Gender roles affecting leadership has always been a questionable statement. The current crisis has challenged leaders worldwide. These leaders have tackled the COVID-19 outbreak with different innovative yet efficient strategies. Amongst these leaders, the female leaders too, are contending against all the odds and doing an exceptional job right now. Women entrepreneurs have always been a source of motivation for aspiring businesswomen. Inspired from such boss ladies like Oprah, Martha Stewart, and Shonda Rhimes — Lindsey Myers (Founder at Concrete Blonde Consulting) started her entrepreneurial journey. She founded Concrete Blonde Consulting in 2016 to pursue her passion for building reputations and revenues through business development marketing strategies.
“I’m inspired every day by some of the female founders I meet and more recently women like Sallie Krawcheck and Whitney Tingle,” shared Lindsey. She is an exceptional communication expert and a successful entrepreneur. In the consulting industry, she has an implausible win-streak for counselling clients from the Fortune 500 companies, to assist in increasing profits, manage brand reputations, and gain market share. This expertise has also rewarded her with several awards such as PRSA Big Apple award, PRSA Bronze Anvil Award, eight MarCom awards, nine Fair Media Council Folio Awards, Communicator Award, SABRE award, and an Excellence in Communications award.
Bouquet of Tailored Services and Products
Concrete Blonde Consulting is a full-service consulting and marketing firm in NYC. It specializes in providing custom marketing solutions for profit and growth. To do so, it examines the clients’ business development pipeline, which enables it to identify new areas of growth while also creating strategies to amplify current opportunities. In addition to this, Concrete Blonde also provides a competitive media analysis, streamline marketing campaigns, and builds additional sources of revenue. It caters these services to various industries including consumer products and services, tech, lifestyle, hospitality, and non-profit companies.
“Communications is a rapidly changing field and our firm is continually transforming to harnesses the powers of both influence and interaction,” asserts Lindsey. The company’s wide range of services also includes a variety of tools ranging from third-party PR endorsements to social influencer campaigns to reach consumers and drive businesses.
Concrete Blonde believes that every client is unique. It partners with them to unearth their business goals and then create tailored strategic marketing plans, with benchmarks to chart the progress and target its methods. The distinguishing factor that sets the company apart is that Concrete Blonde is not only responsive to the client’s needs but also to the ever-changing world in which the clients operate.
Supporting and Serving the Clients
Presently, Concrete Blonde’s core services have upsurged in demand due to the pandemic, thus it is highly focused on servicing its clients with the best. Lindsey also underlined that many of the hospitality and travel sectors have been impacted severely by the pandemic. Hence, for all consultancy companies supporting and serving these sectors should be the top priority.
Clients have always been and will remain the highest priority for the company. Lindsey and her team are striving to offer better media coverage to its clients. She added, “Gaining media coverage that can move the needle for our clients in those sectors has been our largest focus.” She believes in times of such uncertainty– being a source of positivity benefits, not just the clients but also improves communication.
Strategies for Persisting Pandemic
The pandemic has managed to affect every business sector and the world of media is no different. The local businesses rely largely on advertising from local businesses—mostly restaurants and diners—as the main part of their revenue model. Due to the lockdown imposed as a preventive measure, business practices have come to halt affecting adversely on the revenue. Lindsey adds, “There has been a domino effect of small businesses being hit by the pandemic are less likely to advertise and sadly I believe we are going to a lot of our local news sources.” She also highlighted that even large media houses are experiencing significant layoffs. Consequently, the media landscape is shrinking and coverage is more competitive.
Under such circumstances, it has become important for companies to ensure their PR team is strong and capable of meeting their needs in this ever-changing world. Besides, a situation like this is extremely challenging for leaders. As a leader, Lindsey is mostly responsible for business development and communication strategy. However, she’s also animated in creating the vision for the company.
Presently, Lindsey has been striving to inspire her team and is continually ensuring their well-being. “Remember that we are all human and everyone is going through something right now,” says Lindsey. She has introduced various strategies to make this timeless hectic for the team such as making workload manageable, and ensuring they have all the tools to do their job effectively.
Seize and Savour the Opportunities
Globally, there is a health emergency along with unprecedented economic downfall, and managing all this requires a positive outlook—especially from the leaders. In line with the current crisis, Lindsey shared some constructive wisdom, “Whenever the world has experienced periods of collective trauma and the universe is thrown into a state of flux—it’s hard on the human mind because people innately resist change. However, it’s possible to train yourself to go beyond that initial state of resistance and embrace this period. It’s hard. It takes a lot of work. But, if you’re able to accomplish it you will experience more growth than you ever could have imagined and find a way to enrich your life. This is a time that is ripe with opportunity— it should be seized and savoured!
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Read full magazine : The 10 Women Business Leaders Overcoming the Pandemic
