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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Car Communicator

At a young age, Dan Kahn knew he wanted to be a reporter. Then he got a taste of what life was like in public relations and the San Fernando Valley native was hooked. In 2008, he started his own firm, Kahn Media Inc., in Moorpark. The 38-year-old Thousand Oaks resident focuses his practice on automotive and high-end luxury brand clients. Starting with traditional public relations, Kahn Media would later expand into offering video production, digital marketing and search engine marketing to clients that include the famed Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles and comedian and car collector Jay Leno. Kahn took time out from preparing to attend the annual Specialty Equipment Market Association, or SEMA, show in Las Vegas to discuss his career in journalism, public relations and marketing of automotive products, and why he admires Teddy Roosevelt. Question: What motivates you? Answer: I have always had a real work ethic, ever since I was a kid. I have a hard time with inaction. I like generally in life to research everything to death, I put together an action plan and I go after it. That’s in all aspects of my life, not just with my business. How about professionally? With my business I am one of those few fortunate people that have known what I’ve wanted to do my entire life. I like communications, I like having my feet in both worlds. I understand mechanical things and the machinations of manufacturing and that part of the business. But I also like being on the creative side. So, I accidentally found my way into this career 15 years, 20 years ago, and found a way to do both things. What do you like best about your job? Being involved in the creative process. I can go out on a shoot with the video team or help them with a storyboard one day and the next day I am sitting with our PR team and we are coming up with a PR campaign and the day after that I might be working with our web development team. How did you start your career? I wanted to be a journalist since I was a little kid. I was on the high school paper, I was the editor of our college paper. By chance right after I graduated from high school my parents’ neighbor wrote for a tiny publishing company in the Valley and he was the editor of a mountain biking magazine. He said, “Our company has a couple of car magazines and we know you’re a gearhead and they are looking for a writer. You should come do this as your summer job.” I went over there and interviewed, and they hired me. They paid me the astronomical sum of $7 an hour. The company had some disagreements with the editor a couple months later and he walked, and they pointed at me and said I was the new editor of the (car) magazine. That was the moment where I realized I could grind it out and figure it out and went “Wow, I can actually do this for a living.” What publications did you write for? I started writing for car magazines. While I was at college I continued to write for them while I got my degree. I also went to Weider (Publications) here in the Valley and worked for them for about a year writing for Men’s Fitness and Muscle and Fitness magazines. That was totally not a subject that I am personally interested in but it was a good company and it was a good opportunity to diversify. I wrote for a tech magazine; that was at the time the dot com thing was crazy. Titles: President Company: Kahn Media Inc. Born: West Hills, 1979 Education: Bachelor’s in Journalism, CSUN Most Admired Person: Theodore Roosevelt. “He came from an influential family yet rejected their trappings and forged his own path.” Career Turning Point: “In 2008 I was an account supervisor at another agency, I wrote a white paper about how the convergence of PR and digital marketing could be a game changer for small agencies. My boss at the time didn’t agree with my ideas. I decided to take a huge leap – quit my job, quit the MBA program and start my own firm.” Personal: Married to wife Sheridan for nine years, three children ages 2, 4 and 6. Hobbies: “We do a lot of camping as a family, we try to go at least once a month. I’m also pretty passionate about car collecting. When time and weather allow we like boating as well.” Where was your first professional reporting job? When I graduated I basically had a job waiting for me at Petersen Publishing. To me that was Mecca. I was living on the west side, working on Wilshire when the company sold the first time and it was sold three times in like a year. On the third sale they took our entire division and moved us to Anaheim. I loved the job but didn’t like the commute. I did that drive for about eight months and couldn’t deal with it anymore and left to go to Edmunds.com in Santa Monica. So how did you transition from reporting to public relations? I was working at Edmunds, enjoyed it and it offered me a lot of cool opportunities but the dot com thing was pretty intense and after doing that for a couple of years I fried a bit. One day I woke up and said I don’t want to do this anymore. It wasn’t the type of writing I was used to. It was chunking out the same article over and over and over again on the different vehicles. Doing new car reviews wasn’t my thing. Those guys do a great job and I have a lot of respect for what they do, but it didn’t fit my needs for the time. So, what was your next step? I just kind of quit. I had a friend who worked for a PR agency, a little motorsports PR agency in a town I had never heard of called Moorpark. He said, “We have an opening for a PR person, you’re a good writer and seem like you’re pretty good on the phone, just come out here and let them pay you for a couple months while you figure out your next step.” I went to work for them and took to it immediately. How long did you stay there? I loved that job. About two years in, a headhunter called from another agency in the Valley and threw an offer on the table that I couldn’t refuse. It was almost double what I was making at the time. At that point I was engaged and it made a lot of sense. How did social media influence your decision to start your own firm? I was there for about a year and a half when the social media thing started to take off. I was reading a lot of stuff by a guy named Brian Solis. He was a publicist who was one of the first to get into the convergence of traditional PR and social media. He wrote a book called “PR 2.0” that was really influential to me. I ended up writing a 40-page white paper about how I thought social media was going to change the communications