Modern PR, Meaningful Stories, and Leadership with Sabina Gault

Justin Levinson (00:10)‍

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Agency Side podcast. I'm your host, Justin Levinson. And today I'm joined by Sabina Galt, founder and CEO of Connect Agency. Sabina founded Connect in 2009 and has grown it into a leading independent WBENC certified full service PR agency with offices in Oklahoma and New York, Chicago, Oklahoma City, and Denver. The agency is known for award-winning work for brands like Kraft Natural Cheese, Hint, Fogo Deschon, and LightBridge Academy.

Under Sabina's leadership, Connect has scaled from a startup to a 50 plus agency and earned multiple recognitions on the Inc 5000 for fast growth. Thank you so much for being here Sabina.

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Sabina Gault (00:50)

Golly, look at that. Thank you for having me. That sounds very impressive and I don't feel that way most of the time.

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Justin Levinson (00:57)

Well, I'm so happy to have you here. I've been interested in what Connect Agency has been doing. I follow you and your content on LinkedIn. And I'm sure our viewers are going to be excited to learn from you. I guess to get started, just to have a little bit of your background story, how'd you get into this particular space?

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Sabina Gault (01:12)

I'll give you the very short version because the very long version is genuinely very long. You can hear my accent. I'm originally Romanian, born and raised at about 18. I decided that I was going to do something with my life. And yes, I was still in high school. You got that right. And I decided that I was going to do TV. So I applied to every job known to humanity in Romania for every TV post possible. And of course I got.

zero answers because mainly I was 18. And fast forward, I'm about to go to college into my first year of college and I get a random phone call and they asked me, are you Sabina Aldea, which is my maiden name? And I was like, yes. They're like, well, we're calling you from MediaPro Studios. We have an opening in our PR department and we got your resume. And is it true that you truly speak five languages? And I said, yes. And they're like, well, if we test you, is that going to come through? And I was like,

Yeah, who lies about that? Like, of course it's on my resume. You know, I'm A, from communist Romania. B, you know, I'm 18 years old. Like, what do I know about lying on resume? I put in everything correctly because that's what you do. So I got a job in PR because I speak a lot of languages and they needed somebody who can speak on the various celebrities that were coming in to shoot films in Romania at the time. Works on that. That's how I got into PR. I never had any other job in

other than PR, that's all I've done. And then about a year and a half into that, I got a job offer from a company in Los Angeles to move. So a little over 19 years old, I moved by myself to LA without having known a soul. Probably, I keep saying a thousand dollars, but I'm pretty sure it was less than that, that I had. I come from a middle-class family in Romania, lived in a one-bedroom apartment all of our lives. So my...

parents had no money to send me with. And yeah, and I woke up in Los Angeles and worked in PR. So the rest is sort of history.

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Justin Levinson (03:11)

That's amazing. Yeah. Talk about a really interesting story from Romania to Los Angeles. I didn't know that. And that is fantastic. You speak so many languages. I guess when you first got to LA, your first role, I had noticed that you kind of come from an account executive background. Is that sort of where you kind of got your start?

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Sabina Gault (03:26)

Yeah, so I actually started in film. Okay. I started in film. I worked in film. worked for the production company here in LA doing PR for the movies that they were launching. I then took a break, went back to school, finished college because I had never finished college. And while I did that, because I wasn't able to work in the United States, I worked in London actually for the BBC. So I worked for this like...

Super old show. mean, it will date me of how old I am, but there was a morning show. Think of the Barbara Walters of the BBC who interviewed celebrities. That's what they were doing, but they were shooting in LA, but it was all done via the BBC UK. So I worked as a freelancer for them and helped get celebs on that. Then when that ended and I finished school a year and a half in, that sort of proposed me into the celeb world. So I worked for BWR for a couple of years and did all celeb.

⁓ started off as, you know, assistant number 79 and learned the ropes and learn how to do schedules and how to manage celeb schedules and got me their relations. And then, ⁓ could not keep that job because I'm a really terrible employee. ⁓ got fired. So then I decided, well, maybe it's the celeb side that doesn't work for me. So I'll go into product. No, about a year and a half later, I got fired from that job too. Cause again.

really terrible employee and can't keep my mouth shut and have opinions about everything. So I then sort of didn't have a choice and started my own agency, not because I thought I can be doing it better than everybody else, but genuinely because I can't keep a job. So I ended up with three clients that didn't want to leave me and started an agency. And that was 19 years ago.

