Manchester Union Leader Newspaper Profiles Demaree Public Relations

Henniker PR firm drives revenues with tech changes

By SHERRY BUTT DUNHAM
Business Correspondent

HENNIKER, December 2, 2002 — At least one New Hampshire-based public relations firm has managed to stay above the curve of the economic downturn and cultivate a 20 percent revenue increase since terrorist attacks started a major change of the way in which American companies do business.

According to Dan Demaree, president of Demaree Public Relations in Henniker, the public relations industry has taken a hit in the last few years, but his company has diversified its services to meet the needs of high-technology companies.

“The downturn in the economy has definitely had an impact on many public relations and marketing firms, but we are managing to do quite well. Our revenue has continued to increase every year since our inception ... although we are having to work much harder to sustain that growth,” said Demaree.

“We have established relationships with several industry consultants and venture capitalists, and they refer emerging technology companies, of merit, to us. In the past three months, we have signed three new high-tech clients.

“Overall, this has been an excellent year for our company.”

Demaree says things have changed markedly in high-tech.

“A few years ago, anyone with a fancy sounding dot.com company and a business plan could get venture capital financing.” Back then, he said, the firm was receiving up to five unsolicited requests for bids per month from various high-tech firms.

“Some PR firms were eagerly signing up every technology firm that came along, but we took a hard look at each company and only partnered with companies that we felt had a realistic shot at long-term success. So when the bubble burst in 2001, we saw many public relations firms lay off much of their staff, with one prominent company downsizing from 40 to 15 people within a one-year period,” he said.

Demaree has brought high-tech change in-house too, replacing face-to-face meetings and media and analyst tours for clients with “a sizeable increase in virtual meetings ... via a phone conference and an online demo via a Web-conferencing provider.”

“We still take our clients out on the road, but the percentage of Net meetings is way up.”

Big changes have occurred in high-tech publishing and advertising, too.

“Many technology media titles have ceased publication altogether, and many others are morphing ... into Web and traditional print format ... reducing overhead while providing a more immediate information delivery.”

Those changes, and a dropoff in computer buying and commercial purchases of electronic goods and systems, are the challenges facing the high-tech PR industry today, he said. “It’s harder to identify and convert viable prospects into solid clients. And it’s more difficult to gain media coverage due to the reduction in media outlets and the scope of their coverage. Coming full circle, the end users are just not buying technology at the rate they did in the past.”

With a background in PR, marketing, technical writing and high-tech, Demaree founded Demaree Public Relations in February 1998. The company has two offices on the East Coast, one in Henniker and another in Maryland, and has grown from a staff of four to six full-time people, with four people in the corporate office in Germantown, Md., and two in Henniker. Demree said annual revenue has grown steadily since 1998, and reached 17% growth in 2001-2002. He declined to give specific revenue numbers.

“As a six-person public relations firm, our overall revenue is not that big compared to the large Boston, New York, or San Francisco-based public relations firms, but I doubt that many public relations firms anywhere can match our steady revenue growth, especially throughout this present economic down-cycle,” Demaree said.

RockPort Trade Systems of Gloucester, Mass., was the company’s first client, growing in the transportation and import-export field until January, 2000, when QRS Inc. of Richmond, Calif., acquired RockPort for $103.5 million.

Grace Cohen manages the Henniker office, and said the Demaree firm represents clients “over a wide geographic area — everywhere from Massachusetts, California, Texas, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey — even Ireland and Great Britain.

“We work closely with a firm in The Netherlands who represents our customers in Europe,” she said. “We work with our client’s internal marketing support staff to refine the company’s key messages,” and handling media placement propose and secure speaking engagements for clients, and manage analyst relations.

“Our clients are typically high-tech software developers, systems integrators, telecom companies, consulting firms or high-tech manufacturers,” she said, along with companies in data mining, supply chain management, transportation, document management, e-Learning systems and wireless network devices.

“Our current clients range from $5 million to $300 million in annual revenues,” said Demaree.

“We currently represent four companies in the transportation logistics and supply-chain fields, and we have several others knocking on our door,” Demaree said.