How Do You Get the Media to Cover Your Business for FREE (with Richard Lorenzen, the founder of Fifth Avenue Brands

Audio Transcription

On today’s show, the public relations expert, Richard Lorenzen, explains how he was able to build a successful public relations business out of his New York City apartment and how you can get the media to cover your business for free and much, much more.

Oh yes. And on today’s show you’re interviewing a man by the name of Richard Lorenzen who started his New York City based public relations from Fifth Avenue brands at just the young age, Dr c of Fifteen. Richard Lorenzen, welcome onto the show. How are you sir?

I’m good. How are you?

Doing well. Doing well. I gotta ask you this, my friend. You started your, our pr company the age of 15 when many people are not taking life seriously. Can you share with the listeners how you were able to start a public relations firm? It just the age of 15?

Sure. So you know, growing up I was. I would preface it by saying you, I was Kinda like one of those computer nerds growing up who I was always interested in the internet and I wanted to look for different ways that I could start a business and make money online. Uh, you know, I wanted to become an entrepreneur. That is something that I figured out early on when I was a teenager and I was looking at all the different ways that I might be able to do that. And obviously 15 years old, you don’t have a lot of resources to be able to go out and start, you know, we’re real physical business. But I had a computer and I had an Internet connection and my parents’ house. So I realized that I needed to find something that I could do online using that. And that Kinda kicked off itself education journey for me where I taught myself a bunch of different things, like how to code.

I learned html and css and I learned things like Seo and blogging and content marketing and keeping in mind this is, you know, 11 years ago. So it was very early stage in the Internet marketing industry, but I was learning what was already evolving into Seo and web design and all these different things. And as I was doing that, I realized that I was learning a skill set and I was developing a service that I could probably sell to local businesses. And again, this is 11 years ago when digital marketing was a very new thing, advertising on the Internet with a new concepts that most businesses didn’t know yet how much it was worth to them whether they should do it. A lot of companies, especially small businesses that didn’t have a website. Um, so it was kind of a, an opportunity for me to find a niche in the industry early on that I can kind of carve out for myself.

And what I started doing was I would do things as simple as going onto classified websites and forums for business owners and start advertising my services now that I was an expert in digital marketing. After learning about it online for a couple of weeks. And I started selling services like Seo and blogging. And you know, very, very early on, digital pr, helping companies get featured on niche blogs and industry websites and things like that. And it started out really slow, you know, in the beginning I would get a client here and there who would trust me with maybe a few hundred dollars to a, whether it was, you know, design a website for them or to, you know, maybe get them some books of the publicity on a industry website or do some Seo. Started very small like that. But I started to get some results for clients and as I was getting results for them growing their traffic, getting more sales leads for them, they started referring other friends who had businesses.

And that was when I was about 15 or 16 years old. And eventually that led to me meeting the founder of a consulting firm that was based in Washington DC. And he was posting on the forum that he was looking for a digital marketing expert. And being the expert that I. That I thought that I was. I replied back letting him know that he had found an expert and he gave us a shot with, you know, I think it was $300 or $400, something like that, which is a lot of money to me at the time, 15 years old. And I did really well for him. We got traffic and we got leads and over time that turned into a six figure contract for us when I was a teenager. We slowly incrementally ramped up the amount of business that we were getting from this company, uh, in addition to the fact that he started referring other friends.

And so that kind of gave me the launching pad to be able to start the business. Fast forward 11 years later and what we’ve really done, and I would say know I started doing this around the age of 20. We narrowed the scope of the services that we provided from pretty much everything we were doing, web design and digital marketing, Seo, we were doing pr blogging. We looked at what do we do best, where are we creating most value and where do we think the most potential in the market is the incident of that question at the time, you know, we thought it was per turned out to be right. And I narrowed the scope of what I was offering down to that and that really allowed us to scale into where we are today

that are not familiar with what pr or public relations is. Could you share for the folks out there who are going, okay, I’ve heard the phrase per, I’ve heard about public relations but, but what, what really is that?

