, but borrowed money in America too, is the covenants are drawn really tightly. One thing banks are experts at is doing banking and drafting covenants, and we were in breach of our covenants, there’s no doubt about that, and they threw us on the rocks, sold the business, got their money back, and we lost all our equity. That was a painful lesson for me to learn, but I think it’s an important one for the listeners to hear about.

6:53 Jim Beach : Well, very impressive, and thank you again for sharing your honesty. So many people don’t do that, Gary, I know you do a ton of speaking. I was thinking about this speech where they get up and read your bio and say, there’s seven things in there that you did, and you make sure they read those seven, and then go back and introduce yourself and say, here are the truth about those seven things that I actually paid for that award, and there’s actually a bankruptcy behind this. You know, give them the opposite side of each one of those bullet points. What do you think of that speech?

7:32 Gary Ashworth : Yeah, I’m happy to talk about the things that I’ve got wrong or my failures. I think one of the things that I took a long time to learn about was leverage and debt, and the same word is used for good debt as for bad debt. So it’s much easier to build a business when you put some leverage in and put some debt in. But on the other hand, one of the things I’m trying to teach my own children is there’s good debt and bad debt. You know, using a credit card to buy a pair of sneakers that depreciate before you just put them in the box and take them out of the store is bad debt, but using an element of good debt. How much is a debate? Should it be? 66% 75% 100% some of the crypto bros are leveraging up by 100 times, and, you know, losing their money every time they go to make a cup of coffee. So there’s a big, big thing about debt that I that I’ve learned, and that leads in from the restaurant story you just asked me about. One funny story was that I got a phone call from the London Stock Exchange to say that we had won an award for the fastest growing stock that year, and I was really pleased, because we’re invited to the dinner. So went out and bought a new tux. I thought, if I’m going to be filmed and photographed, I need a new tux. So when I bought a very expensive tux, I had it made to measure, and then they filled me up three days later and said, Actually, we’ve made a mistake. You’re not the winner at all, and so you can’t come to the dinner. So all I was left with was the, was the invoice for the for the tax. Sadly, that wasn’t a that wasn’t a great day.

9:06 Jim Beach : All right, you want to hear my restaurant story?

9:09 Unknown Speaker : Yeah, I do tell me as

9:10 Jim Beach : Bad as mine. Guy next door to my parents calls me up and says, I hear you’re doing really successful with your first business that you’ve started. And I was wondering if you would take over my daughter and her really yucky boyfriend that I can’t stand. They bought a restaurant. We were hoping you could take it over. He’s a really good chef from New York City, but that’s about all they they know. And so I went, and it was the pharmacy that was on the cover of Coca Cola annual reports more than any other building. And it was one of the original Coca Cola pharmacies been there for 98 years, or something like that. And it had, I’m going to guess conservatively, $10 million worth of Coca Cola memorabilia in there, and they gave me the key. 90s, and no one was there all weekend, and I didn’t take any of it. I should have just cleaned it out, because no one knew about no one cared. It was up in the attic, and that wasn’t part of it. And they were going to paint over the big sign outside. And I started talking to the boyfriend, and I realized that he was just too New York crazy. And so I said, bye, and left.

10:20 Gary Ashworth : You didn’t. You should have sold it all on eBay. Jim, you twice as wealthy. Well. This was 1995

10:26 Jim Beach : So I don’t know if eBay existed that early. That’s possibly true. Yeah, if I hold on to that, I could have retired just off of the Coca Cola stuff. Yes, you could. All right, so let’s talk about the book. What are some of the things that you are talking about. What are some of the thesis points I love. Chapter One, anyone can do it. I have made that exact same argument myself. Talk to me about the book. What are we learning from it?

10:52 Gary Ashworth : So it took me about 30 years of doing business to realize that I was looking at life through the wrong lens. And I think most business people look at life through the wrong lens. We’re just trying to do a little bit better this year than we did last year. And I don’t think that’s right. Double Up Money Mastery is really about just remembering that you only have to double 1000 bucks to make a million. You only have to double 100,000 bucks to make 100 million. Now that’s just 10 good decisions. 10 good decisions in your life. Look, it might take two or three years or four years for each double but compared to the two or 3000 decisions that you make every day, what am I going to wear? What I’m going to have for breakfast? 10 good decisions in your life shouldn’t be too difficult. So that’s really the basis of the book. It’s about compounding. People have been doing it for years. The Robert barons of America did it. The spice traders the Middle East do it. Private Equity do it pretty well nowadays. So just think about doubling your stake and then doubling it again and then doubling it again. That’s the core of the book, really. And actually, the funny thing was, it occurred to me when I saw a kid’s TV program where they had a chessboard, and they said, if you put a grain of rice on the first square, then two grains on the second square and four grains on the next square, by the time you get to the end of the chessboard, there isn’t enough rice in the world to satiate the desire. So that’s all about doubling up. It’s pretty straightforward. I didn’t make it up, but it does matter, and it is a great way of achieving financial security for life. The next pattern in the book is that, if I say, if you double 100,010 times, you make 100 million, great. But if you were to pay, let’s just say, 20% tax, which is what capital gains tax is in the UK, instead of being left with 100 million, you’d only be left with 37 million. You’d be leaving 65 million pounds on the table by not structuring your your companies or your deals in a proper way. I’m not saying avoid tax. We all should be paying tax, but we should be structuring our business in the most tax efficient way. And that’s, that’s something that I think that most entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time looking at, what

