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Robyn Sachs, president and CEO of RMR & Associates of Rockville, has long been known as an award-winning marketing, advertising, design and public relations guru, with a 23-year career leading her own business to multimillions in revenue.

But Sachs is known to many business owners as even more. She's a longtime mentor and an award-winner in that field as well, having won the 2009 Small Business Mentorship Award given by the Montgomery County Workforce Investment Board and Department of Economic Development. She has not only participated for many years in the county government's mentoring program, but added one of her own this year.

"Each year the mentees are supposed to graduate, but this year I had so many say they wanted to get together and they had a need to talk to me, so what I did was put together a group of my own and invited them to meet once a month," said Sachs, 48, who grew up in Pikesville and now lives in Potomac.

"I'm there to facilitate and the members hold each other accountable for specific goals that they set, and it's amazing. The group is producing business and sales and it's become so much more than I could have ever imagined," Sachs added.

Sachs said one of her mentees, Judy Reines of Contract Furniture Options of Potomac, had an initial $1 million government contract and has grown that into a recent order worth up to $17 million. "We have IT, international law, a company doing meeting and convention planning. ... They are all small-business owners in different sectors," Sachs said of her group.

"The thing they have in common is they somehow heard about me and the program. It's pretty interesting to see what happens when you have peers in a sense supporting each other, making each other accountable and hassling each other. I said to myself, ‘This was as valuable as a $5,000 focus group.'"

Besides successes, Sachs notes from her mentoring, "I do think the downturn has created more entrepreneurs ... people who either were downsized or left corporate America. They really often don't have the classical business training or background that one needs to run a successful company. ... Some of them are struggling, and they need a lot more training."

RMR & Associates' clients over the years have included America Online, Subway, Lockheed Martin, Kastle Systems, Telogy/Texas Instruments, Post-Newsweek Media — which owns The Gazette — OTG Software, ICore Networks and Duron Paints. Sachs, set to publish her first book next month, "Market to the Max," said among her newest clients is Truband, "a social media entertainment site we will be launching this fall."

The Business Gazette recently talked to Sachs about mentoring and RMR & Associates, which has capitalized billings of $14 million and does about $3 million in annual revenue.

Social media has become so big recently. What do you tell your clients about using social media to help their business?

Well, social media is definitely very popular and we do have clients using social media very effectively. ... ORG, the folks who run the global domain [for organizations, clubs and others], we helped them with a revamp of their social media program. ... They went from having a few hundred readers on their blog to over 10,000. ... And we're doing a social media campaign for Verizon.

As a vehicle, the whole social media sector is new, exciting and really inexpensive to leverage ... and in the book I have three chapters dedicated to social media, because, like public relations, it's a very low-cost, high-return way, depending on your sector, to interact with your audience and influence a community. But it is not an end in itself. ... We never just recommend social media, because we know that having just that, unless you happen to be a celebrity, it's not going to be enough. Just doing a blog doesn't mean you are going to get readers ... nor is doing Twitter if no one's following you. And we do have some clients and they are so enamored with the concept and we're like, "No, it works if you are an association or someone in entertainment or an author, and have a following."

You said some of the people who have decided to become entrepreneurs during the downturn are struggling. With what in particular?

What I have found is through this work with the county and through working with lots of small-business owners is that they don't have the training and certainly don't understand marketing and marketing communications and sales strategy. We have something we use called the tactical implementation pyramid. It starts with broad reach vehicles like public relations, advertising and web marketing, and it goes up to other vehicles like direct mail, trade shows, seminars and finally to a sales call. And as you go up the pyramid, if you think about media by reach and frequency — how many people do I reach, how many times do I need to talk to them to make an impact — most lay people don't understand that, they don't really get it.

Having to make a hundred cold calls to get five sales, that kind of thing?

Right ... and no one likes making a cold call, no one likes getting a cold call. ... So one of the things that we have also come up with are strategies that eliminate stuff that people, A, don't like; B, it's not effective; and C, they won't do it, and then they feel bad because they won't do it. So we've come up with a work around to a cold call that actually works more effectively.

And one of the things we've seen through our mentor accountability group is this strategy that RMR uses transfers [to other types of businesses] so that our group gets a 10 [percent] to 20 percent response on a strategy that we call a preheat strategy that warms up a prospect before you contact them by phone. It is a targeted letter campaign to a client's top 100 prospects that makes a free offer to help get our clients in the door with their top prospects.

With RMR talking to so many businesses and with your mentoring, what are you seeing as far as what businesses are doing well and which aren't?

In our group we have eight owners, a million-plus [revenue] businesses ... and for the last year and a half at least, you know, people in real estate they've taken a hit obviously ... venture capital people ... one of our businesses in a related PR field has taken a hit. Where do we see things growing? Our health care clients are doing well. ... Subway is doing well. ... Creig Northrop, now he's in real estate and he's weathered the downturn. I think the one thing a downturn shows us is that ... there will always be your standouts, your winners. So I think strong managers can grow in any environment, and they focus their team on whatever the reality is.

You used to be focused on IT, and that sector has had downturns. How have you survived those?

Yes, we used to be about 90 percent IT, and now we are about 30 percent there. We saw IT grow for 10 years straight, then 2000-2001 happened, and now this more recent downturn. The thing I learned in 2000-2001 is, just like you don't want your stock market portfolio to all be in one basket, you want to diversify and that's pretty much the decision I made in 2001 to more highly diversify our client base.

So who are your major clients now?

Our government system integrators, they're growing ... they are in growth mode, good times are here again, for them. ICore Networks, they do voice over IP. ... We have some consulting companies doing work for the government that are doing very well. So if we really look at that, for us what was just IT is more government contractors, with some of them in IT. [University of Maryland University College], we do all of their web marketing. ... So our [other] clients are in food, education ... two authors ... it's a real mix now. We just picked up some project work for a company involved in preserving wetlands areas. We never started out to be just tech, but there was such a high demand, and we did so well for those clients, that one tells another, that tells another.

So this will be a good year?

This year is hard to tell. ... We had a good year last year. This year we have more accounts, but we have more projects than programs. At RMR we know that consistency over time is critical to a successful marketing program, so we always recommend programs because they work better, but we find people who say, ‘Well, let me stick my toe in,' meaning for just an ad campaign, or a web release ... a brand rollout. We have a small-business solutions program, and we've have had many people come through on that and most of them continue. ... That's four months at $2,500 each for a distinct program ... they are seeing enough value to continue. If we wouldn't have adapted to what changed in the economy two years ago, we would have been in some big trouble. We beefed up our own marketing efforts, our preheat strategy, our contact with companies we saw were growing and thriving and that has paid off for us. So I feel very fortunate.

Robyn Sachs

Age: 48.

Position: President and CEO, RMR & Associates of Rockville, a marketing, advertising, design and public relations company, with a full-time staff of 12 and freelancers and consultants used as needed.

Education: Bachelor's in advertising design, University of Maryland, College Park.

Selected awards: Small Business Mentorship Award, Montgomery County Workforce Investment Board and Department of Economic Development, 2009; Brava! Woman Business Achievement Award, Washington SmartCEO, 2009; Top 25 CEOs You Need to Know, The Gazette of Politics and Business, 2008; Entrepreneur of the Year, Ernst & Young, 1998.

Organizations: Entrepreneurs Organization; Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce; National Association of Women Business Owners.

Residence: Potomac.

Hobbies: Going to the beach, traveling, long walks.

smonroe@gazette.net