Susan von Seggern handed the finances to her business partner and stopped looking at them. Then she decided their Los Angeles PR agency should open a New York office -- a lease, three hires, salaries, insurance, payroll taxes -- without opening the books first. Her partner pushed back. Susan says she didn't listen.
Then the dot-com crash hit, then the 9/11 recession, and PR budgets disappeared. A forensic accountant looked at the books and told them what they had to bring in each month to keep going. They weren't close. Susan took a home equity loan against the condo she had bought in her twenties to cover final paychecks, handed off the New York lease, and closed the office. People lost jobs in both cities.
The leadership question here isn't about accounting. It's about what happens when you delegate a function and quietly delegate your attention along with it, and what it takes to hear a partner who is telling you something you don't want to hear. Susan is a Los Angeles PR consultant with more than two decades in the field, starting as a major label publicist working with artists including Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Elton John, and Ice Cube. She and her former business partner are still close friends, which she credits to how deliberately they both tried to do right by people on the way down.
We also get into earned media, why lead time is the thing clients underestimate most, and her three years doing PR for one of the world's largest online gambling companies.
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