Sure. So the cornerstone of pr is media relations and what that is, is getting yourself or your business or your products basically covered in the media in the press, whether it’s getting articles about your company in the newspaper or whether it’s getting featured on a television show, a getting covered in the news in a way that promotes your business or promote your brand or your product, uh, typically for the purpose of growing your business, getting more customers, growing your audience, etc. Uh, so it, it’s, it’s the strategy of how do you get news organizations to cover your business for free versus paid advertising where you’re less say buying a, you know, a page ad in the New York times or something like that.

That’s jUst a fantastic story. how a 15 year old and just kind of grinds away, gets a little bit of here. it gets a little success in their, uh, you know, I love the fact that you introduced yourself as a computer nerd and you said, hey, listen, this is something, obviously it’s something you love to do and what we try to teach them to thrive nation out there is find something you’re good at and figure out how to make a living doing it right. Find something you enjoy doing, you know, so go

know it doesn’t even need to be the new shiny object and business, you know, it doesn’t need to be blockchain or it doesn’t need to be ai. You can look at established, mature industries and look at how you can outwork everybody else and can carve out a niche for yourself and still build a very profitable business. You don’t need to find the next facebook.

Absolutely. And I guess the good thing about starting when you were 15, you didn’t have a house. Come on, tell me that, you know, you’re gonna have to pay electric or a trash bill or anything like that. So you had a little bit of an advantage. So maybe that’s maybe some young drivers are listening out there. Listen up. You know what, maybe this whole like where everybody wants me to go, go to college and go do this and get a lot of debt and you have the normal routine. Maybe that just say, hey, you know what, when I’m young like this, maybe I just start something I really enjoy doing and try to build it up. So when did you, when did you get like an office? When did you. I’m trying to picture this. I mean you’re probably working out of your parents’ house, right? Or our apartment. I mean your New York, everything’s an apartment, another microwave out of there. So walk me through what we do. Just the physical location of where you were and how that, how that transpired because that’s kind of fascinating to me.

I would say about 21 years old when I got to a point that I realized that I wanted to start a, you know, pursuing larger clients where it would be the advantages for me to be able to have this space where I can meet them in person

given your bedroom.

For me that was when I saw it as being an investment that would be worth a, you know, it would, it would provide some kind of advantage for growing the business rather than just getting an office space for the sake of having an office space they go to every day. Um, you know, still even today, a lot of the work that we do could be, do, could be done online. We have, you know, members of our team that work remotely from all over the country. Uh, but I think the advantage that you get from having an office space, and I guess it’s particularly for us because we’re in New York city, um, you know, maybe in some other places it’s not an advantage, but for us in New York city, there’s a big tech community here, there’s a big financial community, so there’s lots of potential clients that you can meet with and it does help to have that office space sometimes where you can meet with them.

It was a powerful statement. I want to open it up just a little bit. Powerful statement. You made a business decision to get an office when you decided it was best for the business now for your ego, not because you thought you had to have one, not because everybody knows everybody else and you said yourself, you know, okay, now to go after the big fish or to go after the next level. It makes sense to have this now. So I am finally going to go out there, spend the money, invest in this because that is an investment. I know you’re renting, but still it’s an investment, right? Commitment, because you probably had to sign a three, four, five. I, you know, I don’t know. I’ve never rented space in New York for I’m maybe longer, you know, commitment to it. That’s a, that’s a big chunk of money or committing to. But you did that as a business move. Not a. Well, doesn’t everyone is an awful thing to demean. You know, my ego, I mean I want a big corner office with the big desk and nobody else could walk in the room because it’s so big. My dose. Can you talk

about that on the show all the time? Dr z is you got to run everything through a filter of what’s best for the business. I’m going to ask you this, uh, Richard Lorenzen, for the listeners out there who say, you know what, gosh, I love that idea. You mentioned earlier about getting the media agencies to cover my business for free. Getting media agencies to run stories, to write stories, to cover stories about my business for free. What advice would you have for our listeners out there who have a business who would like to have the local tv, radio, different media outlets cover their business? What advice would you have for the listeners out there for how to get free media coverage of their business?

