Lori Sussle Bonanni is the founder of elssus, LLC, a multi-disciplined communications consultancy. Lori builds and grows companies’ reputations thereby increasing awareness, business results and credibility.

Think of her as a nontraditional publicist working with companies as early as funded startups and as established as Global 500s. She partners with her clients to help them raise their next round of funding, hire and retain top talent and be noticed by potential and existing customers. Her work spans communications including public and media relations, strategic, internal and crisis communications, integrated marketing, advisory and more.

Lori speaks and writes about effective and mindful communication, visibility and reputation management. Lori’s most requested talks are ‘Attention is Earned, Not Given: Getting Your Business Media Attention’ and ‘Mindful Communication: Who are you Unknowingly Excluding?’

Lori gives generously with her time. She opens office hours to mentor startup founders through Almaworks (Columbia University’s startup accelerator), Black Ambition (supporting Black and Latinx founders founded by Pharrell Williams) and Mentor Makers (via the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center). She speaks with marketing and advertising students at universities through a partnership with the Advertising Education Foundation. Lori also hosts monthly Ask Me Anything sessions to answer questions from founders and operators about how to best communicate a funding round before, during and after the announcement.

Prior to launching elssus, Lori held senior-level marketing, communication and business development roles at world-class organizations including Verizon, World 50, NBCUniversal and DDB. Her writing has been featured in prestigious media outlets such as U.S. News and World Report, Huffington Post and The Muse.

Lori earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communications with a Specialization in Advertising and Public Relations from Rowan University. After graduation, she participated in BUNAC’s International Work Exchange Program in London, England. Lori also earned multiple continuing education certificates for Advertising Copywriting from the School of Visual Arts. In 2021, she earned both a Certificate in Women’s Entrepreneurship from Cornell University and a Certificate in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace from the University of South Florida.

In 2023, Lori was recognized as a Woman of Excellence by the Rochester Business Journal.

Key Moments

[00:05:44] Random jobs in London, publishing firm followed.

[00:07:58] Found it, booked it, went big, loved it.

[00:12:11] Temporary remote work led to permanent company.

[00:13:40] Flexibility, diversity, adventure – thriving in work.

[00:17:18] Jersey Shore, different country, reference for Philadelphians.

Find Lori Online

https://www.elssus.com/series-a-funding-announcement-pr

https://www.elssus.com/ask-me-anything

https://www.elssus.com/services

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorisusslebonanni/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/elssus

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Transcript (Provided by CastMagic.io)

Seth [00:00:00]:

Entrepreneurs Enigma is a podcast for the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, the wins and the fails that we all face being entrepreneurs. How we learn from adversity. Every week, I talk to a different entrepreneur with a story to tell. I’m Seth Goldstein. Come with me on the journey. This is Entrepreneurs Enigma. Let’s get started. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Entrepreneurs Enigma podcast. I am your host. As always, Seth, I am here with Lori, who is the founder and chief bottle washer of Elsis, LLC, a multidisciplinary communications practice or consultancy based out of the Rochester, New York area. She actually is actually local to Bucks County. We met through Christy Mitchell. Lori builds and grows company reputation, thereby increasing awareness, business results, and credibility, and is a nontraditional publicist working with fast growing, high impact, VC backed startups and Global 500. So that mouthful. Let’s bring Lori in. How’s it going, Lori?

Lori [00:01:21]:

Thank you for having me.

Seth [00:01:24]:

You are in the Rochester area, right? I get that, right?

Lori [00:01:27]:

You did get that, right?

Seth [00:01:29]:

Just outside of the Great White North? Well, it depends on the weather. You can be in the Great White North as well. You’re just outside of Canada.

Lori [00:01:36]:

Yes. Not today, though.

Seth [00:01:38]:

Not today. Not today. You’re in Rochester, so there you go. So tell me about this. You’ve had a journey. I mean, somehow you end up in Bucks County. I mean, how do you end up in Great? It’s a great area. I’ve been in rochester. It’s a great area, but it’s a little far from Bucks County. A little like, how did you get started in all this?

