“Use your obstacles.” – Marcus Aurelius
In a profession where spin and branding are tightly controlled, Risa Hoag – founder and president of GMG PR in Nyack, is one with the ancient Roman Stoics like Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Control what you can,” she said.
It’s one of the principles she has lived and worked by. And what you can’t control? Well, that’s when your creativity kicks in, she said, helping you to turn adversity into opportunity.
It’s a quality that has no doubt contributed to the success of 34-year-old GMG PR in a world where 65% of businesses close after 10 years. And there’s equally no doubt that it played a role in the Rockland Business Association honoring GMG with the Pinnacle Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Small Business. The award, among those presented by the association June 1 at the Hilton Pearl River, was the only one not announced beforehand. Hoag was thrilled.
“I was overjoyed to have that honor. It meant so much, being part of the Rockland and Westchester communities for 34 years. I feel I worked with so many businesses and nonprofits. I’ve tried to give back and offer my services. This is a reward for three decades of hard work.”
That industriousness has led to some big gets, like Bond, James Bond himself, Sean Connery. In 2002, “CBS News Sunday Morning” said it would run a story on the kilt, promoting the Tartan Day Parade and her client VisitScotland, the country’s tourist organization – if, that is, she could secure an interview with the Scottish actor. “I’m on it,” Hoag replied.
She got her man. “He was handsome and charming, just what you’d expect him to be,” she said of Connery, who led the parade, making its Sixth Avenue debut that year, with then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Hoag spent a decade promoting the Sidney Kimmel Foundation’s multimillion-dollar support of cancer researchers around the world, an effort spearheaded by Kimmel, founder of the fashion label Jones New York. And when the owners of the “World’s Most Valuable Dollhouse” asked her to get a story about it into The New York Times in 2015, she secured it within three weeks, which led to the dollhouse being showcased in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan during the Christmas holiday season.
While she has developed many campaigns, perhaps her most impressive, she said, occurred last year when she was asked to promote the auction of a rare, signed copy of the U.S. Constitution, discovered in North Carolina and sold for $11 million. She secured an Associated Press story in less than a week and the campaign went viral. Subsequent coverage included CBS, Fox, NBC, WPIX and The New York Times, to name a few outlets. Ultimately the campaign generated more than 6,000 media hits, valued at $240 million-plus, with 7.5 billion impressions.
Her present roster of clients includes American Christmas in Mount Vernon, which NBC’s “Today” show did a five-minute segment on after three years of Hoag pitching it; the conservation program of water company Veolia North America; Kingfish Bay Development in Calabash, North Carolina; Nanuet-based Meals on Wheels Rockland, Paramount Country Club, the former home of Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor in New City; Penguin Repertory Theatre in Stony Point; Rockland Community College in Suffern; and the New York City-based Job Research Foundation, seeking to ameliorate Job (pronounced Jobe) Syndrome, an immunodeficiency disorder resulting in skin and lung infections as well as facial and dental abnormalities.
Her approach to each client is the same – “attention to detail and a high level of integrity. The more you pay attention to the details of what your clients need and want, the more successful you’ll be.”
Hoag never intended to be a publicist. Raised in Nanuet, she crossed the Hudson River to study acting at Purchase College, the conservatory-style school that’s part of the State University of New York system, but wound up with a Bachelor of Science in political science. She worked for IBM, a mortgage company and an Irish tech importer but liked the idea of having her own business, an entrepreneurial bug she inherited from her father, Stanley Bell, who owned a retail electronics store in the Bronx. He helped her start the Corporate Stork, bringing new businesses to life, with her mother, Leatrice, coming on board as an employee.
When it folded two years later, she made 12 phone calls to convince Ernst & Young’s White Plains office that it needed her as marketing coordinator. It was while Hoag was still at Ernst & Young in 1991 that she married Bill Hoag, (“I didn’t become an actor; I married one”), with whom she lives in Rockland and now has two grown daughters – the younger having followed in her mother’s footsteps in Manhattan and the older becoming a somatic therapist, emphasizing the mind-body connection.
That same year Hoag started the Global Marketing Group in White Plains. (“I wanted it to sound big.”) As time went on, it became more about public relations than marketing. In 1996, she incorporated the company which consists of herself and six freelancers, as GMG Public Relations, known popularly as GMG PR.
Hoag has also used her leadership skills beyond her own company. She created a coordinating, networking calendar that features events from nonprofits in Rockland and Westchester counties. And Hoag edits Hudson Valley News & Events, a newsletter and website that offers free articles and advertising for nonprofits, reaching nearly 9,000 people in the region daily.
In July 2019, she also took the helm of the Rockland Business Women’s Network (RBWN), navigating the pandemic for the organization, which still hosted the RBWN Woman of the Year luncheon, on Zoom. And she has served as a mentor to female business students through the Buccino Leadership Institute at Seton Hall University in South Orange Village, New Jersey, and to students at Rockland Community College.
Still, Hoag can see the argument for not modifying businesses and awards with the word “women.”
“We don’t give out awards for ‘men-owned businesses,’” she said. (The five other businesses she beat out for her award happen to be owned by men.)
But power in the business community is something that women have come to only recently.
“It’s harder to be a woman in business,” Hoag said. “Women need more coaching. They still question themselves too much. And they try to please too much.”
Hoag called the need for striking a balance between supporting and labeling women a fascinating topic for a panel discussion that needs to be explored “now more than ever.”
In the meantime, she keeps wearing many hats. How does she do it? “Set priorities,” she said.
And one thing more: “Don’t sleep.”
