DSF: Tell us about yourself.
FM: Originally, I am from Center Line, Michigan, which is just north of Detroit. I have a younger brother who was also a Delta Sigma Phi. We were brothers squared I like to say, since he went to school at Hillsdale also. I was a track runner in high school, among other sports, and was being recruited by all kinds of colleges, big ones actually, and I was also a pretty good student. Interestingly, one of the coaches who was recruiting me at Eastern Michigan ended up taking the head coaching job at Hillsdale College, and he picked about ten of his smartest runners he was recruiting at Eastern Michigan, and asked them to come down to Hillsdale. He showed us the school and that's how I settled on going to Hillsdale.
DSF: What was your experience like there?
FM: It ended up being an interesting opportunity for me, because I was always interested in government and politics, and Hillsdale is very active on that scene. So, I was able to get a really good start on where I ended up going over the next 20 or so years.
DSF: What was your track event?
FM: I was a steeplechaser, and I did all four years in cross country, indoor track and outdoor track, so it was a very full four years of school.
DSF: What made you decide to join the Tau Chapter at Hillsdale while you were on campus?
FM: Interestingly, I wanted a place where I could have the fraternal type experience that a lot of people have when they go to college, and one of the reasons I really looked at the Delta Sigma Phi chapter is because a lot of my fellow athletes were there. In doing that, those were the kind of people you saw all the time, at the field house, in the dining hall, and you hung out with them naturally anyway because you were all traveling together. At a small school especially, you had a sense of who was on the same schedule as you with sports and trying to get to practice after going to class, and trying to eat right and making sure you're in bed early enough. In the case of even social functions, who couldn't go out on Friday nights and such because they had a game or track meet the next day. Those were the type of people that I was around a lot, and wanted to join up with them in the fraternity.
In the long run, it has turned out to be even more interesting, because of the people you met there and the people you now reconnect with as you look 20 years back to your college experience. Some of those people now, I still talk to quite a bit in fact, because we were in the same fraternity and have that natural connection to be able to call them up. For instance, I teach a class at Johns Hopkins, and several of my colleagues in the fraternity are experts in the field in which I am teaching these business classes. It's my hope to be able to contact a number of them and see if I can get them to come speak to my class. I can pretty much guarantee you that if they can fit it in their schedule, they're going to do it.
DSF: What else were you involved in on campus?
FM: I was involved in a million things. In fact, I probably made more money in college than I did in my first three or four years out of school. The reality was that I was a sports official at the local high schools, and refereed hockey, baseball, football and basketball ever since then and still do to this day in the Washington area. I would have probably done more had I not gotten a much more important job on Capitol Hill out of school. When you are entry level on Capitol Hill, you think that you're much more important than you are. But, at some point, you do in fact get to be a significant advisor to the member of Congress that you work for, and when I reached that stage, it made it difficult to jump out of the office on a Tuesday at 2:00 to fly to North Carolina to do a basketball game. That, and impending family issues with a new wife and a potential child on the way at that time made me make a difficult choice to do less officiating that took me across the country, and made me do more local officiating.
In addition to getting that start, I was a newspaper guy, writing for the local newspaper in town, and I was always working some angle that would to keep me busy. One good thing about all that activity was that I learned to manage my time. When I entered college, I was young, 17 years old and didn't have a clue about time management. When I walked out of college, I certainly knew how to manage my time in a way that I would have never imagined. That was probably the most important thing that I learned in college. To this day, I still manage to use that time management skill that I learned back there to make my daily functioning work. Right now, I am running between my own officiating, my kids' lacrosse games, I have three kids, and trying to spend time with my wife, and then oh, trying to work my job as well.
DSF: When you graduated, did you go directly to Capitol Hill or did you do your master's first?
FM: I went to Capitol Hill. That was my master's – my master's in life was going to Capitol Hill and living on $12,000 per year. For Washington standards, it's pretty much chump change. It was difficult. You could live on $12,000 per year in Hillsdale. That's why I say for the most part, I was helping formulate policy, talking to the New York Times, and things like that, but I was probably making less than I was in college. It was a good experience, and a real hands-on practical life experience of being thrown right into the most interesting things.
DSF: Tell us about your first job on Capitol Hill.
FM: The first job I had was with Senator Lugar of Indiana. I think part of the reason I got the job was because I was a fast track runner. The Senator is a very, very avid runner. When I was interviewing there, I told his assistant my 3-mile time when they asked me, and I was instantly hired. I like to think it was my talents that got me there, but it was probably more of my running time that got me there.
But anyway, I worked in his office and that was a really crazy time. The Berlin Wall was falling. We were invading Panama. There were free elections for the first time in Nicaragua. And, when you're in an office which has one of the most respected foreign affairs experts in the US, you are basically thrown right into the fire. I wasn't making policy for Senator Lugar, but I was standing right there next to the door. It was a very exciting opportunity for someone who just walked out of college.
That was really how I got the bug to do what I do, and it's been 20 some years since then that I have been doing the same thing, just specializing more.
DSF: Tell us where you went after that.
FM: I spent nine and a half years on Capitol Hill, and for the past 10+ years, I have been working as a media relations expert mostly focused on environmental issues. I was just out at Purdue last month to make a couple speeches to some of their energy folks about what's going on in Washington, and managed to drive by the Delta Sig house while there.
