Coffee & Tea with SCG

Season 1, Episode 1: President, Valerie Doyle

• SCG Advertising + Public Relations • Season 1 • Episode 1

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This is the first episode of our agency's new podcast, Coffee and Tea with SCG,  featuring our president, Valerie Doyle with host Lupe Dragon. 

Tom:

Welcome to Coffee and Tea with SCG, a podcast from the industry experts at SCG Advertising and PR. We are a full-service woman-owned agency that offers advertising, public relations, recruitment, marketing, and association management. In this season, we'll be chatting with some members of our team about their specialties. So grab your coffee and your tea and let's brew up a good conversation.

Lupe and Val:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Coffee and Tea with SCG podcast. Today on our podcast, we have Valerie Doyle. Val, thank you for coming onto the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. A question for all of our interviewees on the podcast is do you prefer coffee or tea?

Val:

Of course, coffee. Couldn't live without it, been brought up on it, and will always love coffee.

Lupe:

How do you usually take your coffee?

Val:

I take my coffee with cream and sugar.

Lupe:

Awesome. A classic. So just to start off, what is a day in the life of a president at an ad agency?

Val:

A day in the life starts very early, starts around 6:30, answering and checking emails, verifying my schedule for the day, taking out of any fires that developed over the evening. Then I'm allowed to be myself for an hour, come into the office. We come in every day. I go over the agenda again with everybody. I greet everybody that I see as I come in most days, as long as everything's working out well. Then I review the finances and the fires that are still existing. I meet with sales reps to go over sales initiatives every day in each of the vicinities and each of a line of business. I then tend to my daily jobs, my regular chores, but then I answer any and all of the outside offices as they come in because of the time differences. Obviously, not everybody's in the beginning. We go across the nation. And throughout the afternoon, I spend on pre-planning, overseeing systems, following up on commitments coming up, planning future commitments, and research for new prospects falls into that, you know, world. Where we're going, what's happening, all new technologies. And at the end of the day, we wrap up, oversee the fires, and we try to go home and check it again at 8 p.m.

Val and Lupe:

And that's the end of the day. Awesome. That sounds like you have a lot on your plate every day.

Val:

Some days, some days worse than others.

Lupe:

So, how did you get your start at SCG and what was your first role in the company?

Val:

I started SCG while I was in college studying advertising, and I came in as a credit collection person, believe it or not. So it was in the finance.

Lupe:

Okay. So you've always been a finance bird. That's interesting. And you've been the longest at the agency, probably out of anyone here. Bring us through a brief timeline of the history and the evolution of what is now SCG.

Val:

When I was hired, SCG wasn't SCG. It was the Cherenson, Caroll and Holzer. Cherenson Group was the morph of the name of Cherenson , Caroll and Holzer. Lee Cherenson ran the company, and he had just brought on a new account executive, Glenn Gershaw, who was doing something different. Lee Cherenson was huge in public relations and writing, worked with the ledger, as I knew. Lee and his wife ran the company, and Glenn was strictly recruitment advertising. Glenn grew and morphed the public relations size, so it became more of a recruitment agency. And Glenn brought in a gentleman called Kurt Schwartz, who was working in New York City, who was more national. Kurt started a subcompany called Success Advertising because he had such a national presence. He morphed then the Cherenson Group and actually took over the Chere nson group, and that became Success Advertising. So then Lee retired, and Glenn and Kurt Schwartz, basically Kurt Schwartz was the president, Glenn was the secretary, and they ran the company together for 15 years, where we blew up to be a company with about 150 employees, and they were across the nation. We had offices from Hawaii to New Jersey. Then we had the recession, and Kurt decided to close down his side somewhat, take his back seat, and Glenn took over the company. So then after that, we tried different names because it was more of a communication with the introduction, the internet, email, everything like that. So it was Success Communications. And then we became SCG, which is Success Communications Group's initials. And that's where we are today because it has passed on from Glenn to Robin Gershaw. And now Robin Gershaw has passed it on to the estate of hers, which is owned by the three children. So that is where we are now, and that is how I am the president because Robin was predeceased since this meeting.

Lupe and Val:

So this timeline scales over 60 plus years, which is incredible. Yes. I wasn't here for all 60 years. No, no, no. But with that being said, what are your favorite memories of past presidents at the agency?