Sure. The two most important starting point for any pr campaign are you need to have a great story to tell and we’ll unpack that one in a minute. And the other oNe is you need to have relationships. If you can tell the story to us, meaning the reporters or editors who worked for newspapers and tv networks where You can reach out to and say, hey, we have this great story. We want to share it with you. Would you like To interview us and have us on the show or publish your paper? Uh, so those are the two things that you, there’s a lot of other moving parts, but those two things you need to get right in order to make it work.

so you gotta have great story and great context. So just make sure I’m getting ready to type it on the show. And have a great story and great context. is that correct?

Great story, great contacts. So, you know, going back to the story, this is where a lot of business owners, especially when they’re new, npr tend to make a lot of mistakes and it’s why they’ll do something where they’ll put together a pr program, they’ll reach out to a lot of reporters and nothing happens and they don’t know why or they think it doesn’t work. And mosT often it’s because of the story or the content that you’re trying to put out. If you’re trying to create a story about your company or about your product or about yourself that’s promotional and sounds more like a sales message or it sounds more like a billboard or a brochure about why people should buy your product. It’s likely not going to get picked up as a news story when you have to think about news outlets and reporters are looking at how they can provide value for readers.

Whether that values education, whether it’s entertainment, uh, you know, whether it’s, you know, insight they’re looking at how they can create value. So when you’re coming up with a story about yourself and your company, you need to think, put yourself in their shoes and think about how you can provide value. How can you educate readers, how can you entertain readers? So we, when we work with a client, we look at all of the different. We do a deep dive into their company, we look at their branding, their messaging, we look at the story behind how they got started and we look at where the interesting stories are. Is the founder have an interesting backstory about how they overcame obstacles in their life to build a successful company? Or is there an interesting story about the culture in the office? Something quirky that they do that might be entertaining or educational for other business owners.

Um, maybe there’s a story about impact they’re having on the community or on the world. Uh, maybe a specific story about a customer that they really helped. But you have to look at where the story is and if there’s a human interest aspect to it, it’s even better. But you need to focus on telling that powerful story rather than just saying, you know, we, we have the best widget at this and these are the features and this is why you should buy it and it’s only this much money with free shipping if you buy it in the next 10 days. That’s the kind of stuff that reporters get all day long from amateur pr people, from marketers who are new business owners who are new to doing pr and that’s the kind of stuff. THey get hundreds of them a day and they just delete them. You really have to focus on what’s the great story.

I want to ask you this as it relates to, uh, a pr. I’ve read a lot of different pr books over the year, over the years. And uh, I think there are some books that I’ve read that I say to myself, why am I reading this at all? This right here was a copious waste of my time. And then other books you go, wow, that was good. The book that to me was the most useful for learning public relations was recommended to me by a friend who worked for a major pr company that was doing a lot of work with microsoft and the book was gorilla per two point zero wage and effectively an effective publicity campaign without going broke by Michael Levine. Do you have a specific book that you would recommend as it relates to public relations? For the listeners out there?

I would recommend a book called the publicity handbook that it really goes in depth into how to pitch, how to build relationships with journalists, what structurally a pitch should look like when you’re sending, you know, an email pitch to a reporter about your company, what that email should look like, how to format it. So that really covers both the strategy and the tactical. I would recommend picking up the publicity handbook.

Okay. The publicity handbook, I’m putting it on the show notes there. So the publicity handbook. Now you said you have to have good contacts. How do you go about and someone out there is listening and they go, I don’t have any contacts. How do they, how do they start with that? Oh wait, I can contact lenses, contact lenses. I’m an optometrist, richard, so I can help with talking about different kind of context, a different kind of clarify sidebar. Go ahead, Richard Lorenzen. Back to you.

