President of AKCG - Public Relations Counselors Mr. Chris Lukach, a 2004 graduate of Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, discusses AKCG's move to Rowan Boulevard, the field of public relations and his own relationship with the university.
Mr. Lukach joins us from AKCG - Public Relations Counselors, a long-standing agency which recently relocated to the heart of Glassboro, NJ on Rowan Boulevard. As a Rowan graduate, a recently named distinguished alumnus and local business owner, Mr. Lukach discusses with us public relations and his ever-changing relationship with the university.
Beth Dombkowski:
Hello. My name is Beth Dombkowski and I'm coming to you from the office of admissions at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. Welcome to Rowan Confidential. I am joined today by Chris Lukach. Welcome.
Chris Lukach:
Thank you. Good to be here.
Beth Dombkowski:
We're happy to have you. Chris is president of AKCG – Public Relations Counselors, a national public relations consultancy with deep experience in crisis and issue preparedness. That sounds intense. As president, Chris heads the AKCG issues and crisis communications practice. And you are also a Rowan graduate.
Chris Lukach:
Proudly so, yes.
Beth Dombkowski:
Wonderful. How long have you been removed from Rowan?
Chris Lukach:
Well, I've been out of school for 15 years this year, which is tricky to believe, but I can't say that I've ever removed myself from Rowan. It's been really an integral part of my personal and professional life. I met my wife and my first boss-turned-business partner in the same about eight-foot stretch of hallway on Rowan's campus.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh my goodness.
Chris Lukach:
So it's certainly influenced me heavily in all the years that have followed.
Beth Dombkowski:
So what did you study here?
Chris Lukach:
I studied public relations.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Chris Lukach:
Which I remember one of my first public relations classes being around the topic of how to describe what you do to your grandparents at Thanksgiving, being such a sort of a tricky and nonspecific topic. And I don't know that I've ever actually gotten all that good at it. But basically what we do as public relations counselors is subscribe to the notion that reputation is essential for your business to succeed, for you to have a healthy bottom line, for you to have customers, for you to be able to operate, you need to have a strong foundation and reputation. And that's what we work to cultivate, to grow, to protect in times of crisis, and to maintain in others.
Beth Dombkowski:
So did you know this is what you wanted to do when you came to Rowan? How did you find public relations?
Chris Lukach:
Oh, certainly not. I couldn't say I knew what it was. Let's see. I came in undeclared with the expectation to study English because that's what my parents studied, and then I think I was in the CAP center in this very building and I saw in a book that you could become a concert promoter with a degree in public relations.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay.
Chris Lukach:
And I said, "Boy, that sounds like fun." Now the funny thing about that is, my trajectory has taken me down a lane where I do some pretty heavy stuff, mostly a lot of crisis work, and I can do that with a pretty steady hand. But if I'm ever asked to book an event, to make sure the DJ shows up on time, to book a sandwich tray, I have no stomach for it. So it's the portion of the business that I've lost the nerve for that eventually led me into it.
Beth Dombkowski:
The part that drew you in is the part that-
Chris Lukach:
That I couldn't do.
Beth Dombkowski:
... you can't stand anymore. Yeah.
Chris Lukach:
And I have the fondest admiration for those that do, and there are many people that do it very, very well.
Beth Dombkowski:
So take me on this journey with you. You came to Rowan, you decided when you were here that you wanted to study public relations, and at what point in your academic career did you realize that? Was that your freshman year or your sophomore year?
Chris Lukach:
I think it was my sophomore year, and it really clicked for me when I came in and met with the advisor for the Public Relations Student Society of America, the PRSSA chapter that's here on campus, which I always saw and treated as a pretty essential part of getting a public relations education in its association that mirrors a professional association for postgraduates, but it was so much about learning to apply the in-class techniques right away.
Chris Lukach:
The PRSSA chapter here maintained and still maintains its own firm that has its own clients, so you get to test out the techniques in real time. And also it really prioritized building your professional network and cultivating that network that you would draw upon, and continue to draw upon, at every stage in your professional career right in those first few days of your education. So it was once I got introduced to the outside the classroom aspects of my Rowan education that I really became hooked and I think really became energized. I think that's kind of when I hit my stride.
Beth Dombkowski:
Wonderful. So the professional group, you're not actually the first person to come in and talk about that. That seems to be a pivotal thing for a lot of folks who are working now. You got a lot of professional experience as students. Okay. So how did that inform your creation or management of this company?
Chris Lukach:
Well, interestingly enough, from a small world perspective, the person who founded that association here at Rowan's campus, at the time Glassboro State, ended up being the person who gave me my first job, and who subsequently sold her agency to me and gave me the business that I have today. So I sort of buck the millennial trend by still being in my first job, though I own the place, so I suppose I'll stick around for a little while. but the people that I met pre-professionally, both in the association, not just on Rowan's campus, but we have a lot of interaction with people on other campuses, with the Rutgers folks, with Widener, with UD, and so on.
Chris Lukach:
They've all sort of moved along this path right alongside me, and the people that I know now professionally I've known since I was a college student, which is pretty special and pretty remarkable, and not necessarily translatable to too many fields. I really had no concept when I came into school how much I could get in terms of building and developing a professional network and how essential that would be to postgraduate success, but I think Rowan really drove that home for me.
Beth Dombkowski:
That's great. And you're back on Rowan's campus, in a sense.