DSF: Tell us a little more about the company you work for now.
FM: I work for a law firm called Bracewell & Giuliani, and of course the Giuliani is THE Giuliani. He is our named partner. We were proud to bring him on in 2004. We used to be called Bracewell & Patterson, which is a 60 year old law firm that does a lot on energy, and is based in Houston. We were looking for a New York office, and the mayor was looking to get back into the law, so we were pleased to join with him to make that effort. Of course, he ran for president right after that, which of course threw us off a little bit, because we would have rather had him working with us than running for president. But, now he's back with us and we're very excited.
What I do is run a public relations firm in essence inside the law firm for the firm's clients. We found that over the years in working together, even in working as a consultant with Bracewell before I came here, the public relations function, legal function and government affairs function, in many issues are so tightly connected that when you have an expert in all three of those and they work in the same office, they function more efficiently. That was the genesis for our idea to put the three functions together, and it's been hugely successful since then. I haven't seen many people be able to capture it, and I think part of that is personalities and part is skill set. I also think part of it is knowing you can't be everything to everyone. In your area of expertise, there is no one that can match what you do. In fact that's where we really have our strengths. Anyone can do crisis communications, but when you talk about environmental issues and things like that, we happen to have some of the best experts around and know many of the key reporters. That's how it's panned itself out. It's a matter of trying to make the best of what you have, and helping your clients to figure out how to meet really tough challenges, like global climate change.
Global warming or climate change, however you want to call it, is one of the most significant issues that this country, its businesses, communities, and colleges will face. There was a hearing up here a few weeks ago where we had a bunch of university presidents talking about their carbon footprints and what their college planned to do to reduce energy use. So, you know it's hitting all aspects of our country and economy. Having someone help you through that is a real benefit.
DSF: Is that what you spend most of your day on?
FM: I work on a lot of wind turbine projects. I work on a lot of gasoline and oil issues. I also work a lot on the utility issues with somebody like Purdue, who has a small coal boiler that they are using to generate power to the larger power utilities who have thousands of customers in their service area. We're working with them to make their machines more efficient, their power cleaner, and upgrading it to bring it into the next century.
DSF: In your media relations work, have you been seeing a shift in the "publications" that you are working with? It seems as though a lot more people are going to the web for their news these days, and so have you been dealing with some other kinds of media than you have in the past?
FM: Absolutely. That's one of the biggest issues we face. First of all, one of the issues is that there is a 24/7 news cycle. That is a huge deal, and that makes it much more important to have folks who are accessible to be able to deal with something. I have been called on Christmas Day or New Year's Eve during all of the football games because an Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against one of our utility clients, and the news media was going to do a news story and couldn't find anybody. So, those kinds of challenges come up, and so the 24/7 news cycle has played a major impact on everything that we do.
Secondly, nowadays, anybody with a computer and access to the internet is a "journalist" in some form or another. I think a journalist holds himself to a much higher standard than some of these web people do, but it also makes it much more difficult and much more important to have a credible and consistent message that you put forth as a company in any situation, because you are always going to be under attack. You want to be able to make sure that what shows up in the mainstream media isn't biased, because those folks who are filing and blogging, they're not held to the higher standards that the credible media are.
DSF:You mentioned earlier about doing some teaching. Can you tell us a little about that?
FM: I did an MBA at John Hopkins. During its final stages, I was doing some of the elective courses, and I was in a corporate communications course. The professor who is still involved with the college and is an advisor to the MBA program, who is a very well liked professor, was a marketing guy, and didn't have a lot of real expertise in corporate communications. So, as I was a student in the class, I was almost like a student-teacher, because I had been dealing with major corporations as a PR person for 10 years. He was very helpful in encouraging me to give back to Johns Hopkins by teaching some of these courses that I was somewhat of an expert at. It's now been five years since I have been teaching at Johns Hopkins. It's been a great experience for me, not only because you get to meet a lot of young professionals who are trying to improve their lives, but they all want to be there. It's not like anyone is forcing them to be there. You have a very excited learning environment. Secondly, these are professionals from every walk of life, and I learn a lot from them. The other interesting thing is the issues that I deal with in the course and in my daily work life are always issues that are being refreshed. So, what happened this week is relevant to what is happening in the class, and how a company handled it is always keeping me up to date on where things are.
DSF: What advice would you give to undergrads or recent alums who want to be successful in their chosen field?
FM: The bottom line is first not to get yourself locked into saying "I gotta do this…" There are plenty of people who will go 20 years down the road and completely revamp themselves by building on the experiences that they've had. You have to maintain some kind of sense and flexibility to understand that you can always adapt yourself to a new career or to changing technology issues. That was one thing I would really encourage people to do is to remember that this is a diverse world and they can always improve themselves by educating themselves. That's one thing.
Secondly, as I said earlier, one of the most important things that I took away from college was the time management skills that at the time don't seem so important. I wrote a 47 pages thesis at Hillsdale in college and I found it when we were moving about four years ago. I interestingly read it, and now, I probably could have said the same thing that I said in 47 pages back then in about 6. So, I think what that tells you, is that you learn to do things more efficiently and quickly so you can learn to manage your time to balance family and professional issues throughout your life. That is one of the most essential skills that I would focus on even more if I went back to college.
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