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Justin Levinson (05:14)

That's interesting. It is a commonality though, that I have spoken to a lot of leaders who have been fired numerous times in their careers before they launched their agencies. I think it's sort of a commonality that I've noticed from guests on the show. It's just fascinating.

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Sabina Gault (05:27)

Yeah, I think it has to do with if you're really passionate about what you do and if you truly have your heart in it, you're not going to be able to say yes to things that absolutely don't make sense. And you're not going to be able to agree to put your name and your agency name behind campaigns that aren't going to be a success because then you really are doing the service to the client. You're wasting their money, but you're doing the service to your team where you're asking them to do something that isn't achievable.

So that usually doesn't bide well in many places.

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Justin Levinson (06:02)

How did you like LA when you first got to LA from Romania? How did you feel about it?

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Sabina Gault (06:08)

It was incredibly overwhelming, but I had definitely traveled. know, the beauty of being a European is that you can travel throughout Europe incredibly easily and you can be, you know, in Spain for a couple of days and then you go back and then you can be in London for a couple of days and then you can go back. So it's very easy to travel around Europe. So I had traveled extensively, never this far, but I think I imagined LA being New York. So I expected.

skyscrapers and busy and the metro and you know, all of that and great transportation. And I got to LA and I was like, I don't have a driver's license and I can't drive because I never had to drive in Romania. And I'm sitting here and I'm like, how am I going to get places? This is awful. Like all these freeways and it's so intimidating. Also, everything's so low and everybody has a house. Like this is so weird. Why do people not live in like a block with like

many neighbors, like this is so off. Like where do I go if I need a cup of sugar? What is happening?

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Justin Levinson (07:10)

That's funny. I sort of, you know, I came, I lived in LA for many years and I came from Vermont, which is really rural, part of the East coast. And yeah, it was really, yeah, it was really intense for me driving, especially like those like five lanes of like, of highway, where you're just kind of like, you know, having an anxiety attack because there's like, you know, so many people around you and it's just, you know, it's not for everybody. Yes. But yeah, I like to take Ubers and Lyfts when I'm, when I'm visiting or Waymo, which I...

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Sabina Gault (07:38)

Yes,

Waymo's great.

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Justin Levinson (07:41)

⁓ want to get into connect agency and just for the viewers who may not be familiar with what you're doing or I'd love to kind of hear, ⁓ you know, what you guys do over there.

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Sabina Gault (07:50)

Yeah. Look, at the heart of it, we're a PR agency. We got started into the world when TikTok didn't exist and Instagram didn't exist and the landscape that we have today, AI and everything, that did not exist. And digital marketing as a whole did not exist. So, you know, almost 20 years ago, it was good old PR, good old crisis, good old advertising, you know, a little bit of like quote unquote spokesperson, even though nowhere near what it is today. But the reality is that

What we did then is largely what we do today. We tell stories that people care about, and we tell stories and shift cultural mentality. So to me, PR and old school PR, and if you watch any of the movies that have been done in the last decade on kind of the rise and fall of the media empires, succession included and everything in between, you're looking at these empires that are truly built on...

changing and shifting consumer perception. Ultimately, that is our job. Yes, our job is for people to eventually buy more products and create more consumerism. Lovely. Peddling products is what I do for a living. But the reality of it is that a good publicist should be able to change your opinion. That's ultimately what we get paid to do. We get paid to convince you that a poppy is better than an Ollipop. We get convinced you that Advil is better than Tylenol.

That's ultimately what we're here to do. Telling a story has obviously shifted incredibly in 2005 and 2006 and even during the crisis of 08, 09. Telling a story was very unilateral. You were able to share a story through the media outlet, through the voice of the reporter, and that was a one way.

Today, that same story has to be able to be shared through the voice of a content creator, through the voice of a social network that may or may not read what's actually in the caption. So visually, you have to be able to create what that looks like. Yes, through the eyes of a reporter, but that may be on a sub stack and not on a national media outlet. That may be in the plaza of the Today Show and without actually being on the Today Show.

