The recession is over. Hurrah. And our business is growing. Hurrah again.

Recessions are hard on everybody. But they can be especially tough on the leaders who have to make the decisions that affect others. It can be like carrying the burden of not only your own anxieties, but the anxieties of everyone you work with. Sometimes, you can just be so ground down by the stress and burden of carrying a team through the bad times that you feel that the only way you can get your energy back is with a complete change of scene.

That’s happened to us. The General Manager of our Toronto office was recruited away from us. We’re sorry to see her go. Not only was she very good at her job, but she was one of the nicest people you could ever want to work with and a friend. We’ll miss her.

Now we have an opening on our management team. And we need to move quickly to fill it.

We’re looking for a General Manager for our Toronto office.

Do you know this person? Or might it be you?

What does our general manager do?

Our General Manager will:

Lead a talented team of consultants whose expertise spans social media, traditional public relations, Web design and development, and advertising. You’ll ensure that they have what they need on a day by day basis to succeed and you’ll ensure that we’re delivering real results for our clients and pursuing opportunities to grow our business.

Set an example of excellence in your communications skills and personal conduct. Be a person who inspires by example.

Mentor and guide the team members. This includes developing an annual career plan with each employee and conducting progress reviews. We want our employees to grow with us. We count on our General Manager to make sure that everyone is thinking about what they want out of their professional careers and that they are working toward attaining that.

Work with our CFO to establish business targets and ensure that we achieve them. A business has to be successful in order to provide a bright future for its employees.

What kind of person are we looking for?

You have already achieved success in your career as a communicator. You have demonstrated your leadership skills through responsibility for a team and a business unit.

You are a successful consultant, having already demonstrated that you understand client needs and that you can organize a team to meet those needs and deliver creative solutions that deliver real results.

You have established relationships with senior executives who lead the communications and marketing functions in their companies. And those people want to work with you again. In fact, you’re confident that when they hear you’re working with Thornley Fallis, they’ll want to talk with you about you and your new team can help them.

You inspire loyalty. The people who work with you love working with you. They know that you care about them and that you’ll put the needs of the team ahead of your own needs.

Are you Thornley Fallis’ next Toronto General Manager?

Does it sound like a job you could excel at and that you’d be passionate about? If so, connect with me on LinkedIn or DM me on Twitter.

Over the past five years, I’ve been working to move Thornley Fallis and 76design from a dying traditional PR business model to a new business model more in tune with the disintermediated world of individual voices and communities of interest. A world in which anyone with something to express can have a voice and others who share their interests can find them and develop relationships with them that transcend the restrictions of geography. In short, a world of social software, social media, communities of interest and relationship building.

What does our new business look like? Well, its draws on a broader range of skills than have traditionally been associated with PR. Yes, we start with our established understanding of communication and design as an enabler. But we add to this an understanding of sociology, group dynamics and organizational design. An understanding of search engines and always-on mobile connections. And an ability to design Web applications to enable people to do the things we are imagining.

It’s one thing to see these new opportunities. But it’s another thing to instill excitement about them in others. And it’s even tougher to get people who are successful in doing things the way they always have done them to open their minds to the likelihood that they may not be able to sustain this over the long term.

So, I was delighted to read how LeeEllen Carroll, a member of our Ottawa team with a background in traditional journalism, described Thornley Fallis and 76design in a posting on the shift+control blog.

[Thornley Fallis and 76design] help clients reach, connect with, and build and sustain positive relationships with their communities through the integrated use of on-line and off-line tactics.

We design the creative, build the innovative, and manage the complicated.

Every member of our firm believes in the power of digital engagement. Everything we do is designed to foster that. We engender mutual respect and trust between our clients and their respective stakeholders and audiences. Our clients are a mix of high-profile corporate brands, bleeding-edge startups, government and associations. For these clients, we go beyond. We don’t leave it at working for and representing them; we believe in them, we brag about them.

Our shop is dynamic, open-minded, eclectic and centrally located. Our style is fresh, friendly, professional and invigorating.

The common thread in all of our efforts is a big idea of what the conversation economy can do for our clients to solve real business challenges and create new business opportunities.

I didn’t write this. I didn’t even know about it until I read it on the blog.

So why am I delighted to read this description? Because LeeEllen has described the new kind of company that will thrive in the era of social media. In her own words. Without any prompting from me.

An organization and its culture cannot be changed by fiat. They can only be changed by common agreement among the people who populate it. To succeed, the people who work at our company must come to share our new vision and see themselves being successful through it.

LeeEllen’s description of the company tells me that the people I work with understand the changes in our business and are embracing them. We are well on our way in the transition from the old model to the new. We’re making progress. And that feels good.

Since launching in July 2007, AideRSS has been well reviewed, attracted venture capital and evolved from founders’ dream into a professionally managed company. During my recent visit to the offices of AideRSS, both Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Grigorik and recently-appointed CEO Carol Leaman sat down to talk with me about the company’s journey from an idea to a venture-funded enterprise.

