6 Years of Scottie Public Affairs: Q&A with Abby Gardner

To celebrate turning six, the staff of Scottie Public Affairs turned the tables on Abby and asked her six questions about starting and owning a business.

Since you started Scottie Public Affairs six years ago, what have been some of your proudest moments as a business owner?

I came to consulting from campaigns, and the most fun part of campaigns was winning on election night. I still feel the same way, though our clients are issue advocacy groups and other kinds of organizations that don’t typically have election days. But they have big events that go off flawlessly, they have legislative victories, they have great profiles in the news, and those wins are my happiest moments and are what keep me going. 

Why did you choose Pittsburgh as a home for Scottie Public Affairs?

I worked in Washington, D.C. from 2008 to 2015, and while I loved my friends and coworkers there, I knew D.C. wasn’t going to be my forever home. In 2015, I reached a moment professionally and personally where it made sense to leave, and Pittsburgh, my hometown, felt like a safe place to launch a business. It was just a short flight to D.C., where many of my clients would be, but I could afford to take risks like opening an office in Pittsburgh, and that wasn’t  going to happen in D.C. 

Tell us about how you created Scottie. What smart moves did you make, and now looking back, what could you have done differently?

When people ask me about hanging out their own shingle, I have two pieces of advice: You need clients, and you need an accountant. 

When I started Scottie, I didn’t consider it much of a risk because I had established clients who were ready to work with me on day one. Having those clients lined up was probably the smartest move I made! And the second smartest move was getting a good accountant who helped me with bookkeeping, taxes, and payroll — all things that I could have sunk hundreds of hours into and never gotten particularly good at. I paid someone else for a few hours of their time a month and slept better for it. 

My biggest regrets are when I saw red flags or had a gut feeling something was off early in the process with a client or otherwise, but I didn’t nip it in the bud. I lied to myself that things might get better. Turns out, they pretty much never do, and you should just listen to your gut immediately!

How has your business adapted since the COVID-19 pandemic hit? Are there any old office habits you’d like to see left in the past?

We were lucky and blessed during COVID, and I will never lose sight of that: most of our clients were able to keep going; none of our Scottie team members got sick, and close friends of the firm and clients that got COVID recovered.

That said, I think I had to come to terms with myself that we did almost all of our client work remotely pre-pandemic, but I still had the mentality that we should be in the office physically ourselves. COVID made me appreciate that it isn’t necessary. We’ve adopted a “the office is here if you want it” mentality, and I don’t see any pressing reason to change that policy. Luckily, I hate open-concept offices, so we have private offices if we want to use them, and I do feel vindicated right now about that preference. Of course, part of why that has worked for us is I have a talented and trustworthy staff that produces high-quality work wherever they are working from, and if that were not the case, we’d have a whole other set of issues. 

It has been interesting to watch bigger firms and other industries wrestle with their narratives about why they force people to come back in when they have successfully done their jobs remotely for a year. I think it comes down to people in charge who are not in touch with their employees and need to justify expensive office space that has sat empty for over a year. My perspective is that we are still in a pandemic, people are traumatized and some are barely holding on, and forcing them back in right now will lead good employees to quit and find flexible work somewhere else.

Lastly, I went from about 18 work trips in 2019 to zero in the last 16 months, which has also made me rethink my assumptions about the necessity of some of those trips. Some travel for me will pick back up, but I doubt it will return to the same level as before.

If you weren’t busy running your business, what would you be doing instead? Would you still work in the same industry?

I’m pretty sure I’d be baking, maybe still as a small business owner. Baking is my favorite thing to do right now, and since the pandemic started, I’ve certainly had a lot more time to do it.

Traditionally, a six-year anniversary is known for celebrating the sweetness, strength, and durability of a partnership. How do these symbols mark Scottie's sixth year? 

Well, that is a sweet premise for a question! This endeavor is a partnership, every day, between staff and me and our clients, and I have to thank everyone who has been a part of that journey. I hope the durability of this partnership will last! When I started six years ago, I just wanted to work for myself, with clients I like, on projects I found interesting. That trifecta is the sweet spot for me, and I’m just grateful that it has worked as long as it has, that our team has grown, and great people want to partner with us.