That may be through the eyes of a digital outlet. So the way you tell that story has changed dramatically and has shifted and impacted. And I think you mentioned our newsletter earlier, but like, you know, one of, one of the newsletters that we did towards the end of last year was about the study that came out that really said that AI is really pulling about 85 % of its data from earned media because it considered it as a

valid source of information and advertising as a whole is pay to play. So it's therefore not a valid source of information. So you can advertise till you turn blue in the face. You're not going to get that change in opinion. And that's become very visible in the last couple of years. So we tell stories for brands in the franchise space and in the consumer product good space, mainly food, beverage, wellness.

And the way those come to life, come to life through social and influencer and yes earned and crisis management, because you can't really not do it and content and creative. So we do that in the scope of telling the story. We don't do that on its own. If that makes sense.

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Justin Levinson (11:20)

Yeah, that's really amazing. And if you, and for viewers to go and connect agencies website and check out some of the newsletters, they're really interesting. I was doing a dive before we had this conversation. That's really good informative stuff there. I'm interested in, so you started out, you said you started out with three clients, I think you said, and then that's kind of what you had launched with. I guess it's kind of a long journey, but how did the scaling happen from

You know, I guess how many people did you have when it was just when it was three clients? Was that just you alone at that time? Thanks for tuning in, folks. This episode is brought to you by Coming Up Creative, a relationship first boutique creative recruitment agency. We disrupt the creative ecosystem by running sophisticated multi-channel campaigns with custom video and voice outreach that actually gets responses. We actively market the agencies and brands we represent to help them stand out to today's industry's top talent.

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Sabina Gault (12:27)

had one employee who is still with me today. She runs our sister agency and she's phenomenal. Her name is Monica. She's an incredible individual that has been able to grow leaps and bounds and beyond any expectation that anyone would ever have. And then we hired teams along the way. We contracted teams along the way. hired, we then...

contracted again and contracted, mean, you know, really like we've gotten bigger and then smaller and then bigger and then smaller. And part of that was due to, you know, the shifts in economy and how that has affected the agency landscape and how, you know, you're looking at the larger ecosystem of, know, where salaries used to be 20 years ago and where they are today.

what kind of level of expertise a client is expecting today that they didn't expect 20 years ago, how you would be able to do more with less 20 years ago and now you really can't more, really is more, and how the level of specialization that we didn't have 20 years ago we have today. And that's across all agencies. We're not special. I think every agency is experiencing this where you have to be having specialized team members that know you can't just have.

a junior two years out of college doing somebody's social media. Like it just doesn't work. Unless that's their specialty.

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Justin Levinson (13:46)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it like you've built something really amazing where people, you know, really enjoy working. Cause you guys have, I saw you won the award there for, guess it was 29th best places to work. And then also, I'm not sure what year it was, but LA distance journal, best place to work. So it seems like the people that, like you said, it's pretty amazing that you had somebody that started with you at inception still with the company today.

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Sabina Gault (14:11)

Yes. I mean, look, there's the what should be said and there's the what I'm going to say because I can't keep my mouth shut and I have to be honest. Look, agencies are a grind. There's no, whoever says that it's, know, rosy and I mean, we had a crisis literally this weekend. So that team had to work this weekend. Like, what are we going to tell that client? Sorry, we can't help you. It's Saturday. So agencies aren't for everyone.

And agencies aren't for sometimes the long run either. There are people who do it for 10, 12 years and their younger careers. And then they're like, my God, I really don't want to do this for the rest of my life. Right. So that's the negative side of it. The positive side of it, I think is if this is what you want to do. And if this is the career that you want, like my president that's been with me for 12 years and, and this is her career. This is what she wants to do. My EVP of digital has been with me for six years.

And this is her career. She's been in agencies all of her life. She loves the agency world. This is what she's going to do. She's raised through kids, you know, through the agency world. She's birthed two kids through the agency world, right? Or our VP of Ops who's been with us for 13 years and she's on her third child. She's currently on maternity leave. Again, this is her life. So when that happens and that move gets made into, yes, this is what I want to do with my life. Then we're really great for that crew.