Val:

Well, my first memory and always was, and this past year when we lost Lee Cherenson was very hard because he was like the beginning. When you came in, he would come around. And that's one of the things I do more if between him and Kurt, they both came around and checked in with every single person in the office in the morning. You know, how you doing? What's going on? What's happening? That type of thing. And I think that's one of the strongest points that I like to carry through our day is that I kind of have a little bit of connection, hopefully, sometimes with everybody at some point in the day. Just checking in, seeing what's going on, because you know, email's great and you see and data and everything's there, but the human aspect is one of the biggest things I think at success that we like to bring out is that we pay attention and we care enough to know about every single part of this company. And same with our clients, we pass that on to. So I think that is one of the things with Lee. Kurt Schwartz was a fun-loving individual. So on top of just knowing us, we did things as groups, which we hadn't done too much of before because we were smaller. When it became Kurt Schwartz's company, we went to games, we had events, we had so much team building. It was, it was crazy. I mean, literally looked like the agency from Mad Men. It was fun. So Kurt was a fun-loving guy, still is to this day. Glenn and Robin were always there in the background. They were huge supporters of anybody, you know, they were very business-like, but they were very caring. So I think all three owners have carried that same thing: caring. They really had the human aspect of, hey, if something's going on at home, it's gonna affect your day. They want to know about it. How can they help? So every single owner, and that's what I try to carry on, is concerned about everything. And that's where I kind of follow the suit and try to use as what it was exampled to me.

Lupe:

Yeah. And I think it's important to communicate with the people that you work with because being able to have the face-to-face interaction is how you continue the camaraderie in the workplace. I think that's super important as well.

Val:

Oh, I definitely think so. It adds to what you're going to learn, how you bring new things in, how everybody adapts. Because if you don't have a great relationship with everybody, it's very hard to understand if it's actually being absorbed, if it's being used correctly. And I just think it's part of the overall what we're trying to communicate.

Lupe:

Yeah, absolutely. As a communications agency and then an advertising agency and a recruitment marketing agency, the main thing you need to be good at is communicating. So if we're not practicing that, then you can't be good at it. So I think that's super important. The agency is a women-owned business. I don't think a lot of people understand what that means. So, what does it mean to you, Val?

Val:

To me, it just shows the accomplishment that can be done, how you can actually show. I mean, I think I came from a generation where I kind of felt a little bit, it was man-oriented and we were the admin people. We weren't the forward thinkers back in the day. I guess, you know, going to college, you saw it as much as we were doing the same thing. There was always a subpar. And I've seen that change over the years to being woman-owned now and being very heavy in women employees in our company. I mean, we definitely outnumber them two to one, if not three to one. We show those skills that we can multitask and we can handle fires and do everything at the same time. And I think woman-owned business just means we work that much harder. And it's it's sad to say, you know, you look back because it was something I grew up and you were, okay, it's just what we had we did. I go, but a woman-owned agency means that I go, we have multifaceted sides to us. Every woman does. And I think we can bring that to our clients, we can bring that to the organization. It just shows that we have that determination to carry us forward and move us to the future. It helps other women, you know. I think it just shows what what you can accomplish. You know, here I started as like a clerk and now I'm the president. I've been through many facets of it recessions, up and down, hills. Still here, you know. It's how hard do you want to work? How much do you, you know, you everybody took hits and we still came back. We didn't stop how hard we worked. We just had to work that much harder. So I think that's part of being a woman-owned business. It just shows that your determination and your work.

Lupe:

Yeah, and I think that's the important part to really note is we've come such a long way. I mean, now we're in 2024. A lot of women in business are business leaders and CEOs, and we weren't really seeing a lot of that before. Now you see it all over on LinkedIn, which I think is incredible growth.

Val:

It's incredible. It's it's wonderful, you know, to be acknowledged and see so much in the innovative thinking that wasn't able to be done because you were put in different roles. You're you weren't given the opportunities. And I definitely see that the opportunities are there for you guys, especially when you come out or like anybody coming out of school, anybody starting their career now, they have so many more opportunities.

Lupe and Val:

Yeah. And as long as you're doing anything possible to strike at the opportunity, there's no way someone could take that away from you. No, not at all. All right. So just to close us off, continuing on the women-owned business aspect, what is your advice to executive women?

Val:

I'm not limiting it to executive women, women, any woman who wants to succeed, it's, you know, I think you always have to work hard and work consistent and be confident. Everybody doesn't get through life without pitfalls. You wouldn't know success if you didn't go down, you know. And that's one of the things I think is really important is you don't know happiness if you weren't sad. You don't know that you're doing well if you didn't have a mistake or two. And we all make mistakes. But as women, it's sometimes held against us a little more. And I think my advice is don't let it be held against you. We all make mistakes. Just keep working harder. Go after your dreams because, you know, it's there. You just have to get there. So that's my advice to everybody, not just executives and anybody else.

Lupe:

Absolutely. That was a nice positive sound bite for all the women out there who are listening. So again, thank you so much, Val, for being on the first episode. I hope everyone listening decides to come back and see what SCG has to show you on the coffee and tea with SCG podcast. And we'll see you guys soon.

Tom:

Don't forget to subscribe whenever you listen to your podcast so you never miss an episode. And leave us a review. Until next time, keep those mugs filled and those ideas flowing.