374: Build a High-EQ Business with Christy Setzer
Christy Setzer, President of New Heights Communications, shows leaders how to build a high-EQ business through flexible work, manageable client loads, and culture-fit hiring. After years in politics and strategic communications, Christy built a consistently profitable firm where emotional intelligence supports workplace culture and attentive client service.
In this conversation, Christy introduces The High-EQ Business Framework—Hybrid/Flexible Work, Work-Life Balance, Fewer Clients/Advisor, Bring Your Whole Self, and Hire Culture Fits. She explains why emotional intelligence matters in a client-facing business, how limiting each advisor’s client load creates room for deeper strategy and thought partnership, and why growing firms must build systems that keep pace with revenue and headcount. Christy also shares reaching audiences through podcasts, Reddit, and Substack, as well as how online conversations can influence AI-generated answers.
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Build a High-EQ Business with Christy Setzer
Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint is Christy Setzer, the President of New Heights Communications, a strategic communications and public relations firm supporting labor unions, progressive advocacy, women’s groups, and others seeking to change the world for the better. Prior to starting New Heights in 2010, Christy served as a national spokesperson for the presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, as well as numerous state and local races. Christy, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, it’s awesome to have you, and I don’t know. We’ve had over 350 episodes. I don’t recall having anyone similar to your profile. I mean, we may have had a couple of PR people, but definitely not who have been running campaigns and stuff like that. So that’s super exciting, and now you have a successful business on the back of your experience. But before we dive in, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice?
Yeah. You know, it’s definitely changed over the years. When I started this business, it was not out of some great desire to start a big business or anything more. And I find that this is actually often true, that there’s a bit of a gender divide. I find that a lot of times when men are starting businesses, especially from politics, it is because, you know, look, we’re going to change the world.
We’re going to make a lot of money. You know, they have these sort of big dreams about it. And a lot of times, I think with women, it’s more like they don’t feel like they’re being used well in their current spaces. They feel like they’re sort of being overlooked, and look, maybe I would just have more success if I went out on my own or did something else in a sort of non-traditional path. And that was the case for me too. It started rather early. I was, at a young age, in my 20s, given pretty big jobs of, you know, the Iowa Press Secretary for Al Gore, for the sitting vice president, et cetera.
I had a lot of really good experiences. But by the time I was in my late 20s, I started noticing that men who were my same age and had my same level of experience were getting tapped for much bigger things, and none of my female friends were. And so that sort of planted a bit of a seed. And by the time I was in my early 30s, I had a job in-house working for the Service Employees Union. So a two-million-member labor organization. And I really enjoyed the job, but ultimately, it was sort of a big, somewhat bureaucratic organization where, again, I just didn’t really feel like I had a ton of agency over how high my ceiling was.
So when I left and started New Heights, it really was just more of an idea of, well, maybe I can kind of create a higher ceiling for myself than what’s been set for me. Over the years, that’s very much changed. And now, I mean, it’s really grown past my wildest expectations for myself. I mean, at one point I thought that the biggest possible dream that I had for my business was maybe one day we’ll hit a million dollars in revenue a year, and maybe we’ll have a team of like, I don’t know, 10 people. And we’ve hit multiples of that, many multiples of that.
So now the goal is, sure, you know, you keep moving the bar for yourself in terms of the money and the headcount and things like that, but really it’s about, can we have a bigger voice in the conversation? I run a political business. Can we really move the needle for our clients in order to change things and change the world for the better, in our view?
That’s very broad, you know, change the world for the better. Why is this important for you?
For some reason, it always has been. I am someone that was interested in politics even in high school. In college, I ran our College Democrats group and our College Women’s group, and I was always on student council. And that was just always something that was kind of interesting and important to me. My parents both sort of gave back in a one-on-one way. My mother was a teacher. She was a public school math teacher for many years. My father was a police officer.
But I really was drawn to the idea that in politics and policy and legislation, you can make change on a broader, more systemic level. And you can not just change one heart and mind, but you can potentially change millions. So that was kind of what drew me to it.
Okay. I like it. Change a million lives. That’s very inspirational. It’s probably practical too for you because you are on big platforms, big national networks. So let’s talk about your business, and specifically, this podcast is exploring frameworks that people discover and use. And the idea is that business owners who listen to this podcast, they might get inspired by your framework and they implement some version of it in their business. So what’s a framework that you could share in three to five steps with the audience?