It’s actually not that difficult to cultivate. Lucky. We were living in the age of the internet where you can basically reach out to anybody through social media and what I would recommend doing, you know, first and foremost, you have to know what your target is, right? So look at what reporters are covering your industry and your niche or whatever topic is it, is that you want to be featured about, um, you can go on google news, you can go on social media, you can look, look for all the most recent articles that you know, whether it’s the New York times, whether it’s tech crunch, whatever niche or industry you’re in. Look at who’s wrIting about your industry. And then what you want to do is compile a list of names, whether it’s 10, whether it’s, you know, 30 slash 50. It depends again on the niche. Some niches and a lot of reporters, some don’t, um, but create a list and start reading up on them, start going to their twitter page, started going to their facebook profiles, read five or 10 of their most recent articles, um, learn about what they like, what they don’t like, what they tend to cover a connect with them on linkedin.

And you can start as simply as that, you know, beginning to engage with them on social media, comments on some of their articles, like some of their stuff. Um, start to send them messages. We could send them a message on facebook or on twitter. And a lot of times you’ll find that reporters, uh, you know, whether It’s in their twitter bio or whether it’s on linkedin, a lot of them post their email addresses for people to send them tick. So the easiest way to do this, to get started in terms of harvesting contact information is check their twitter and their linkedin. You may be able to find their email contact if you can’t. There are also a lot of tools and softwares out there that you can use. And most of them are not too expensive, uh, compared to hiring a full service agency to do it for you. Uh, you can use some of these tools. Muck rack is one of them decisions. Another one of them, there’s one called trendkite and these are all tools software that are basically databases for reporter contact. Yeah.

Somebody out there wants us to take notes on this here. So we like to put on the show notes for these. And these are new words, new concepts and new ideas for a lot of people out there. you said muck rack. Can you spell that for the listeners out there?

Yeah, that’s muck rack m u c k, r a, c k.

okay.

Trends. So trends to you already and d a, k I a t

got it. Okay. And what’s the next one?

The other one was vision c, I s I o n.

So between those three, uh, you know, you should be able to find something that works for your price point. They’re all very good tools. We’ve used them all. And again, like I said, the most important thing is compiling that list of names of reporters that so you know, what you’re looking for, but once you have that list and you know what they like to cover and you’re familiar with their work and you’re beginning to engage with them, that would be a good time to get their contact information and now you can send them a pitch about your business and your story and what you’re working on

your business. I want to make sure we’re not skipping this part because he started, you started at the young age of 15, richard and you went onto different websites, different job posts to get your clients. Have you had to summarize how you got your first 10 clients? How would you, for somebody out there who’s maybe looking to startup pr company and in California or some other market, uh, how, how, what would, what advice would you have for getting their first 10 clients

in two words? I would say direct response. And really what it was, it’s just consistent outreach to people, cold outreach, um, you know, introducing yourself, what you do, asking you about their needs, whether or not, you know, they’re in the market maybe for a new agency, but I’ve personally, and I’m a direct response guy, so I, that’s, you know, an area of marketing that really worked for us as it’s a channel that we’ve really scaled. Um, but I definitely think if you’re in a service business, especially in agency business, it’s more valuable in the beginning for getting clients quickly. Then, you know, let’s say a running paid traffic which tends to get expensive while you test it, uh, where content marketing, which tends to take a little bit of time, they get traction if you take those and you compare it to just going out and asking people to buy our product and making them an offer, you can get traction pretty quickly that way. That’s what I did in the beginning. It was very early on. It was very basic stuff, classified websites for them. Just meeting people and talking to them, telling them what I did, asking them to buy. And to, you know, what we do now where we do a lot of different outreach through email, through linkedin and your different platforms a, but I’m a big believer in, in direct response for agencies.

