TAMPA BAY – Bill Frederick’s
communications career really started when he was still in high school,
when the battery in Frank Mahoney’s Ford Falcon died early one Sunday
morning.
Frank, the much-respected fire reporter for
the Boston Globe, managed to jump-start his Ford, and drove it to Jack
Doyle’s Esso Station on the other side of town. Bill, who was 17 and
working part-time as an auto mechanic, installed a new Atlas battery and
hooked it up to the charger.
While
they waited for the battery to charge, Bill pumped Frank for stories about
newspapering. And he told Frank something he had never mentioned to anyone
before – he wanted to be a newspaper reporter someday.
“Give
me a call one of these days at the Globe,” Frank said as he drove away. “I
may be able to get you a job as a copy boy.”
Frank
made good on his promise, and Bill became the Globe’s only high
school-aged copy boy. The romance of the newspaper city room was
overwhelming, and the many fine Globe writers offered a daily workshop on
lively writing that Bill draws upon every day, even now.
Bill
went on from the Globe and moved upward quickly – at 21, he became
assistant city editor of the Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript, managing a staff
of eight people, all of them older than he was. At 22 he became
Springfield, Mass. bureau manager for United Press International, and at
23 was named night editor for New England, directed the news report for
morning newspapers and, again, managing a staff of people all older than
himself.
After covering government
and politics in Maine for several years, Bill was named press secretary to
Sen. William D. Hathaway, D-Maine. He spent the next two years in
Washington, DC and, upon Hathaway’s defeat by then-Rep. William S. Cohen,
opened his first public relations business in Augusta, Maine’s capital
city.
For
the next few years Bill serviced clients in Maine, Massachusetts and
Washington, DC, including Scott Paper Co., the Maine Secretary of State’s
office, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Canadian
Embassy in Washington, DC, and Digital Equipment Corp.
Bill
did corporate and trade association PR and served another tour as bureau
manager and Maine State Editor for UPI before he and his family relocated
to Florida in 1993. He worked first as a business writer for the Tampa Bay
Business Journal, covering commercial real estate, media and the business
of sports before he was recruited to join Public Communications Inc., one
of Tampa Bay’s oldest and most respected PR firms.
At
PCI, Bill moved quickly from vice president to senior vice president to
partner and corporate secretary, overseeing the accounts of a number of
clients and pursuing new business.
Seeing an opportunity in a down economy,
Bill left PCI amicably and, just after Labor Day of 2001, opened Bill
Frederick Communications Inc. Starting with just three clients, the
company grew to 10 clients in the first six months of operation. The
client roster is expected to grow to 12-15 clients by the end of the
agency’s first year of operation.
Bill
attributes the firm’s success to three factors:
CREATIVE IDEAS: Ideas that work are what separates
run-of-the-mill firms from great ones.
GREAT WRITING: Ideas don’t mean much if they can’t
be clearly communicated. Unfortunately, clear and colorful writing is
becoming a lost art. Bill’s writing, honed by years of demanding wire
service work, sets Bill Frederick Communications apart from the PR
mainstream.
VALUE: Clients want to see the bottom line.
Too many agencies simply don’t deliver adequate value – the benefits do
not fare well when compared to the expense. Bill Frederick Communications
devotes its resources to the technology and people needed to do a great
job, not to Class-A office space with original artwork in the lobby. That
means superior work delivered at surprisingly low fees.
In
the next few years, Bill expects the agency to grow rapidly and to attract
clients from outside of Tampa Bay. Already, two of the agency’s larger
clients are based elsewhere – one in New Jersey, the other in Washington,
DC. Clients in such areas can enjoy the special benefits of personal
attention and rates far below those available in their own
backyards.
Bill
Frederick Communications does not limit its practice to certain fields
because difficult challenges and new horizons are just too tempting to
pass up. But Bill does see great opportunities in the areas of public
policy/politics; alternative energy/transportation; recreation/sports;
health care/pharmaceuticals; and some technology sectors.
“What
we really enjoy is the opportunity to solve problems through the use of
creative and compelling communications,” Bill says. “Bring us a challenge
– we’ll jump start it and make it purr like Frank Mahoney’s Ford.”
Bill Frederick is a member of the Public Relations Society of
America (PRSA)
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