Yeah. I mean, honestly,
the big one for me has been and continues to be just create a business that's a place where you would want to work.
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So for many years, we were all remote, and that’s because we were small. It was myself and a few other people. But even before COVID, we became hybrid. There was a year in which we went from four people at the start of the year to eight people at the end of the year. And so I thought, okay, we should actually be meeting in person.
But I didn’t want to be in the office 100% of the time, and so we were in the office three days a week, work from where you wanted two days a week. So that was always important to me, was sort of that kind of hybrid piece. Now we’re actually all remote again, but we’ve kind of gone back and forth. And the idea there was that, you know, I thought sometimes I do my best work when we’re all together, and sometimes I do my best work just being able to be head down by myself, no distractions. So that was one thing.
Two, the work-life-balance piece was always really important to me too. I mean, some of which is, you know, as I said, illustrated in the fact that we were always either hybrid or all remote. But one of the ways that that plays out now is with a lot of PR firms, and most of the people on my team come from other, sometimes really big firms. They would have seven, eight, nine clients at a time, and what happens is that you can’t really go very deep with the clients. We do a lot of media relations, so you can get them that press hit and then move on to the next client. But you don’t really get to learn their why.
You don’t really get to learn what is driving the client and be able to give them more top-level advice. So
it's not just a good move for my team's work-life balance that they only have, on average, about four clients. It's also good for our clients too
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They know that our people are not burned out. They know that they’re getting real attention. And again, all of this is about sort of like, create the business that you would want to work at.
And then sort of one final piece of that, I would say, is we really bring our whole selves to the office. Because we’re mostly remote, we do get together in person maybe once a month or so for lunch, happy hours, that kind of thing. But in the meantime, and again, it being a remote environment, we’re really into each other’s, like, showing pictures of our kids and our pets, and we have a book club and all of those kinds of things.
Which I feel like, if you’re not able to bring your full self to work, if you don’t actually enjoy spending eight hours a day with these people, what are you doing, right? So I’m hiring people for culture reasons, and I mean, I’m obviously hiring people who have a very experienced background in exactly what we’re looking for. But I’m also looking for a culture fit too, which is, is somebody going to really just add to our culture as well as just produce good work?
Do you find that men are also as receptive to that part of the culture as women?
That is a great question. I think PR in general tends to be pretty female-dominated, and at times my business has been pretty 50/50 in terms of male/female. Right now, we’re almost all women. And I do wonder sometimes, yes, if that is, when I’m talking about the way that I’m describing this business, which is, again, we’re very successful, we’re very profitable, et cetera, and we’ve been consistently profitable. But I’m not leading with something that is a cutthroat approach.
We have targets for things like, again, our profitability or new business, that sort of thing. They’re not “If you don’t hit this, you’re out.” That’s just, I think, not how people produce their best work. And I do wonder if that is gendered. Or even, I’ll give one more example. When I’m interviewing people, I really don’t like to put them on the spot. I really like to have a conversation with them where they feel comfortable being able to kind of give me their best, most thoughtful answers.
It’s not because you’re not going to have to be put on the spot on the job. Of course you are. But I don’t feel like what is historically more of an adversarial interview process really gets me the people that are ultimately also going to be a good culture fit too. So again, is that gendered? Probably, but it is what I’ve found works well for me and my firm.
That’s fascinating. I never thought about this, but I had a client which was a PR firm. It was also an all-female PR firm, and I thought it was an accidental thing. There’s another one that I follow on social media, and I know the CEO, and they are almost all female. I think they have one male member.
Yeah, one.
And I was wondering, is there something that allows women to be more successful in PR generally than men?
I think that there is a high degree of emotional intelligence required to be in a client-facing business and in general.
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And to vastly, vastly stereotype, I do think that sometimes women are better at those soft skills of even just… I was on a new business pitch call the other day, a couple of days ago, and I said, “Okay, I’ll get you the proposal by early next week.” Figured that was fine. It’s only a few days from now. And she kind of made a little bit of a face and said, “That would be fine. That would work.” And I said, “Oh, okay. I’m hearing that you’re going to need it sooner.
