Outside magazine tabs PR firm for fun work
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Fittingly, Nate Simmons was vacationing in a surf town in Mexico when he got the news that Outside magazine had dubbed his livelihood one of 37 "Dream Jobs" and would be profiling Simmons and his partner Penn Newhard in its May issue.
Part of having a dream job is taking dream vacations, right? At Backbone Media, sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other.
Simmons, 36, and Newhard, 43, are co-owners of Backbone, a PR firm based in Carbondale that represents about 22 clients, most of them related to outdoor recreation -- manufacturers of skis, sunglasses, climbing equipment, and hunting and fishing gear.
"All sorts of toys, basically," Simmons says. "A lot of our job is working with the media and writers and editors and producers to get them familiar with our clients’ products. So that involves taking people skiing, putting trips together to go fly fishing, that sort of thing. It’s not all that -- I wish it were. There’s a lot of desk time in between, but still ..."
But still, it’s apparent why Outside tabbed Simmons and Newhard as holders of "dream jobs." The profile in the May issue of Outside, just now hitting newsstands, points out that Newhard left a job on Wall Street to go climbing and fly-fishing around the world. He returned six months later and took a job marketing Climbing magazine. Eight years later, he launched Backbone Media in Carbondale.
About a year later, Simmons came west from Boston where he’d worked for Prudential Insurance and John Hancock and was hired at Backbone. He became a co-owner when one of Backbone’s original partners left.
An obvious benefit of the Outside exposure is the visibility boost it will give Backbone when prospecting for clients, although the firm already is known as one of the country’s foremost outdoor PR firms. It also stamps Backbone as a great place to work.
"We’re a PR company, so believe me, we understand it," Simmons says. "We don’t often do a lot of PR for ourselves, so this was pretty serendipitous that it all came together, and we’re happy that it did. We expect it to help us from a prospecting-for- new-business standpoint. It lends credibility that a magazine like Outside would recognize us. And we’ve already got a stream of resumes coming in, so it’s affected us that way."
Resumes are always welcome, even for positions considered "dream jobs." Carbondale is located between Glenwood Springs and Aspen, and as with a lot of recreational hotspots in Colorado, the high cost of housing makes filling roles with the ideal employee a challenge.
"The cost of living is quite high," Simmons says. "Any single-family home under $500,000 sells in a couple of days. So there’s a lot of price pressure, and that is definitely a challenge. New employees, especially entry-level employees, being able to purchase a home here is a real challenge."
Then there’s the fact that outdoor enthusiasts who are hired at Backbone aren’t going to stop with the Colorado mountains in seeking out new adventures.
"We’ve got a guy headed down to Costa Rica to start a surf camp, so we’re losing an employee that we’re replacing, and that’s the way it’s going to be, always," Simmons says. "So we always need to be in kind of hiring mode and new-business mode. Which is good. It’s fluid. It keeps it exciting."
Backbone Media currently has 11 employees. Simmons says he didn’t expect any unusual celebrating to result from the Outside magazine profile. Just business as usual: taking journalists and retailers out to play with and promote clients’ toys. The magazine profile points out that Backbone "has helped turn companies like Black Diamond and Cloudveil into industry powerhouses." And has had fun doing it.
"Everyone here is aware, and we’re thrilled," Simmons says. "We just keep doing what we’re doing, I guess, to celebrate."