So how many people work

with you today on your team? Do you have like a huge team? Do you have to keep the team lean or what? What does the team look like?

Okay. Most of them are involved in either client services or marketing and I definitely liked keeping the team lead. we’ve been able to provide really high touch level, uh, services to our client and I think for an agency structure that there’s lots of agencies out there that have gone from zero to thousands of employees and it’s just really tough to quality control it. So I’ve enjoyed staying lean.

Uh, richard eric shop here. I was going to ask you, where do you see most companies going wrong with today’s digital pr and marketing environment? So there’s some big mistake people keep making over and over that you see as you work with your clients.

Again, number one is definitely the storytelling that you can do a lot of other things wrong in pr, but if you have a great story, the news is still going to cover it and that kind of awful applies to social media and other areas of marketing as well. If you’re putting out great content, people are going to share it, they’re going to talk about it and engage with it. So, you know, I, I do think there needs to be a lot more emphasis around storytelling and quality of messaging versus just trying to pump out tons of content. That’s a big thing that I see, you know, a lot of people doing. um, and then the other thing would probably be, and this also goes back to the other thing which is, you know, relationship, uh, focusing on building real high quality relationships rather than just trying to, you know, cultivate transactional relationships where people do something for you and then you move on. So a lot of emphasis on messaging, a lot of emphasis on relationships.

So what does the next 12 months look like for you as you’re growing a richard, you’re growing your agency or your growing your business. Obviously you’ve had some, some really good success so far with fifth avenue brands, a company you’ve been working on since the age of 15. What do you see happening over the next 12 months? What’s your big goal?

No, for us, we’re actually first book is always serving clients, you know, we’re, we’re making sure that we’re providing the maximum and the value that we can for our client. And then number two is I definitely think that asia is going to be a developing market for us. Uh, I spend a lot of time in asia, we do a little bit of business there now and I think that it’s going to grow into a much bigger market for us in 2019 and 20, 20. Uh, obviously, you know, you’re seeing the economic growth that’s happening in areas like China and South Korea and awful southeast asia like Singapore and Vietnam. Uh, and we think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity there for companies that punt to bridge the gap between what they’re already doing in asia and awful scaling into the us market and that’s something where we’ve been uniquely positioned to be able to help some asian companies with doing so that that’s something that’s on our radar for next year.

For people that want to learn more about your business and decide where they want to work with you or just learn more about you and your and your story on what website do you want to direct all the listeners to go check out?

Sure. They can go check out, check out some of the clients you work with in case studies and we’ll be happy to talk to them.

Fifth avenue brands.com. Correct. Okay. We’ll put that on the show notes there. And z. We’re always curious about the habits and routines of people that are having abnormal success. Kind of curious dudes, aren’t we? We are curious cats like george, the george, and so this just in here. Richard Lorenzen, I want to ask you this. What did the first four hours of your typical day look like?

Good. I like this kind of stuff because I’m actually really into hacking routines.

Yeah.

So the first four hours, that would be from 4:30 to 8:30 AM. Let’s see. I get up at 4:30. So I think that’s, you know, that’s always been something for me. I’ve been doing that my whole life. I’ve been an early riser since I was a little kid and I definitely think that that gives me some kind of an advantage because you can get a lot of work done before the rest of the world wakes up and before all the distractions, like the phone ringing and stuff like that start. So I get up at 4:30. I usually spend the first hour or so reading. I try not to touch any devices for no phone, no email for the first hour and no news. So cnn, but I spend time reading, I spend a little bit of time journaling and just reviewing my plan for the next quarter, for the current year, uh, going over my goals.