13:07 Jim Beach : Is the most tax efficient.

13:09 Gary Ashworth : There’s no There’s no income tax. There’s a 9% corporation tax. You know, there are a lot of lot of millionaires and billionaires that have moved to Dubai, but, you know, I like America and the UK, and there are, you know, there are still lots of tax breaks. A lot of people are making money out of property. Is straightforward, I know. But in a lot of states and in the UK, you know, if you, if you buy a property in your own name and you improve it, you can leverage it up. If you sell it for a profit, you can roll that profit over into your next deal. You don’t have to pay tax, capital gains, tax on on every role. So it is worth just really thinking about what’s the best, the best structure to put our deals in.

13:52 Jim Beach : Have you lived in Dubai? Long? Where are you now?

13:56 Gary Ashworth : I’m in France now skiing, but I live in the between the UK and Dubai, and there is a kind of can do attitude. There is a kind of glass half full attitude in the UA that I that I like and I like it, that it’s a growing population, it’s growing economy, and I can’t boast those things about the UK at the moment, unfortunately, right?

14:22 Jim Beach : Yeah, the UK is undergoing a lot of changes right now, and I’m not sure all of them are good, especially with the freedom of speech. So I got the living in the UK, and, you know, they are certainly stricter i i guess i Respect, respect that, but I heard that influencers were just taking pictures of damage and sending it to their family at home, and were getting arrested. They didn’t even post it. They were still getting arrested.

14:50 Gary Ashworth : No, I mean, I’m a great advocate of free speech, and I am concerned about any kind of censorship, really, and that’s the great thing about America. Yeah, but, you know, there are, there have been successive problems across successive governments. And, you know, I wouldn’t like to say London’s got cancer, but it’s, it’s pretty ill at the moment, and and it needs fixing. And I hope the pendulum swings back towards freedom and and free speech. The other thing I’ve noticed is from when I was a kid, is capital is more difficult to to obtain. Now, I remember getting my first bank loan as a kind of 22 year old kid with a proper business plan and and one of the banks backed me. I think it’s more difficult for young entrepreneurs and people starting up their own businesses now to raise capital, which is why they’re kind of bootstrapping themselves with loans from friends and family rather than capital markets, especially for smaller businesses. Are you finding that?

15:55 Jim Beach : Well, I’ve never been able to get bank money, even with the SBA. I’ve never, well, that’s not true. Once I did, had to go through the SBA to get a bank loan. You know, that’s when the government basically guarantees the loan for you. I I’ve had such bad luck with banks, you know, banks that I’ve been at for 2025, years telling me no with a seasonal business that cash flows positively, you know, five years in a row, and they still say no. So I have a big problem with the banks. I I think that it was loose a year ago, that there was money available. I think there was money on the sidelines a year ago, and now I think a lot of that money is getting sucked into, uh, it’s six o’clock in the morning and I need toothpaste.ai. You know, we have so many stupid AIS now that people are investing in. But I do think that there’s some uncertainty now with not the war so much. It’s just the election coming up and the nastiness that’s going to happen after that. So I don’t know, I

17:07 Gary Ashworth : Agree, and that’s why we’ve seen the price of gold go through the roof. I think when times are uncertain, they just go to the safe haven of silver or gold. And you know, we’re seeing that, you know, whichever country we live in, it’s just a fact of life, isn’t it? Yes, it

17:19 Jim Beach : Is very true. All right, another lesson out of the book. Do you want to go with the Dunn community? Do you want to talk about the specialty number 66 Where do you think we should go? Gary? Well, you know,

17:32 Gary Ashworth : I have a thing about debt. A lot of people are frightened about debt. My parents said, you know, never be a lender be or a borrower be. And, okay, Dan, okay, dad, but, but I think there’s a property convention that goes on the south of France called mippen, and you get people there in private jets in good years, and then they go bankrupt in bad years, and that’s because they’ve over leveraged. So I do think that 66% leverage is a sweet spot for most deals. You know, if you’re buying a house, you might go to 75% mortgage or more, but in a business that you can add value to, I think 65% or 66% two thirds debt means that, you know, you can suffer some problems. You can suffer some bumps in the road, and it’s not going to wipe out your equity if you over leverage, up one little pipsqueak thing going wrong, and you’re wiped out so slightly, conservatively, I’m saying I would stick to 66% leverage, and I think most people will sleep better in their bed at night if they don’t have too much debt.

