Mimi MacLean:
Welcome to the Badass CEO Podcast. This is Mimi MacLean. I'm a mom of five, entrepreneur, Columbia Business School grad, CPA, and angel investor, and I'm here to share with you my passion for entrepreneurship. Throughout my career, I have met many incredible people who have started businesses, disrupted industries, persevered, and turned on opportunity into success.

Mimi MacLean:
Each episode, we will discuss what it takes to become and continue to be a badass CEO directly from the entrepreneurs who have made it happen. If you're new in your career, dreaming about starting your own business, or already an entrepreneur, the Badass CEO Podcast is for you. I want to give you the drive and tools needed to succeed in following your dreams.

Mimi MacLean:
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Mimi MacLean:
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Mimi MacLean:
Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden is the CEO of Ruder Finn, one of the largest independent communication consultancies in the world. Ruder Finn was co-founded by her father, David Finn, in 1948 in New York City. In a more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Bloomgarden has developed communication programs to help shape and enhance the reputation for clients, including Citi Group, PepsiCo, Cisco, and Microsoft.

Mimi MacLean:
Under Dr. Bloomgarden's leadership, Ruder Finn opened up one of the first global communication offices in China over 25 years ago, which has grown to eight offices in the region. Dr. Bloomgarden has also overseen the growth of Ruder Finn Innovative Studios, which is one of the industry's largest dedicated digital teams with expertise in online presence and reputation management and the development of insights and data analytics. Dr. Bloomgarden has recently been named PR CEO of the Year by PR News' PR Platinum Awards.

Mimi MacLean:
To get your top 10 tips. Every entrepreneur should know, go to thebadassceo.com/tips.

Mimi MacLean:
Kathy, thank you so much for coming on today at really appreciate it. I first want to congratulate you for getting PR CEO of the Year by PR Newswire The Platinum Awards. It's a great accomplishment. Congratulations to you.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Thank you so much. It's great to talk with you, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. I'm excited because there's so much to unpack with your story. And with, first of all, your dad passing, I'm sorry about that, in the last year, that must have been really hard. But he started this company in 1948 and now you're running one of the largest communication consultancies in the world as a female in a male-led business, right? What an accomplishment. I guess I'd love to first start your story. Once you got out of college, did you start working directly for him, or did you decide...

Mimi MacLean:
Because there's going to be a lot of people who are listening here who also have family businesses. Do you go right into the family business, or do you try to like sow your oats somewhere else and then come back and work your rank up through that way? I'd love to hear your story.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Thanks, Mimi, and thanks for your kind word about my dad. I mean, thankfully, he lived to be a hundred. The firm, Ruder Finn, was one of the first PR agencies. It's been great to really have this legacy and responsibility of bringing a communication consultancy to a new level at a moment in time which is so important for communications. But I didn't start in the PR business, although I grew up hearing all about it every single minute at the dinner table, et cetera.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
But I started actually while I was getting my doctorate at Columbia in political science and Chinese studies. I always thought I would go into government, or I would go in working with companies that were American and Chinese companies working together, which wasn't really that popular in those days. I started actually doing freelance work in the research part of Ruder Finn as a kind of like side job. It was a back office. I mean, I literally sat in a closet literally. I loved...

Mimi MacLean:
No favoritism there.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
The reverse. I loved data and statistics, so I was actually doing the programming for our research studies. I just really discovered in working on these big research reports that there was more big beyond the math. It was really about problem solving and looking at sort of big picture questions and that it was really a lot of fun helping companies sort of look at a problem and try to really figure out together how you could find a really interesting solution to that problem.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I kind of segued then at that point. I worked for a couple of years and just finishing my doctorate and thinking about what I wanted to do next. And then I discovered that I really loved communications. I love people. I'm an outgoing extroverted kind of person. I little by little started thinking about joining Ruder Finn.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that's great. When you enter in there, did you like start from the bottom and work your way up? How does that work?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Yeah, I definitely started from the bottom. I wasn't entirely embraced with open arms. The founder's kid is coming wasn't actually something that was planned or something that everyone was feeling great about. I started in two really... Again, since I started in research, I worked in the research organization, which was actually a separate unit for some time.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
That became a very important part of our business, as surveys, polling, insights were increasingly something that we used in order to understand the communication environment. It became increasingly important. And then I actually raised my hand and said there were two areas that I was interested in that we at that PO moment had no presence in. One was opening offices in the China market, and everybody thought what a stupid idea, but I really pushed hard on that and finally got the okay to do so.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
And that was really somewhat of a challenge to make people understand that there was a really important market opportunity and a lot of collaborative interchanges in terms of sharing of innovation and other kinds of things that were coming as China started to transform. There was the experience of believing in something that you really wanted to do and really having to convince people around you that it was worthy of the organization really spending time and resources in order to develop a new market.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
The second area that I was particularly interested in that I started was the healthcare part of our business. Again, we were much more in government and major corporate and consumer and other areas that were more popular in the PR industry, but my husband was a physician and I spent an awful lot of time in the healthcare environment. I felt that this was an important area of communication. New innovations were introduced. And as people became more engaged in their own healthcare decisions, it was something that I really felt I wanted to bring to Ruder Finn.