I try to do a little bit of meditating or breathing exercises, do a little bit of exercising, eat a good breakfast, and then I’m at my desk, uh, usually by about 6:30, first two hours of my day from 6:30 to 8:30 at my desk are usually spent doing, you know, a lot of different things. Sometimes it’s a, you know, working on stuff with my team, like management related stuff or sometimes it’s working on a client related stuff. I try not to do my first conference call until about 10:00 AM. This way I can spend the first few hours of my day working on just some of the heavy lifting and getting done the most difficult tasks of the day. And then I spend the rest of the day doing phone calls or meetings or events or whatever else I have going on.

So at 4:30 in the morning, you’re waking up at 4:30. And what time are you doing your reading and your journaling? What time’s that?

That’s between 4:30 and 5:30 5:45. I usually take about an hour, sometimes a little bit more to do all that stuff.

When do you work out? When are you getting jacked?

Right after that. So that’s around five, 45, 6:00. I try to the gym in my building open a little bit before 6:00, so I tried to get up there right around then.

Did you go in there and just throw the weights around and inject steroids in front of everybody? Everybody else? We’re kind of routine. Do you have.

it’s a combination of, you know, lifting weights and also running on the treadmill for three cardio.

Okay. Now you’re at your desk like at 6:30 though. So you’re getting. You’re working out like 45 minutes, is that right? Or probably about 30, 30 minutes. Okay. Okay. Okay.

That’s it.

No. See I have a few more questions for Mr. Richard Lorenzen, but I’m gonna let you interrogate them because I know you want to paint them into a corner with tough entrepreneurial questions that only richard could answer. And then marshall morris, the amazon bestselling author of the start here book that we have. He’s wants to interrogate you and then eric, it’s like british surrounded on four sides. Come to come to the tough questions. Samurai questions here. He’s like, chuck norris were the samurais were closing nc. Good. Ready

richard? So what do you go to bed when you’re a kid? You’re like, you’re going to bedtime. That’s a tough one. I know. She getting six and a half hours of sleep. Not too bad. That’s. That’s actually, I have a sleep center. It’s one of my businesses I have. So it always amazes me that some people wouldn’t want to carry around this, this badge of pride about it. I want to do like 87 minutes of sleep. Now,

this is not political. This is not a political statement, but this is a statement that was made by a political figure. I’ll never forget during one of the debates where Donald Trump, president trump and president, or a presidential candidate, hillary clinton and presidential candidate Donald Trump. We’re debating. Yes, and he went on a tangent about how he requires little sleep and she requires so much sleep goes I require so little sleep and she requires huge amounts of sleep, but it was a huge thing because when you ended up reading the transcripts, he basically was excited that he only sleeps three hours a day, so he’s still alive. So that’s his move. I guess that’s his move as he’s coming back,

man, you know, and some people depends on how you get into ram and it’s two hours of sleep is the quality of sleep and how quickly you get there. And so there’s a lot of things kind of, but you know, six and a half isn’t that bad because what happens in a lot of times is that I’m a night owl and play play over here as a morning lark. Yeah. So every time we have. Every time I have a guy or a gal on that talks about their daily routine, they get pearly clay looks at me and kind of raises an eyebrow, goes [inaudible] [inaudible] because I like to do most of my heavy lifting in the evenings when everybody else is asleep, you know, and so I’m kind of that

my wife, my wife is a night owl.

There you go.

Your best work at night.

Different for everybody. It is. And that’s the point I was trying to trying to make on that because a lot of people listen to success stories and then go, okay, if I do exactly what richard does every day I’m going to be successful and there is some truth to that and we follow me.

Let me give you audio of dr z, what he sounds like at midnight. He says, so this is dr z. Is this batman? No, the dr darcy.

Cause he would happen to protest richard about 9:00 PM is the hour. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movies where. What’s that movie where the wolf and the and the eagle and then right at dusk they know they turned into a person and then or whatever. No, it was a guy from ferris bueller resilience, you know, I know I got to google, but what happens about 9:00 PM, clay starts shutting down. I mean, he, dr c dot, he is like on a. I mean, uh, I mean it’s like falling off a cliff and I am like, let’s go, let’s go. So we passed each other in the nocturnal portion of the day is warrior, what forest warrior. And I get in the pattern of interest to younger, another movie. So. Okay. Who’s the point is you got fears. Who is that? Who’s that actor? Huh?