18:39 Jim Beach : Yes, I have had some bad debt problems in my life, so

18:45 Gary Ashworth : It and the anxiety makes you make bad decisions, too you know, and too much debt causes anxiety, I think so. The older I get, the less anxiety I want in my life.

18:59 Jim Beach : Very true, very true. I heard Gary that you wanted to play our little game, the quick 10.

19:05 Gary Ashworth : I’m happy to play the quick 10. Yeah, I’ve listened to some of your other guests and been amused and and and entertained by some of the answers. So yeah, let’s go.

19:15 Jim Beach : Do you want to accept the standard wager?

19:19 Unknown Speaker : I don’t know what the standard

19:21 Jim Beach : Wager is. If you’ve listened to others, you would know they all took it. Everyone who’s ever played took the standard wager.

19:27 Gary Ashworth : Well, then I better take the standard wage. Well, now

19:31 Jim Beach : We have to ask, Are you currently sober? Are you sober?

19:35 Gary Ashworth : Well, come on, it’s I’m in a different, different time zone,

19:40 Jim Beach : Skiing, sober.

19:43 Gary Ashworth : It’s it’s after midday. So you know a couple of Van shows at lunchtime compulsory on the ski slope. Sunday, number

19:51 Jim Beach : One, your favorite creativity hack.

19:55 Gary Ashworth : I just want everybody to remember that you only have to double 100,010 times to. Make 100 million. Don’t start with a blank sheet of paper. Just remember that, what is your favorite

20:05 Jim Beach : Bootstrapping trick?

20:07 Gary Ashworth : It’s all about leverage. Use other people’s money to grow your business.

20:11 Jim Beach : Number three, what are your top passions?

20:15 Gary Ashworth : I try to play jazz piano. It’s very difficult. I like singing. I like skiing. I like baking, but I love the thrill of doing a deal.

20:23 Jim Beach : Number four, the first three steps in starting a business are that’s easy.

20:29 Gary Ashworth : How much does it cost? How much will it make? How long will it take?

20:33 Jim Beach : Number five, your first real customer is secured.

20:37 Gary Ashworth : How begging Jim, people, underestimate the power of begging. Anyone who’s had children will know this, can have an ice cream. Dad, no can have an ice cream. Dag, no can have an ice cream. Dad, all right, then begging works

20:52 Jim Beach : Number six. What is your dreamiest technology?

20:57 Gary Ashworth : Oh, I just want somebody to send round a robot chef to my house and cook healthy food and make it taste like burger and chips.

21:07 Jim Beach : Number seven, what’s the best entrepreneurial advice?

21:10 Gary Ashworth : Do it now. Stop procrastinating. Just do it now. Number eight,

21:15 Jim Beach : Your worst entrepreneurial mistake,

21:18 Gary Ashworth : Going into a business that I knew nothing about cost me one and a half million dollars in nine months. Number nine,

21:24 Jim Beach : Your favorite entrepreneur? Why?

21:27 Gary Ashworth : So I love James Dyson. He’s a British entrepreneur who came up with this kind of new style vacuum cleaner. What I love about him is he had 5100 failed prototype before he got it right, he’s like a kind of modern day Colonel Sanders, and I love that kind of lesson about tenacity and keeping going.

21:48 Jim Beach : Number 10, your favorite superhero?

21:51 Gary Ashworth : Well, I’m British Jim. So my favorite superhero is Sherlock Holmes. He’s a very interesting man with a very big brain, and he always used intellect to solve challenges and big problems, and didn’t use violence or go to war. Fantastic.

22:07 Jim Beach : While we calculate your answers, we will continue. We’ll get the answers in just a second most important question, Team Harry or team William,

22:21 Gary Ashworth : I have to go with with Team William. I think, I think Harry needs to go and talk to his therapist for several sessions.

22:31 Jim Beach : Yes, I think it’s really sad. What has happened I do too. Yes, yeah, I do too. Is now a good time to start a business, or are there reasons out there that you would hold if you were going to start something?