Mimi MacLean:
Well, your instincts were right, because those two areas, I mean, this was talking... I know with China was 25 years ago, right? I'm not sure when the healthcare initiative started, but that was well before everything just took off, right? You were ahead of the curve in both areas.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I was lucky. As one of my great mentors likes to tell me who I've worked with, John Chambers, who was the former CEO of Cisco, he always says, "Don't compete against your competitors, Kathy. Compete against market transitions." I was always thinking about where the market is going and not really looking sideways that all the people around you, but just really trying to forecast and think about what the future strategic opportunities are.

Mimi MacLean:
Do you think that ability to do that, can you learn that or is that you're born with, like that's intuition that you have?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I suppose it's half and half. I think that actually my training in political science really helped me in that regard to think about sort of evolution of systems, social, economic, political systems and how they evolve and trying to conceptualize and step back and try to think in a macro sense and then apply it. The intuition part comes into trying to integrate it into your everyday activities, and the training part comes from training yourself to think in that way in a kind of big picture perspective.

Mimi MacLean:
You just brought up a really good point as well. You talked about your mentor. As you know, there's only like 5% of women that are CEOs in the United States and only 1.7% of women who have their own businesses ever really reach a million dollars in sales. I was kind of diving into that with the book I wrote about why that would be and what reasons, and one of the main reasons I think is mentorship, because I think there's a stat that's like 70% of men have mentors and only like 39% of women have mentors.

Mimi MacLean:
For some reason, women don't tend to want to get mentors or can't find them. I don't know what it is. The fact that you mention that you have a male mentor, right? Can you talk a little bit about your mentor? Is he your only mentor? Did you have other mentors? Did you formally ask them to be a mentor? Just talk a little bit about how women can use mentors to help grow their companies or grow through their career path?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
No, I never asked anybody to be my mentor, and I don't think that I only had one, but I've been really fortunate in my career because I've worked with a lot of CEOs, really fantastic CEOs. Working very closely with them, I've learned so much. I think what is really important for us as women leaders to do is to try to really learn from what you see and integrate it into your own way of thinking about your leadership and your opportunities.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
People have said to me, and there's statistics on this, that women lack the self-confidence to raise their hand. Opportunity just to really say, "I want to take that opportunity, or I'm willing to put myself out to take that risk," is something that women need to learn to do a little bit more. I would say that the two factors are... I mean, nothing ever comes easily in life. It's not like someone walks up to you and says, "I'll be your mentor. Let me help you get there."

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I've yet to see that happen. But I think the learning your own selecting people that you admire you. Again, as I've said, I've learned from so many different CEOs and also from my father. I mean, my father worked with such great global institutions. He worked with the Kennedy Administration. He worked with the Vatican for over 20 years. He worked with the UN. Watching that, I realized how much of a difference you can make.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Even in a very complex or difficult situation, which looks really very, very sort of poor in terms of potential outcomes, there's still ways to make a difference and build bridges and find solutions. I think that each person you work closely with offers you an opportunity to learn something critically important. You need to take that opportunity. You need to really seize the learning possibility, and then you need to really integrate it into your own leadership style.

Mimi MacLean:
Because I think women tend to want to also say like, "I need to have an official mentor role," and that necessarily doesn't have to be the case. It could just be like learning from them, even reading books that maybe somebody in your field who's an expert on, or it doesn't have to be like, "Hey, every Saturday or every Friday I'm going to call you." Right? And make it like a formal...

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Yeah, I think that's wonderful and fantastic if it happens, but I've actually not seen it happen all that frequently.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah, because people don't also want to commit to something that they don't really know the time commitment. It's kind of like if someone were to call you and be like, "Hey, will you be my mentor?" Well, what does that mean? How much time does that entail? Now that you've been running your dad's company and as a female in such a large organization, what have you found to be the most difficult challenge?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Yes, I think you have to... As I said, when you reach a problem like my wanting to open the China market, you really have to believe in what you're doing, because you're going to have a lot of setbacks. And if you have setbacks, I mean, that was one of my big challenges is to keep pursuing it because it was difficult in the early years. There really were very few Western agencies at all in China. Luckily I speak Mandarin, so that actually helped me to understand and build real cultural affinity with my background as well.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
But I had to believe in what I was doing because it took quite a number of years before we kind of got it right. And now we have a fantastic organization in China. We're one of the largest. We have several hundred team members and great leadership. I think it just really proves that be passionate. Believe in what you're doing. Be dedicated. Roll up your sleeves and just stick to it and you will ultimately be successful.