Ferris bueller actor. I’m looking for right now. Ferris. Go actor. Okay. Oh, it’s matthew broderick. Matthew broderick. Matthew. Matthew broderick.

Yeah.

We’re gonna. Figure this out. This is. Okay. We’ve got. This is the most important thing in the world and now we’ve solved it. Matthew broderick movies and here it is. This showing up here. Does he show he’s pulling it up here, a z? Give us the real and raw truth

place, baby. Alight. Here we go. We’re getting ready, richard. This is the important stuff. Falls apart. Here we go. Wait. In the movie, there’s a. There’s a curse on the couple and the one right at, right at dusk. Dusk, one turns into the human form and the other turns into it’s audio. It’s a silly movie, but the point is, is that at 9:00, that’s clay and I are passing each other and missing cross spectrum. Okay. I, I way when I went there, I went there.

I am serious. And don’t call me shirley.

Okay. We’re going back to the interview. So now, uh, Richard Lorenzen perlin listeners out there, who are we? We have a lot of curiosity because you started a business at the age of 15. You’re doing very well now. Your company’s doing great. Are there certain books that you’d recommend for our listeners out there? Media of one book or two books for you? Go. You have to read this book. This book is.

I would recommend you’d. I read the compound effect by darren hardy and I was probably 20 when I read that book. It’s a book about productivity, basically your, your schedule and your routine to get the most done every day and and also how to, how to kind of tweak your mindset as well for productivity and I would definitely recommend reading that book. Anything by robin sharma, author of a friend of mine. He is a lot of great books. I would definitely, definitely recommend it.

How do you spell that? Spell that name?

Robin sharma. S h a r m a.

Got it. Okay. So robin sharma, darren hardy, compound effect. Anything by robin sharma, marshall morris, coauthor of the amazon bestselling book. Start here. It is now time for you to paint our guests into a corner and to attack him as only you can. Okay. Here we go. So, um, so we, we’ve interviewed a number of different mentors, marketing, pr, and Michael Levine. He wrote guerilla pr two point. Oh, he talks about needing to spend 11 percent of your gross revenue on marketing and hearing you talk about needing to set aside a certain amount of time to continually reach out to different people for, for being featured in the news. What we see a lot of times with business owners is that they will do that habit until they become busy and then slowly but surely that management time, like you said, that you set aside, you want schedule a conference call and it sounds like you do that very intentionally so that you can do most of the heavy lifting before, you know, burning fires come up during the day. Why? Why is that so important that you protect that time in those resources to do that, that as you’re growing the company and working on the business as well as working in the business, scheduling time, uh, to actually improve the business, why has that been so integral and important to you moving forward?

Well, it’s really important to be able to allocate that time block every single day consistently where you’re spending time on activity that’s actually revenue producing activity, right? Because when you’re running a business, there are so many different things that come up that you’re just reacting to all day long, putting out fires, dealing with issues with your team, client issues. There are a lot of different things that pop up unexpectedly and you have to react to them immediately. So if you’re not intentionally carving out time every single day where you’re investing yourself into revenue, producing activities, whatever that looks like for you, based on your goals, you’ll be busy, but you’ll find that over time you’ll lose your momentum, starts shrinking. And that’s what I found for me, you know, and I think then you need to figure out what time of the day works best for me to schedule that activity in.

