Terri R. Jones, vice president of Public Relations for local Roanoke agency Access Inc., sat down Monday for an hour long interview.  She graduated with a Bachelors of Science from the University of Illinois, and also a minor in Latin-American Studies and Finance.  She then completed the coursework for a Masters of Arts at Ohio University. She answered a variety of questions, and a selection follows. 

Q: I am very interested in your transition out of the college life.  How was finding a job in your chosen field?  Did you find one quickly or did it require a lot of work and interviewing?

Jones: I think you all will find that a whole lot of job hunting has less to do with you and more to do with what the company needs at any given time when you walk in the door.  I never sent out a single resume to get my first job.  I sat in the waiting room till the director of advertising could talk with me because he was busy that day and I just said I would wait for him.  And maybe a little persistence on my
part helped, but the fact that they needed someone on that day was really important.  So I did not actually have, I don’t think I wasn’t as well prepared to do the job that I did, that a lot of you would be, but primarily they wanted to know that I was able to write and organize things and work with the media.  And in that role I had done all those things, having graduated in media television and served as an anchor for a station and obviously had gotten through graduate school up to my thesis.  And I guess maybe it’s really really important as you start looking for a job, not to, well to keep that in mind because, not to get discouraged.  And definitely it’s not necessarily what’s on your resume.  You can be very impressive, but if no jobs are available in that company on that given day you know maybe the next month or the next month or maybe a different company.  I think the transition to me; I was a little naïve because I walked into a corporate structure and was immediately named to a crisis team.  The company was facing a strike and I had all of these 50- 59-year-old vice presidents of engineers looking to me for communication.  You just kinda get the moxie going and you go with the flow…

Q: With such a broadcast media related major how did you end up with your first
three jobs in mainly supervising and editing?  Was that where you wanted to be originally?

Jones: I think I never really expected to be in the on camera side of television.  I knew I wanted to be in television research, … I liked the production side more than anything but I was really interested in television research. … But reality spoke and I needed a pay check.  And I decided to get married and my husband was in medical school and that pretty much dictated where we were going to go.  But I think you all will find those kinds of things. 

Q:  Now from 1974-1976, you had two jobs in Iowa.  How did you balance writing for two monthly magazines on top of your supervising of 700 managers for Rockwell International and doing the PR work for University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics? 

Jones: Well, as it turned out because my husband was in medical school being at the Iowa Hospitals were very important because I was just traveling.  I was on the road or on an airplane almost everyday and it was about an hour away.  So the University of Iowa Hospitals made my life a little saner. 

Q: What were the primary lessons you learned in balancing that work load.  And would you suggest that for someone else?

Jones: When you are young and trying to get your career started, um you will probably work longer hours than you would.  I don’t think I ever had a high school counselor ever tell how many hours in the day I would need to work; I might have gone into, you know, elementary education or something where my life was a little more controlled.  But it was a really exciting time and there was a lot going on and I enjoyed what I was doing so it didn’t feel so bad. 

Q: After working for Rockwell International and the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, you stopped working for 11 years?  Were you still doing any public relations type of work, or were you continuing to write for some of the magazines while you were on your break?

Jones: After my job in Iowa, when we moved here to Virginia, I had two young
children. So for a while I was able to freelance work to Carilion and to Lewis Gale because of my background in health care. It was good, I could work from home and I pretty much was in control of my own hours. But then I had four children and so once they were all in school I decided that ok it was time.  I didn’t really stop working but I was freelancing.  And no I didn’t keep writing for the magazines.  Those jobs were over and done with when I moved here. 

Q: Was it hard to re-enter the business world?  What made you come back and what were the hardest things?

Jones: It wasn’t difficult because I was hired by one of the companies I did the most freelancing for.  So that part of it really was very simple, they, it was again sort of a matter of timing because they needed someone at a freelance level for a couple of years before they really needed a body in a chair.  So it worked out well for me because about the time I was about ready to go back to full time work they were ready to let me do that.   It was perfect timing but also staying connected and everything that you do, whether you are just interning for a company, is allowing you to make contacts within the industry, and that where a lot of things happen, because very few times will you get hired in a PR position absolutely blind.  Sometimes you will, but a PR position requires so deeply of you that the company has to make sure you are tested before hiring you.  So that’s pretty much how I did it and I went to work full time for HCA.

Q: Did you feel that had you missed a lot by being in a kind of part-time position for the 11 years? 

Jones: I didn’t, primarily because having a home office I had to stay up with the
technology in order to communicate with my clients.  If I had absolutely not done anything for 10 years it might have been a little bit tougher to get back into the market. 

