Star Profile
Jacque Riley of Riley Communications
By John Temple Ligon Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Jacque Riley

Riley Communications recently relocated to the Suggs & Kelly building at 500 Taylor Street. Suggs is no longer with Kelly, but the building's name remains. Jacque Riley is head of her own marketing firm, Riley Communications, and is relatively new to the field. Riley graduated summa cum laude as a USC honors college student with a major in journalism and mass communications three years ago.

Riley's father was a Navy pilot when she was born in Beeville, Tex., and her mother was an elementary school teacher. In less than a year, the Navy asked the family to move to Key West, and in another two years, to Rota, Spain.

After Navy assignments in San Francisco, Memphis, Dallas, and Boston, Riley's father joined the flight crews at Delta Air Lines in 1997, and now flies the eastern seaboard out of Atlanta.

Riley's parents live in Gainesville, Fla., where they moved in time for Riley to attend Buchholz High School. But she also was within a short distance of the local community college. For her senior year she spent more time there. Upon high school graduation, Riley's college credits were about enough to give her sophomore status, and USC accepted her with a full academic scholarship.

Riley's brother, who is four years younger, is a rising sophomore at Florida State.

Riley's husband handles conventions and special programs for the S.C. Bar Association.

While in college, Riley was an obituary representative for The State, where she experienced more interesting problems and departures than might be expected for a student intern. She also interned with Columbia's Adams Group, Wayne Adams's advertising and public relations firm.

In her senior year, she participated in the National Bateman PR Competition. Her efforts for Ford Motor Credit Co. placed third out of the 87 total entries.

Soon after graduation, Riley worked with the S.C. Bar as a communications assistant for about a year. She co- produced the

annual Lawyers Desk Book

for more than 11,500 S.C. attorneys.

For another year, Riley was the director of marketing for the S.C. Association of Realtors and its more than 20,000 members. She developed all their marketing collateral, including brochures, signs, mailers, and specialty items.

A little over a year ago, Riley began Riley Communications, where she serves 48 small business clients. She located some of the 48 through the Small Business Development Center at USC's Moore School of Business.

One of her more interesting individual clients is Barnwell- based attorney Linda Farron Knapp. For Knapp and other small business clients, Riley shares in the business plan strategies. Too many small firms, Riley laments, think they can shift to strategic planning once they start to make real money.

The problem with that thinking is maybe the small firm may never start to make real money because they have failed to plan. Money spent by a small firm on strategy can be far more productive than advertising. Advertising the product is fine, even necessary, but advertising without strategic planning is too big of a mistake, according to Riley, to hope to do well.

Riley, still a sole proprietor, outsources to trusted local professionals, particularly in design. She prefers Kristin Gissendanner for graphic design and Scott Krause for photography and Website design.

She is a firm believer in continuous improvement. Riley is enrolled at Midlands Tech's Fast Track Growth Venture Class, which is heavy on financial planning.

Riley is happy with her new office at the corner of Taylor and Huger where parking is not a problem. How to double her client count to 100 and when to double her hourly billable rate are problems with growth and expansion and continuous improvement.

For now, Riley is on the brink of doubling her company's people count as she considers hiring her first employee.