You know, we have incredible benefits. have, you know, incredible pick your perks where you can get money or days off or, know, extra perks that you may want, you know, random ass, but Costco membership. Like people love our Costco membership. They're like, this is a great perk. We have a ton of PTO. it's just, we're great for the people that choose this as a career. And I think that's the big differentiation. So yes, you're always going to get people that are like, this sucks.

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Justin Levinson (15:59)

Yeah.

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Sabina Gault (16:09)

Yes, because that would have sucked no matter where you would have gone. Because in the big world of agencies, I think we're probably in the top 5 % in terms of what we offer and how kind of a human interaction we have with our teams.

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Justin Levinson (16:23)

Yeah. Well, yeah, agency life is a hustle. And if it's in your DNA to do that, I always tell people, cause I do a lot of staffing in the PR and creative agency space and everyone's always looking for a place where, Hey, can I get a better like work life balance? And it's like, you know, no matter where I'm going to pitch you, you're going to be grinding. Cause that's just how agency life is. And you're either it's either in you or it's not.

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Sabina Gault (16:45)

And I think work-life balance just, know, Simon Sinek says this really, really well. had a talk about this a while ago. And he said, you know, people imagine that the equal time you spend at work is the equal time you spend at home. And that's work-life balance. And that actually is highly incorrect. When your life at home is in flames.

You're going through a divorce. You're having a brand new baby at home. Things are just not good. Whatever is happening in your home life is immediately going to disrupt your work life. And that is a fact and vice versa. When work isn't going well, you're always bringing it home and you're always disrupting your home life. So work life balance isn't about the time you spend actually at all.

You could be working two hours a day and be at home for 22 hours. If those two hours are absolutely the worst hours of your life, you're going to bring that home and those 22 hours are going to be miserable. So what work life balance really is and should be explained that is how do you balance out the emotions between the two? And how do you find the joy in the hours that you are at work, whether it's two or four or nine or 18? And how do you find the joy at home?

whether it's two and eight and eight, 22, it doesn't matter. But those two, when they find their sink, that's when you have work life balance and you don't feel like you hate either one of them. Otherwise you're always gonna feel like you don't have enough from either one because you're expecting this like, well, I worked for two hours more, so I really should have this. Right, but then you really probably shouldn't be working at all because you're not enjoying that.

So that's the bigger problem there, not the fact that you work two extra hours.

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Justin Levinson (18:36)

I like that, I might steal that Sabina, so just letting you know.

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Sabina Gault (18:39)

It's Simon. It's not me. I can't take credit for it, but he's brilliant.

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Justin Levinson (18:43)

I like that. So as CEO at this point, like what's sort of your roles in the agency? Like what, what do you do day to day?

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Sabina Gault (18:48)

Oh, again, I'm going tell you the truth. Well, anything from, um, you know, cleaning up the conference room cause nobody was there to clean it up the day of. And we have a meeting to, uh, putting Christmas decor because our VP of ops is on, um, uh, math leave and our, uh, you know, front person, uh, doesn't work, uh, didn't work the past week. So we had clients in town and we still had.

Christmas decor app. So I was like, guys, let's get this Christmas decor app quick, quick, quick to managing accounts with our team. You know, we have a sort of a simple rule. Whoever at the executive level pitches the business stays in the business. So if I'm on a pitch, then I oversee that account moving forward. If our president or our two SVPs pitch, they stay in. So that allows for a little church and state where there's not an expectation that

I as the founder or I as the owner will be on all the accounts of the agency. But that also does give a lot of just thoughtfulness to the account, let's just say, and a lot of credence to the client because they're like, okay, there is somebody that's watching this account and it's not just, you know, a more junior person on it alone.

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Justin Levinson (20:11)

Yeah.

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Sabina Gault (20:11)

And then that would never happen. have enough layers that that wouldn't happen, but still we stay in the business. So part of my job is to make sure that the accounts that I oversee and I bring on are actually doing what they're supposed to do and the KPIs are met and the team is really happy doing it. ⁓ And then I'm seeing what the SVP on that account is seeing. So if they're saying, Hey, we really don't think this is going to work out. Here's what we're going to do.

Am I seeing the same thing in my experience or can I just guide and drive a little bit different the car and then say, what about this view? Are we better with this?