22:48 Gary Ashworth : I think there’s an old expression that’s been written about for 1000s of years. Homer even wrote about it, and that’s Homer who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, not Homer. Simpson Fortune favors the bold. So I think now is a good time, and I think that there are some stocks and some businesses that are crashing now that don’t deserve to be low priced. And I think you can, you can invest and you can buy good businesses more cheaply now. So yeah, I’m bold and I’m optimistic.

23:19 Jim Beach : Are there a lot of, lot of UK businesses that are looking for an owner because the current owner is ready to retire and the kids don’t want it.

23:32 Gary Ashworth : Yeah, I think there are. I think there are too many businesses for sale. At the moment, I’m being offered businesses every week, and some of them are sadly insolvent, and I don’t think we’ll ever recover, because I think that there are big challenges and the way that the world is changing very, very quickly. You talked about AI block laid off 33% of their staff the other day. It is going to have an enormous impact, but it’s also going to lead to opportunities. So I guess one bit of advice that I would say is just stick with what you with what you know. We talked about that before. Most entrepreneurs know an awful lot about their little area of the world. And I think that’s a great thing, and AI can enhance that knowledge, really. But yeah, there are good businesses for sale, I think in every country at the moment, I think so,

24:22 Jim Beach : Oh, I’ve just been giving your score, Gary. Oh, this is so sad. This is so sad. You got a 94 which is an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win. Apparently, we had a judge from France, and you have the UK and France of hundreds of years of history. And so you got a 94 we have to have a 95 to win, so you owe it for a Tesla. So you need to send us one of those, please. Yeah, I’ll send you a toy car. Okay, we’d prefer a real one, but that’s okay. British are. How do we find out more about you? Follow you. Online, get in touch, get a copy of the book.

25:03 Gary Ashworth : Do you know, seriously, there’s a free copy of the audio book? I’m so keen to people to find financial security for life. If you just go to Gary ashworth.com or dumb D, U, double m.org, you can download a free copy of the audio book. You can find me there. You can contact me there. I’m pretty responsive. I’ll reply to emails, and I love having discussions with other entrepreneurs, so I’m easy to find. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, all the usual places.

25:31 Jim Beach : Fantastic, Gary, thank you so much for being with us. Really appreciate it, and hope you’ll come back. Thank you for

25:37 Gary Ashworth : Being kind, Jim. Love to talk to you.

25:41 Jim Beach : Yes, we’ll be right back. Keep well, oh no, oh, man, oh, this is Gary. The entire file was lost.

25:52 Gary Ashworth : Yeah, that’s a good April fool. I think you’re allowed to do them until 12 o’clock. You’re allowed to do them until midday, and it’s past midday here, so I’m not falling for any of your pranks. Jim, all right,

26:03 Jim Beach : We will be back in just a second.

26:22 Intro 2 : You a great question. I think it’s a great question. It’s, it’s, it’s great, great question.

26:29 Intro 2 : Yeah, that’s a really good question. Okay, that’s a great question. And, yeah, it’s a great question. And those are two great examples. Great Jim.

26:38 Intro 2 : Jim, I think that’s absolutely, absolutely perfect. That is exactly it. School for

26:44 Jim Beach : Startups radio. We are back and again. Thank you so much for being with us today. Very excited to welcome Samantha Flynn to the show. She is the founder of juniper public relations. They have been doing it for about a decade and a half. And listen to some of this success she has done accounts for the Super Bowl thing, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, South by Southwest. She’s been on Good Morning America. Or her clients have been her deals that she puts together, the Today Show, CNBC, a woman’s world and a whole lot, or she is very active in the space to giving back and whole bunch of other things here op eds that she does. We’ll get into it. Samantha, welcome. How you doing?

27:36 Samantha Flynn : I’m doing great. Jim, thanks so much for having me Happy April Fool’s Day.

27:40 Jim Beach : Oh yes, I love April Fools. You have any famous ones that you’ve done or been a part of or anything.

27:50 Samantha Flynn : I always am tracking the brands on what they’re doing on April Fool’s Day. And I would say that we’re actually participating in our first April Fool’s Day branded joke today, so the jury’s still out on if it hits or if it doesn’t, but I’ll have to circle back and let you know.

28:07 Jim Beach : All right, my favorite thing is, of course, it snowed last night. It snowed last night, kids, anyway, that didn’t last too long. All right, Samantha, let’s talk about the the agency itself, and then we’ll come back and talk from an entrepreneurial standpoint, like, how do you build an agency, but help talk to us about it. What do you do? What do you specialize in? Give us the Sure. Slow down. Yeah.

