The secret to scaling a business? According to Allison co-founder and global CEO Jonathan Heit, "it's making sure that your people and your clients have the resources they need to be most successful. What we do is we spend a lot of time looking at what is it that our clients are interested in and what is it that we should invest in."

Heit says that his agency has long put a major focus on technology and that "historically, we've really learned a lot from our clients. We were early on in digital and social media because of a lot of our clients. We had YouTube in its earliest days going all the way back to launching Myspace. That's really as true today with Allison Advanced and our AI capabilities."

Implementing AI, he says requires "a team that truly understands the landscape and we're understanding it in the broader context of all integrated marketing and not just public relations, so that we're really looking at it from every angle."

"The importance of comms and integrated marketing pros to be able to tie their success and their results back to business because of the measurability of the work that we do," is also essential, Heit tells Simon. "It's never about vanity metrics. It's got to be about moving the business forward. So, the more we're able to do that and the better measurement tools that we have, that's where we've really invested to look at brand reputation."

The keys to onboarding employees in a hybrid work environment are also discussed. "Maximizing communication across the manager and the employee I think is something that's so important. But one of the real things that I think has had the greatest impact is cohort-based onboarding. So, we might hire throughout the year, throughout the first part of the year, and we'll bunch or batch three, four, five, ten new hires together, and put them into a cohort-based training onboarding."

Heit also talks about the rules for employee retention. "Retention is something we think about all the time. We we've always prided ourselves on our culture. One of the things that we have really invested in heavily is our EAG’s, our Employee Allyship Groups. We have found if you give folks the ability to have that agency, that has really helped with retention. And that's something we've always prided ourselves on. We're not quite at the nine-and-a-half-year average as your team is. But for the agency environment, we're well ahead of the average. And we really pride ourselves on that."

View all of the interviews in the “PR's Top Pros Talk” series. Subscribe to get notified when new episodes are available.

Interested in taking part? Contact Doug Simon at [email protected]

D S Simon Media helps clients get their stories on television through satellite media tours and by producing and distributing content to the media. The company also produces live social media events.