Another Year Older...

My friend Andrew Ponzoni, Manager, Public Relations and Communications for Dassault Falcon, and former mentor/supervisor from when I started my PR career, spent the past week gently reminding me to update my blog. Fortunately, I have been so busy with clients, new business, the media, and everything else this job entails, that I haven't had time to update my blog on a daily basis. While I know this doesn't make up for nearly a year of no writing, I hope the following 2005 Year End wrap up will suffice.


2005 started off with a bang with not one, but two, back-to-back appearances for my clients on CBS "The Early Show". In January, the kids from Wingspan Arts were on the program to promote the inaugural Children's Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The media exposure was a tremendous success and the event filled every single seat at Avery Fisher Hall! For Valentine's Day, a contingent of Date.com members braved a cold and misty Monday morning to try and meet the love of their lives on the Early Show. We celebrated with a great breakfast event at the Hard Rock Cafe and a couple of phone numbers were exchanged!

March featured another great event with the Wingspan Arts kids, as Time Out New York: Kids covered the inaugural fundraising event. Josh Lucas almost appeared as our guest actor in a reading by playwrite Stephen Belber. Unfortunately for us, Josh couldn't make it as he was preparing for his Broadway show. The actors in Michael Patrick King's play were fabulous and, with a silent and live auction with great items donated by Scholastic and DealSafari.com, we were able to raise 10% more than the previous year's event.

April/May were spent with three new clients added to my current roster. DealSafari.com, a great website offering brand named items at discount prices; LiquidXS.com, a B2B exchange for overstock items and Cook with Class, a wonderful company run by Chef Rob Endelman who brings cooking instruction in people's homes. Combined wtih some great press for Date.com, the spring really paved the way for a hot summer!

June/July/August were just incredible. I expanded my client offerings and started working with a completely new industry. Shane Reilly or Shane Reilly, Inc. is an extremely talented, driven and capable Interior Designer. Her mission: to find, rent, design, decorate, furnish and finish an apartment at the luxury One Beacon Court in under a month. The end results - gorgeous. Through Shane, I met wonderful editors and reporters such as Jason Kontos, Wendy Goodman at New York Magazine and Annie Block at Interior Design Magazine. While our work together was merely for a few months, focused primarily on the One Beacon Court project, I loved the industry and am looking forward to adding additional interior designers/companies to my roster.

September/October and November featured a number of shared clients with Ilya Welfeld of Welfeld Public Relations Consulting, Inc. And, while I can't disclose what I did with these clients, I can say that working with Ilya Welfeld has been an absolute career highlight for me. Ilya and I have similar backgrounds and very similar work ethics. Like a well oiled machine, we compliment each other and our clients have only reaped the benefits. The results were immediate, impacted the bottom line, and left us with very happy, and satisfied, clients.

December has been a great month for another new client of mine, this time, I've entered the restaurant/bar industry. Bogart's, located at 99 Park Avenue (39th and Park) is a great tapas bar/restaurant. With an extremely talented new Executive Chef from Markt, and a tapas menu that would make your mouth water, this speakeasy has been extremely popular with the Wall Street jet set. The Daily News has already covered the bar twice, and on Friday, December 23rd, a recipe from Chef Joseph Roldan appeared in the Food section.

January is shaping up to be an extremely busy month for all of my clients. From Date.com, gearing up for our biggest holiday season with Valentine's Day, to Cook with Class, who has great at home recipes to make sticking to a healthier diet as a New Year's Resolution fun and EASY!

My New Year's Resolution is to update this blog a little bit more frequently, and here's hoping my next update will be before December 2006!

Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year to all!