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Justin Levinson (20:47)

Yeah. Speaking of KPIs, I saw your post on the KPIs. You sent that out. That was pretty cool. It's got a lot of interest on there. Everybody commented on that thing, asking for the high resolution version of it.

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Sabina Gault (20:58)

Yes. mean, look, it's just very interesting because I think no matter how you look at the landscape today, whether you're looking through the influencer lens and content creator lens, or you're looking through the PR lens, you know, ultimately nobody should forget that results are why we get paid. So we're not getting paid for efforts. Nobody's getting paid to be cute here in the room. Everybody's getting paid to get a result. So what results are you going to get? And that's really important. The other piece that I think is really important is

Are those results actually what the client wants? Because sometimes what people say and what they do are two very different things. So somebody may come and say, we really want to be in Forbes in the Wall Street Journal and we want business press. But then what you're actually hearing in the conversations is, we have this retailer and it's not working out. we're afraid the sales team is not going to get through this other retailer. We think we're going to lose some skews and they're going to do some skew rationalization of this retailer. And then.

It behooves you as the person with experience in the room to come and say, guys, those, that's not going to help you with what I hear the problem being. You have a retail problem, that's a trade problem, and that's not a Wall Street Journal problem. You can be in the Wall Street Journal all day, every day, but that's not going to help your retailer relationships. So if that's the challenge, then maybe we put a content creator plan that is retailer specific.

Maybe we put a shopper marketing plan that is retailer specific. Maybe we put some money behind some regional advertising in those areas. If you're Publix down in the South, if you're Kroger, right? So like depending which flag of Kroger are we talking Albertson, California, we talking, like talk to us more about that. Cause we're not hearing that this is going to help you. So I think a smart agency isn't just saying, well, we were told to pitch Forbes and Wall Street Journal and we got it for you. So congratulations, here you go.

and we're gonna put it on Solar Platter. And it's more like, well, stop the press. That's not what's gonna help what I'm hearing the problem to be.

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Justin Levinson (23:03)

Well, how do you get the client to understand that? Is that a tricky thing to do?

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Sabina Gault (23:09)

We usually, we come pretty upfront and we just share some of our thinking behind it. Oftentimes we'll say, look, there is a world in which the two can coexist, but we want to attract attention to what we're seeing to be the issue and the matter. And if we are going to fix that, these are the tactics that are going to use in order to fix that problem while we're also doing this.

And maybe there's a vanity metric as to why you need to be in Forbes and Journal and Business Insider and whatever else. And let's take that vanity metric at the same time that we're taking the more tactical metric because ultimately if you're going to get this here, but you're not actually going to fix the problem, we're going to get fired. And I think you don't want us, we don't want, you don't want that. We don't want that. So it's probably going to be a lot easier for us to.

come together and fix the problem while we're getting the vanity backer.

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Justin Levinson (24:07)

Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. mean, I'm sure a lot of places do want that big press. They want to be in all these big spots. That must mean that you have to, your team has to have build relationships with all those big publications. that, and how does, how does that happen?

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Sabina Gault (24:23)

I think everyone at the agency level would say it is about relationships. I'm not going to deny, definitely there's relationships. And I also think that it's so much about how quick, how clear, and how fast you can be. If you look at where the media world is today, the earned media world, and just media in general, the amount of articles that a writer has to write is probably 10x to fix what they had to write even five years ago.

Time is no longer what they could do. They can't work on a story for two months anymore. Like they just don't have that leisure. They have to crank stories quick, dirty, and the easier you make it for them, and no knock to anyone. It's the job. I actually feel bad because as somebody who has to write for clients, I'm the slowest writer known to humanity and albeit not a very good one. So that just takes so much time.

So how do you write 15 stories in three days? And they have to be clickbaity because let's be honest, if they're not clickbaity, nobody's reading them. They have to be shareable because you have to be able to share them on socials and people have to like reshare and reshare and reshare. And that's how you value that media. And they have to be interesting to advertisers because otherwise advertisers are not going to put a penny, whether you're a dot com or a good old school print publication.

