She’s building big: A business Toastmasters might love to take
THE INTERESTING part of Chryssa Zizos’s business is unleashing people’s potential.
She trains clients to overcome their fear of public speaking, demolish their weaknesses and expand their horizons – at a nice, four-figure fee per tutorial.
After smashing barriers for them, she is now going to do it for herself. Her Arlington, Virginiabased Live Wire Media Relations is launching a software business that allows people to train themselves to be polished public speakers.
“I’m 46. I am at the peak of my career,” Zizos said. “Never been smarter. Never been healthier. Never been happier. We are doing this.”
Looking back as a 62-yearold, I admire people like Zizos - and many of the subjects I have written about over the past decade - who aren’t afraid.
“I know what it feels like to fall flat on my face and crawl through the mud,” the seasoned entrepreneur said. “Failure doesn’t scare me. You learn a lot through your failures. You always come out stronger on the other end.”
I buy into this. Life throws curveballs. Success is not a seamless arc upward. Just read Forbes’s most recent issue of the 400 richest Americans. Most of the billionaires who have built their fortunes from scratch have been slapped around.
Zizos is no billionaire, but she does well. Live Wire will gross over US$3 million (RM13 billion) this year, putting several hundred thousand dollars in her bank account.
Live Wire has represented some heavy-hitters in its 20 years: Private equity’s Carlyle Group; international construction giant Bechtel; defence firm Raytheon; Georgetown University; the HayAdams hotel; Deloitte; and the usual smattering of Washington alphabet soups, such as Finra.
So she does pretty well. She wants to do better. Zizos is spending US$1 million on her plan to take revenue into the double-digit millions.
“I want to hold on to the business for as long as it takes to create a new industry, a new standard, a new way of doing things,” she said. “I want to sell it for as much money as I can get for it. A dream prospect to sell it to would be Toastmasters.”
She hired former WJLA-TV reporter Jeff Goldberg to help run the day-to-day while she focuses on the new software company as well as an expansion into digital and social media.
Zizos is working with a division of Mumbai-based Tata Industries to license software to corporations. It uses artificial intelligence and algorithms to customise media lessons to each user.
“The camera on your laptop and computer will scan your head, neck and shoulders and will record your speech or presentation in real time, and the computer will provide you real-time feedback,” she said.
It’s important stuff. You aren’t going to get far up the corporate ranks if you can’t master public speaking.
The software will be sold in licensed batches.
Most of Live Wire’s revenue comes from traditional public relations, which means getting clients good press. Nearly US$1 million, almost a third, comes from her corporate media training.
Zizos said that if everything goes as planned - and it never does - annual revenue should get to over US$5 million within two years. That’s a 66 per cent increase. Live Wire has 10 employees, and she expects it to grow to 20.
“We are perfectly fine the way we are,” she said. “But I am smart and conservative. Being smart is knowing when to change, evolve and disrupt, and what’s working and what’s not. The conservative part is keeping your head down, minding your own business, do good work, and don’t owe people money.”
Zizos grew up outside Cleveland and comes from a family of entrepreneurs. Her father was a nuclear physicist who had several patents. Her mother was a solo saleswoman for cranes, hoists and other industrial equipment. “Every person in my family owns their own business,” she said.
Zizos has dyslexia. It sharpened her memorisation skills. It taught her to be creative and quick on her feet.
She served as a congressional page before she was out of high school.
She sent a letter to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was then chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports for President George H.W. Bush. She began working there in 1993, booking interviews for leadership on “Larry King Live” and “Good Morning America,” and in USA Today and other newspapers.
“I was a young person who had a lot of tenacity,” she said.
She attended Eastern Kentucky University on a fouryear field hockey scholarship and graduated in 1994. She received a master’s degree in public communications from American University a year later, with an emphasis in crisis management.
In 1995, at 23, she started at the Washington office of Ketchum, a big New York-based public relations agency.
Her salary was US$23,000 a year. She was forward-thinking even back then, taking a lowlevel job that allowed her to work closely with her boss. She soaked up everything she could about how to manage in the PR game.
She hated the big firms with their 15-minute billing increments, and in 1998, she went out on her own with Live Wire, taking what she learned from working on national campaigns such as Girl Power and the WorldCom-MCI merger.
Live Wire began in the sunroom of her Alexandria, Virginia, home.
Clients came pretty quickly from the network of contacts she had built. The big break arrived within a few months, when Hard Times Cafe called to ask whether she was interested in handling public relations for the expansion to 50 stores on the East Coast.
She received her first monthly check from Hard Times on Feb 28, 1999, for US$5,577.90. She made US$300,000 her first year and hired her first employee.
Then, the contract of a lifetime landed in her lap: Software developer PeopleSoft paid her US$120,000 a month to represent them. Zizos had more money than she’d ever had in her life.
The next five years went swimmingly. Revenue climbed. Staff increased to 15 people.
Live Wire built its reputation. Zizos was pulling in six figures as her share of the US$2 million in revenue.
In early 2003, the PeopleSoft contract dried up when Oracle announced it was acquiring the rival firm. Live Wire revenue went from US$1.7 million to zero. — WP-Bloomberg