28:35 Samantha Flynn : So I started Jennifer public relations in 2019, perfect timing, right before the global pandemic, right? And we are a strategic communications firm, so we really focus on public relations and building awareness for our clients. We do that in a variety of different ways. Most of it, I would say, is media relations focus. So getting our clients in the news from an earned perspective, talking to reporters, managing reputations, and we do a lot of strategic communications and thought leadership as well. So we’re based here in Chicago. We have a team of about 12 people now, which I’m incredibly proud of. They’re the ones that kind of keep everything running and moving, and we have an offshoot office in Philadelphia. So it’s been about seven years,

29:22 Jim Beach : All right, very impressive, very impressive. And there’s a distinction, you know, I get PR and I pay 2000 5000 10,000 sometimes a month, right? And your clients, though, are paying 100, $200,000 a month for PR, right? Can you give me a breakdown of how the industry works with the different sort of price points and things like that? Does that question make sense?

29:51 Samantha Flynn : Sure, it does make sense. I think it’s really interesting. So I always like to say that PR is an art in a sea of marketing. Sciences and the awesomeness, but also the Achilles heel about public relations is it’s something that I think is incredibly challenging to measure, right? So if you go into a digital marketing agency and you know you want to run social media ads, and they say, this is the budget, you’re going to very clearly back see what an ROI is, and this many clicks, this many add to carts. And from a PR perspective, because we’re building rent brand reputation, that’s a little bit more difficult. But what I would say is that, from a standard perspective, $5,000 around your $10,000 level, you’re really focusing on that media relations part of it. So just making sure that you have a team that is sharing your news effectively and clearly with your various audiences, but also that they’re inserting you into the conversations that matter, and that they have a pulse on what’s culturally relevant. So I’d say that that’s the baseline to any good public relations work is media relations, you’re only as scalable as you are visible, and so you have to be in the conversations. You don’t always have to be driving them, but you have to be present. I would say from there, it just expands into crisis communications, which I think is a lot more expensive, and kind of at that tire higher $200,000 range that you’re talking about, influencer work, always having that on and having people talking third party on social media, and then layering in thought leadership, speaking engagement awards. But really, anything that goes into reputation management is falls under that PR lens.

31:41 Jim Beach : Okay, a lot to unpack there. I guess I want to make the distinction that the $5,000 point people have lists that they sort of hit out cold, whereas you, my understanding would be, would be, call your third friend on the Today Show and ask, what Tuesday can you get your client on? Sure.

32:06 Samantha Flynn : I mean, I think there’s a little bit of a misconception about the importance of relationships in media. I think it always comes down to the set of the story. I think it’s the volume of pitches that you have going out. So for example, exactly right. If you are sending out news to a cold list, I think that that would be at the lower level. But looking at again, being culturally relevant, dissecting a story from multiple different angles, it’s the volume of pitching and the time in the market that really changes. And I apologize if I’m not as hitting that point as clear as I should be. No, I thought

32:47 Jim Beach : You were great question. And brought up another question. If a publicist says they want to do you, but right now they’re having a problem. The war is going on right now, so nothing’s getting on except for the war right now, right? They’re not lying when they say that. Are they?

33:05 Samantha Flynn : No, that’s the issue with public relations, is we’re always at the mercy of the editorial calendar. And to your point, it has been incredibly challenging the past couple years, particularly right now, on your news has to be something that can really break through the clutter and be immediate without being tone deaf. So exactly to your point, if you’re a bakery and you’re launching a new cupcake, there’s just not that sense of urgency when there are so many larger, macro things that are happening right now. So I would say that your publicist, it’s your publicist job to guide that conversation and also find the areas and the opportunities, even in a tough landscape. So with the cupcake example, Easter’s right around the corner, there are holidays right around the corner, there could be a little window of an opening for that. So I think that’s the value of a publicist, yes.

33:59 Jim Beach : So that’s a you a great publicist, though, have people that you can call and pretty much say, you know, I do this, or this happens to me on the show here, people will call and say, Jim, we’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I need to get this guy on. You know, if you do it, and I’ll be, yeah, I’ll do it. You know, don’t you think a great publicist can do that absolutely.

34:23 Samantha Flynn : And we have very, very strong relationships here in the Chicago media, and I would say, with the Chicago broadcast media, and we’re very confident that we can call up a producer and book in our client. There’s not always that immediate, but sometimes, I would say, within a two week period, there is some value in that, but we also have to do our due diligence and protect that relationship by making sure that the story is valuable, it’s worthwhile, and that we’re treating it like it would be any other truly earned opportunity.

34:57 Jim Beach : So make sure that the listeners. Understand what earned means. I really want to enforce that, because it took me a while, decades ago. Go ahead, tell us Sure.