So to match all of those and to put all those tick boxes by a piece of press has become increasingly difficult for the writer himself or herself. So for you as the publicist pitching for you to come in and be like, I'm working with a new water. think you should try it. They're going to be like, delete. Like what are you emailing me about? This is nonsense. How about you write the context of the story and you say, Hey, in the wake of

these three new waters launching and these two waters selling and these three things, we're seeing the trend being this. So actually protein water is kind of the thing right now. Now there's still a debate out there whether you're gonna do sparkling protein water or regular protein water, non-sparkling. Let's comment on that later, but the trend is growing. and by the way, here's some data from spins, from Nielsen, from like Sarcona. So give me something to put behind that pitch.

not just, I work with this water and it's really cute. You should try it. And then the writer is going to be like, okay, wait, you did some research. You actually have some numbers to back this thing up. You're willing to send me samples of these two products. So I'm going to try them. And you have a valid story. Protein water is growing. So yes, let's talk.

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Justin Levinson (27:09)

Yeah, that pitch must, is there like a, like, I guess you probably don't want to put too much. You can't like blow somebody up with like a giant email. I'm sure there's like a formula. Not a million attachments and links for people to click on.

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Sabina Gault (27:18)

Yeah, need to keep it tight.

No,

do not do attachments. Do not. Do not.

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Justin Levinson (27:26)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that takes a real skill to be able to write something to somebody, even if, I mean, to get them to read it. I'm sure that's a really ⁓ creative position to have.

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Sabina Gault (27:40)

Yeah. And you know, what we're also experiencing is this interesting landscape of sexy brands. So there are brands that you can pitch until you turn literally purple. And no matter how good your pitch is, you're just not going to get the answers that you think you're going to get. And then you, you sort of have to do old school bartering. And again, this is what I tell my team that PR has always been the

creator of these opportunities that may not have existed otherwise, right? And if you watch the Fox documentary about Roger Ailes and all of those kind of good TV, you're able to see that the call is made and says, hey, I need this story this way. Yes, I will give you that other story. When I worked in Celeb, we would have somebody that wasn't necessarily the most famous.

person and maybe it was an up and coming and an indie, but then we would have like an A-list celebrity. So the bartering would go, yes, he can do this cover and I'd love an interview with this. So the conversation is always around moving pieces of on the chessboard and how do you move those pieces? So it benefits everyone, right? Ultimately the

publication has to benefit because they're getting what they want and they're getting the stories they want and your clients have to benefit because you're getting them the stories that they want. So together that has to work. The chess has to work both ways. And, and the board has to be played right in its entirety. That said, you know, there are brands that you, I always say like, whenever we have an account like that, I'll tell the team, the incoming team, I'll say,

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Justin Levinson (29:07)

Yeah.

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Sabina Gault (29:21)

This is an account where you send out two pictures and you get a hundred answers. So there are just very sexy brands that everyone loves to write about, that everyone wants to talk about, that, you know, take somebody like a diamond crystal salt, for example, like it's the salt of every chef in America. It's and beyond it's the salt in every, you know, kitchen that respects itself. It's in every movie you see it, you see the packaging. People love it.

People just absolutely adore it. They use it. It's the best salt. Like it just is. It's not a matter of like, this is my opinion because I'm their publicist. It just is. So when you talk to chefs, they talk about, you know, how it perfectly feels in between the fingers because we have a diamond, hence the name, pattern in our salt. you then, the crystal itself, you feel it. So you know how much you're putting in and how much you're salting. So that's immediate, darling.

Does that mean that you don't have to work? No, it means you have to work very smartly and how to bring that to life. But that's one of those like very sexy brands. And then you have some other brands that aren't that sexy. Maybe a B2B brand, maybe something that is very obsolete that people just kind of think it's kind of the way of the past. But that doesn't mean that that brand isn't probably a couple hundred million dollars or more, or public, or doing incredibly well financially.

But the media doesn't necessarily think that. So then you really have to play how you write those stories and how you write for one isn't how you write for the other.

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Justin Levinson (30:55)

It sounds really fun though and like wins for both like a brand that's harder to sell and one that's easier to sell. It's got to be kind of a challenge and fun no matter what you get. Yeah. And at this point, like do our clients, do they come organically through your work that you've already done or do you guys have to do a lot of reach out or how does that sort of work?