As I reviewed the recordings of these interviews, I was struck by how different Ilya and Carol are. Ilya is the quintessential techno-enthusiast. His enthusiasm for the original idea and the pursuit of the next innovation is almost palpable. Carol is the rationalist. Polished. Bottom line oriented.

Two very different people. Yet, they complement one another. Hmmm. A smart pairing brought about by smart money?

Ilya:

“It all started as a personal project when I started blogging. I wanted to create an analytics engine for myself, defining my own metrics for how people interact with my content, how has one post performed better than another. … One evening it occurred to me that if I’m doing this to track my own performance, why can’t I apply the same idea to outside posts?”

“It’s an amazing experience to wake up in the morning and realizing that you started with something that was just an idea and something you worked on on weekends, and all of a sudden you have a company working around it.”

“We went from an idea to an actual Website launched in July ’07. It was an amazing launch. We received lots of attention from the online community. Everybody loved the idea. It was something that everybody needed. We had articles written in Japanese, Korean, Arabic, English. It was really an amazing experience to see all the feedback. Following up on that, we went out and raised some money to take the idea to the next level.”

Carol:

“What’s behind the system is highly complex, but people won’t use it unless it’s extremely simple” to use.

AideRSS received its first round of financing in December, only five months after launch and plans to raise a second round “in a few months.”

What’s the business model? AideRSS seems to be working toward a “freemium service with a variety of potential services.” AideRSS is still in the early stages of exploring this, but they “hope to launch by the end of the calendar year.”

More about AideRSS

Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

It should be apparent from the series of posts about Michael McDerment ’s and Saul Colt ’s session at Third Tuesday that Freshbooks is a very social media savvy organization.

Not only does CEO Michael McDerment blog, but at least five other employees also blog. And there will likely be more.

So the obvious question: What will you do if one of your employees messes up and gives out a company secret or does something to hurt the company? Do you try to curb your employees’ blogging?

Michael McDermont: “It comes back to hiring. You’ve got to find people with shared values. And at the end of the day you have to trust people. … That’s the best you can do.”

It strikes me that this is a problem for large organizations which, by their nature, lose the ability to ensure fit between employees and company culture. But having acknowledged that, for organizations that still are of a size where this is practical, McDerment focuses on exactly the right place – management’s hiring decisions and attitudes.

Other clips with Freshbooks’ Michael McDerment and Saul Colt :

A Fresh(books) approach to social media by Dave Fleet

Building a Winning Team

Your next great business idea may be staring you in the face

Freshbooks: Don’t talk about the product. Talk about what it means to people

Freshbook Execs listen and respond to customers

Online media deliver results. But traditional media still add legitimacy

There’s no shortcut past setting realistic expectations

Companies, even the ones driven by the most powerful ideas, are not the work of one person alone. Sooner or later, every entrepreneur must come to grips with the need to build a team that can build a dream into a successful reality.

Freshbooks has been on a recruiting tear lately, bringing in talent like Saul Colt , who was behind the launch of ZipCars in Canada, and Mitch Solway , the former VP of Marketing at Lavalife .

In this video clip recorded at Third Tuesday Toronto , Freshbooks founder Michael McDerment talks about the effort that should go into recruiting and hiring and the rewards from doing it right.

“We hire for fit. … You’re building a team. You want an extension of yourself and somebody you can trust has got your back. We spend an inordinate amount of time hiring. That makes some of the other things a lot easier. If you find people with shared values, who are smart people and get things done, then I don’t have to worry about it. … I’m constantly trying to put myself out of a job. My goal is to have nothing to do. Everyone else is doing stuff. Me, doing nothing. … It comes down to hiring. And if you can find people with the right fit and shared values, they will make financial decisions and others that make sense.”

Interested in more about Freshbooks’ appearance at Third Tuesday Toronto?

Dave Fleet: A Fresh(books) approach to social media

Your next great business idea may be staring you in the face

Freshbooks: Don’t talk about the product. Talk about what it means to people

Freshbook Execs listen and respond to customers

What’s one of the secrets to success for a startup company fine tuning its offering to respond to customer needs? At Third Tuesday Toronto , Michael McDerment and Saul Colt of Freshbooks said that the top executives of the company regularly take support calls from customers.

This was “born out of necessity,” says Freshbooks founder McDerment. “I read the first three and a half years of every support request that came through. We were a pretty small company at that time.” Now that the company is growing, new support systems are being put in place. But, McDerment insists that the involvement of senior executives in support calls “is conscious and it is something we’re going to hold on to. … Just to ground you, it’s huge. Because otherwise, you start thinking, ‘we don’t need to change the products. We just need to sell more.’ …“ I’m doing more support now than I ever used to because I’m afraid of losing that touch.”

Here’s the clip. (Yes, the lighting is bad. But the content of what Michael and Saul were saying was just so strong, I really wanted to share it. We’ll get better lighting for future Third Tuesday events.)