Lori [00:02:04]:

Now, do you have a lot of Philly listeners that know what you’re talking about?

Seth [00:02:07]:

If they don’t, they can look it up. It’s called Google.

Lori [00:02:10]:

Okay.

Seth [00:02:11]:

Bucks county is literally just north of Philadelphia. It’s a county just north of Philadelphia County because Philly is a contiguous city county thing. We jigger going on there. I think it’s the only one that’s actually I think Philly a little tangential here. I think Philly is the only city that is contiguous with the county. Chicago is in Cook County. New York’s a bastardization of a lot of things. New York is, I think, their counties, their boroughs, their city. It’s a lot of everything. And she’s googling. She’s googling.

Lori [00:02:46]:

Manhattan is in New York County is.

Seth [00:02:49]:

In New York County, but it’s part of the overall city.

Lori [00:02:54]:

What? I was double checking. I knew New York County was Manhattan and I knew King’s County was Brooklyn. But Bronx County is the Bronx. Queen’s county is Queens, and Richmond County is Staten Island.

Seth [00:03:07]:

Hey, the more you that you can.

Lori [00:03:10]:

Nail.

Seth [00:03:17]:

Saying, let’s use every kind of municipal government possible in our city. Let’s be New York. Let’s just do everything. Philadelphia is like, hey, we got our county. We’re a city. The city goes to the county line. All right? It’s the same thing. Whatever. So it’s a little bit more practical. I’m biased because I’m from Philly. I know you’re from Philly. We’re a little bit biased, but, you.

Lori [00:03:41]:

Know well, I’ve got 1ft in Philly, 1ft in Know.

Seth [00:03:46]:

We’re going to take a quick break, hear from our sponsors, and get right back to the show. Exactly. Lori, how did you end up in Rochester? Let’s start off in the very beginning. How did you get into marketing, communications, and all this fun stuff?

Lori [00:04:02]:

All right, very beginning. I went to school in New Jersey, and when I was looking to go to study abroad, I had already missed the window by the time I was going to be a junior, so that wish never faded. So when I graduated, I found a program where I could live abroad.

Seth [00:04:23]:

Where’d you go?

Lori [00:04:24]:

I went to London and the travel bug truly hit me.

Seth [00:04:31]:

Yeah. In your bio, it says a longer bio. She gave me two BIOS. You’ve been an avid traveler 30 plus countries.

Lori [00:04:37]:

Yeah.

Seth [00:04:38]:

Can you list them all?

Lori [00:04:39]:

Some of them twice? Yeah. Do I list them all?

Seth [00:04:43]:

Do you remember every single one or is it sort of like no.

Lori [00:04:49]:

I have some favorites.

Seth [00:04:52]:

What’s your all time favorite?

Lori [00:04:55]:

I’m a little partial to Argentina, but I would also throw in Belgium and Croatia.

Seth [00:05:02]:

Chocolates.

Lori [00:05:04]:

Yeah. This could be a whole separate podcast.

Seth [00:05:07]:

Yeah, we’ll do a whole separate podcast. We’ll just chat offline about that. Where are your favorite places? I love Capri in Italy. Oh, my God, I love that place.

Lori [00:05:14]:

But when I was in London, I was, like, hell bent on working on an ad agency. And so email I’ll date myself, but email was still pretty new, so I took printed out resumes to all the big ad agencies in that.

Seth [00:05:33]:

I remember doing that. I did that. We’re in the same age, so I remember the printed resume. I remember mailing those suckers to news outlets to get jobs. I remember painful.

Lori [00:05:44]:

And so while I was doing that, I picked up a couple of random jobs in London. But then the job that stuck is a good word. I wound up being I’m working in a publishing firm in London that felt like, okay, this is like it was very startup vibe and yeah, it was pretty cool. And then when I came back, after living abroad and traveling, I needed to find a job here.

Seth [00:06:13]:

You grew up in the United States. Now it’s time to come back to reality.

Lori [00:06:20]:

It was awesome there, but I came back and I went up starting to work for a company that was from the UK that was getting established in New York.