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Sabina Gault (31:14)

The majority come through one of the many channels. So conferences we attend and or speak at, and we meet people and that becomes a conversation. Referrals, that becomes a conversation. We do get some cold calls. Some more appropriate than others, right? Some more like, I really want to do this? This seems like a very long shot. And some that are like, okay, we'd be perfect for this. Let me see if we know somebody. I would say the...

cold calling out almost never works. because, ⁓ and look, think that if you're a Weber, if you're a WPP, if you're a massive agency, if you're an Edelman, it probably works wildly differently because your name is so, everybody knows it, your name is so well, your audience knows who you are and everyone that you would email knows your name.

⁓ and they're like, my God, Edelman is emailing me. Of course I'm going to answer this email. Cause I never know when I need them. But you know, mid-size agencies like us, if you just randomly email somebody that you have zero connections with, it's going to go straight in the trash. So we don't even waste our time doing that. I think it's more about like what connections can we find and what kind of introductions we can get if there's a brand that we really want to work with.

Do we know somebody that knows somebody that can introduce us or do we have an otherwise connection through an investor, through a friend? That's probably a lot easier to get a personal hello before you blast the pitch out than to just cold call.

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Justin Levinson (32:54)

Are there any events or conferences that you enjoy attending that you do typically?

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Sabina Gault (33:00)

Yeah, we're very involved in both of the areas that we do work in. We don't really do work in other areas other than that. So in the CPG world, we're very, very invested in that community. We do a lot of pro bono in that community just to give back. That's our way of giving back. get zero business from that. It truly is to give back to the CPG world. So for that Expo West is sort of the big prom.

Fancy Fair renamed, it used to be Fancy Foods Show, the FSA renamed it to the Fancy Fair, was just in San Diego last week and I went. And that's sort of a bit of a smaller show and a bit of a more specialty show.

⁓ Expo West is coming up in March and that's like the big show. There is a Denver show, part of that same group called Newtopia that's happening in usually in August and that's in Denver, Colorado. then we go to that. So we do a lot of being part of that community. Truthfully, we post dinners, we do pro bono. We, I'm on the board of Naturally New York and we have a large office in New York and I'm in New York all the time. So we do.

Pro Bono for Naturally New York, we do Pro Bono for Beyond Brands, which is kind of a skew-like spin-off where our team just went and spoke to that. So we do a lot in that, that CPG world, everything from, you know, helping our brands to giving out advice to just doing things to be good humans in the world and believing that karma comes back to you one day, one way or another, and you do a good deed to somebody and, and, know, you're more likely to feel good at night than not.

And same in the franchise world. So my president, our president, Amanda Bielak, she is the lead in that. I sort of do a lot of the CPG and she does a lot of the franchise. And so she, she is the chair of the franchise business network on the West coast here in the city of LA and then a little bit larger. She's very involved in women business franchise. She is very involved in the IFA. IFA convention comes up here in February. So we do a lot of sponsorships for that and talks and events and.

roundtables and all sorts of things. And then again, we give back to that as well. We work with several brands that just could never afford PR. And we just help to give some guidance where appropriate and give them the tools that they may need that otherwise they wouldn't have. So we're very, very involved in those communities just because again, that's where our business is and that's where we set our flag. So therefore it feels like we'd be total horrible humans if we didn't do that.

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Justin Levinson (35:33)

Totally. I want to cover just a couple more things I'm interested in. I'm interested in, I guess one thing I noticed was like the craft pop-up that I saw online. Could you tell us a little bit about that and your role with it connects role with that?

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Sabina Gault (35:45)

Yeah.

Yeah, it was fabulous. We pitched this idea two years ago and the client just said, let's, let's pull the beat. And last year, the beginning of the year, they were, they approved the idea for the holidays. So it was a, truly was a 360 and plus plus because it had so many fun legs. And so we made a advent calendar, our first ever advent calendar, and it was

gorgeous and was massive. was like ginormous. It was a beautiful craft home. So it was a craft natural cheese, which is part of the Lactalis Corporation. And it had our logo at the pop and it had all these cute little drawers that you would open out of the house and stringy like our string cheese little mascot was in there. And you had like a key chain that was really cute with our house, with our big, big blue house. You had a pair of socks. ⁓

You had like very cute usable things that you would use in your kitchen, that you would actually, we had an ornament cause it was for the holidays. It was like a little blue house ornament. So was very darling. We did a limited edition and limited run of those. And then the idea was how do we bring this to life? Because this is a limited edition. This is going to, you know, get pressed and get what we want out of it. And influencers loved it and posted it about it. And we had really great content.