Q: What made you move to Roanoke in the late 80’s?

Jones: I moved in 1991 and that was following a divorce from my husband, so my
children were in school in Roanoke.  So it was easier for me to be up here and live.  And so, I actually, at that point was still continuing to freelance until 1994 when I took my first corporate job with the Red Cross and then moved to HCA, … but that job at the Red Cross, also, was 32 hours a week, so it kind of allowed me that transition time before I had to go back to one of those 60 hours a week jobs.

Q: While doing many varying PR related things, did you find that working for a Non Profit agency, like the Red Cross, made it more rewarding then working for the corporate world?

Jones: I don’t know if you can say it was more rewarding.  I think that in the corporate world you have a mission of sorts.  I mean you have a product or service that you are selling.  And for the Red Cross it was the same.  The thing that was primarily interesting about the Red Cross was, was disaster communications.  And that’s maybe where I got the bug for crisis.  I still enjoy crisis communication probably more than any other type of PR.  Because you would go along at this little plateau level and then suddenly you were working at this huge number of hours and getting a lot of clips and doing a lot of stuff and then it would kind of taper off a little bit.  But I really enjoyed the Red Cross; I think they do a great job in their mission…

Q: Do you think it was that position or another one that has really helped prepare you for where you are now with Access Inc. and your role in healthcare here?

Jones: I do healthcare here, I actually do more types of other things than health care; although, I do get involved almost every time we have a health care client.  It was mostly the job at HCA because it was all healthcare. 

Q: What made you change from John Lambert Associates to Access Inc.? 

Jones: I really liked John Lambert, but this gave me the opportunity to have my own shop and to grow this side of the business. … We negotiated that pretty much according to the PRSA code of ethics.  When I was at Lambert, I had not signed a non-compete contract and when I left that was a concern and rightly so.  Chances are, in a lot of industries, I would have taken all my clients who wanted to with me.  But PRSA ethics requires that you at least give a period of time for the client to determine whether or not they are happy with their former agency, or whether they want to switch.  So I did not ask any of my clients to follow me over here to Access.  And as it turned out, after a period of time, one of them did.  So I was grateful because I liked working with those people, but not to a detriment as it could have been.

Q: It was an overall smooth transition?

Jones: I think it was because I actually had clients waiting for me here at Access that were different than those at Lambert, so it was pretty smooth. 

Q: You won the PRSA Summit Award in 2002 for John Lambert Associates and then again in 2004, but for Access Inc.  How did your work in the OxyContin crisis assist you in dealing with Anthem vs. ACV communication crisis and in your winning of this award?

Jones: In some ways it did.  But primarily crisis was what I did even in health care.  I mean it’s the form of Public Relations that I find most challenging, so I’ve always kind of sought after those kinds of opportunities and whenever I have an opportunity to enter a crisis contest I always do that because I like crisis. … The Oxycontin issue was a little different for me because I never had worked an issue that covered two states.  Mostly I have always worked like a western Virginia issue.  And Oxycontin when I started was a western Virginia issue.  It was very isolated along the Appalachian Mountains. The abuse really just followed those mountains like a strip.  But then when it started to be covered in the national media, it spread very quickly to other parts of Virginia and Tennessee primarily in which there were situations that received it, a lot of fairly low income or poor people and the people who had had problems with addictions in the past.  And when you have kind of a ripe area like that it moved in very quickly.  So one of our goals there was to try to educate the population. Its very unique it wasn’t an illegal medicine its not like trying to stop an addiction like heroine or cocaine or meth, it was a combination of trying to stop people from abusing it but also keep it available to people who really need it to control there pain.  And that dual message was what we ended up working with for that issue. 

Q: You work with a much smaller team with Access, seven in all right as compared to the 19 or more at Lambert Associates.  How has that changed the way you deal with clients and projects?  How have you enjoyed working for a smaller team?

Jones: In this case the majority of my people are on the creative side and at John Lambert really we only had four or five people who were involved in PR.  What it has done is made me rely on my PR contacts in other agencies and other locations for help when I need it.  And I also have a full bevy of freelancers that I call on a regular basis who are like I was about 20 years ago, people who had been in the industry and I knew could do the job, but they wanted to stay home with young children.  But I can call on them in a moments notice.  So that’s primarily the difference.  I don’t see on a day to day basis that there’s a whole lot of difference other than I’m really integrally involved in every client here where as at John Lambert I tended to have, you know, my clients.   And there were a lot of clients that I never touched. 

