15 Years Later: How We Got Here

By Michelle Lyng, Founder & CEO

In 2005, I sat in APCO’s Washington, D.C. office in an interview with its then-managing director Robert Schooling and confidently told him and others in the interview that my five-year plan was to open my own public relations firm.

Unbelievably, they hired me anyway. But, it didn’t take me five years to open Novitas. It took just three years.

On August 1, 2008, I left my job at Robinson Lerer Montgomery (now FGS Global) and enthusiastically – and naively – opened Novitas. See, I moved to Washington, D.C. with my new husband for his job and RLM wasn’t equipped for multi-state employees. Initially, I was crushed because I loved my job, my coworkers, and my clients. But, then, I realized that RLM was essentially paying me to start my own PR firm, as I had identified years prior I planned to do, and I was going to lean in to the opportunity.

Our first clients were Robinson Lerer Montgomery (as a contractor), American Banker and U.S. Banker’s  “The 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance” annual ranking, and the construction giant, HNTB. At that time, it was just me sitting in a sun-filled office in Alexandria, Va., pounding away at my keyboard from 7 a.m. until about 7 p.m. each day, partially because it was necessary as Novitas had no employees, but mostly because I had (and still have) a deep passion for my clients and their challenges.

For about the first five years, I was Novitas’ only employee. Then, I got pregnant with my son, Andrew. One of my colleagues, off the cuff, said, “You’re not going to come back to work after your son is born, right? I mean, your husband has a good job, you don’t really need to work, right?”

I was so offended. I loved my work so much that it had never occurred to me to not return.

So, I doubled down on Novitas. We hired an employee and rented office space. I was six months pregnant moving office furniture into our little office on the 7^th floor of 621 17^th Street. The building was one of Denver’s original modern skyscrapers and featured in the opening credits of Dynasty – it felt like a hat tip to Denver’s narrative. The rental management office let me pick my office suite number, so I picked all sevens – Suite 777 – for good luck.

The first years with employees were challenging, but rewarding. Andrew visited me at work occasionally. We first won local awards and, then, won national awards for our work.      

Four years later, we moved into our current office at 17^th and Wazee. The real estate market in Colorado was booming and my landlord wanted us out of our current office and offered us the “bargain” of doubling our rent by increasing our price per square foot while also encouraging us to move into a larger space. 

We didn’t have a ton of extra money, but we knew we needed to buy our own space to have greater control over our destiny. I looked at several spaces and they were all…fine. Then, I found this ramshackle office condo in Lodo and knew with just a bit of shine, it was meant to be. The carpet was that fugly multicolored industrial carpet, the walls were the “classic” colors from the Crayola marker box – maroon, hunter green, and navy blue, it had a funky smell, it had no kitchen. But I loved the light, the bustling location, the tall ceilings…and, most of all, the price.

Over the next few months, we renovated the space into something that was truly lovely, thanks to Elsy Studios’ décor prowess and a mishmash of contractors and handymen who helped paint, lay new flooring, update the bathroom, and add a kitchenette. It was finally ready for Novitas’s future as a local and national powerhouse PR agency.

It was in this space that I have made some of my worst mistakes, but we also saw some of our greatest triumphs and growth.

I used to not recommend that entrepreneurs start a business at 28 because I believed (and still do) that I made a lot of mistakes along the way – some of which could have been prevented with age and/or wisdom. As I’ve aged, I’ve become more circumspect about starting a firm so young. Without the mistakes and without the journey, I wouldn’t be the leader I am today and Novitas wouldn’t be the award-winning firm it is today. And, frankly, if I knew how hard running a small business was, I might not have done it.

Our path hasn’t always been linear and it certainly hasn’t always been easy, but it’s our journey and I wouldn’t trade it, even if I would have preferred fewer heartaches over the years. Ultimately, Novitas has succeeded in growing far beyond where we started from. We were one of the fastest growing PR firms in the country and among the fastest growing in Colorado.

We’ve built a leadership team that offers our clients extensive depth and breadth of skills, that has a great appreciation for the humanity necessary to be long-term colleagues, and that is creating a firm that we all take pride in, and for them I am eternally grateful. I also am so grateful for our clients, who trust us to fix big problems, and for our partners without whom we simply wouldn’t be as successful.

Cheers to 15 years, cheers to even greater success in the years to come.