35:08 Samantha Flynn : So earned media is what you do is you would pay the publicist, and that would be the full transaction of what the financial transaction would be. And what we do is we call reporters, we call news stations, we reach out to influencers and bloggers, and we come up with a pitch or a news story and ask them to cover our clients, and there’s no exchange of money in place of that. So what we’re doing is we’re relying on third parties to tell our clients story accurately and correctly and making it interesting enough that it would be something that their viewers or their listeners would want to

35:48 Jim Beach : Engage with. All right, excellent. So I want to tell a very brief story and then get you to respond to this when I you know again, two decades, oh, my god, almost 30 years ago now. Someone, I was raising money, and one of the money people said, you know, you should get some publicity and get in some of the magazines and stuff so that it will look good for the venture capitalists and the angels and stuff like that. And I had never thought about that. That was brand new to me. I was like, 27 or 28 and so never thought. And got in touch with some publicist, and they said, Where do you want to appear? And I said, you know, my mom reads this, this and this, and she would really be impressed if she saw me in the news. That would be really cool. And so Samantha, I got three of the four that I will comment

36:41 Samantha Flynn : That’s amazing. No, I think that. That’s I think that you missed your calling in PR.

36:48 Jim Beach : Let me make sure I didn’t explain well enough, I’m paying a publicist like you tons and tons of money. I got three or four,

36:59 Samantha Flynn : Right, and so you’re saying you should have gotten four or four. No, no,

37:02 Jim Beach : I’m not, you know, I was very impressed to get three or four. That’s, you know, a very good ROI. I’m just pointing out. My point is, media is frequently bought. And the 40, under 40 that I was, I was, I paid someone to get in there. And I know I was number one that year. I was like the like, the first one with the bigger picture, my picture was in color, and everyone else’s was in black and white. And number two that year was the guy who started rooms to go, oh, okay, just interviewed his daughter a week or two ago, who now runs furniture.com which is a great place to buy your furniture, by the

37:42 Samantha Flynn : Way, very nice. Full circle moment. It’s so interesting how that happens. You know, I think it’s interesting because PR, like I said, suffers a little bit from an image problem. And I would say, I think that’s for two reasons. The first one is, I think when it goes well, it looks like it’s effortless and anybody can do it. I’ve lost count of the amount of journalists or people from other marketing professions that I run into that will say I want to do a career change. I’m coming into PR, because I know it’s just easy, like I’m ready to kind of move to the greener pasture of, like the cream puff life of PR, right? So I think that there’s a little bit of that, this number, that kind of anybody can sit there and do it. But I also think that there are a lot of bad actors in the industry, unfortunately, and I think you get that across the board in any industry that you’re in, but to your point, what they’ll do sometimes is say that they’re earning something, they will charge you a large, exorbitant fee, and what they end up doing is they take half of that and they buy it, but they present it back to you as earned. So that’s something that we really try to differentiate ourselves. And I think that we do it is and I think that that’s something that we do really well at Juniper. I think our philosophy is that we want to do smart work for nice people. That’s the lens in which we filter everything through. And part of that smart work is being transparent about what PR can do, but also equivalent, equivalently, what it cannot do. And I think that’s what’s really helped differentiate us in a sea of competitors over the past couple years.

39:19 Jim Beach : All right, I want to comment on your you said that PR has a little bit of an image problem. I don’t know if I agree with that. PR is a great industry, and I’m a huge proponent all you listeners that you need to be doing this. If you’re not hiring, you need to do it yourself and get into that. And I’ve talked a lot about that on the show, but you need to go out there and do the PR. And here’s the lesson I want to get your comment on, Samantha, don’t talk about yourself. Talk about the people your hat are helping. And so if you can find a customer that’s helped or a cute story, you sell popcorn. And you have an orthodontist who gives your popcorn to every kid when they get their braces off. You know, that’s a cute story or something. It’s better than a story about Dr Jones, right? So, you know, find a niche, something about you that ties in with your what’s sexy about me conversation? How am I unique and compelling? And that can be part of the PR message, very, very first business I did in my 20s. You’ve heard me talk a lot about it through 89 locations, we stopped talking about us and only talked about our kids and so, man, the thoughts,

40:34 Samantha Flynn : I think that that’s that’s right on most audiences. I think what ends up happening is a lot of companies or organizations misinterpret or misunderstand the value in which their audiences, even their most loyal customers, are tuned in to what they’re doing and their every single move. And so a lot of times what happens is, is we have clients that come in and they want to mean to the person that is receiving the message. And so to your example, there about orthodontics or the popcorns, right? It becomes that this popcorn is a significant milestone in a memory for kids that are getting their braces. Often, it’s so much more than the fact that, you know it comes in 34 different flavors, and it’s the number one popcorn of all orthodontics, right? And so when you similarly shifted to talking about your kids, you’re talking about the family business, the next generation, giving people a reason to buy in, and what it means to them. And so I think, you know, you’re right on all of that approach.

