https://youtu.be/wrIFxgnkJ1A
Nathan Miller, Founder and CEO of Miller Ink, is on a mission to help organizations communicate clearly and strategically—especially in moments of high stakes and crisis.
We explore Nathan’s journey from diplomacy and speechwriting at the UN to launching one of California’s top crisis communication firms. He shares the Miller Ink Communications Framework, which anchors every campaign with a clear objective, a targeted audience, and a compelling message. Nathan breaks down how to craft memorable messaging using the 3 Cs (Clear, Concise, Compelling) and the 3 S’s (Stories, Statistics, Soundbites). He also reveals how to build a reputation-driven business, navigate hiring decisions, and future-proof your communications in a rapidly changing media landscape.
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Communicate in Soundbites with Nathan Miller
Good day, dear listeners. It's Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint and my guest today is Nathan Miller, founder and CEO of Miller Ink. and he's also a seasoned communication strategist with deep experience in business, government, diplomacy, crisis management and issue advocacy. Nathan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Steve. It's great to be here.
Well, it's good to have you. And I've got some questions I'm really curious about that I want to ask you. And starting with my favorite one, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?
My personal “Why” really is a couple of things. One, our business makes a huge impact for a lot of people and to feel that impact every day is tremendous and it gives me a lot of satisfaction and pride. The people who work for Miller Ink., the people who work here and launched their careers through this company, our clients, every day you get to be in rooms with people who are solving problems, addressing challenges, navigating different challenges, and helping them get to a better place is incredibly gratifying. You want to be somebody who's of service in that way. We do a lot of advocacy and mission-driven work as well as an agency.
I've done a lot of work on behalf of the Jewish community and the State of Israel, which has also been very meaningful. And for me, the most important personal “Why” is I have three kids and so much of what I do is really for them. And that is really one of my big North Stars in life.
Yeah, well, lots of meaningful stuff in your life. And you left the UN Security Council, where you were a writer, to become a PR entrepreneur. So tell me about this journey.
The journey was crazy. My career began, I got a master's in public policy here at UCLA. I went to Europe for a little bit. I worked in Brussels with the EU institutions there at a think tank. And then I came back and I worked at a PR firm in LA for a couple of years early in my career. I got a job as the chief speechwriter for Israel's mission to the UN. And it was a crazy time to be doing that job. I was really young, and it was the outbreak of the Arab Spring. A lot of different things that were happening in the Middle East and in the world. So, fascinating moment. And I did that job for three years. And at that point, my now wife and I were dating, and she was in LA and I was in New York, and we had to figure out a place to be. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna come back. And I think I have a problem with authority is what I learned working in big institutions in different ways.
And I like to be able to set the pace of what I do. And so I say, every entrepreneur has a different cross that they're trying to not bear. And for me, it was really having control of my own destiny, and that mattered a lot to me. So I was a young guy. I saw communications changing rapidly, really rapidly. When I started at the UN, then the ambassador, Susan Rice, they asked her if she was on Twitter and she said, I don't do diplomacy by haiku. And that was like a funny thing. But then within a year she was on Twitter and it was a big deal. And so, my first job in PR, I remember, I went into a meeting with a professional sports team and I set up their first Facebook page. Facebook came out my freshman year of college or sophomore year, maybe, but it was something that I sort of, when I was very young was very new and I saw how this was going to completely change the ecosystem of how you do communication.
And I thought there would be an opportunity for us in starting the firm. And I think I was right. I mean, I think that was an insight that was correct. And so, we've been able to build a firm that I think is on the leading edge of a lot of the changes in our space. And we've grown over time today. We could talk about that whole journey, but fast forward to now, we're about 20 people. on the West Coast, on the East Coast, 65 plus clients across a number of different industries. And we're one of the market leaders in a couple of different important verticals.
So that's impressive. So one of the things that led you to achieve that success is you developed your own communication framework. You just spoke about how communication was changing rapidly. So tell me a little bit about this Miller Ink Communication Framework. What does it look like?
Absolutely. Well, I'm really an analog guy in a digital world. I really believe in the principles of communication. When you go back to Aristotle, there's really nobody who understood the framework for persuasion. There's a lot of wisdom that's been passed down through the ages and that people have. I think too much of the people now who are purely digital, they think in a very tactical way, but they're not getting back to the big strategic framework of what are we trying to achieve and how does communications do that. Communications is a means to an end. It's not an end in itself. Just doing good PR because it makes you feel better or whatever is not a goal.Share on X
It always is what are we trying to achieve? Having the experience that I had in diplomacy and in politics, I felt like there's a lot of skills that I would sort of a shorthand, but they're analog skills, like really like core building block skills that I think are missing today that we train everybody on our team and those skills, but we also bring a sense of understanding of how the ecosystem has changed and leveraging all the opportunities in a place where the mediated model of communication is no longer as relevant, where everybody is a publisher, where digital is so important, et cetera. We can talk about that. So, but our framework that I teach everybody, and I think this is important for any entrepreneur starting out, Miller Ink 101, every person who comes in and all of our clients, we really talk about this framework.
So, every good strategic communications program has a clear objective, a clearly defined objective that's measurable, specific. The objective is not, we want to get better PR. The objective is what do we want the PR to achieve? Do we want more clients? Do we want more sales? Do we want to raise more money? We want our issue to be seen by a certain segment of the population. So the first thing is that clearly defined objective. A targeted audience, I have yet to have a client that has unlimited budget to reach the whole world. You always have to think about, and people will say, well, everybody matters, but that's not the truth. The art of this business is understanding who really matters.Share on X And being able to clearly understand your target audience, who is it, define it, and then be able to inhabit the mind of that audience and understand how are they going to receive the information that you're sharing. It's not what you say, it's what they hear. How are they gonna hear what you're saying to them? And we do a lot of work around trying to understand that our audience, there's perceptions, there are misperceptions, there are likes, their dislikes, and then how do they relate to whatever it is that we're trying to talk to them about.
How do you do that, by the way?
So, there's many different ways. Sometimes you do formal research where you'll do quantitative research and survey or you'll do focus groups. We do a lot of focus groups. A lot of it is using your imagination. We train our team to before they write something, they have to think about who they're writing it for. How are they going to internalize the information that they're writing? And I think this is where a lot of people have lost that ability in some sense. It's really important. Even when you have research, you have to understand how to apply it. So a lot of it lives in your mind. And this is where AI and things like this are never going to really be as strong in my view. It’s in really learning, it's a combination of formal research and then having the kind of the sense of things from doing this for a long time and from really like thinking about who is the audience. And then the final thing is a message. And the message aligns your audience in the direction of your objective.
It drives your audience towards whatever your goal is. If your goal is to sell more chocolate, your message gets your customers to buy more chocolate. If your goal is to help people think differently, a certain segment of the population to think differently about an issue, it's the message that's driving a certain segment of the population to think differently about an issue. And so how do you make that message really do that? So we have a framework. We call it the three Cs and the three Ss, and there's different frameworks, but I developed this working with clients, I have had different positions, training in different educational settings, training CEOs, startup founders, and teaching a bit at some different schools. So I wanted to try to boil down the way I think about messaging into something that's simple and memorable.
So the three Cs, a great message is clear, it's not full of jargon,
