Jim DeLorenzo started his PR practice in July 1999. Fourteen months later, the dot-com bubble burst. Twenty-seven months after that, 9/11 wiped out his two biggest clients in a single month. Then came the GFC, then COVID, and now AI is the latest thing everyone predicted would end the solo practitioner. He is still here, 27 years in, doing every piece of the work himself, one client at a time.
His survival across four industry collapses comes back to a distinction most service business operators get backwards: the difference between reorienting and restarting. When the ground shifts, the reflex is to tear everything down and begin again with a new identity and a new story about who you are. Jim didn’t do that. He rebuilt reputation and kept working with what was still true about what he did and who he had built relationships with over the previous decade.
This episode is worth your time if you run a service business solo or close to it. The practical material is useful: how he uses ChatGPT without sounding like ChatGPT, how he lands earned media with no budget and no team behind him. But the more durable thing is watching someone describe four genuine existential threats to their business and explain, plainly, what they did each time and why it held.
The reorient-don’t-restart playbook
After 9/11, Jim lost two major clients in a month. That is not a slow business downturn to manage around. It is a sudden, visible hole in both revenue and reference list at the same time. The common response is to treat it as a reset: new positioning, new target market, a new story about who you are and what you do. Jim’s approach was different. He looked at what was still true about his work, his relationships, and his reputation, then asked where those things still applied.
Reorienting rather than restarting means not throwing away compounding. Every year you spend working in a field, you are building something that doesn’t appear on a balance sheet: credibility, referral networks, a track record that other people can point to when they recommend you. Restarting resets that clock. Reorienting means pointing what you have already built in a new direction, with all the years behind you intact.
This applies directly to small business operators facing disruption. When a major client category disappears, when a platform wipes out your traffic, when an industry-wide downturn takes out the segment you built your offer around, the impulse to reinvent from scratch is often panic dressed as strategy. The question worth asking first is what is still true about what you do and where that still has value. The answer is usually more than it feels like in the middle of a crisis.
Why the story you don’t want to tell is usually the one that works
One of the most specific points Jim makes in this episode is about what gets traction with media. The instinct in PR is to lead with the polished version: the outcome, the credential, the impressive number. What tends to land with journalists, with audiences, and with potential clients is the story the business owner was most reluctant to pitch.
He gives a specific example: a single mother who built a 700-person cleaning business. That story sounds ordinary to the person who lived it. To everyone else, it is a story about building operational scale without capital, about managing a workforce that size with no margin for error, about what that kind of growth requires in practice. The specificity of the real situation is what makes it compelling. A cleaned-up version with the rough edges removed would be forgettable.
For small business owners, this is a practical reframe for how you describe your own work. The story you have been most reluctant to tell is often stronger material than the polished version of events. Someone who hires you after hearing the real story already knows something honest about how you operate. That is a different foundation than someone who hired on credentials and hasn’t encountered the hard part yet.
His ChatGPT workflow and why he prints everything out
Jim’s approach to AI tools is the opposite of what most marketing content describes. He doesn’t use ChatGPT to generate finished copy. He uses it as a first-pass drafting tool, prints the output, reads it away from the screen, marks it up by hand, and rewrites it himself. The physical distance from the interface is deliberate. It forces him to read the text as text rather than as something to accept or reject while still inside the tool.
What he is doing is using AI to rough out and himself to finish. That distinction matters for a PR practitioner because the value he brings to a client is not words per hour. It is the read he has built over 27 years on what a journalist will respond to, what framing has been overplayed, what angle will be ignored and why. ChatGPT can produce sentences at scale. It cannot produce that judgment.
The broader principle is that AI tools are most useful when they handle work that doesn’t require your specific professional judgment, freeing you for the work that does. That is a different proposition from “use AI to produce more content faster” and a more honest one. For a solo operator whose value is accumulated expertise rather than throughput, the distinction is worth getting clear on.
How to land earned media with no budget and no team
Most small businesses treat earned media as something that requires a PR retainer or at least a dedicated person doing outreach. Coverage, features, interviews, mentions: the assumption is that these happen to larger businesses with more resources behind them. Jim’s view is that the mechanics of pitching a story are not complicated and are available to any business owner prepared to put a specific, well-considered story in front of the right person.
What makes a pitch work is not production value or media credentials. It is a clear angle that is relevant to the outlet’s audience, delivered to the right person, with enough specificity that a busy journalist or producer can see the story immediately without needing to do the framing work themselves. Businesses that consistently get coverage are not necessarily more newsworthy than the ones that don’t. They are more deliberate about framing and more consistent about putting pitches forward.
For service-based businesses, earned media builds a kind of third-party credibility that paid advertising cannot replicate. A mention in a trade publication or a feature in a regional business outlet reaches an audience that already has a relationship with that outlet. That trust transfers, in part, to whoever is being written about. The cost is time and the willingness to put a story forward, which is a more accessible entry point than most business owners assume.
What 27 years of disruption teaches you
Jim’s framing for getting through hard periods is not motivational. He talks specifically about taking the hit without taking it personally, a distinction that sounds simple and is genuinely difficult to hold in practice. When 9/11 cost him two clients in a month, those clients weren’t leaving because of anything he had done or failed to do. The work was good and the relationships were intact; external events had made the spend untenable. Understanding that clearly kept him from making decisions driven by self-doubt that had no bearing on the actual problem.
He also talks about working with a coach during the GFC recovery period. Not as a turnaround fix, but as someone who helped him rebuild focus when personal grief and business pressure were landing at the same time. That kind of support rarely features in the advice circulating for solo operators. The operational guidance is everywhere. The acknowledgment that running something alone through consecutive crises is genuinely isolating, and that the mental load compounds over time, is less common and more useful to hear named plainly.
The line Jim says he uses every time something falls apart is the one the episode opens with: whatever doesn’t kill me will make me funnier. That is worth taking seriously as an operational stance. It is a way of staying functional when the alternative is getting paralysed by an event you have no control over. Across four industry collapses in 27 years, the business has continued not because circumstances were ever particularly forgiving, but because he kept working with what remained after each wave passed.
About Jim DeLorenzo
Jim DeLorenzo runs JHD Enterprises, a solo public relations practice he founded in July 1999. Over 27 years, he has worked through four major industry disruptions and continued doing his own client work throughout each one.
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