How To Turn a Disaster Into Something Special...

Running your own business can be a real rollercoaster ride. One minute things are going swimmingly, and the next you're served a curve ball, that if you let it, can really set you back.

Take my first ever PR stunt for instance. There I was, six weeks into my new job at a creative PR agency, on a train to Blackpool. The idea was to have a large-scale sand drawing of a Monsters Inc. character on the beach with the infamous tower in the background. I'd spent 13 years working as a Journalist, so had no clue how to make everything piece together. You could say I was well and truly out of my depth.

But there I was on that journey, booking a helicopter, a photographer and a videographer and liaising with the man heading up the team who would be creating the image.

We looked at the times of the tide. We worked out that we needed to be up and on the beach for 3am in order to create our masterpiece. And I made the decision (rightly or wrongly) to make it all work for how the video chap thought it should. It was going to be a picture led story and this was a Friday so we were trying to get everything into the Saturday papers.

To cut a long story short, the images fell far short of what we needed. We also learnt the invaluable lesson of never staging a PR stunt on a Friday (it's too hard to get stories like this into the Saturday papers). Lots of tears were shed along the way and I also felt really sick circling the Blackpool Tower several times whilst in the helicopter.

But when I arrived back in London, I picked up the phone to The Sun Online and asked the then Editor if he would run it as an exclusive on the front page. You see, whilst the images might not have worked - the video did. And once The Sun had run it, then all the other online sites started to run it. And what went from being a complete disaster, slowly but surely gained valuable traction in the online space. My agency even later used it as a great example of an online campaign.

The lesson here is, if something doesn't seem like it's working, please don't give up.

Keep going and stay on your path because there is always a way to make something work.

Tenacity and a thick skin are two of the most important ingredients for being successful in PR. Add in a dose of patience and it's a great recipe for success.

Just because something doesn't quite work out how you think it will - it doesn't mean you won't be able to make a success of something else further down the line.

Nicola x