Twelve years at bat with Jon Newman and Josh Dare

Just a few weeks ago on July 1, The Hodges Partnership celebrated its 12^th birthday. Celebrations ensued—the annual baseball outing—a Nats game this year—as well as lunch in D.C. and a visit to The Newseum.

Celebrations aside, what better time than an anniversary to reflect on the past, the present and what’s next for Hodges?

I sat down with founders Jon and Josh last week to chat with them about all of that:

What are your proudest accomplishments for Hodges?

Jon Newman: Lots of things. To begin with, learning how to manage a business and being named one of the top 100 PR agencies in the country. [O’Dwyer’s annual rankings]

Josh Dare: I’d add the culture we’ve created, the things we offer employees, from fun things to educational things, the spirit of comradery. Amid some great work, we can still have a lot of fun. In 12 years, you can count on one hand the people who have left us for other jobs (aside from those who moved), and we like to think it’s because of the culture we’ve created.

Jon Newman: Most importantly, long-standing client relationships that have developed into friendships as well. We’re proud of relationships we’ve had over the year with clients like Snagajob, AMF, FCEDA, and University of Richmond. It’s very important as you go to work every day that you have those type of relationships. When we look back, we can say we’ve had a lot of fun not only doing the work but getting to know the great people. Whether these people stay clients or not, they are people that we know will remain friends.

Both: Oh, and proving our wives wrong.

When you originally came up with the idea to launch the business, how long did it actually take to launch?

Josh Dare: Once you catch the entrepreneurial bug, it’s hard to go back. Jon and I started having conversations—I had visions of being a solo practitioner. The Martin Agency’s PR arm starting to shrink. A friend suggested Jon and I talk to each other, knowing we were both thinking of going solo. It was Jon who actually proposed that we to strike out together. He mentioned at the time that Richmond had only one independent PR firm, and with the growth of the Richmond business community, there was likely room for another one.

Despite the fact that it was a terrible time to start new business, we ended up putting out our shingle on July 1, 2002. We retained a number of bad advisors that roundly gave us bad advice and cost us more than we should have ever paid. Even with that, we were able to secure a client, and I remember even before we had a space to work from, we were taking conference calls on my cell phone. From there, it’s just kind of grown. We hired our first employee, Stacey, within two and a half months. From idea to conception, it all happened within a few months.

What have been some of the changes in the industry in the past 12 years?

Josh Dare: When we were coming back from one of our very first meetings in D.C., we thought the client would be so impressed that we knew how to write an email from our mobile phone. Wow, what pioneers we were.

Jon Newman: The industry has changed so quickly, and it continues to change in significant ways. There’s a tremendous amount of learning and self-teaching you have to do to stay ahead of these changes, of technology—social media, content marketing, lead generation. If you don’t spend time taking a breath and thinking about it and learning from others, you’re left in the dust. That’s something we try really hard to do. If you don’t, you risk losing any competitive edge.

Josh Dare: With the exception of a few, I think we’re ahead of our clients with respect to staying out ahead of the technology and the evolving tactical approach to our business. But there’s no doubt there have been huge changes.

Is Hodges now what you envisioned it to be when you started?

Josh Dare: I remember Jon saying, in five years we could have five people and in 10 years we could have 10 people—but we didn’t think we would grow much past that. It’s bigger today than I ever thought it would be. I didn’t think it would grow beyond the capacity where Jon and I couldn’t work on every single client we have. When we originally were shopping for office space, we were looking only for a few hundred square feet. Even when we moved into this building, we didn’t anticipate needing the upstairs. And now eight people work upstairs. We built the downstairs for eight people, and now we’re more than double that.

Jon and I came at founding this agency from two very different backgrounds, which touched PR in very different ways. Jon’s background was as a reporter and news director. I dealt with PR people from a client’s perspective, having worked in the corporate and start-up worlds as well as the government.. In founding Hodges, we intentionally wanted to apply those experiences to create an agency that in both of our previous lives, we would have wanted to work with.

I can’t tell you the amount of frustration I had over the years with agencies I hired that you could tell they just were going through the motions. And I’m sure Jon has stories has about PR people that were ill-prepared in pitching him stories. We feel like we’ve created an agency that both clients and journalists want to work with.

Jon Newman: We always try to be truthful and transparent. We’re not going to be people that are going to beat our chests or sell something that shouldn’t be sold. We’ve probably won and lost a lot of business based on that philosophy. We’ve relied on word of mouth and good client relationships. We save our best promotion for our clients. We’ve always tried to establish relationships first.

Josh Dare: It took us years to be convinced there was value in applying for awards. For a long time, we resisted, thinking it smarter to just focus on the work. We’ve transitioned mainly because of employees wanting to feel good about the work we’ve done here. In the five years of the Rising Star award from PRSA, four of them have worked here. Jon and I deserve no credit for this—only in that we’ve hired good people.

What’s next?

Jon Newman: We’re committed to being a leader in this new hybrid that is evolving, telling clients’ stories not only through media relations but on social platforms, and more recently, with sponsored content. We hope to exert that leadership through things like our new Starters series. But we’ll never turn our back to our media relations roots. We’re excited though to see where the industry is heading. We expect to grow the agency on the back of our expertise in creating and managing content, and how that marries with social platforms. If we do that well, we’ll be in a good position for the next 12 years.

Josh Dare: What I’d love to tell is next is that we’ll have a ringside seat to a new ballpark in the Bottom. But don’t get me started…