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Sacke & Associates in the News
From the October 23, 2000 issue -- Financial Post Entrepreneur section
by Terrence Belford
At first blush, they seem to have nothing in common: Nancy Smith, 50, a grandmother with a passion for travel and charitable works; Tom Thompson, 39, divorced, and a confirmed believer in the joys of Eastern Ontario and John Sacke, 34, married with a toddler-aged son and so much energy that he can not sleep more than five hours a night...
...John Sacke also found contract work to be the parachute from a regular corporate paycheque to self-emplayment. In business only a year, the president of Sacke 8r Associates Public Relations already has a staff of four and a stable of nine rapidly expanding hightech clients.
“I left Wyrex Communications Inc. in April of 1998,” he explains. “I had been the third person to join when it was a startup and simply wanted to take a try at being my own boss. Happily, I picked up a contract as a consultant first and then another and another.
“By last fall, I stopped telling myself this was contract work, and I was a consultant and realized that I had clients and was running a company. That is when I moved out of my office in the basement of my home and into a proper office suite and started taking on staff.”
Mr. Sacke’s niche also is in providing in-depth understanding of his field coupled with his enormous energy in pursuing his clientst interests. Mr. Sacke is either blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with the inability to sleep more than five hours a night. The result is that the newspaper writers across Canada are often greetedwith e-mails from Sacke PR the moment they switch on their computer.
“My associates and I share the belief that our clients interests are our own,” he says. “And we must pursue them as aggressively as we would our own. What we sell is service and that sets us apart from the big agencies, the Hill and Knowltons and such.
“We also only serve small but fast-growing high-tech companies. That is our niche and that is how the business will grow. If we do our part, we will grow and be able to increase our billings along with them.”
Granted, making a move to self-reliance at the very moment you become a father for the first time can create moments of extreme anxiety. But that anxiety was always shooed away by confidence that it was the right move.
“When I was a boy, a rabbi once told me something that stuck with me,” he says. “His advice was ‘bite off more than you can chew and then chew like mad.’”
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