Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Wednesday at approximately 6:35 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
September 16, 2009

Stan Stein has some special magic. The veteran PR counselor is EVP and global accounts director of one of the world’s largest PR firms, Weber Shandwick. He’s been a major player on the General Motors account for more than 25 years in at least two different firms and, for a while, as an independent consultant.

I asked him to come to Lansing to talk to the 150 or so advertising, PR, and retailing students who attend the John Aldinger endowed-lecture series I call “Promotions Commons.”

I like to kid Stan. Dave Hayhow and I first met Stan a few months after we opened our public policy oriented PR firm in Lansing in 1978. We called the firm Publicom Inc. I didn’t like the name that much at first. It was a made-up name in which Dave combined public and communications, I think. It was our firm, but it was his name.

I was OK with that. I was OK that is until I picked up the Detroit Free Press one morning to see that a guy in Detroit, a J-school graduate from MSU by the name of Stan Stein, had announced his new PR firm in Metro Detroit. He called his new firm Publicom. He did, at least, until Dave Hayhow got through threatening to send Jack Davis to Detroit to peel a layer of skin off him.

I actually thought it was quite funny, and I was intrigued that some young kid a) just came up with the name himself and didn’t bother to check and see if it was taken, or b) had been given the name to use by his former employer, Tony Franco, who somehow had seen our upstart firm in Lansing as a competitor and thought it would be funny to screw with us, or c) thought it would be a little like picking up somebody else’s errant golf ball on the course — an interesting way to strike up a conversation with new people.

And a conversation we did strike up. Dave and I liked Stan so much that we gave him some kind of a contract and let him open a Publicom office for us in the Detroit area. It’s a long time ago, but it was something like that.

Anyhow, Stan and I became good friends and have stayed in touch over the years. He’s a high flyer in PR, and has been for a long time now, and I have always been proud to know him. So I asked him a couple of months ago if he would be so kind as to take a September afternoon off from the grind and come to Lansing to share some insights with our students.

“What should I talk about?” Stan asked me in that initial conversation. “Why not tell the kids how it is that a consultant — an outsider in an organization as locked down and stressed out as GM — can make his relationships so tight as to survive all the ups and downs he must have experienced along the way. Give them your best tips on how you can make a “Client for Life,” I told Stan. And that’s exactly what he did on September 8, 2009, in East Lansing.

So as a tribute to a guy who could commandeer the name of a small-town issues management firm and ride it all the way to the Big Show, I am going to commandeer Stan Stein’s 15 Tips to MSU students, followed by my observations (it is my column, after all). It strikes me that much of what Stan told my students might constitute the kind of universal truths — axioms, almost — that are just as relevant to a lobbyist, a trade association executive, a political consultant or pollster, or any other “PR guy” who eats what he kills.

Stan’s Tip #1: Find clients with real budgets
RC: There is no easier way to look like a fool than to start a business or accept a client that is undercapitalized. Just like in medicine, consulting requires having a patient who can afford to buy the medicine, and is willing and able to take the full dose. Half a dose usually doesn’t work, and often does more harm than good by building a resistance to the medicine in the naïve patient, so that the next time medicine is needed it won’t work at all.

Stan’s Tip #2: Create a positive reputation
RC: Dave Hayhow once told an employee with an attitude that her personality is really nothing more or less than how she chooses to act today. Reputation is similar. Reputation is how you choose to be known. It’s what you want, in this case, your client to know you for. You can’t make that up. You have to choose it and use it, and when you use it enough, you have it. And when you have it, you have to remember how easy it is to lose it.

