ABOUT

In 2013, and Josh Steimle was in a bit of a pickle.

His marketing agency, MWI, had hired a new account manager who didn’t manage the accounts very well, and quickly lost almost all its accounts. Josh got a new account manager in, but that only stopped the bleeding. Josh needed new clients—fast.

“I went to my friend Cheryl,” Josh says. “She was in PR, and I had never made an investment in PR. I didn’t think it through very much, I just thought that maybe getting in an article in a big publication could help me get more clients. I was ready to try anything.”

Josh got more than he bargained for. Cheryl knew Josh had experience writing, so she told him that rather than getting someone else to write about him or his company, he should become a writer for the big publications. Josh didn’t know where to start, but Cheryl did.

Cheryl introduced Josh to an editor at Forbes, and the editor immediately offered a column to Josh. “It wasn’t a paid column,” Josh says, “I was an unpaid contributor, but I got to write for Forbes, and that changed everything.”

During the next three years, Josh wrote over 300 articles, not only for Forbes, but for over two dozen publications including Fast Company, TIME, Fortune, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and Mashable.

Josh’s writing earned him new clients and saved MWI. The agency can track over $10M in revenue to the articles Josh wrote. However, Josh’s writing did much more than that. It put him on speaking stages around the world, secured him a book deal, and even landed him for a week on Necker Island with Sir Richard Branson.

One more thing came from Josh’s writing experience, in that it taught him about both sides of PR.

“The more I wrote, the more pitches I received,” Josh says. “And 99.99% of those pitches were terrible. I couldn’t believe clients were paying good money to expensive PR firms to have them hire an intern to copy a PR pitch template and send out spam.”

Josh knew he didn’t like how he was being pitched, and he talked to other writers and verified they didn’t appreciate these pitches either. Josh thought he could do better, and that’s how Canvas PR was born.

Today, Canvas offers guaranteed PR services to companies that need to build authority and credibility quickly. “It’s exactly what I needed when I was in a bind,” Josh says. “I wanted to put the words ‘As seen in…’ on MWI’s website with a bunch of media logos. Now that’s what Canvas does for its clients.”