Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen. This is Rhamy Alejeal, your host of People Processes. We're so excited to have you tune in today. Today we are interviewing Lee Caraher.

She is the founder and CEO of double forte PR, did a double forte PR and digital marketing. She is the author of “Millennials and Management: The Essential Guide To Making it Work at Work.” She based the book on her experience with epically failing and then succeeding at retaining millennials in her business. Her second book, “The Boomerang Principle, Inspire Lifetime Loyalty From Employees” was published in 2017. It's a pragmatic and actionable guide to creating high performing work cultures ready for the future. And we are so excited to have her on. Lee, are you there?

I'm here, Rhamy. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I'm ecstatic to have you. I want to start with figuring out how you got into your current business, doing PR and really writing a lot about HR work.

So I started my PR career after college. I graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota with a degree in medieval history. Very helpful. I did not know what I was going to do when my friend Ramona and I were talking and she said, you should really check out this PR thing. I think you'd do well in it. And so I checked it out and here I am almost a little more than 30 years later having been in the public relations career and communications career my whole career.

30 years, man, you must start it at I guess what age, age to age, three rolled right out of college.

Sorry. You know, I'm very enhanced.

Sure. Well, in 30 years of doing this, I know you've had some crazy highs and some probably pretty rough lows. So what I love to do is start with our guests talking about their toughest time, because I think our listeners learn more from the failures in our guests stories and they do from the successes. So why don't you take us really to that time, maybe even like a specific day you realized you had a problem, what happened and tell us that story. Then we can talk about maybe some of the things that our listeners could learn.

Sure. So I started my company with a co-founder, a very good friend who we'd worked together many years before we started the company. In four years he said, I really don't wanna do this PR thing anymore, Lee. He left the company and actually he came back and then he left again. Which is about my second book, boomerang. But well, going forward, a few years ago I was thinking about what is next for the company. The company needs to transcend my tenure there and who would take over for me. There really wasn't anybody in the company who either wanted to or could become the CEO of the entity. So I was intent on bringing somebody in. I did that. I brought someone I knew pretty well.

I thought of the company and some cultural things were a bit different as you always will. You know, everything is not static. But my gut, I was very intent on finding this person and getting that person in place which I did. After a couple of years, that thing happened, it was like, Oh well, it's just him. He's just different than me, etc. And then one day or one week, he lost four clients all at the same time, really for the same reason. Not for our performance, but really about him. And I was like, okay, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I go, you have to listen to your gut. So, we parted ways and I wished him well. But it takes a long time to recover from that. You know, you don't just like one day have a succession plan and the next day, get rid of that person and say, okay, everything's okay. You really have to read it.

Right. The cascading. Yeah. We had a guest not too long ago, in a very similar situation. Brought on a COO with the idea of this person eventually taking over in the the investment and transition time to getting them up and then, that person not working out. It's a morale hit, if nothing else, not to mention operational hits your bottom line...