A communications company is an odd place to recommend less talking. Yet one of the rules Gerri Knilans carried into Trade Press Services was an 80/20 split: listen for most of the conversation, speak for the rest. Her consulting partner, Cork Platts, supplied the rule. Knilans supplied the years of practice. For someone whose business depends on getting words published, she has spent considerable time considering when to keep them to herself.
That small instruction opens a window onto a career that began far from trade magazines. Knilans owned a preschool and kindergarten, moved into marketing consulting, then co-founded Trade Press Services in 1995. Along the way, she developed an approach to business that gives ordinary obligations unusual weight. A client has a problem. Someone needs to understand it. Eventually, somebody must do the work.
The appeal is partly its lack of ceremony. Marketing can make a spectacle of announcing what comes next. Knilans keeps bringing the conversation back to the person waiting for a reply.
A classroom before the client list
Knilans was raised in Los Angeles, in a family where both parents were college graduates. When college approached, her father framed the choice around which University of California campus she would attend. She chose Santa Cruz, joining the university in its early years. Her later education included postgraduate work at Loyola University.
Business ownership arrived early. At 23, she bought a nursery school and went on to operate a preschool and kindergarten for about five years. The work introduced her to staffing, money, marketing, and the practical business of serving families. A school has a curriculum. It also has bills. Both require attention, and neither becomes more forgiving because the owner is learning.
She has described wanting the independence that entrepreneurship offered: “I needed more freedom. I needed more control.” That preference eventually took her into a marketing consulting practice. The classroom changed; the need to understand other people’s expectations followed her out of it.
The phone was part of the strategy
Trade Press Services began with a specific frustration. Smaller businesses wanted editorial coverage, while the public relations arrangements Knilans encountered could involve large retainers and disappointing results. Platts proposed another way to provide that help. Knilans agreed to try it. Within two weeks, she recalled, the business had its first client.
A useful glimpse of the work comes from her account of 2011. She described spending much of her day on the telephone: finding prospects, maintaining client relationships, and securing assignments. The image is reassuringly physical. Before a piece could appear under a client’s name, the founder had to pick up the receiver.
By the end of that year, the company had added 21 clients. Demand was also changing. Businesses wanted success stories, white papers, blogs, and publication on websites, alongside the bylined trade articles that had been the firm’s familiar territory.
Her response was to follow the demand. The year-end account connects the hours on the phone with a business learning what else its customers needed. A conversation could produce an assignment. It could also change the menu.
When the magazine moved
For a company built around trade publishing, the move from print to digital raised an uncomfortable question: what happens when the place where you do your work changes around you? Knilans’s answer was to widen the work. White papers, newsletters, blogs, and other formats gave the firm more ways to serve clients.
In a 2024 conversation with Elizabeth Mahusay, she connected that adaptation with a willingness to take risks. There is a particular discipline in being attached enough to a company to build it, while remaining willing to alter what it sells. The company name can stay on the door while the assignments crossing the desk look increasingly different.
Her discussions with Inspectations host Justin Starbird returned to that problem of continuity through change. Digital publishing, artificial intelligence, team retention, and future planning all entered the conversation. These subjects belong together in her career: each asks how a service business can keep being useful as its surroundings shift.
The practical thread is visible across the formats. A client still needs to communicate something that matters to a reader. New tools and new outlets change the route. They also give a founder fresh reasons to ask whether yesterday’s offer still fits today’s request.
The plan needs a calendar
Knilans’s public advice repeatedly puts structure around good intentions. During a 2019 conversation with Bob Pritchard, she pointed to businesses that market without a coherent plan. Her concern was basic: people cannot help an organization reach a destination they do not understand.
Her planning requirements included a clear purpose, measurable goals, a strategy, specific activities, available resources, assigned responsibility, and ways to check progress. The list has the satisfying quality of a cupboard with labeled shelves. You can see where things belong, including the things that have gone missing.
She also offered three starting questions for businesses without a plan: how frequently to communicate, which messages address the audience’s interests, and which channels suit those messages. They are manageable questions. A company can begin answering them before it acquires a fashionable marketing vocabulary.
Her later Extraordinary America appearance again emphasized the mechanics: budgets, schedules, delegation, and monitoring. A campaign needs someone who can say what happens next Tuesday. Knilans’s version of strategy leaves room for that person.
“If people don’t know where you’re trying to go, they can’t help you to get there.”
Gerri Knilans · 2019
Get both departments into the room
The same instinct appears in her discussion of sales and marketing. In her 2020 Sales POP! interview with John Golden, she addressed the distance that can grow between the people creating marketing messages and the people having sales conversations.
Her proposals were concrete. Bring sales into planning meetings. Cross-train. Examine new markets together. Compare information about customers and buying decisions. Shared data can give teams something firmer to discuss than their grievances about each other. An organization already contains plenty of useful knowledge; sometimes it needs a meeting invitation.
In her own writing about customer relationships, she extended responsibility beyond those two departments. Everyone in a business contributes to how customers experience it. Listening, showing interest, and offering useful help become part of the job wherever a person sits on the organization chart.
That argument makes service harder to delegate away. A relationship can be strengthened by an attentive answer or weakened by a careless handoff. Knilans treats the accumulation of those moments as business work. The article, the call, and the next interaction all belong to the same relationship.
A public voice, a private card table
Knilans has also spent years publishing under her own name. Her 2024 podcast biographies credited her with more than 80 articles, including work in The CEO Magazine, Publishing Executive, Richtopia, and Leadership Excellence. Her own communications practice has given her a recurring subject: how people make their expertise useful to other people.
In a 2015 essay, she described thought leadership through the work it requires. Looking ahead matters, but so do learning, facilitating change, and communicating an idea in a way that invites a response. The emphasis sits comfortably beside her operating advice. Having something to say creates another obligation: make it understandable.
Outside work, she describes herself as an avid duplicate bridge player and world traveler, with a fondness for reading and being with people. Bridge offers a pleasing footnote to a career in communication. Partners must make sense of limited information; a long speech is rarely available as a rescue strategy.
Her support for opportunity has also taken a tangible form. A donation helped fund an Aspire2STEAM scholarship for Iranian clarinetist Paniz Shafaei. Discussing that support, Knilans connected the opportunities she had received with a desire to help young women pursue their own ambitions.
Leaving the lessons where others can use them
By late 2025, Knilans was writing about a subject with an immediate connection to her own career: corporate legacy. She argued that documenting a company’s experience can help new leaders understand its decisions, preserve knowledge, and give teams a clearer sense of direction.
Her January 2026 article developed the practical uses of that history, from onboarding to sales support and leadership alignment. She recommended giving the material a purpose, making it accessible, and updating it as the business changes. The company story, in this view, still has work to do after somebody finishes writing it.
In December 2025, she announced plans for a year-end retirement and a transition to longtime colleague Jamie Pagett. The company’s current team listing names Knilans as co-founder and CEO and Pagett as president. The two had prepared an operational and strategic plan for the business’s next stage.
Across Knilans’s career, the settings and services have changed. The question she brings to them has remained plain enough to ask without a presentation: what would help the person in front of you? After that comes the less quotable part, the part that occupies the calendar. Listen carefully. Agree on the work. Deliver it.