PR and Cloud Computing Forecast: Sunny Skies, Slight Chance of Rain

You could say that Laura Borgstede has had her head in the cloud since about 2006. That’s when she decided that the traditional PR agency “pyramid model” at her boutique agency Calysto Communications wasn’t working. “We became a starting place for assistant account executives and account executives who then got hired away by bigger agencies,” says Borgstede, who founded Calysto in 1999.

She, and her clients, just couldn’t take the turnover. “We were niche and we were good, but we weren’t doing VP-level work all the time,” says Borgstede. So, in order to attract top talent and cut down on the overhead in an increasingly challenging economy, Borgstede decided the agency needed to be run “on the Internet”—a precursor statement for being “in the cloud.”

Today, Borgstede has assembled a team of 50 VP-level executives (each with 10 to 25-plus years of experience and located in more than 40 cities across the U.S. and covering more than 80 countries around the world). And there’s no Calysto headquarters in Atlanta anymore; everyone works in the cloud— from a home office.