industry. It included an action plan and a business plan. I brought it to the head of the agency. I don’t know if he read it or not. He gave me one meeting and afterward said this is not a good fit, this is not what we do for a living, this social media thing is a fad, it is not going to work. That was a hard pill to swallow. How did that lead you to starting Kahn Media? (My wife) was making a good enough living where we could pay our bills and I could just quit, take the white paper and see if it works. If it works, I’ll learn a lot; if it doesn’t work, I can always get another job. So, with her support and backing I did and that was in early December 2008. Honestly, I was respectful in the way I handled it. I didn’t want to take any clients, I didn’t want to take any employees. I didn’t want to poach anything. To this day, I still have that feeling; there is enough work out there for everybody. I don’t like poaching clients, I don’t like poaching employees. I wanted to prove my model. What were some challenges? The first year was a direct link between how hard I worked and how much cash flow came in. My wife was getting her MBA and working full time, so she was gone most of the time. I was working out of a home office. I worked 80, 90 hours a week. We had a strong first year. That second year I realized I can only sign as many clients as I can personally handle which means I need to bring on staff and I cannot have people come and work in my living room. We needed to get an office. Years two through five the challenge we had was scaling and cash flow. It was a situation with an upward growth trend (but) a lot of time I wouldn’t get paid. Especially around year four, year five I went an entire year without taking a paycheck. I would take a draw as the company could afford it and everything went back into the business. At that point my wife wasn’t working anymore because we started having kids. Things were lean. But I kept telling her and telling myself if we just keep reinvesting in the business eventually it will get to the point where it is profitable and be a fruitful venture. Things got scary around year four in terms of cash flow. Why the interest in cars? I grew up in a car family. My grandfather was a car guy. He came back from World War II and was a gearhead. My dad is the classic baby boomer, cruising Van Nuys Boulevard, hot rod guy. For me I grew up in that culture. My first car I bought when I was 14 – a ’68 Mustang Fastback that we restored together in the garage. What do you drive now? I have a truck that I daily drive. I have a ’74 Jaguar XJ12 that I picked up as a fun thing to drive to the Petersen (Auto Museum) when I go down there. And I just finished the restoration of a ’62 T-Bird. That car is going to the SEMA show next week. What are some of the fanciest cars you’ve rode in? I have ridden in a Duesenberg SJ, which was pretty neat. I have ridden in a Bugatti, which was cool. At the Petersen I have ridden in a couple of their cars. Their Bugatti is called the Shah Bugatti; it is a custom coach built roadster that was a gift from the premier of France to the prince of Persia, who later became the Shah of Iran. Any thoughts on driverless cars? Absolutely. I am on the board of directors of SEMA and autonomy, when I put on my industry hat, is a big deal. Car makers know it. The aftermarket is starting to prepare it. As a business owner with an agency that primarily focuses on the automotive industry and specifically the aftermarket, I am constantly looking down the road. When I see the rise of autonomy and the rapid embrace to me I don’t think it’s bad. I think it’s good for society. What are some interesting campaigns that you have done? One that was fairly recent that was a lot of fun was with the Petersen Automotive Museum. In the past year we’ve unveiled five major exhibits. The one that sticks out is an exhibit called “The High Art of Riding Low.” What the museum curatorial staff came up with was this exhibit focused on Chicano art in all its forms that is influenced by low rider culture. They did have two cars in the exhibit, but the rest was painting, sculpture and kind of found objects. They have a giant full-sized piñata of a low rider car the size of an actual car. They have a scissor lift that an artist painted crazy colors and customized. We got Danny Trejo, the actor, behind it. Cheech Marin got behind it. Jay Leno is one of your clients. What is it like working with him? Pretty amazing. We’ve been booking clients on his show (“Jay Leno’s Garage). We’ve always had a good relationship with him and his producers. When we got the call from his team that he had this new product line and he was looking for PR help, we were falling all over ourselves to just help him back. What shocked me is in the initial meeting I was expecting to meet with a bunch of business reps. When we got there, it was his marketing guy, his partner in the business and Jay sitting around a kitchen island drinking soda and talking. He represents himself in all his business dealings. You listed Theodore Roosevelt as a person you admire. Why? He was a child of privilege. Young people who came out of a certain class of society didn’t necessarily have to work that hard. He forged his own path. At the time being a politician was not glamorous. He continuously through his life was this constant contradiction. On one hand, you had a guy who was a police commissioner for the Republicans in a conservative party and was also this advocate for protecting people from police overreach. When he became president, on one hand he is conservative in his fiscal policies and at the same time he read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and becomes this advocate for pure food and pure drugs and taking care of the people. Again, he was a friend of industry but at the same time is this incredible conservationist and goes with John Muir and wanders around Yellowstone and Yosemite and comes back with this policy to protect what became national parks. That trueness to self is something I admire.

Mark Madler
Mark Madler
Mark R. Madler covers aviation & aerospace, manufacturing, technology, automotive & transportation, media & entertainment and the Antelope Valley. He joined the company in February 2006. Madler previously worked as a reporter for the Burbank Leader. Before that, he was a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago and several daily newspapers in the suburban Chicago area. He has a bachelor’s of science degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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