Seth [00:06:29]:

Well, that’s perfect.

Lori [00:06:31]:

So their first day in the office was my first day. We went like, furniture shopping and everything.

Seth [00:06:36]:

So it was a really started up with the wow.

Lori [00:06:40]:

Yeah, that’s fun. It was a healthcare communications firm, and because it was also a startup, there were four people in the office regularly there was a lot of freelancers and consultants, but I got to do a lot more than I would have done had I started my career at larger agencies, which I ultimately went to. But I got exposed to so much more things and I was still so new to working in New York. And just like New York its own beast.

Seth [00:07:15]:

New York and London are similar. They’re both kind of fast paced, kind of mean.

Lori [00:07:22]:

You have high and I thrive on like, I need that.

Seth [00:07:26]:

Yeah, high energy. Exactly.

Lori [00:07:27]:

But yeah, high energy and kind of nutty. But I remember the CEO was coming over from London and she’s, I would love to get tea with you. And I was like, oh, great. And like, there was like a deli downstairs. And I was like, yeah, we could just go downstairs and get tea.

Seth [00:07:41]:

She’s like, no, tea property biscuit.

Lori [00:07:46]:

I was like, oh, this is silly.

Seth [00:07:48]:

American, you silly American.

Lori [00:07:51]:

Well, and so then it was like.

Seth [00:07:53]:

Okay, but there’s high tea in New York, I’m sure.

Lori [00:07:58]:

Oh, there is, yes, I found it. And we booked and I think we went to the Plaza and went big. Yeah, so much for my little deli. But yeah. So I worked there for quite a few years. I loved it. It was all healthcare, but it was a lot of quality of life and end of life care and it was all outside the United States. So we were really just talking to doctors and physicians and opinion leaders and my friends were working on like, Nike.

Seth [00:08:35]:

It was different and it wasn’t as sexy, I guess it wasn’t as sexy.

Lori [00:08:40]:

And it was like I was in my early twenty s and I was sad. I was going to these conferences and I was meeting these people who were basically dying. I changed gears and I moved to DDB, which is a big ad agency on Madison Avenue. And the joke was on me because I thought, oh, main advertising agency, I’ll work on lots of different things, which I did, but I was hired because of my pharma experience.

Seth [00:09:10]:

Oh, no.

Lori [00:09:15]:

More like your diabetes and heart disease.

Seth [00:09:18]:

All right. It’s a little bit more interesting, a little bit more, I guess to say chronic.

Lori [00:09:23]:

Yeah, it was interesting all over, but it was less dire, I guess. I worked in Biz Dev for a couple of years. I also ran an account and then I left and know did not go far because I went to Rockefeller Center, which was a block. So you like New York? I do like New York. I know, I’m like breaking your heart.

Seth [00:09:50]:

Who likes New York? Wow, there’s a lot of us that like New York. I can’t stand New York.

Lori [00:09:56]:

And then, so I was at NBC, I worked there at the Peacock. The Peacock and the company that I worked for was recently acquired by NBC. So it was very startup like within 30 Rock for this division and worked on marketing campaigns. So got to work on brands across the board. And then that travel bug came up again, and so I quit to take a sabbatical, and I went to South America as one course.

Seth [00:10:30]:

Everyone takes a sabbatical to South America. Love it.

Lori [00:10:34]:

Well, I wanted more than a two week vacation, and I didn’t want to wait till I was retired. So I left, and when I came back, I had set in motion, like, some freelance work. And then I started freelancing much longer than I planned to because I stopped looking for jobs because I was like, this is really fun, I can and because I had a biz dev experience at DDB, and I had startup experience, small company experience, it was all kind of meshing together. And then push came to shove, and I wound up ultimately finding a role in Atlanta. And so my husband why does everyone.

Seth [00:11:20]:

End up in Atlanta in marketing? I know a lot of marketers end up in Atlanta for marketing.

Lori [00:11:27]:

There’s a lot of big companies there.