How do we take that to more than? So we came up with the concept of making the actual advent calendar into an actual blow up house. And we partnered with Chris Kindle Market in Chicago. Chicago is the home office for Kraft Natural Cheese. Lactalis Corporation is based out of there.

So, or lactalage heritage. Dairy is based out of there. So we brought it in Chicago for the time of the Chris Kindle market in December. And people were able to come in and experience the little blue house, if you want. And you would open up an actual flop and you could get a prize. So you could get anything from, you know.

some of our cheeses and some of our specialties. good news is it was like literally freezing outside and the cheese was just perfect. So we had nothing to worry about. With cheese, that is something you have to worry about at all times.

But we had, you know, our protein sticks there, which we're just launching up right now, which are amazing. ⁓ And we had string cheese and we had our blocks and we had our shredded cheese, which we launched last year. So it was really fun. And we also had all the stuff that you could find in the advent calendar and about there was a golden ticket and here and there somebody would win the golden ticket. And that was to get the actual advent calendar home.

So it was really, really fun. gave us an opportunity to activate in our hometown and to build community in our hometown where we have great distribution and great fandom and people really love us. But it's also an opportunity to activate with people that have come to the Chris Kindle market that don't live in Chicago and live in the nearby states that drove in for the weekend for Chris Kindle to just check it out since it's such a beautiful Christmas market.

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Justin Levinson (38:57)

Yeah, that's cool. saw the pictures on your LinkedIn page. It looked really fun and creative.

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Sabina Gault (39:02)

It was really fun. The team had a blast.

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Justin Levinson (39:06)

Cool. love that. guess lastly, I have a couple more minutes here. It's kind of just in terms of you as a human being, what do you like doing outside of, ⁓ you know, running a connect agency?

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Sabina Gault (39:15)

my gosh. You mean aside from walking grocery aisles and taking pictures and freaking people out, which I do a lot, or like seeing activations in the wild and sitting there taking videos and sending it to my team, or being on a plane and going through magazines and sending pictures to my team and being like, look at this! That seems to be a large majority of my time. I genuinely do enjoy what I do, walking around and looking at billboards and...

coming up with creative ideas. But I do have two children that I have to rare in this world. I have a 15 year old daughter who's prepping for college and we're in the throngs of everything from college tours and SATs and ACT prep and everything you can think of. That's definitely something that keeps me very busy. And I have a son who's a competitive skier. he is constantly somewhere that there is either snow or an airbag. He's a free skier.

So think X Games. So everything that, you know, he wants to do revolves around that. So that also keeps us as parents busy. I work out a lot just because it's my way of getting it out and getting my endorphins up and staying alive and not losing my mind. So I probably work out five, six times a week and it's just my way of staying sane. You know, I...

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Justin Levinson (40:13)

Yeah.

Yeah.

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Sabina Gault (40:39)

like to spend time with friends and host and enjoy dinner parties and go out and experience new restaurants and, you know, have a life. To me, that's my balance. It's not how many hours I spend at work or on a plane going to work. It's finding joy in those moments. It's, you know, a great day and I'm not tired. And I've had a really long but amazing day in New York and I feel super fired up. Coming back home, I'll sit in flight in six hours. I'll just blast through emails and get everything done.

If I'm legitimately fried and I have quarter of a brain cell that's still working and it's going like, I'm like, you know what? This is not going to happen. I'm going put on a movie. I'm going to take a nap. I'm going get home and then we'll start fresh tomorrow. That's balance. So the balance of all that is, you know, making it to a game, making it to a ski competition. Sometimes watching it on zoom from my husband, then that's going to be good enough too.

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Justin Levinson (41:35)

love it Sabina. Well, thank you so much for being on here today and offering value to the community. I always feel like the guests we have in the PR agency space are always the easiest to talk to. So it was really fun getting to know you today and really thanks for being here.

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Sabina Gault (41:47)

Really great talking to you. Thanks so much for having me.

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Justin Levinson (41:50)

All right, take care Sabina, thank you so much.

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Sabina Gault (41:52)

Thanks. Bye.