Early in her public relations career, when Robin Derryberry and her team orchestrated the grand opening celebration at the new Krispy Kreme store in Franklin, Tennessee, a few lucky drive-thru customers got an extra treat: a surprise serenade from country superstar Vince Gill.
“It doesn’t get much better than that,” Derryberry remembers. “Vince was terrific to work with and sang a few songs. We asked him if he’d sing some more and he said, ‘No, you paid me two doughnuts. You get two songs and I’m outta here.’”
Founder of Derryberry Public Relations, the gracious entrepreneur with the warm sense of humor has been coming up with fresh ways to promote her clients’ good news and navigate them through the bad for the past 24 years.
Her work, however, didn’t always revolve around restaurant debuts and stadium announcements. A Scenic City native, Derryberry focused on criminal justice at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga despite the fact that she didn’t yet have a clear vision of what her career path might look like. “I always knew I just wanted to help people,” she says.
In her senior year at UTC, she lost a bet with a Kappa Sigma student who challenged her to enter the Miss Chattanooga pageant. “I was surrounded by girls who had been doing it since they were five,” she says with a laugh. “They were professionals. Then the real shock came when I had to go compete statewide. That’s where you really realize that you’re out of your element and that you have no business being there.”
Nevertheless, she says, “I ended up being myself, having a great time.” At the end of the weeklong competition, she was named Miss Congeniality and won a scholarship that helped pay for her master’s degree.
Just out of college in 1983, she became a child abuse investigator with Hamilton County Juvenile Court. “Once you’ve been in those situations, you can handle anything because you’re dealing with people when they are at their very worst. The biggest thing is being able to make that child feel as comfortable as possible and be protective.”
A couple of years into the job, then-Juvenile Court Judge Dixie Smith called Derryberry into his office. “We’ve got this grant, and it’s to be the eyes and ears of children coming into the court in abuse and neglect cases. I think you’d do a really good job with this, and you could train volunteers. But it is a grant.”
“So if it doesn’t work?” she asked.
“Then you’re out of a job.”
“Talk about young people who take on challenges and don’t look at it right between the eyes,” she recalls. “I was 25 years old.”
Armed with the relationship-building skills that would later serve as the backbone of her own business, Derryberry recruited a few female community leaders she knew from Junior League to serve as CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) members and fight for the best interests of the children in court. “The program grew and grew and I am so proud of everything that that program has done,” she says. “It’s really helped a lot of children and a lot of families.”
In 1990, Derryberry became Juvenile Court administrator – the youngest in the state at the time – overseeing 129 employees. She left four years later, when newly elected congressman Zach Wamp asked if she’d run his district office, which then covered 12 counties in southeast Tennessee. She later served as campaign manager in his first reelection bid.
In the long run, Derryberry was cut out for neither court nor politics. So in 2001, she quit her job as Wamp’s deputy chief-of-staff, called the Ingram Group, a public relations firm in Nashville with whom she’d worked during her time in the district office, and told them she was looking for something different. Within two weeks, she had opened an Ingram branch in her home in Chattanooga, kick-starting it with the contacts she’d made during her time at the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Once we’re friends, we’re kind of like friends forever,” she says. “My goal was to be up and sustainable within the first 18 months. And within seven months, I was looking for some help in the new office space.”
One of the first tenants in Jack’s Alley, in January 2006 Derryberry acquired the office she’d opened for Ingram and changed the name on the door. “I was very, very blessed,” she says. “Every client came right along with me.”
She remembers telling one of her first clients, an architectural firm, “There’s no other place to be but downtown,” to which he replied, “You’re serious?”
In an obvious testament to her tenacity, her business is still going strong, in the same spot. “I still think that downtown is just the best place to be in this town, in this community,” she says. “I wish that there was more retail, and I wish that there were a few more things to plug into. But I still think that downtown has so much to offer. I love seeing what’s happening, and I love being a neighbor.”
With clients ranging from Cloudland at McLemore Resort to the Moccasin Bend Environmental Campus, Derryberry has represented both small and large businesses generating revenues of up to $800 billion. Among other things, her six employees craft press releases, oversee crisis communications, help with grant applications, plan special events, and sometimes connect clients with possible supporters.
“We kind of set the tone,” she says. “We put together messaging that is very reflective and very thoughtful, so it doesn’t appear that someone’s just shooting from the hip. In some instances, especially with clients who are facing some legal matters, one bad soundbite positions your story. If we can make sure that that first soundbite is a good one, then that’s where we do our best work.”
Derryberry is grateful for long-running clients like the Chattanooga Housing Authority, which is currently redeveloping the Westside, the city’s oldest public housing community. But extensive vetting can also reveal that a client isn’t right for her firm.
“It’s all about strategy. If I have a prospect come to me, and the ox is in the ditch, it’s bad news any way you cut it. If they are open and honest with us and it’s something that we believe in, we will go to the mat for you. We’ve had some challenging clients, but they were always straight up with us, and those are the people that we will work with. On the flip side of it, sometimes we found that people weren’t as honest with us as they could’ve been, and you let them roll off as clients.
“In very few instances—I can think of maybe two or three—we look at them and go, ‘Wait a minute. Something’s not adding up here.’ It’s usually that gut check that [prompts me] to say, ‘You know what? Maybe we need to go a different direction.’ And it never let us down. We’re just very careful because we’re not only willing to put our reputation on the line for the people we serve; we also realize that reputations are very fragile and that you have to protect yours as much as you try to protect your clients.”
In the more than two decades she’s been in this business, Derryberry says the biggest change is that she is now expected to be available 24/7. By the time she hits the office, she’s already scoured her clients’ social media accounts and emailed some of them with updates.
To help them maintain a solid online presence, her team must take the time to really know who they are and what’s important to them, she says. “The voice for one particular client may be totally different from another, and you have to really get in and understand who you’re working with so that, when you post something in their voice, it’s very authentic. … Having the trust of the people we represent is so critical, and we want to do a good job. The only way we can do that is by getting to know them.”
What’s more, she adds, “We’re very, very careful with confidentiality and in protecting those that we work with.”
Derryberry also does what she can to take care of her staff. She’s never laid anyone off, despite two recessions and the pandemic. “We tell our employees, ‘If we hire you, we intend to keep you.’”
No longer directly involved in the CASA program, she serves as vice chair for the Hamilton County Juvenile Court Commission, which keeps an eye on trends and shares insights with public officials and business owners. “That’s been fun, and it’s like a full circle moment for me to come back to the place where I started.”
One of the best things about being an entrepreneur in her field, she says, is seeing clients enjoy success because of the positive media coverage she’s generated for them. And when she hears a client deliver an on-point message at her coaching, “It’s like a proud mama moment.”
Her own mom, the first female underwriter in the Provident (now Unum) accident department, was an important role model who instilled in Derryberry a strong work ethic. So was her grandmother, the longtime bookkeeper at Highland Park Baptist Church.
“She worked until she was 82 because she liked to keep her mind engaged, and she loved to be around people,” Derryberry says. “I see a lot of myself in the high bar that she set for my mom and me. And I like to make a difference. I love to give back in ways that I can. When I see that I’m not being effective, then I probably won’t do this anymore, but I just don’t see it happening.
“You’ll probably find me dead at my desk one day,” she says with a chuckle, “and hopefully not because somebody killed me.”