In this third of three episodes, I’ll be talking about the most recent years in my career, which led me to found the NATA PR agency in 2000.
For the youngest of our listeners, who are wondering where to start looking for your first job, this is a good example. I believe that non-profits that are in the arts or serving a good cause offer young people exceptional jobs. Take the time to find out about the public figures sitting on their boards and how they’re involved in the organization. Looking back, I realize that I had the good luck to start my career off on a very solid footing, because some board members were very committed and involved in the Opera. Because the chair of La Presse was a member, I got to negotiate and create ad campaigns with the biggest French-language newspaper in North America. I created all the campaigns, their strategies and the advertising material (posters, brochures, subscriber documents), working closely with a major ad person from the BCP agency, which later merged with Publicis Groupe.
I could tell you a great deal about those four years, when I learned the basics of everything I’m still doing today.
After that, I held marketing & communications positions for a theatre that was building an entirely new space. I was really missing music, so I activated my contact network and discovered that the classical label ANALEKTA was looking for a marketing director. I spent four exciting years there, during which the CD was still a really popular format. The label could still sell more than a hundred thousand copies of some of its titles. And that was a tour de force for classical music.
Next, I moved briefly over to TV production, still in the communications & marketing department, until the day a friend told me about a colourful character, Salvatore Parasuco, who was also looking to fill a marketing director spot.
It was my entry into the fashion world and, for two years until the fall of 1999, I put together a marketing & communications department for a company that badly needed one.
Today, you’d describe the employee I was as an intrapreneur, because without knowing it I was creating departments from scratch within the company framework as if it were my own. I hit my mid-thirties just before the year 2000, when they announced that the Y2K virus was going to fry computers around the world. There was a whiff of doomsday to it. I began to feel limited in what I could do within companies. And though my energy and talent were recognized, I was restricted in what I wanted to deploy.
So, at the end of 1999, I made the big leap: I became an entrepreneur, providing marketing & communications services to businesses in the music and fashion industries. You’ve got to remember that back in those days, becoming an entrepreneur was not trendy, and didn’t inspire admiration the way it does today – quite the opposite! We were still far away from hit shows like “Dragon’s Den” and “Think Tank”. People who dared to venture out and create their own business were seen as incompetent employees who couldn’t land a good job. Starting a service company was dubious… just goes to show you how things change.
Creating a business is an adventure in self-discovery, but I knew nothing about that when I was doing it – and yet something inside me compelled me. The unconscious? Maybe. The more time passes, the more fascinated I am by our amazing brains. They drive us to invent and create activities, human enterprises of all kinds.
NATA PR was started in 2000 in my living room in Montreal, and later expanded to Toronto and Miami. Today, we operate in all the North American markets, from Vancouver to Los Angeles to Toronto to New York to Dallas… and the list goes on.
And here I am telling you the story in a podcast, which anyone in the world can listen to. So you see, you never can tell what’s going to happen.