Seth [00:11:29]:

That’s probably what it is. And they’re all on Peach Street. They’re on peach something.

Lori [00:11:36]:

So we got to Atlanta, and I worked for a company called World 50, which brings together C suite executives, also a company that had been around ten years but had never had a director.

Seth [00:11:45]:

Of marketing, which I find like the intra startup entrepreneurial. Wow, you finding this, they find you. Wow, that’s awesome.

Lori [00:11:57]:

And then I got laid off from there, and we decided not to stay in Atlanta. Came up here. Well, I like warm weather over cold, which is ironic that I’m here, but.

Seth [00:12:09]:

Here in yeah, yeah.

Lori [00:12:11]:

But we came up here, which was supposed to be temporary and, you know, picking up, know, clients remote, and I was like, this could kind of be here. But I was still, like, I felt like I still needed big cities. So I was looking at Boston, I was looking at Philly. I was looking at Philly a little, but then but then I was like, I think I’m sold on this. Like, I can have my own company. Yeah. So I’ve been doing this since on and off from 2012, but after the layoff of 2015, and then I made it official in 2018, and I applied for my LLC. So actually, August of 2023 is five and a half years.

Seth [00:13:02]:

Officially, where the IRS can bill you. Officially they can bill you under your company name. Isn’t it funny how the fastest thing to get an IRS is not your refund, it’s your Ein number. You press a button and the form spits out your Ein number. Like, absolutely the fastest thing you ever get from the government is your Pay US number. So you’ve done the entrepreneur a lot. You’ve done the travel. What is the best thing about being an entrepreneur now that you’ve done a little bit of everything?

Lori [00:13:40]:

Literally well, I think the thing that a good example of this so when I was at a full time job, I always used to leave a postit, like, on my computer at the end of the night and whatever time that was, because I worked at crazy places. Sometimes it might be 05:00 p.m. Or it might be 1130, but I used to leave like, okay, these are the five things I have to get done tomorrow. And nine times out of ten, no matter what time I came in, those five things were all thrown in the air and something else happened or whatever, and I thrived on that. I loved that, which is a little bit muddy, but I think the thing, too, that I loved when I was at DDB, I kept getting asked, do you want to work on an account? Do you want to work on an account? And I was like, no. I love being in Biz Dev because I can work on anything from toilet paper, which was actually a Georgia Pacific client in Know, to tires. And I remember going Know, a business trip from and to see like, all the way up to Ll. Bean in Maine. So I just love the diversity of work on so I think that was one of the things that was very desirable. The other was, like, not having to kind of think about what’s next. It was on me to figure that out. Right. That doesn’t go away. The adventure, the chase, whatever that is. That’s kind of fun. And now that I have a child, the flexibility is great.

Seth [00:15:40]:

You tell your clients, not today, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Lori [00:15:44]:

Well, where I just block out my calendar and don’t make meetings at those times.

Seth [00:15:48]:

It helps. Exactly. So what keeps you up at night, besides your child? What keeps you up at night? Being a business owner.

Lori [00:15:59]:

Biz Dev, the.

Seth [00:16:02]:

Thing that you love keeps you up at night? Yeah, I love it.

Lori [00:16:04]:

Well, no, it keeps me up because maybe that’s when I’m doing it. I think being able to keep all the balls in the air for different clients because there’s different phases of things, and because it’s just me, it’s really important to know exactly what is needing to be delivered, because I could be on four calls in a row and I need to change gears super fast. It’s kind of fun.

Seth [00:16:34]:

It’s fun. What keeps you up at night or it keeps you awake at night? That’s awesome. What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

Lori [00:16:45]:

Most important thing to carry with me? All the mean I want to say passport, but it comes in handy.

Seth [00:16:56]:

You never know when you’re going to stumble into Canada. I guess you can kind of stumble in the Canada from Rochester.

Lori [00:17:03]:

Say it again.

Seth [00:17:04]:

What is it, 20 minutes? I think you can stumble into Canada.

Lori [00:17:07]:

No, it’s about an hour to the border.