Am I hearing that correctly?” And she said, “Well, I have this long flight on Sunday. I’d really love to, I was thinking I could read it on my flight.” No problem. Okay. Even just that little thing of just being really attuned to people’s faces that they’re making, the body language, all the nonverbal stuff too, I think is something that is really important. Because we’re always constantly trying to divine, like, yes, what are they saying, but what are they not saying? And I’ll give one more example.
We do, every week with my team, we do two all-staff meetings. One is just sort of your typical, right, let’s go client by client. What do we have? What are the deliverables for each client each week? What are we putting up on social media? What’s going on with our new biz pipeline? You know, all the sort of usual stuff. And it’s a report-out meeting. But the other one that we do each week for 30 or 45 minutes is a training, the whole team, of whatever. And so the one for this week, our training was, I went through an exercise with them. And I said, “There’s often a discrepancy between why we think people are buying from us and why they are actually buying from us.”
And I said, okay, a couple of examples. One, let’s say, we’ll keep it gendered here. You go to the manicure place around the corner. They think that you go there because you can get a cheap gel manicure, because whatever, they have all these new products and pretty colors and things like that. But really, you go to them because you can easily book online, because they always have an appointment available, because it’s really just around the corner, et cetera, right? So there’s this discrepancy that in order for you to know how to do both your marketing and how to relate to people, you need to understand that.
So then I went through an exercise with them. I said, “Think about a client that you have right now. What do you think they most value us for?” And in no case was it, you know, because we get them great media attention, whatever. That’s a given. Of course you have to do that. But what they really valued from us was the strategy, the thought partnership, the stuff that we were seeing that they had not, or even just confirming sometimes, “Yes, you’re right. Your communications director does need to grow,” or those kinds of pieces too.
So that is what I find is sort of the thing that keeps people coming back.
They might hire you for media relations or for messaging or digital, whatever, but the reason that they keep you on is because of strategy, and thought partnership.
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Can they really sort of, you know, are you providing a value-add in this more soft way as opposed to kind of on the harder skills way too?
Yeah. That is fascinating. And I always thought about this. I used to have an investment banking business, and I always talked about reading between the lines. So what are the people not saying? Especially in deal situations, there are a lot of things on the line, and they were hesitant or you felt that their body language or their voice inflection gave something away. Yeah, so that makes sense. That makes sense.
So this emotional intelligence, especially in your area where there are often critical situations where people’s reputation is on the line, you really have to resonate with them. So we touched a little bit on this, but I’d like us to go deeper. So what drives growth in your business? So beyond the soft things, or maybe you can elaborate more on that.
Sure. Well, so the first part is what we just talked about, that if you’re providing a consistent high-level service, like, that’s great, but that’s a non-negotiable. You have to be doing more than that. You know, in order for them to re-up the contract and expand it, they need to see that you are going to be, again, a true partner, especially, again, in the age of AI, where so much of some of the work that we can do, frankly, can be at least made easier by AI and shortcuts like that.
So that’s the first part, making sure that you’re truly meeting them kind of where they are, providing more than just the hard skill stuff. The second thing is, of course, diversifying. For a really long time, my business was a reflection of what my skill sets were, which was media relations, rapid response, some strategy. And again, in a very political sense, political landscape analysis was something that I always brought too. But now we offer messaging, which is probably as much of our business as media relations. The digital space is a growing one.
And then it’s also, this is maybe part of the second answer, and maybe a third answer, understanding the way in which the landscape is changing in your field, and I don’t mean politics. For me, I mean communications. So obviously, when I started this work, we were still faxing press releases to news stations. And now we’re in a situation where most people say, like, I think it’s the majority of people who say, “I consume no news at all,” and that is by design, that they are burnt out from it. They do not want to consume news. Okay. Well, then, if what we’re trying to get people to do is consume what is essentially political news, then we need to stop…
Well, we don’t need to stop going on NBC Nightly and things like that. That’s always important. But you need to figure out, how are we meeting people on podcasts, on Reddit, on Substacks? Again, understanding how that field is changing is really critical to getting people to both continue to re-up with us and also getting new clients.
That is so interesting because I’m one of these people that is on a news detox most of the time.
Yeah, I mean, understandable.
Yeah.
Right.
