Founder shares agency growth story

Lucy Schultze featured on “Made in Mississippi” entrepreneurship podcast

Red Window Communications is focused on helping clients grow by spreading the word, but the company’s own launch happened in a very different way: Quietly.

“We didn’t even announce what we were doing until we were a year in,” said Founder and CEO Lucy Schultze, who shares the company’s story in a new episode of the business podcast “Made in Mississippi.”

“We wouldn’t have had the bandwidth that first year to support more clients,” she said. “Over time, we have built our team and capabilities around what our clients needed or asked us to do, and the growth happened very organically. But in the early days, it really began out of relationships and responding to a need.”

This month, Schultze joins a roster of more than 120 Mississippi business owners to be featured on the “Made in Mississippi” podcast.

Hosted by Casey Combest, owner of production company Blue Sky Studios in Jackson, the podcast aims to share inspiring stories and practical advice for those building businesses in the state.

In her conversation with Combest, Schultze said that while some marketing and public-relations agencies launch with an intentional business plan, many others like Red Window have evolved out of the founder’s work as an individual.

Before launching the agency, Schultze spent a decade as a journalist with The Oxford Eagle, where she also gained experience in photography, graphic design and website development. She was also a contributing writer for Mississippi Medical News and its sister medical-news publications in Memphis, Tampa and Raleigh, N.C., before turning her focus to public relations.

“A lot of the things I learned during my time as a journalist still influence the way we do things at Red Window,” she said.

“A lot of the things I learned during my time as a journalist still influence the way we do things at Red Window.”

— LUCY SCHULTZE

A core value for journalists — transparency — was the original inspiration for the agency’s name, Schultze said in the podcast interview.

“We want to create great content that is authentic to the client and engages the people they want to reach,” she said. “Our goal has always been to bring attention to our clients, rather than to ourselves.”

Over time, the value of transparency has taken an even broader meaning for the company, both in how team members collaborate internally and how the agency works with its clients.

On the podcast, Schultze described how her team gives clients a private, external view of their project management system to view their work progress, pricing, timelines and deliverables at a glance.

“In the beginning, we were just thinking about transparency as it relates to the client’s audience,” she said. “But as we have gone along, we realized just how important it is for how we deal with our clients, too. They really appreciate never having to wonder what we’re doing or how their projects are coming along.”

In a frequent theme for the “Made in Mississippi” podcast, Combest asked for Schultze’s perspective on prospects for entrepreneurship in the state in the coming years. She pointed to important shifts in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, such as videoconferencing becoming normal even across generations and in small towns.

“With people being so used to meeting and working remotely, we don’t have the same geographical obstacles we once did,” she said. “There is a lot of opportunity for Mississippi to be more connected to the rest of the world.”

Schultze said Mississippi benefits when it is less isolated, offering a different take on the state’s challenges around “brain drain.”

A spring 2022 report from the Office of the State Auditor showed only half of graduates from Mississippi public universities still worked in the state three years after leaving college.

For Schultze, it’s also important to look 10-15 years after college, when those graduates have established their careers and are raising families of their own.

“At that point, people have a different motivation to come back,” she said. “We want to give them even more reasons to come back to Mississippi — and to bring new ideas, perspectives and connections with them.”