Chris Lukach:
Yeah, right on the tip. We've always been headquartered in South Jersey and proudly so, but when our lease came up a few months ago, we had to look for a new home, and Glassboro was at sort of the top of our list as a firm that's fairly young that likes to attract a lot of young talent and fresh talent and highly skilled talent. We couldn't think of a better place to be than so close to campus here. Not just because of the access to the talent that we had, but also because there's just such a remarkable energy to the Boulevard right now. It's energizing, we were here from July when it was a little quieter right through ... it's October now, and we're starting to see the year has picked up, and it's like an infusion of energy that we just soak in through the walls.
Chris Lukach:
We're so happy to be here. We're so happy to see what the campus has done, what the university has done, and what it's doing for the town of Glassboro. This could sound cynical, but I've mentioned to a lot of people we've been moving down here to the borough and some have said, "Whoa, what do you want to go there for?" And once we've brought them here and we've shown them around and seen it, they just couldn't believe the transformation that this university has experienced in the last few years. It's remarkable.
Beth Dombkowski:
It is remarkable. I remember seeing the plans for Rowan Boulevard and it seemed so far in the future, like they were going to build this thing and here it is. It's here. We have built a downtown.
Chris Lukach:
Yeah. It's great to just, like I said, just to walk around and soak it in and be a part of something.
Beth Dombkowski:
So I have to ask. Issue and crisis communication plans. What is this?
Chris Lukach:
Yeah. It's that piece of the reputational puzzle where we try to make sure that organizations can get out of difficult situations with as much goodwill as they possibly can. We tend to work for the types of clients for whom their trust and the confidence that the people they serve have in them is essential to doing business. That's everything from hospitals and health systems to senior living organizations to Catholic diocese to chemical producers. We sort of run the gamut of the industries we serve. And the common thread is that to the extent they are facing issues or recovering from issues, they deserve to have their story told and their point of view represented, and that's what we do.
Chris Lukach:
It's very unpredictable work, it's very exciting work, and it's extremely rewarding work because we are not just giving people a stack of newspaper clips, we're in many ways giving them, I think, peace of mind and reassurance and setting corrective courses for their businesses. I love the work we do.
Beth Dombkowski:
So I'm a client, I'm seeking you out. I have an issue needs to be mitigated. What does our relationship look like? What types of things do you help me do?
Chris Lukach:
Well, the first thing we ask is, "Are you contrite? Are you sincere? Have you taken action to correct whatever has put you in the crisis situation?" If we don't have those pieces in place, we'll say, "Thanks. There's not a whole lot we can do for you." I think that's one of the main lessons I took from my Rowan education is that public relations is only as good as the person sending the message. Public relations only works when we're promoting good work done well.
Chris Lukach:
I remember one particular professor saying, "What it can never do is perfume manure. We can't make problems go away with spin. We can't do damage control to make difficult things go away." So we have to be reassured that we're helping someone that's in a position to be helped.
Chris Lukach:
From there, some of the things we do involve working with media, some of the things we do involve finding ways for them to connect with the people they serve. Be that in person, be that through social media, be that through video. We also like to set goals for ourselves. We like to measure how we're doing against those goals. It's not just throwing spaghetti at the wall. We try to understand what our position is and see how we can move the dial and see how we can help our clients. Help them grow, help them strengthen their positions.
Beth Dombkowski:
So what advice would you give a student or the parents of a student who's thinking about going into this field? [crosstalk 00:11:39]?
Chris Lukach:
Well, sure. It's a strong field and despite the fact that sort of our counterparts in journalism are getting a reputation for being a threatening field to go into, I don't really buy that, and I certainly don't buy its impact on public relations. The more that things change, the more that people get their news every day from Facebook and Twitter, the more we just have to be on our game. The more we have to look for ways to engage with people meaningfully, to engage with them in person, to engage with them in a way that resonates.
Chris Lukach:
I just did a presentation this morning for group of hospital officials and one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about is the shrinking attention spans of consumers. Microsoft Research does a study every five years where they've pointed out that since the onset and the rise of Facebook, humans have lost a third of their attention spans. So we have to be even more guarded to cut through the muck and cut through the waste and cut through the distraction, and it's a thoughtful field, it's one with sort of a firm academic basis, and it's one in which I think there's a lot of opportunity for good, rewarding work.
Beth Dombkowski:
I'm going to ask one more question. What is something that you wish people knew about your field? What's a misconception or something that you feel you need to correct?
Chris Lukach:
Yeah. I think that we're too often painted with a brush of not being strategic, of being something that sort of anyone can pick up, that anyone can make the leap into from other professions, and in many ways that's true, but I think there's really a solid academic discipline behind the practice of public relations, and I think that's something that I fortunately entered the field with from my Rowan education. Rowan, I have no humility in saying, is one of the preeminent public relations programs in the country. It has the reputation for being such. Its PRSSA chapter is nationally recognized, one of the first, has been for a long time.
Chris Lukach:
And Rowan has sort of the right mix of putting people out, both where they can do the work because they think about practical application, but when they have that good basis and understanding in theory, and I think that's what practitioners need to succeed. So I think it's a great profession to be in. It's one that's rife with opportunity. It's one that I've enjoyed working in for as long as I have, and will continue to enjoy working in for a long time, and one that I certainly wouldn't try to talk people out of.
Beth Dombkowski:
Chris, thank you so much for coming in today. I've enjoyed our conversation very much. Thank you for taking time out of your day, and we hope to see you again.
Chris Lukach:
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Beth Dombkowski:
This has been Rowan Confidential.