And I find it fascinating that people like you are looking for ways to reach us anyway through other channels, and that is very interesting, like blogs and Substacks and perhaps not direct messages. Is there an indirect way of talking about politics?
Sure. I mean, look back at one of the things that I think Donald Trump’s campaign did pretty well was being able to insert him in non-political spaces. I mean, Joe Rogan wasn’t considered political when he went on his show, right? I mean, he was the guy from a reality television show many years ago. And there was a whole lot of the manosphere thing, right? Like, these guys who go out and are telling you definitely what supplements to use and how to work out and things like that.
It’s not their main message, but you would notice sometimes, right, that they would end up, as they’re doing their reps, saying something about how they really appreciate his campaign or something, right? Now, being able to capitalize on that was incredibly successful. It was something that was really hard to track because you’re not going to see that support in the latest polling or in them having particularly good stories in mainstream media. But there was this momentum that was growing kind of under the surface.
Democrats are playing catch-up in that way. And again, I imagine that people who do probably corporate PR have probably already been employing a lot of those strategies. But specifically in progressive and political media and political PR, I think we’re playing kind of catch-up in that way of getting into these sort of non-political spaces.
That’s super interesting. So it sounds a little bit like influencers promoting products.
Yes. Some of it is. Some of it is. It’s also understanding where you can kind of control the conversation more. Like, one of the things that we have learned is that Reddit is a space where there’s not going to be as much content probably on your specific niche issue, so you can really dominate the conversation. And then that, of course, impacts GEO when people are asking AI, “What should I know about either this issue or this organization or this company?” So it’s both of those things. It’s finding your ways in, it’s figuring out the places where you can really dominate the conversation and other places where you are going under the radar a little bit more.
This is maybe an aside, but I thought that Reddit was very vigilant in policing people to not be doing that.
I think you have to be very subtle about it. Maybe you’re just being very helpful and answering questions for a long time before you can insert the message a little bit more. But there’s a way.
So it’s about warming up these channels until you get the influence to actually steer them.
Yes.
Yeah. So I think Winston Churchill or something like that, if you want to go from A to B, you have to get on a horse and turn it in the right direction or something like that. Maybe that’s what he meant. So let me ask you this. This is a business question. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now?
Yeah. So we are going from, right now, a pretty flat hierarchy. I mean, obviously we have, you know, it’s myself, we have a chief of staff, we have leaders in the business, we have what we’d call directors who are client-facing and lead clients, and then below them we have a structure. But what we are going to now is more defined departments. Our earned media department, our messaging department, our digital department, AI is sort of incorporated throughout.
And then the flexibility that that gives me at that point is that you have people who are sort of, every time an RFP comes in for new work, then okay, well, is it mostly messaging and narrative work? Okay, well, then this person is in charge of it. Okay, are we getting more work in earned media? Okay, then this person’s in charge of it, and that person is now in charge of flagging for me, like, “Okay, I think we’re going to need new staff.” All of that was on me before, so the challenge that I’m trying to work on is that essentially our revenue and headcount have scaled in a way that came before the corresponding systems and processes.
And also, I’m a campaign girl by nature, which means that you’re ready to wake up each morning and do the rapid response all day, but the long-term stuff is something that often gets short shrift. So the challenge that I’m working on right now is developing the systems and processes of an organization that actually reflects our growth of today as opposed to a couple of years ago. So we basically doubled our revenue in the last couple of years, and great, but it means that, again, the systems that we worked pretty hard to put together don’t really make sense for us anymore. So
the challenge is continually building to reflect the growth path that you're on.
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So how do you scale a professional service firm that is very dependent on the personal relationships?
Yeah, that is a great question. And that’s why I was sort of talking, too, about how, in the interview process, essentially how someone is with me in the interview is probably how they’re going to be with a client, right? If I find them a little bit too casual or a little bit not as sharp, or obviously all the ways in which I could be judging them potentially in the interview, well, that’s probably how they’re going to come across to a new client as well.
Is there anything red flag-ish about that? That’s what I’m sort of looking for. Because you’re right, the service industry, everybody on my team, for the most part, almost without exception, is client-facing. And so I’m, yeah, I’m testing those soft skills just as much. We don’t really have a product in that… A paid product, sorry. We do some paid ads, but it’s a relatively small part of the business.