Mimi MacLean:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). No, it's true. Your, I mean, employees are pretty much the basis of your business. A lot of CEOs I talk to, one of their biggest pain points is managing employees and finding the right people and keeping them motivated and keeping the community, especially now that we've been online and not in our offices. Do you have any suggestions to that? Because obviously you have it figured out because you have such a large organization.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Yeah. Well, I think the Great Resignation, as we call it, is one of the big challenges facing people today. Everybody's actually struggling with it. What we have to do is we think as we've all been talking about how we constitute the workplace and people are very uneasy and uncertain and it's an uncertain environment, whether it's the question of the pandemic, whether it's inflation in the economy, whether it's Ukraine and political situation, with stock market volatility, there's so much that's uncertain today.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
People just feel uneasy and we've all heard about this kind of increase in mental anxiety that people are experiencing and the increasing rates of that. I think what you need to do for your internal communications are a couple of things. First of all, people want to get up in the morning and feel that they're part of something bigger than themselves. I think this sense of values and purpose, even though people used to raise their eyebrows in the old days, but it really is meaningful for people to feel that they're doing something really good.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
They can feel proud of talking to their colleagues or friends or family about what they're doing at work and why it's making a difference. I think that's really important. I think it's really important to continue to instill a very empathetic leadership style. Forget about this authoritative top-down way that big companies used to operate. People want a caring environment. They really want to be in an environment where the culture is of empathy, authenticity, et cetera.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I think that's been a real shift. I think that communication has also increased. You don't need a newsletter once a month that will tell you about what's happening in the company. You need much more frequent dialogue and exchanges that we used to have within companies. The whole internal communication work stream has changed and much more important to CEOs. It's not just, "HR, please do that." It's become part of what a CEO's mandate is and what they feel very intensely.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I'm part of The Wall Street Journal CEO Council, and we were having one of our breakout sessions. My question to the head of P&G was really, "You're so well-known for your customer insights. How have you changed or adapted with respect to the internal communications?" He was very vocal about spending his own personal time now very heavily on internal communications and communicating with employees.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I think that an iconic company like that is just as representative of what this shift has been. I think that those are really... You can really segment your focus on this new leadership style, this new commitment to restating and making a sense of purpose for people, and then finally, an increased communication that helps people to stay in touch.

Mimi MacLean:
Have you had to be more vocal online and do more like weekly, monthly meetings in touch with your employees?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Yes, we have. Since the shutdown, we started weekly town halls, which we have every Friday. We'll have one today, and it's made a big difference. People really enjoy it. The last piece that I think important for addressing this Great Resignation is this sense of fun. People want to have fun at work. It's not like they can come to work anymore and just do their emails, achieve their goals, take off their tasks. They really want to be part of a community. They want to have fun together.

Mimi MacLean:
Can you give an example of what you've done at your company to create fun especially online?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Yeah. We've actually had yoga classes. Our UK office has cooking classes. They also had a hat competition. The UK's fantastic. Our office has the best sense of humor. We try to do a little bit of that in our town halls, which brings everybody together. When you laugh, you open up in a different way.

Mimi MacLean:
Yup. It could be like bring your pet to work day on Zoom. Are you actually in person now, or are you still virtual?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
We're still virtual. New York City has been slow to return. Around the world, I mean, our China offices are all back and have been for many months, but in the US... The UK is coming back. India's back a couple of days a week, et cetera. It's very let's say segmented, but we are planning to come back hopefully just after the spring break.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh good. We haven't touched on your other... You're obviously very innovative and you also started or overseen the growth of your Ruder Finn Innovative Studios. Can you talk a little bit about that? When did you see the trend, like I need to bring digital in-house and make it a part of our business and kind of gain that market share as well?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
We actually started thinking about this now a couple of years ago. As I said, my early entry into working with Ruder Finn was in the data and statistics area. I always really loved watching that carefully. I realized in working with clients that decisions could be made a lot better if we were looking at how analytics that could help us.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
And that it wasn't just that companies were integrating that into business models that we had to think about, especially in era of high misinformation, how we can actually understand information flows and how we can really help people to see, absorb, and find the right information for them. I started this tech lab, and we have a wonderful person who's our chief technology officer.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
We started a tech lab, which was really focused on not only making sure that we were offering the best and emerging technology tools to our clients, but that we always knew it from the startup community like what's coming. It wasn't like we would bring something that was already formed, already polished, but it's like, okay, where are people think about innovating? Where are they trying to find new capabilities? We were very early in the voice area. We were one of the Alexa partners early on and started using voice.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
We're now looking at NFTs and also the metaverse and all these new kinds of things. I think that we're really trying to stay in touch and enter into areas where we feel uncomfortable. It's like make ourselves uncomfortable so that we push ourselves and our boundaries. I always tell my clients, "I want to push you to a point where you say no. If I don't make you say no to some things, then I haven't made you think differently."

