About Allison 

Rather than bore you with a formal biography written in the third person, I'll just tell you a bit about myself...

How did I manage to get this gig interviewing some of the most compelling public figures in the world? Completely by accident! Ok, well the initial opportunity came to me by accident. The rest I worked my butt off for :). I majored in Criminal Justice in college thinking I would find my way into the FBI and live out my days organizing federal sting operations and criminal investigations (yes, that is how I saw it playing out). During my senior year in college I became an Auxiliary Police Officer in my hometown on Long Island, while also interning at a county courthouse where I went down into the court's holding jail cells daily to speak with men who had just been arrested, but who could not afford bail. My job was to interview them to see if they were eligible for free legal council. After some less than pleasant experiences in both of these positions I came to the conclusion that at 5'3" and 110 lbs. perhaps this wasn't the right career path for me.

Concurrently, I began modeling to earn extra money while still in school, and that eventually led me out to Los Angeles where I knocked around for a few years soaking up the scene on the Sunset Strip (mostly from a spectator's perspective. I've never been the wild type). I fell in love with the weather and terrain of southern California and particularly adored Malibu, but ultimately accepted a public relations job at a well known PR firm in New York, and I came back home. Right after that, all hell broke lose! Shortly after 9/11 I was laid off and that is really where my story begins. Sometimes you have to say, "Thank God for being fired!" This is when I found my entrepreneurial spirit.

I've always been one to resist authority, to put it mildly, so corporate life was not for me. I realized it was time to try to do something on my own. My first attempts at starting my own business were two Internet based businesses: one selling and distributing speciality products for left-handed people, the other distributing and importing/exporting niche automotive aftermarket products around the world. I used whatever public relations and media acumen I had accumulated up until that point to generate national press for both product lines. I found a great deal of success landing regional and national television segments, national magazine placements and newspaper placements. At one point Entrepreneur Magazine did a profile on me and that opened the floodgates. I began getting emails from people asking for start up business advice and tried to answer as many as I could. Eventually I was urged by a friend to create a small consulting firm and handle them that way. That consulting firm began to incorporate public relations and marketing consulting, and that is how my own firm, Allison Dawn Public Relations was born.

Around this time a friend of mine had just acquired the domain name PR.com in a business deal and was toying with the idea of putting together a full throttle online international business marketplace with this domain name. He had approached me to oversee their public relations efforts to help build a momentum of traffic to the site. During the time it took for the site to be fleshed out and built I had suggested a section of the site where there should be editorial article content, "everything from travel pieces to entertainment articles," I believe is how I pitched it. At one point I blurted out, "Why don't we do celebrity interviews. It will be great, and it will draw a lot of traffic to the site!" At that time celebrity interviews were not exactly all the rage in the new media realm, and they were mostly considered untouchable if you were not a well known publication with national recognition. It was like me saying, "Why don't we fly to the moon?" Basically, the response I got was, "If you can make it happen, you got it and you can run it." Ok...

I had no real connections at that time, no famous friends to speak of, save for the random distant acquaintance from my L.A. days, and only a start-up website backing our efforts. I was armed with some knowledge of the entertainment industry I had gathered in my mental file from years of knocking around Los Angeles in my early twenties. Basically, I just kind of went for it. I was raised to believe that anything is possible and if someone else can do something, I can too. I operated on that belief for the first year when we had little else to go on.

We began to send out pitch letters to various publicists, studios and record companies, and you can guess what most of the answers were. "No" became something I heard so often that it started to feel like a game. How many "NOs" can I wrack up in a day? The first interview we landed was one of the cast members from the first season of The Apprentice and not having any formal journalism training and just a public relations writing background I started studying some of the most famous interviewers of our time, both on TV and in print. After that interview was in the can, we became giddy with the notion of, "Maybe we can really do this!"

It was an uphill battle at first, but I soon hit my stride and found myself realizing one day that many of my landmark goals have been accomplished. People we used to sit around and say we would one day book for interviews, I can proudly say I have interviewed many of them! That massive mountain doesn't seem nearly as steep in my rearview mirror. One day Jason, the owner and Editor-in-Chief of PR.com said to me, "You are really good at this. No, you're great at this. This is what you are supposed to do." He was right. The rest is history.

xoxo -A

 

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