Twelve Years In: What I'd Tell My 2003 Self

I started 5W in May 2003. Five thousand dollars in the bank. No clients. One bedroom in Manhattan that was also the office. Twelve years later, the firm has crossed a hundred and twenty people, two coasts, and a list of clients I would not have believed possible from where I was standing in 2003. Here is what I would tell anyone starting now.

1. Sell before you build.

The single most expensive mistake first-time founders make is building before selling. You don't need a perfect product. You need a customer willing to pay. The product gets fixed in contact with the customer — never before. If nobody will pay, the business doesn't exist. Sell first. The product will catch up.

2. Cash is the only metric that matters in year one.

Profit, growth, valuation — all of it follows cash in the door. Ask for the deposit. Bill the retainer. Get paid on signature, not on net-60. I have seen excellent businesses die because the founder was too polite to send the invoice. Politeness is not a financial strategy.

3. Hire slow. Fire fast.

The most painful lesson I have learned, and the most expensive. The wrong hire costs more than the empty seat. Every founder I respect has told me the same thing — they waited too long to let someone go. Move faster than you want to. The team you build in the first three years sets the ceiling for the next twenty.

4. Digital and earned belong on the same team.

The biggest operational mistake I see agencies making in 2015 is keeping their digital practice and their earned-media practice in separate silos, with separate P&Ls and separate creative directors. The clients have one budget and one brand. The agency should have one team. The firms that figure out how to operate on both sides of that wall will own the next ten years. The firms that don't will spend the next decade explaining why the integration deck doesn't match the org chart.

5. The brand is the founder. Until it isn't.

In the first five years, the founder is the brand. The reporter wants the founder on the call. The customer wants the founder in the meeting. The investor is buying the founder. Use it. Then, around year five, you have to engineer your own replacement on every surface where the founder is the bottleneck. The companies that scale past the founder do this on purpose. The ones that don't, plateau.

6. Crisis is the test. Build for it before it arrives.

Every company gets a crisis. The product fails. The executive falls. The customer screenshots the email. The only question is whether you have the infrastructure to absorb it. Build the press relationships before you need them. Build the playbook before you need it. The firm with the playbook in the drawer wins. The firm building the playbook at 11pm on a Friday loses.

7. Stamina is the unfair advantage.

Talent is overrated. Capital is overrated. The founders who win are the ones still working in year seven, year ten, year fifteen — after the early excitement has burned off and the work is mostly grinding. The market eventually rewards the operator who refused to quit. Decide now whether you are that person. Most people aren't. That's the opportunity.

I built 5W because nobody would hire me. Twelve years later, the firm is still independent, still operator-led, and still picking up the phone at 11pm when the crisis call comes. The work has not gotten easier. The stakes have gotten bigger. That is the trade an operator makes — and it has been worth every minute.

EPR Founder Archive — The Early Years

5W at Ten: An Operator's View of PR in 2013 · Ronn Torossian: A Decade Building 5W · Twelve Years In: What I'd Tell My 2003 Self