And you know, going back to what I said before, I tend to be the most productive in the morning. So I’ve found that if I’m spending that time from 6:30, uh, you know, up until about 10:00 AM really focusing on, you know, the nitty gritty stuff that needs to get done to really move the needle in the business. And then the rest of the day I can spend time responding to emails, phone calls, putting out fires, whatever it comes up. Um, and again, you need to find the time of the day that works best for you. But I do really think it’s important to identify what are those revenue producing activities for me and how do I make sure I’m doing them consistently every single day, even when I’m really busy with, you know, uh, you know, things are great and we’re making money and we have business, we have projects you still need to be doing those things that are laying the foundation and planting the seeds for more growth tomorrow and next year and down the road.

My final question for you, do your, your personal life. I want to, I want to take a look into the man outside of the world of pr and then eric is going to one up me with a question that, that, uh, probably a, a game changing question that requires cow bell to celebrate. So do you have a. Are you a family guy? You’re a single guy. Walk us through because you had so much success. I mentioned his wife earlier, so. Well, I mean, I mean, do you have a lot of kids? Do you have like, I mean I have five kids. I mean I have, I have like a herd of kids, but you couldn’t afford cable for a long time. So richard, how manY kids do you have? How many kids do you have?

I’m married but I have no kids, but in recent years I guess after getting married I figured out how to be a lot better at balancing between personal life and business. So I used to be working a lot more hours than I am now. I still work a decent amount. I probably put in about 12 hours a day or a little bit less, but I’ve definitely become better at having that balance where you go home at the end of the day and you recharge, do something different, do something fun with your wife. Um, it’s a good way to stay married and just delivering the business.

Yes. Okay. Eric chop saw with the final hot question. Okay. I want to know where, where does your drive come from when you were 15 and starting your first business? Were your parents driven? People were, uh, were you born with the drive where they entrepreneurs, where it come from?

I spent a lot of time thinking about it and you know, obviously I grew up in New York. I grew up just outside of manhattan in the suburb, so I was in New York as a kid my whole life growing up, you know, around the city and just seeing so many examples of people who are really successful entrepreneurs. Seeing examples of. Obviously wall street is here and business and politics. So growing up around all of that, I think, you know, at some point when I was a teenager, you know, just seeing everything, seeing New York city and all the abundance that’s here, I realized that I wanted to figure out a way to be like that too, you know, how can I do something that’s really big or important or know achieved some level of success and that’s kind of what kicked it off. But again, if it’s probably, I think it’s a combination of different factors.

Some of it’s inherent, you know, you’re born with maybe some drive that, uh, you know, others aren’t, I don’t know, maybe some of it through nurture. Um, you know, my, my father is a fireman here in the city. My mother stayed home with the kids and she’s also a novelist, but she was always interested in entrepreneurship. So I, you know, I think it’s a little bit of a lot of different factors, but definitely I would say, you know, growing up in New York, I was fortunate to have surrounded by an ecosystem of, uh, you know, entrepreneurship and finance. So that was definitely something that helped drive me.

I’ll tell you what, richard, you are a wealth of knowledge. I know that we have a lot of listeners out there that are going to want to learn more about you and andrew per affirm. What is the one website you would direct all of our listeners to check out today if they want to learn more about you? Do you want to, you want to send him to fifth avenue? Richard lorenzen dotcom or where’s the best place to continue this conversation digitally for anybody out there?

Well, they can definitely go to my instagram, instagram.com backslash and obviously they want to learn more about me. They can see all my, you know, my folks there, they can reach out to me directly. Otherwise they want to connect with the company. They can also go to any brands. Com.

All right, well richard, we’d like to end every show with a boom, which around here stands for big, overwhelming optimistic momentum. So essentially we say three, two, one and then we end with a boom boom. That’s what we do in New York. You say boom. A lot. I know it’s probably both. So richard, are you prepared to give us a boom from New York city? By the way, those kind of social media. I do this dr. [inaudible] and richard is at linkedin and I just didn’t use linkedin to be my buddy. Is it, is it a business broker? Sure. Yeah. So we can business bro up, bro. Bro. dawg, let’s do this guys. Here we go. Let’s roll it up.