41:34 Jim Beach : I read somewhere, Samantha, maybe on your website. I wrote it down luxury for the end of the Oh, PR isn’t a luxury for the end of the journey.

41:45 Samantha Flynn : Yes, that’s correct. It’s essential. It’s essential to building your visibility

41:51 Jim Beach : Business only when we go to three or four people.

41:54 Samantha Flynn : I disagree with me. I Yeah. I mean, I think that you’re only able to scale as wide as you’re able to be seen. And so I think in general, there’s a lot of value when you’re first starting your business, in positioning yourself as the business that you currently are obviously being truthful, but also sharing the trajectory of where you’re going and what services you can provide. I think that it’s never too early to start PR. And unfortunately, I think people find out that, you know when they really need to to pull on that, on goodwill, if you haven’t already been investing in it. It’s a very hard thing to have happen overnight. It’s a it’s a longer gameplay.

42:40 Jim Beach : Yes, very well said.

42:43 Samantha Flynn : I always like to I’m sorry. I always like to say to clients. I always like to say to clients, if I’m filling up a sink of water, it’s so much easier to just turn on the faucet and let it run than to keep turning it on and off and on and off and on and off. You find yourself in a drought, and you don’t have water in the sink to pull from right or to get the fire out. And so I think that that’s a good way to look at pr

43:07 Jim Beach : Very well. Said, Let’s switch the topic of conversation, please. Samantha, how’d you get client one? Why’d you need employee one? Walk us through the burden of this business, baby? How’d you get the idea go six months, you know, a year back in time before the start date? Absolutely.

43:27 Samantha Flynn : So I, I had been working in PR for nearly a decade. And, you know, the unsexy answer, but the truth answer is, the truthful one is that I had just been burned out, right? I think that PR is very demanding. It is a lifestyle, right? If somebody has a crisis, if you have a client that is pistachios and someone chokes on a pistachio, there’s a salmonella recall. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Saturday or if it’s Christmas or if it’s three in the morning, right? And so I had started really thinking through, I had been a department lead for PR, and I built a PR department within a larger, integrated marketing firm, and I had started to really want to get back to my roots of just practicing PR at its core. I really value the PR discipline, and I really understand its spot in the wider marketing funnel. And sometimes that can be a really great thing, where your PR is being supported with creative and big media ad buys. But sometimes that can also be really stunting, because there seems to be a safety net there of well, if you can’t earn it, we’ll just buy it. And I was looking for a way to get a little bit of mental clarity and a break, as well as to kind of come back to my PR roots. And so entrepreneurship seemed like the first path for me. So I don’t know that it was super well thought out at the time, but it was a necessary pivot that I needed to make. And.

45:00 Jim Beach : Why Were you successful? How did you do something different and get that first client?

45:05 Samantha Flynn : Sure, so I treated myself as if I was the client, which I found it to be so interesting, because I can find message values and promote somebody else. But when it was me, it was me. It was a little bit more challenging, which I thought was an interesting conundrum, but I decided to really sit down and get some clarity on what I was trying to do, what my key differentiators were. And then, honestly, I started with my network. I did formalized announcement cards, similar to what I would do if I were having a baby shower or wedding shower, anything like that, and sent out and just had a lot of information, I think again, circling back to our earlier point about here are some questions, or Here are some ways that public relations can help you, because sometimes I think that your potential clients or customers have no idea that they could Be your potential clients or customers, unless you make that crystal clear to them. And so I just began to start engaging with my network, connecting into community groups, and really just kind of turning the pavement some cold emails to try to get that first client.

46:17 Jim Beach : And you said you’ve worked up to 12 people. Very impressive. What’s been the key to the success of growing to that stage?

46:28 Samantha Flynn : I think it’s just being really clear about the work that we want and very clear about the work that we don’t. And so I said a little bit earlier, we have this mantra of smart work for nice people, and that is the level which I hold myself to. I hold my clients to, and I also hold my staff and those that I’m working with too. So at some point, when we got the courage and kind of to start letting go of things that maybe weren’t for us, we ended up being able to scale in a way that I was just becoming a bottleneck, and so I needed to have more people to come in, and more people wanted to be a part of the process, from an employee standpoint to a client standpoint. So that’s what I would say is, is where it moved,

47:23 Jim Beach : Very good. And is the market changing now with uncertainty, and it’s been an uncertain year, I think absolutely market or a bad market right now for you,