And so that is harder to scale. It’s partly why, for somebody like myself who actually worked a lot of time for many years on campaigns, we don’t really work with a ton of candidates these days. Why? Because it only makes sense financially if you are someone who has a paid product. Either you are a full-time, 24/7 staffer on that campaign, or you’re, let’s say, someone who, you know, they buy ads and you run ads for them, and so therefore, you’re getting a cut of the buy. That can certainly make financial sense, but for us, it doesn’t make sense to be on 24/7 and still be getting paid like someone without a product.
Yeah. That would be like a butts-in-seats kind of situation that is not a high-margin product. And how do you differentiate your brand in this market?
Yeah. So in a couple of different ways, I would say we differentiate. One is that it’s important to our clients, who we would, for the most part, not all of them, but for the most part, they’re what we’d call movement clients, right? They are, again, progressive advocacy. That means they’re doing, let’s say, voting rights, climate change, economic justice, those kinds of issues.
So it’s important to them that they’re working with a firm that shares their values, shares their political values, and isn’t playing both sides of it. And you see that with a lot of companies, especially PR firms as they get bigger, which is that, sure, they’ve got these, you know, what we would consider kind of mission-driven, good-guy clients, but they’re also on the other side of it, too. So you can’t have like an anti-gun control client and then a pro-gun control client.
You know? It’s like you need to be able to do both. So one of the differentiators is that we’re not playing both sides of things. Our values are, we wear it on our sleeve. That’s always who we are, always who we have been, et cetera. That’s number one. Number two, we are still able to offer clients senior-level service without doing too much of the switcheroo, which, I mean, I’m sure you’re familiar. It’s where the senior person sells the work, and then you never see that person again. No, we are still both at the size and the way that we’re structured so that the senior-level person definitely still has face time with the client.
That’s becoming, I think, a little bit more vanishingly rare. And then, third is some of the stuff that we talked about before in terms of both the work-life balance of my team means that they can also spend more time with our clients, and that really is something that our clients can tell. They value it. They really feel like we are part of their team and not just somebody that they kind of see fly by night once in a while.
Yeah. Did you say switcheroo?
Switcheroo. That’s what I said.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s interesting. So, incidentally, I was running a PR department in a bank, I don’t know, 25 years ago, just for a year or so, and I hired a PR agency, and exactly this thing happened. Right. This guy flew in from London, and he was very smooth and very smart, and as soon as we signed the contract, I never saw him again.
Well, I mean, that happens in every industry, right? When I was planning my wedding, we met with the DJ. We really liked the DJ. He was awesome. He was cool. But for our actual wedding, it wasn’t him. It was some other guy who we’d never met with and who didn’t seem to have the list of songs that we had given him and all that, right? So nobody appreciates that. No one likes that at all. Yeah.
And there are ways that you can handle it, right? Like, at least if you’re going to have that person doing the pitch call, then they should be accessible to the client. They don’t have to be on every call. They don’t have to be doing the work, but they need to know that there is a through line between what was sold to them and the actual day-to-day interactions.
Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that actually works, and it’s more credible because that person, if they are really that good as they seemed on the interview, then they can’t be available 24/7. It’s not realistic.
It’s not realistic.
Yeah. Right. But if they can be pulled in and there’s a competent team below them, that’s a perfect combination.
Yeah.
So, Christy, if our listeners listen to this and say, “Wow, I really would like to get involved or learn more or talk to someone at this firm or talk to Christy,” where should they go for information to learn more about New Heights and yourself?
Amazing. Well, so our website, for starters, just newheightscommunications.com. They can email me directly, christy@newheightscommunications.com, and I would be delighted to connect.
That’s fantastic. So if you enjoyed this conversation, listening to this, then stay tuned because every week we have a couple of exciting entrepreneurs and learning really good frameworks, such as this framework here, you know, hybrid, flex, work-life balance, making sure you provide substance for these clients, not just be there and do a switcheroo on them, and bring the whole self.
So employ people who are actually culture fits and who you have fun working together with. That’s a really great way to build a firm and where you don’t mind spending the long hours that you probably do. So thanks, Christy, for sharing your framework, and thanks for listening.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Important Links:
- Christy’s LinkedIn
- Christy’s Website
- Christy’s Email: christy@newheightscommunications.com