Women in Small Business: The Rink Report Laura Rink

This is the last in a three-part series on Women in Small Business Month.

LEWISTON — The glitz and glamor of Madison Avenue still excites Laura Rinne and you can hear it in her voice.

However, when she and her husband, Peter Rink, decided to start their own advertising agency, they lost out on Lewiston despite strong ties to New York City and Portland. As his father explained, “‘Mad Man,’ was on Madison Avenue,” the advertising world centered on the iconic Manhattan street.

Laura Rink Russ Dillingham / Sun Journal

Before turning to entrepreneurship, Laura Rink was a teacher at Montello Elementary School for eight years before moving to Turner, where she taught gifted and talented students.

Although three out of four teachers in America’s public schools are women — a statistic that hasn’t changed much since the early 1900s — Rink said she’s not afraid of entering a male-dominated environment at Montello.

Rink’s announcement does little to intimidate the president, her teaching style is non-traditional, creating her own curriculum and teaching only math from textbooks.

“I tried hard not to teach the same lesson twice,” she said. “Being the president of an advertising agency is a different job. You create an intellectually challenging but psychologically safe space for geniuses to inspire courage and unleash their power and see what happens next.

The first days of rink advertising

Getting there was not easy. Her first brush with the advertising world came when she and her two children were asked to talk about her cancer experience in a commercial for a health insurance company. Director Peter Rink said she loved the experience even though she cried while filming.

Bitten by the advertising bug and fed up with her brand’s low profile, she sought an internship in her 30s in the creative department at Garrand & Company, a Lewiston-based agency that produced advertising for the insurance company. She did not return as a teacher, she moved to the agency full time as a writer.

In the year In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the country was in a recession, Laura and Peter Rink decided to create their own agency. They ultimately decided to stay in Lewiston for the sake of their children. “We were life partners and we became business partners.”

They started the company in a recession with no client list and no office space. Still, there was hope. “Lewiston was so welcoming that they welcomed us. We were given free office space.

Rink’s first client was a non-payer – L/A Arts. So they built on that one pro bono job by winning the first of many awards for their work.

Rink said each year has been a challenge as the agency has grown and become more successful, but now the corporation has come into its own. She said that Laura and Peter Rink are not the only ones. “It’s full of really smart, really smart people. It’s amazing to me. “

Working in a male-dominated industry

Laura Rinck relaxes Tuesday afternoon at her business, Rinck Advertising, in downtown Lewiston. Russ Dillingham / Sun Journal

When Laura Rink started her business, she said it didn’t occur to her that advertising was a male-dominated industry. But he had a well-documented reputation for misogyny and sexism, perhaps most famously portrayed on the award-winning television show “Mad Men.” In the year Set in the 1960s, the show featured an industry rife with smoking, drinking, sex, adultery, homosexuality, feminism and racism.

Women have seen growth in the industry over time, but will remain marginal through 2021, according to employment data broken down by business information website statista.com. He mentioned that 42 percent of the workers in the advertising and promotion industry are women and 57 percent are men.

In the year In 2016, a female executive at J. Walter Thompson, perhaps the oldest and most famous advertising agency in 20th-century America, filed a lawsuit against the company’s CEO, accusing him of sexism and racism. The executive resigned within a week.

Rink says she’s been lucky in that she’s never had to experience the sexism and sexism that many other women have experienced in the advertising world.

“The biggest thing about owning your own agency is the ability to choose the type of clients you want to partner with,” she explains, which means partnering with people who share the same values ​​they hold.

Women outnumber men 3 to 1 at Rink Advertising, and eight out of 10 executives on the team are women.

Rink emphasized: “We don’t recruit women, we recruit the best people.

Is there a checklist – do they align with the agency’s core values? Are they strategic and smart and creative, are they creative, are they resourceful?

That’s what I’m looking for – leaders, and can I empower leadership in them? So it is not surprising that eight out of 10 are women, but they are better people for the job,” she said.

Rink’s advice to women who want to become entrepreneurs, leaders or executives reflects how she lived her career.

“Be bold in your choices, be creative in your vision, aim for happiness,” she said. “Let integrity guide your thinking. Respect yourself and those who come into your life to teach you a lesson…know that you are allowed and encouraged to change your course and change your mind at any point along the way.

More work for women’s rights

When asked about wage equality and gender equality, Rink’s attention grew.

“There are thousands of women who don’t have bodily freedom, and that’s unacceptable,” Rink said of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this year to overturn women’s constitutional right to abortion. “So, when we’re talking about things like payment autonomy, how do we get there even in the face of the battles we face?”

The statistics on women in business certainly show progress over the past 50 years in business ownership and pay equity, a point not lost on Rink, with a caveat.

“We (have come a long way) but we have a long way to go, and we cannot rest at all. We fight every day, not only this, but we stand up and speak. Look at what’s happening in Iran,” she said. “Women’s rights are human rights, and we don’t all have the same rights. I feel strongly about that. “

Rink thinks there is a child care problem in this country. As the midterm elections approach, people need to remember that every vote counts, and women need to understand where each candidate stands on women’s issues and women’s rights, such as child care and health care, she said. Her advice to women struggling to deal with the challenges of being a woman today is straightforward.

“A lot of the programs are free of tuition — especially at Maine Community College,” she said. “Having a growth mindset is being willing to learn. It can absolutely improve your life,” she said. “We’re very fortunate to be in the same state as our first female governor, Janet Mills, and I think what she’s done with community colleges and tuition is going to lift up young women and young men.”

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