Seth [00:17:10]:

That’s still pretty close. It’s from Bucks County to the Jersey Shore.

Lori [00:17:15]:

Exactly.

Seth [00:17:18]:

The Jersey Shore is like a different country, too. Yeah, that’s a reference now. That’s a reference for the Philadelphians. They understand down the shore is like a different country, whereas Canada is probably less of a different country than the Jersey Shore. So we’ll leave it at that.

Lori [00:17:33]:

Or even the fact that you’re saying the Jersey down the shore versus at the.

Seth [00:17:40]:

Shore is definitely a lot of times it’s not down the shore. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s due east. Sometimes it is down the shore. It depends on what beach you go to.

Lori [00:17:51]:

That’s the thing. Depending on where you are in New Jersey, some people say at the beach.

Seth [00:17:56]:

Do they? Yeah, they still say down the shore if they’re going up.

Lori [00:18:01]:

Well, if you live at the beach, you don’t say down the shore.

Seth [00:18:04]:

Yeah, that’s good. At the beach. Yeah. You made a makes logical sense, actually.

Lori [00:18:11]:

Anyone that is not in that area is not going to understand these references.

Seth [00:18:16]:

So other than your passport, what do you need to carry with you all the time?

Lori [00:18:21]:

This is a stumper. I don’t know.

Seth [00:18:23]:

Is that a good one? But it doesn’t have to be a physical item. It could be metaphysical, too.

Lori [00:18:28]:

A positive attitude.

Seth [00:18:29]:

I love it because you definitely have a positive attitude. You love Biz Dev, you’re a go getter, you’re RA. I love it. I love it. High energy, high impact.

Lori [00:18:40]:

What do you bring all the time?

Seth [00:18:42]:

Oh, no, don’t actually throw it back at me. I would say my positive attitude oftentimes my perseverance is a good one. I like that one, too. I think we both have perseverance because you have to be an entrepreneur.

Lori [00:18:56]:

I have a former client turned friend that called me pleasantly persistent.

Seth [00:19:02]:

Oh, I like that. That’s a positive negative. I love that. Well, so, Laurie, where can people find you online? Like, where do you hang out the most?

Lori [00:19:14]:

I would say LinkedIn. And what was Twitter? So trying to find a new.

Seth [00:19:21]:

He didn’t even rebrand. He changed the logo file.

Lori [00:19:25]:

So I would say, I’m sorry, I’m.

Seth [00:19:27]:

Going to go there, but what an idiot. Anyhow, so we’ll put your LinkedIn into the show notes.

Lori [00:19:34]:

We’ll leave whatever in advance of Twitter blowing up. I have a threads account. I have a thread. What? Say it again.

Seth [00:19:44]:

What do you think of.

Lori [00:19:49]:

Asking that? It’s still early, right? It’s still practically a data. But I feel like there’s potential.

Seth [00:19:57]:

There’s definitely potential. And if it federates with the metaverse or not the metaverse, it’s already in the metaverse. It’s already part of meta, but it federates with the know mastodon and all those other things. For those that let them play in the sandbox, a lot of them are saying no meta. And I’m like, okay, guys, calm down. We don’t know what it’s going to happen. It could get interesting. And I’m excited to see what’s going to happen with that.

Lori [00:20:22]:

It’s going to be interesting, and especially because for what I do anyway, most of my journalists were on Twitter, and so finding them, they’re there. But that was always my research.

Seth [00:20:35]:

You’re hunting down again. Exactly. So, Lori, this has been so much fun.

Lori [00:20:41]:

Likewise.

Seth [00:20:42]:

And we’ll see everyone next time.

Lori [00:20:45]:

Thank you.

Seth [00:20:45]:

That was a great show. If you’re enjoying entrepreneurs Enigma, please view us in the podcast directory of your choice. Every review helps other podcast listeners find our show. If you’re looking for other podcasts in the marketing space, look no further than the Marketing Podcast Network at Marketingpodcasts Network. Goldstein Media hopes you have enjoyed this episode. This podcast is one of the many great shows on the MPN Marketing Podcast Network.