Stan’s Tip #3: Hitch your wagon to a rising star
RC: What I have been saying for a lot of years is that just about the most important thing you can do, at any age and in any business, is to pick a good mentor, and choose to build a reputation with him or her as having been her best mentee of all time. You want your mentor to say your name when someone asks: “Who is the smartest, most hard working, most loyal mentee you ever had?” If you read my column on any kind of a regular basis, you probably know who my favorite mentor is. I won’t mention his name again, because I’m not sure that he likes the attention (or the implication). But my mentor used to tell me, “You can’t make a friend when you need a friend.” That’s as true in life as it is in lobbying. Don’t wait until you’re in hot water to ask for a lifeline. There’s no reason why you can’t be a mentee to more than one person, and there’s no better formula for good client relations than picking the right mentor in the organization you work for or the client group for whom you are consulting. While you are at it, you might pick a young employee of your client organization to mentor.

Stan’s Tip #4: Entertain, or at least be entertaining
RC: Life is hard enough without having to go through it with a prune face. The shortest time I ever spent in a real job — after I left college the first time — was working for a boss who was incensed that I would suggest in one of her staff meetings that I thought it was “about time we started having a little fun around here.”

“This is a job,” she snapped. “We’re not supposed to be having fun.” That afternoon I went shopping for a new job, and by the next week I had signed on to a great, fun-loving boss, and that relationship lasted 13 years. A good boss enjoys a little comic relief in his or her life. The same is true with a client. Find clients with whom you can share a good laugh, and don’t hesitate to be the one who lightens up the conversation, especially when everyone else is freaking out.

Stan’s Tip #5: Never make the same mistake twice
RC: I would have said, “learn from your mistakes.” We all make them, and sometimes we make them more than once. I have made some serious mistakes. And what I have found is that people don’t hate people who make mistakes. They hate people who do not admit them. I think the reason Dick Nixon got thrown out of office was because when he was given what turned out to be his last chance at public redemption, he said: “Mistakes were made,” instead of “I made a mistake.”

Stan’s Tip #6: Learn how to manage people
RC: Stan’s take is to learn how to delegate. Golf taught me that. Not that you do much delegating in golf, unless it makes you feel important to let a 14-year old kid read a green that you have been making putts on for 20 years. Golf taught me that if I wanted to play golf during the week, I better learn how to get other people to do my work.

My take is a bit different than Stan’s on this one. You can Google “leadership training” and you’ll probably read about 1,000 leadership-training programs before you read any reference to “followship training.” Everyone wants to teach you how to lead or manage (and even these are two different things). No one wants to learn how to follow. You get brought in to a meeting as a high-priced consultant, and it’s natural that you want to give orders rather than show that you can take them. The hardest part of leadership, I think, is also the most rewarding. It’s creating a team to get a job done, and giving yourself a job on the team that you can do well, and letting one of your “subordinates” (perhaps a mentee of yours) in the client’s shop lead the team.

Stan’s Tip #7: Don’t fall in love with “what is”
RC: Here’s the dirty little secret. Nobody really knows “what is” anyway. People just know what they believe what is, and they believe that because they believe it is what is. Work for clients who are truly interested not in what is, but in what is possible. Help them take the blinders off others in their organization who believe that their self worth derives from “the fact” that they know what is and nobody else knows what is. I worked with a woman for a long time with an interesting way of flipping you off in a meeting with a back-of-her-hand gesture anytime you would suggest that her data-rich assessment of what is may be an interesting opinion, but it may not be the truth. I learned then to use Stan’s rule #4 — entertain, or at least be entertaining, especially under that kind of circumstance.

Stan’s Tip #8: Don’t mirror what your client is already doing
RC: Stan says “agency work is all about adding value.” I tell my students that all work is about adding value. Don’t get angry or disappointed when you expect a compliment for what you did yesterday, and the only thing the client says is: “So, what will you do for me tomorrow?” That’s exactly what you want her to say. That means you are expected to add value. You need to be able to show your client some tricks she won’t see at the water cooler.

Stan’s Tip #9: You owe your clients your outside perspective
RC: This has always been a problem of mine. No, the problem isn’t that I don’t feel I owe the client my perspective. I do that freely. That’s the part that turns me on. I’ve often been called an idea guy, so people expect ideas from me. They expect my perspective. What I am terrible at is not backing off when they ain’t buying my point of view. You have to learn to live to fight another day no matter how right you may think your perspective is.