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
"That's fine for you to say, Kathy. That's totally not something that I want to do." And I was like, okay, now I've succeeded.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that's good. I love that. I've never heard that before, so that's a good way to look at it and adapt with that. I think the hardest part of starting a business is getting eyeballs and getting customers, and that's where you would hire a PR firm to bring on and help you grow, because it really is. We're all competing off of the same eyeballs online and social media, whatever.

Mimi MacLean:
Is there any advice from the professional that you can give a startup who definitely might not have the money to get a proper PR firm since it is expensive, what they can be doing out of the gate to kind of grow their company organically and virally most cost efficient?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
A couple of things. First of all, differentiate yourself. Make sure that people understand why they should pay attention to you. So many people really don't take that step. They're all over the place. We can do all these various things. Yeah, but so can everybody else. I think you have, have to really be clear about why you're making an important contribution and then why you're making a different contribution is just point number one. Point number two is you need to own your own story.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Don't rely on, "Oh, hire a PR firm and they should just go get some press for us," because information is 360. It's as important to have stuff that's searchable, that's on your own website or a blog or in your social channels. It's just as important to have social channel activity as it is to have coverage in the paper itself. I always say to people, ask your kids. Ask your friends. Ask your family. Are they getting their information mainly from sitting down and opening the paper?

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I can and tell you the answer is no. Nobody. Like zero. Take that in as a way for you to go forward in terms of creating your own storytelling, your own story, and making sure that you have ongoing sustained content that flows out. Because someone calls me, "Develop a communication plan for us. We want to be in The New York Times." It's like, how many times it's going to be in The New York Times? It's not enough.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Even if we were to get you in The New York Times once, you're not going to capture enough eyeballs on a sustained [inaudible 00:22:19] for anybody to remember who you are or why they should engage with you. We have now this 360 perspective that you have to embed into your way of thinking. All those channels are equally important and really need to be leveraged.

Mimi MacLean:
That's great. I'd love to just end on any piece of advice that you would give to an entrepreneur woman or somebody who's also working in Corporate America who's trying to make it to the C-suite as a woman, especially in a male dominated industry.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
I think that the most important thing, as I said, is, first of all, I'll raise your hand if you have an idea about what you want to do next. Believe in yourself. Be confident that you're able to raise your hand and that you can do a really good job in that position. And then lastly, be really passionate and determined once you get there. Don't be afraid to take lateral moves. The more you build your capabilities, the more you're going to be seen as someone who really can be helpful in terms of rising up the ladder.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
So many people are just, "No, I want to go from this position to one step up, to one step up." I think that you have to be really flexible and adaptable when you think about opportunities. Sometimes taking an opportunity that may not look like a step up. If you make it something, it becomes critically important. Basically raise your hand, be confident, and be passionate about taking your next job.

Mimi MacLean:
Because confidence is a huge, I think, issue women need to work on. We try to make sure we're perfect. We don't think of ourselves that we can do that job. We always undercut ourselves, whereas I think men tend to walk into a room and think they know more and we think we know less. We might even know more than they do, but we just assume we know less, right? I think being not confident is hard for women. But this has been amazing. I appreciate your time, and I thank you so much.

Mimi MacLean:
I'm just in awe of everything that you've done and how innovative you've been over the last 30 years as you've been working with your dad's company. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Thank you, Mimi. It's been great to talk with you and really appreciate it. It had fun.

Mimi MacLean:
Yes. Congratulations, again, on your award.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Thank you so much.

Mimi MacLean:
Okay, take care. Bye, bye.

Dr. Kathy Bloomgarden:
Bye.

Mimi MacLean:
Thank you for joining us on The Badass CEO. To get your copy of the top 10 tips every entrepreneur should know, go to thebadassceo.com/tips. Also, please leave a review as it helps others find us. If you have any ideas or suggestions, I would love to hear them. Email me at mimi@thebadassceo.com. See you next week and thank you for listening.