Simone Heydon and Jules Brooke needed a brainwave solution for their PR agency to help clients affected by the global recession of 2009.

Simone tells how the recession ended up in their agency extending into a new and exciting direction!

We had been running a full service Public Relations agency for a number of years called Handle Communications. 

We had a range of clients but our ‘bread and butter’ clients were predominantly small business people launching new products and services in Australia.  When the recession started to hit, these clients started to really hurt financially.  They felt they needed to spend less money.

We decided to create a DIY PR business to allow people to do their own PR on a much smaller budget. The theory was that when they had grown the business to a certain point they would come back to us for ‘full service’ again.

We knew PR wasn’t difficult it just needed some time to be allocated to it. The site is www.handleyourownpr.com and it offers small business owners all the advice they need to run their own campaign. 
We also sell qualified media contact lists and offer a press release writing service to these customers. 
Our clients are getting amazing responses for themselves and the feedback has been very positive.  Word of mouth is now spreading and we are in the process of offering this service overseas. 

I guess it is true that necessity is the mother of invention.  If the recession hadn’t hit we wouldn’t have thought to create this new and exciting arm of our business!