Q:  Did you play any role in the creation of your website, one that seems to weigh creativity and uniqueness very highly? 

Jones: On the PR side yes, but we’re actually redesigning the website.  Access is one of the agencies in western Virginia that does interactive work, as part of their whole creative package.  Most agencies will freelance out web design or the company’s, their clients, will go somewhere else for web design.  And we do it here …

Q: Have you used your skills in Spanish and French in your career at all?

Jones: Actually I have, primarily Spanish. It’s becoming more useful all the time.  The French is enough to let me order a hamburger from a McDonalds in Montreal, that’s about as far as I go.  But my Spanish is fairly fluent.  And actually a former vice president of John Lambert, who now works in Richmond, and I have formed a company called English Works Institute, and one of the things that we are doing is going into corporations that have had a huge influx of Latino workers in the last 18 months that is really this ramp of time.  I think I saw some statistics that Virginia has had a 17 percent increase in Spanish speaking populations just in the last 18 months.  So what is happening is corporations are hiring them to do jobs, but now they are starting to feel the effects of that lack of communication within the work force and also some quality issues, as maybe products are evolving or changing and this work force was hired to do one thing, but they don’t have the communication skills to keep up.  Also some real issues in costumer service. … And trying to help employees within these companies you know bring them on board and bring them into the fabric of the company and help them with the customer service issues is what we started that side company for.  We are doing it because it is primarily a public relations business; we’re only doing it at that corporate level.  But we both took some time in July to become certified, English as a second language instructors at UVA.

Q: Has this new company taken you abroad at all?

Jones: No, no in fact if anything we are very locally centering this in Virginia, North
Carolina and South Carolina.  And we’re developing some materials now so that Companies can institute our product on their own, outside of these geographical areas.  Otherwise we’d be just traveling all the time…

Q: Is there anything from your career you wish you could change or redo?

Jones: That’s a good question. I think that I’ve really been 95 percent happy with it.  Which I guess if you can say that you can’t really complain too much.  I think in some ways I would have liked to have had a little bit more of a flexible schedule.  PR is pretty labor intensive and 60 hour a weeks were not uncommon in my earlier years.  And now, I’m not saying that I’m in my twilight years, but I’m kind of in a position where I can be a little bit more flexible with my time, and sometimes work from home or whatever.  And that is I think maybe more accepted in your generation because people realize you actually can do that.  And telecommuting is not that far out there.  But I was of the Gloria Steinem era where if you weren’t in that seat there 60 hours a week you would get overlooked as a woman in that corporate field. And so I think if anything I would have spent less time sitting in that chair and more time.  Look I’ll tell you what, your still going to work long hours. … I guess I wish my field could have been a little more flexible but that’s really a minor complaint. 

Q: What is the one thing you are most proud of?

Jones: My crisis work I think.  Any time there is a public relations crisis you are at a watershed.  The company or the service or the product or whatever is going to fall off that cliff one way or another and public relations probably more than any other discipline is the decider on which way that company falls.  And having that kind of input and control, no not control, but just having that kind of power and input into those kinds of situations is great. … During the time that I was working the Oxycontin issue, which was a period of about three years, the company never lost money and they were facing something that they didn’t realize was going to happen. … That’s the thing I think I’m proudest of. 

Q: How have you balanced being mother, wife and working out of the home professional, and what were the most challenging things about it?

Jones: I think the difference between my mothers generation, which was primarily a stay at home mom generation, and mine, and then in yours where I think you guys are learning how to balance even better, we didn’t always balance real well in the early days.  But it’s that there are times when your career is going to be more important, and everybody in the family reacts to that.  And then there are times when your family is more important, and your career has to react to that.  And you’ve got to know very quickly what time that is.  If you don’t and one of them starts to fail, it takes a whole lot more effort to bring whatever’s failing back up to speed. So this little balancing act of what’s more important at this moment is real important. … If you think that your children are failing because of your career you won’t be happy in your career.

Q: Any advice you can give me and my fellow students who are soon embarking on trying to get into the PR communication field?

Jones: Network, network, network, network.  You hear that, I’m sure from your teachers, but it’s just like anything else.  You tend to want to associate with people who you know can do the work, or who you’ve met and been impressed by and in just to keep in mind, it, that it is rarely your inability to perform that will be the reason you don’t get a particular job, extremely rarely, unless you are coming in with a D minus resume and some really sloppy stuff.  Most of the time it will be because that company on that given day is not hiring anyone. And that’s why the networking is so important. …