In any industry, the success of a business can be determined with trust. Trust plays an important role and without it, a potential sale is left on the table in business. Thus, businesses hire public relations experts to bridge the gap between clients and businesses.
Public relations involve sending the correct messages to the correct place and the correct people, to create a stronger brand reputation. A public relations expert helps you build trust and credibility in your brand.
One such organization is Red Banyan, led by Evan Nierman, which is dedicated to accomplishing goals and delivering the right messages at the right time to those who matter.
Press the Truth® is Red Banyan’s modern, proactive, assertive, and effective approach to communicating. It is used to seize the initiative, craft perceptions that become reality, influence public opinion and protect the reputations and bottom lines of their partners.
Unlike most PR firms, Red Banyan precisely spells out to clients what to expect from them each month. By outlining the deliverables, they ensure that they are in total alignment with their customers and together they set expectations and targets that are clear, specific, and realistic. Every team is led by an experienced communicator who serves as the principal point of contact, making sure that the quality of the work is top-notch and the client is not only aware of the efforts underway but fully bought into the process.
An Exceptional Leader
Evan Nierman, Founder and CEO of Red Banyan, possesses over 20 years of high-level experience in public relations, marketing, crisis management, online media, international relations and public affairs. Throughout his career, Evan has provided strategic communications counsel to top business leaders, government officials, and presidential candidates and private individuals.
Growing up, Evan wrote poetry and short stories. Moreover, as a scholarship athlete at George Washington University in D.C. his major was in communications. Thus, Public Relations was a natural fit for Evan since communications and writing have always been his passion and area of focus.
Prior to forming Red Banyan, Evan served as the Director of Communications for a fast-growing start-up where he represented the company and formulated interviews with top-tier media including dozens of international, national, and local print, TV and online outlets. Evan’s entire professional career before Red Banyan involved PR positions either in-house or within an agency. With Red Banyan he set out to create a dynamic and effective firm with a culture built on collaboration, results. and a relentless commitment to advocating for clients.
As the CEO, Evan dedicates his time to ensuring that the company is in excellent financial shape, cultivating their outstanding culture, placing the right people in the right seats, maintaining high-level strategic relationships and positioning Red Banyan for success in the years to come.
Over the years, Evan’s role as the CEO has evolved with the company growing. He tries to model the very behavior he wants to encourage his colleagues to adopt by focusing on the activities that are the highest use of his time and have the biggest impact on moving the company forward.
Building Strong Foundation
Evan, in his early career, had worked for a boutique PR firm that did interesting work but approached businesses in a transactional manner. Clients were seen as piggy banks and the goal was to charge exorbitant rates and rake in the maximum amount of money as fast as possible. He knew that he wanted to create an agency with a diametrically opposed view of how to do business.
At Red Banyan, Evan Nierman focuses on building client relationships that last for years and treats his clients how he would want to be treated. Red Banyan has become indispensable by demonstrating a relentless commitment to guiding good organizations through bad circumstances.
The inspiration for the company’s name came from the banyan tree, which is a powerful metaphor for effective communication – small branches weaving together to form a strong base. Moreover, there is no color better than red to express confidence and action. While most PR firms are named after the founders, Evan never wanted the company to be about him. “It’s about our team which is a remarkable group of professionals who are devoted to our core values, confident in our capabilities and show up every day with a victory mindset,” shares Evan.
Evan believes that the biggest challenge for any company is finding the right people and ensuring that they are in the proper roles to be successful. As Red Banyan has expanded to multiple locations across the country and attracted industry-leading clients, they have increased their need for experienced managers and mid-level professionals.
“It’s a truism in business that ‘what got you here won’t get you there’. So, that has at times necessitated tough conversations as we sought to move people around to new positions,” he mentions. What Evan learned is that transparency, honesty, and clarity in communications are vital elements in helping empower and inspire team members at every level.
An Inspiring Journey
Evan believes that entrepreneurship has taught him so much about himself and has helped him see the world in an entirely new light. Although it may sound clichéd, Evan Nierman believes it to be completely true that we are all capable of so much more than we realize.
As a former soccer player, he thinks the lessons taught by team sports are the same ones that you discover creating a business and driving it forward. Evan has learned from experience to try to keep his focus on going forward not backward. That being said, there are always things that could be done better, and it’s important to learn from mistakes.
Evan shared that talent is an important element but never enough. He believes hard work and relentless commitment to perfecting your skills to be far more important. Working together is essential and nothing is more vital than ensuring the right people are in the right positions and working together on the right game plan.
He inspires to be a leader who is a coach, shares knowledge, strategy, and tactics that helps bring out the potential from within every member of the team. “When you show up every day knowing that others have your back and that together you are united behind a common goal, you are empowered by the feeling that you are unstoppable,” expressed Evan.
Tackling the Pandemic
COVID-19 was a crisis for Evan’s company like anyone else’s, however he flipped the situation into an opportunity. After having to conduct a round of layoffs and weathering two full months with zero client payments, they recovered rapidly. They doubled down on their crisis PR focus and accelerated their marketing efforts and have since increased their customer base.
Evan was already optimally positioned to utilize a remote workforce since Red Banyan has for years provided flexibility and freedom to their employees.
Looking Forward
“The future is bright for the company,” claims a passionate Evan.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Red Banyan has grown its workforce by 100% and they are on pace to double the company’s revenues during the coming year.
Moreover, in response to the requests from their clients and a need in the marketplace, they are preparing to launch the Red Banyan’s Crisis Preparation Roadmap (CPR). The CPR is a unique plan tailored to each individual organization designed to help them, in advance of a potential crisis, protect their reputation and revenues. Red Banyan’s CPR will further broaden its global impact and help more people everywhere.
