3RM’s annual note recapping the year behind, what’s ahead, sticking close to values, partners and customers, relationship-focus, stewardship, and trust. – Todd Razor, President
Each year presents its own unique set of obstacles, victories, and challenges to be overcome.
Bring it on.
Going Vertical, Not Ballistic
For our part at 3RM, 2025 went out on a bright note. We took stock of what worked, what didn’t, deeply examined, tested and validated our approach, took the pulse and had a good touch base with valued customers, and reached future ones.
In the past year we took on new business, opened the door for expansion into new verticals, supported and hung out with clients, including partners this past October at The Utility Expo, and launched 3RM’s new blog and website.
What’s presented is “who we are” as a business, what the brand stands for, an overview of our service offerings, and vision for what originally came to life in 2011. So we additionally have the privilege of turning 15 years old this year.
The company has grown up a lot, for more than a decade leveraging proven methods and advancing grassroots techniques by way of applying, monitoring, adapting, measuring, understanding, continuously learning and improving.
We invested in the infrastructure, developed the architecture, built the systems and are sharpening the tools contributing to sustained growth and maturity.
Today, we get to think about what staying on point for clients will look like over the next 15 years, collaborating around the important work they do.
Demonstrating that relevance and making it more targeted, discoverable for the segments they touch and serve, how meaningful that is–driving results and generating desired outcomes–not simply creating noise.
For consultants, marketing and public relations teams dealing in owned and earned media for B2B industries, we can see “trust” being increasingly viewed by decision makers and adopted in the C-suite as a measurable KPI.
The sales cycles in B2B are traditionally long, and that includes content marketing and public relations, our industry. 3RM has come to embrace it, we like it that way.
We’re staying the course, leading with our core values: Authenticity, transparency and consistency.
Navigating Periods of Intense Change
After the school of hard knocks and before I went to college, I worked for a company and was part of a culture which, early on in my career, helped reinforce a simple fact: the only constant in business is change.
I may be of a school that believes we are only competing against ourselves, there is not much standing in the way beyond that, and nothing really new under the sun.
Yet time marches, and it sure seems to be accelerating at an awfully quick pace these days.
My own worldview, my two cents, says there is enough trouble, right now, in front of me, today.
This leaves only one minor problem. Tomorrow.
All of us could be run over by buses.
Sorry, that was a little direct, didn’t mean it if I caused alarm.
Is all of us being hit likely to happen? No.
Plus, think about the logistical effort and how much fuel and drive time it would require to get us all. They may even have to build more buses, get them shipped, hire and train more drivers.
It probably won’t.
But am I certain?
No.
The point: Uncertainty exists. It’s out there. A guy named Mark Twain that people like to quote and a quote often attributed to him says, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
To borrow another cliché, ignorance is bliss. And nobody knows what they don’t know.
For a lot of companies right now, the facts are, they are thinking hard about what’s next.
Let’s be real. Beyond hard work, being proactive with business, marketing and operational plans, what else should owners and companies be thinking about?
What should never be neglected and always be prioritized, right now?
It’s trust.
Leading With Trust, Values
3RM’s approach is set and we’ve laid in a course. It has been designed to carry us forward, propel our team. We are 100% focused on building strong relationships, helping outsmart marketing problems, getting the story right for customers, and leading with our values.
If you’re still reading this and are like us, you may be optimistic and skeptical, but have also known what it is to drink marketing Kool-Aid and peer occasionally through rose-colored lenses.
- We may be entrepreneurs
- We may be owners
- We may be executives
- We may be part of a marketing or sales enablement team
Over the past few years, we’ve seen many headlines revealing the thinking and effort companies are putting into the fundamentals, defining or rediscovering core values, prioritizing listening to the voice of the customer, thought leadership, storytelling, customer service and support, trust and relationship building.
We love our jobs, take extreme ownership of our work, and we respect our peers, companies that are similar to ours in content and media spaces, founders that went before us and who came after, they are out there. We look up to them, too.
We like following the good ones that handle this all very humbly, quietly and effectively, focused on delivering excellence at a fair price and never taking advantage of clients–doing the next right things for them and their customers.
Listening, planning, strategically implementing, taking action. Believing that authentic and original motivation, the “why” behind the “what we do” and how an agency delivers value, is just as important as a marketing company’s bottom line.
We salute you.
With all the changes happening, it’s good to know and remind ourselves once and a while that some things have not.
In a new age of AI and machine learning, ensuring client nurturing and authentic sales enablement is never neglected, through consistent development and execution that never ceases to “be real,” has never been more important in marketing and public relations.
Whether a company does it themselves, hires another agency to do it for them, 3RM does it or we do it together, the things we root for are the same: seeing more companies doing business with integrity, building on the success of owners and client organizations.
We want to see more amplification, creating and helping set the conditions for outreach, sharing and media exposure that get their credible voices out there, faster and more often, attracting and earning the types of attention they deserve.
At the same time, 3RM is:
- Staying the course
- Focusing on relationships
- Prioritizing meeting client needs start to finish
- Sticking close to partners
- Growing alongside companies
- Developing new models and business connections
- Building that trust, fostering that credibility
- Leading with our values
Same Company, New Day
For the better part of two decades, harrowing through this B2B digital marketing and public relations landscape, our profession, 3RM saw it transformed with the dawn of the internet, forever changed through the advent of social media and era of digital transformation, and now a Gutenberg printing press level milestone, generative AI.
Contrary to any popular opinion, in politics, journalism, even in business and from a buyer’s perspective, at a base level, perception is still very much “reality.”
Recapping our own best laid plans, we’ve buttoned up a mission statement, designed a new site outlining core competencies, alongside transparent pricing and implementation details, our promises, what customers are saying, best practices we employ and how we communicate.
However, we could not provide a better or clearer summary of where we are going–what has, is and will continue to be the most consequential aspect of our business–than how a client put it recently during a virtual encounter on New Years Eve.
Providing honest feedback and validation, and a feather in 3RM’s cap, in just seven unsolicited words our customer perfectly summed up the point of this 2016 Founder’s Note, which at the time was already under construction.
The client’s words: “I trust you, I trust you specifically.”
The Human Element, Experience
Across all industries, markets and sectors, the new human-AI/GPT collaboration can do some pretty intelligent and cool things. I do know it can be hard for any business to see beyond the next quarter.
I’ve also read, “Experience is like a comb that life hands to a man after his hair is all gone,” though the exact origin of that proverb I do not know.
If I was any good at predictions, and always am when they come true, it appears 2026 will be bright.
We are grateful and excited the future, thankful for our awesome customers, and to know the direction we are going together, humbled everyday to peek inside some amazing niches, innovative verticals and industries.
Determination, luck, hard work and persistence each have their place, and pay day.
It will always return to the human element, back to leading with values and trust.
And don’t make fun of my hair.
Remember the only constant is change.