Women in Small Business: Laura Rinck of Rinck Advertising – Lewiston Sun Journal

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

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

Yet when she and her husband, Peter Rinck, made the decision to start their own advertising agency, the allure of New York City and even Portland lost out to Lewiston, despite the fact they had a solid connection. His father was, as she describes him, “a ‘Mad Man’, he was on Madison Avenue,” a reference to the advertising world centered around the iconic Manhattan street.

Laura Rinck  Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

Before taking the plunge into entrepreneurship, Laura Rinck 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 American public schools are women — a statistic that hasn’t changed much since the early 1900s — Rinck said she walked into a male-dominated scenario at Montello but was not intimidated.

There’s little that intimidates the president of Rinck Advertising, who described her teaching style as nontraditional, creating her own curriculum and teaching only math from a textbook.

“I tried hard to never teach the same lesson twice,” she said. “Being the president of an advertising agency is the same job. You create an intellectually challenging but psychologically safe space for geniuses, to inspire courage and unleash their power and watch what happens next.”

THE EARLY DAYS OF RINCK ADVERTISING

Getting there has not been easy. Her first brush with the advertising world came when she was asked to be in a commercial with her two children for a health insurance company to talk about her experiences with cancer. She said she loved the experience, despite the fact that the director, Peter Rinck, made her cry as they filmed.

Bitten by the advertising bug and with her trademark low threshold for boredom, she sought out an internship in her 30s in the creative department at Garrand & Company, a Lewiston-based agency that produced the ad for the insurance company. She never went back to teaching, moving full-time to the agency as a writer.

Fast-forward to 2001 where in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks the nation was in recession and Laura and Peter Rinck made the decision to create their own agency. They ultimately decided to stay in Lewiston for the sake of their children. “We were partners in life and we became partners in business.”

They started the company with no client list and no office in the midst of a economic downturn. Yet, she said, there was hope. “Lewiston was so receptive, they embraced us. We had free office space offered to us.”

Rinck’s first client was not a paying one — L/A Arts. So they built on that one pro bono job, winning their first of many awards for their work.

As the agency has grown and become successful, Rinck said every year has been challenging but now the corporation has become its own entity. She said it’s not just Laura and Peter Rinck. “It’s filled with vibrant, really smart geniuses. It’s amazing to me.”

WORKING IN A MALE-DOMINATED INDUSTRY

Laura Rinck …….

Source: https://www.sunjournal.com/2022/10/15/women-in-small-business-laura-rinck-of-rinck-advertising/

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