Stan’s Tip #10: Be ethical in everything you do
RC: I meant EVERYTHING! There are no ifs about it. Peddle a bogus story to get publicity for your client and if it works your client will think, appropriately, “If he’ll steal for me, he’ll steal from me.” You’ll be gone. “The best stories,” Billy Fitz used to tell me, “are the ones that have the added benefit of truth.” He used to joke like that, but I pity the guy who thought truth was just an added benefit when he was dealing with Senator Fitzgerald. And I pity the consultant who thinks he or she will ever gain client respect that leads to lifetime loyalty for being anything less than perfectly ethical.

Stan’s Tip #11: Respond, Respond, Respond
RC: Here’s Billy Fitz again. I can hear his voice rising to an Irish crescendo: “The gun goes up, get into the blocks. The gun goes off, get out of the blocks. Get out of the blocks. GET OUT OF THE G.D. BLOCKS.”

Stan’s Tip #12: Hire and keep really good people
RC: I say never be afraid to go after the very best. You never know when the A player out there discovers that he is working for a C player and wants more for himself. Go after the best possible candidates for your agency. Tell him you love him to get him. Show him you love him every day he comes to work.

Stan’s Tip #13: Don’t be afraid to admit a mistake
RC: I already turned Stan’s advice about how not to make the same mistake twice into my simple desultory philippic about not being afraid to admit a mistake. Now I want to go one step further. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. Good clients realize that besides gravity, the most important universal law beyond “Shit Happens” is the law of trial and error. In the military we called it bracketing.

Here’s what bracketing is not. You meet an occasional artilleryman who, it turns out, was a perfectionist. Here’s a case where perfect is the enemy of completion. The perfectionist would never fire off a round without being completely sure that the round would hit the target the first time. Get him into the field of battle, and you find he has paralysis by analysis. You meet these artillerymen at Arlington. The survivor is the one who fires high the first time, takes two clicks back and fires low the second time, and then takes one click up and hits the target — bullseye, “mission accomplished,” as Karl Rove might say. That’s called trial and error, and bracketing is the only way, sometimes, you can get anything important done. You have to make mistakes from which you can learn.

Stan’s Tip #14: Get rid of crappy clients (before they get rid of you)
RC: I just had this exact conversation with a chief executive who asked me to advise him on an agency selection process, but I looked at it from the other side of the coin. What does a client have to be to not be a crappy client? You must be ready, I told him, to fall in love with the agency you pick. Agencies always work hardest for the clients they love, and they love the clients who treat them like they love them. So do that. Conversely, if you are a consultant with an agency and you can’t love your client, don’t be satisfied with having them leave cash on your nightstand. Those things never last anyway. You’ll never have a lasting relationship with a client if you are a conSLUTant. End it yourself, and save your integrity.

Stan’s Tip #15: Be quick, but don’t hurry
RC: Stan quotes legendary basketball coach John Wooden on this one — and it makes sense when you think about it. Here’s the way I put it. Being patient in a golf tournament doesn’t mean slowing down your swing. Show your client that you are leaving no stone unturned in getting him your best advice, and you will do it as quickly as you can without creating a bigger problem than you have been asked to solve. Explain to him that “we may have to do some bracketing, and we should be prepared to make adjustments in our strategy and approach.” But don’t do something stupid because you feel pressured. If a client screams, “Do something, anything, dammit,” pull a piece of limp rope out of your pocket and tell him what he should try to do up it. You might lose a client, but you’ll retain your integrity.

Well, that’s it — my best summary of the advice of a very smart man who is considered by peers and competitors alike to be among the greatest working PR guys anywhere, Stan Stein.

And oh, by the way, I just sent all of the students in my John Aldinger endowed-lecture series “Promotions Commons” a subscription to DomeMagazine.com, just to make sure they read this and that they know I was listening to Stan Stein just as hard as they were. That could have been Stan’s rule #16. Never ask a client — or a student — to do anything you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself.

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.