But execs aren’t expected to be up to speed on technical issues, are they? How does Freshbooks ensure that their execs have the technical knowledge to respond to the support calls they take? Says McDerment, “For the most part, tech support for us is answering simple questions and holding people’s hands. … We build teams … a marketing person, a development person, a management person all doing support on the same day. So they get to spend time together, communicate, collaborate, get things done, get all the answers within a team.”

Now, you may be sceptical about whether the company actually lives this every day. Well, spontaneous validation was provided by Connie Crosby , a Freshbooks client, who spoke up to offer her story about how Saul Colt had responded to her support request late on a weekend night.

Impressive.

I’ll post more Freshbooks at Third Tuesday Toronto clips over the next week.

Pat Gossage, the founder and now Chairman of Media Profile, talked to me recently for the series of video interviews with heads of Canadian PR firms that I’m conducting for the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms.

Some of the highlights of the interview:

What makes Media Profile a special place?

“I wanted a firm I enjoyed coming to work at every day. And I wanted a firm that had a pleasant, accepting and respectful atmosphere amongst its workers. A lot of teamwork. Bringing people up from within rather than parachuting from above. I was much more interested in creating a culture than creating a big, successful firm. The culture is here and the success followed.”

On client relations:

“The other thing we stress is being incredibly attentive to clients. We’re good listeners. Somebody once told me that when you are listening to the client your are winning. That’s been a theory we’ve put into practice and it’s been an important aspect of us winning and keeping clients.”

Advice to young people considering a career in public relations:

“The atmosphere in an office is very important. … It’s whether you want to come to work at a firm and whether the senior people are accessible, whether there’s a mentoring program, all the things that will allow you to build on your skills over time. And stay with one firm, which is very important to all of us in public relations, so that we have continuity with our people. That’s what the client respects. The client doesn’t want to be dealing with different people every couple of years.”

You can view the video of the complete interview with Pat Gossage on the CCPRF Weblog.

76design, our Web design and development firm, has been booming. And we really need to bolster our team of developers – quickly.

So, if you are a great developer who is looking for a chance to do interesting and challenging work in an environment that provides growth opportunities, click over to 76design’s Web Developer Wanted post and let us know that you’d be interested in joining us.

If you take a look at “Our Community” in ProPR’s sidebar, you’ll see two new additions: FlackLife and The Client Side. We’ve added these blogs because their authors, Bob LeDrew and Michael Seaton, have joined us at Thornley Fallis.

That’s pretty exciting for us. Not only do we gain two new work colleagues, but they also bring two blogs to us with two very different perspectives.

Bob LeDrew has been sharing his perspective on the public relations industry and issues since April 2003. Michael Seaton writes and podcasts from the perspective of a digital marketer who was until he joined us on the Client Side as Director of Digital Marketing at one of Canada’s major banks.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been able to include some very smart people in our community who write about social media, communications, marketing and design. Our community currently includes: Michael O’Connor Clarke, Terry Fallis, John Sobol, the Web designers and developers at 76design, the PRGirlz (although they’ve posted sparingly lately), and the PR team in Canada’s capital. And although they’ve left the firm, we still think of David Jones, Chris Clarke and John Wiseman as members of our extended social media family.

Our approach to blogging is that we want people with their own blogs to bring them to our community. We encourage them to write as frequently as they want. And we always acknowledge that if they leave us, they can take their blogs with them. We will retain the value of what we learned and shared while they were with us, but their blogs are theirs.

While they are with us, we ask only that they observe our blogging policy – which is simple. It has only two provisions: “Blog Smart” and “Cause no harm to any person.”

I’m a longtime reader of both Bob’s and Michael’s blogs. They’re smart and always interesting.

So, if you haven’t discovered these two writers yet, I hope that you’ll subscribe to the feeds of both FlackLife and The Client Side and see for yourself why I’m excited to have them as part of the Thornley Fallis Community.

Chris Clarke joined Thornley Fallis straight out of school. He was the first person we hired primarily because of his experience in blogging. He’d begun his Student PR blog while studying public relations at London’s Fanshawe College. I subscribed to Chris’ blog and read his posts. Over time, I thought that Chris demonstrated passion for PR and a distinctive perspective and voice that would mesh well with Thornley Fallis’ exploration of social media.

Well, today is Chris’ last day at Thornley Fallis before he leaves us to join another firm that recruited him away from us. We sat down to chat about the highlights of his first PR work experience, what he learned and what advice he would offer to students who are thinking about a career in public relations. Some of Chris’ observations:

• On the job discovery: PR is a small community. Everyone in the business know one another. If you want to build a career in PR, get out from behind your desk and network. “It’s a nice, small tight-knit community, so the sooner you get to know people, the better off you’re going to be… Networking is one of those things that I picked up early on and hung on to because it’s so important to advance yourself professionally.”
• On the job lessons: “You’ve got to listen. Always listen. Write things down. Try to take on as much as you can. … you try a little bit of everything and you learn a lot.”
• Advice for students hoping to break into PR: “Start blogging. Get out there and get involved in the social media community and blog as much as you can.”

You can watch a five minute video of my interview with Chris Clarke here.