47:39 Samantha Flynn : I think it’s a good market from PR, because PR is probably the most cost effective portion of the marketing funnel in general, like I said, from a social media perspective, and that’s just an easy one for me to draw a line to that algorithm can change overnight. You know what people are spending. It becomes more competitive on the PR side, I think people are looking to trust a little bit more, and what ends up happening is that we need to find some credible third parties to tell these stories. So I will say I am seeing concerns with clients on a couple different things, with the state of a lot of these macro economic factors, purchasing power and people’s willingness to kind of spend is a little bit more reserved than what we’ve seen in the past, and I believe that companies know that pumping more money into advertising isn’t the answer, so it will boomerang around to PR, and we are seeing a strong year in PR. It’s always one that kind of gets thrown away when the new shiny toy comes in. I’ve seen it three or four times in my career, but I think everybody comes back to PR because, again, there’s an intangible value to having a brand that resonates and that people will stick with, even in trying times.

48:57 Jim Beach : Yes, if you get an agency that works well with you that it’s all firing, you stay you don’t shop around because it’s a pain. So what about AI? Is it impacted anything?

49:11 Samantha Flynn : I think it impacts things in the sense of, we are getting a lot of conversations from people that are reaching out, that are asking for, and I’m doing air quotes ai pr, and what that really is, is they want to make sure that if people are asking chat GPT or Gemini or any of these other AI search tools, what is the best beef brand or what is the nicest hotel in Chicago that they’re indexing really High on the chat GPT or the search results that are coming with AI. I think I’ve seen this before quite a bit. PR helps a lot, and does weigh into some of those answers, but we counsel our clients that that should not be the primary goal and effort of everything that we’re doing from a PR standpoint. So that’s how we’re seeing. AI start to affect our industry a little bit. It’s a new request for a different type of service.

50:07 Jim Beach : Forbes is Forbes, right? I mean, it doesn’t absolutely, you know, if you get into Forbes, you’re going to get an AI bump, just like you’d get an SEO bump, right? I mean, it’s the same thing. I think

50:23 Samantha Flynn : Absolutely and essentially that’s what they’re asking for. They’re asking for backlinks and SEO. But there seems to be this new branding. I don’t know who gave it a facelift, where they’re calling it a IPR and so again, like, like I said, we understand the role that earned plays into that, but there are also other components that do not fall under PR, that fall into that as well. To me, I just think it’s an evolution of a search strategy, to be honest with you, but that’s what we’re seeing people ask for, and just want to make sure that we’re writing for SEO. So again, it’s, it’s a little bit cyclical, but people feel like it’s new.

50:58 Jim Beach : I wish people would decide what letter we’re going to use. You know, I keep hearing Geo for generative optimization, and then you’re using, I just, I wish everyone would get settled Absolutely.

51:12 Samantha Flynn : And then also the best practices, right? Like, it’s a little bit of a wild wild west here. And so it’s, I saw the same thing with social media. You know, back in 2010 or two, it’s anybody that’s coming out saying I’m the expert, and I know, and I can guarantee that I’m going to get your ranking up and so on and so forth, is going to charge you a lot of money, and in my opinion, probably going to then pay for it or do something that’s not exactly on the own side, but that’s just kind of the cycle that we’re in.

51:40 Jim Beach : My brother got married in Chicago to a Chicago woman, and Vice President Gore was in town that day, and it was a blizzard, and the highway was stopped, and her traffic wasn’t moving. Her dilemma wasn’t moving, so she got out of the car in her wedding dress and walked over to the Secret Service and told them to get out of the way, because her wedding was more important than Vice President Gore. So, you know, sounds like my kind of woman. Yes, they got out of her way. Got out of her way because she was obviously not a threat to anybody except my brother and, you know, just a woman in a dress. And it was like four degrees that day too. It was just rigid.

52:27 Samantha Flynn : It sounds like a Chicago woman to me, you know, four, four degrees is balmy, you know, negative four, four that’s balmy this time of year. So looks like she it sounds like she had a beautiful day.

52:38 Jim Beach : She did, she did. She was very happy. Samantha, great stuff. How do we find out more? Get in touch all that.

52:46 Samantha Flynn : Please Absolutely. So you can find out more about Juniper at WWW dot Juniper public relations.com, there is no E in Juniper. So sometimes, as you said, people say Junie PR. And also, I have a book that’s coming out called the entrepreneur advantage. It talks about turning chaos into clarity and how I’ve taken the PR principles that I’ve learned in my career and applied them over to entrepreneurship to help me scale and grow and build this wonderful business. You can find out more about that at WWW dot Samantha flynn.com, thank

53:23 Jim Beach : You so very much, and we’d love to have you back sometime. Thanks so much. Well, we did it. We got through an entire show without any practical April Fool’s joke. So thank goodness for that. And again, this is a real show. A great day. Everyone. Take care, go, make a million dollars. Bye, now you.