Trish DeBerry President & CEO, The DeBerry Group | Powering Expertise

One of San Antonio’s most driven entrepreneurs, Trish DeBerry learned the importance of tenacity from an early age. As the youngest of six kids at home, “I had to speak up for myself. I had to advocate for myself because it was very easy to get lost in the shuffle,” she explains.

Fortunately for Trish, there was an inspiring figure at her side growing up. “I also had an incredibly powerful role model in my mother, who was a working mother, who instilled in me very early [to] get an education, put your mind to what you want to do. And if you do that and you work hard, there should be nothing you can't accomplish. I think that all of that rolled into my experience really propelled me forward to say ‘Hey, I can try this.’”

After a decade-long stint as a reporter, anchor, and producer for KENS-TV (our local CBS affiliate), Trish shifted into public relations as a founding partner of PR and marketing agency Guerra DeBerry Coody, and started her own firm in 2012. Today, The DeBerry Group represents high-profile clients like H-E-B, Spurs Sports & Entertainment, and the San Antonio Water System.

“...one of the hardest lessons as an entrepreneur that I had to learn was the art of delegation. It's so difficult to want to micromanage everything and every person and every client and every project. And there is no way, if you're going to grow in business, that you are going to be able to micromanage everything. You have got to be able to delegate responsibility. You have got to be able to empower people to do their job. Sometimes those people might fail… but those are important and valuable lessons. It's how you recover from those things that teach us how to move on from them.”

“I think it comes through a lot of interviews. I've learned a lot over the years that it's not just about the owner interviewing, that you need to pull a team together, that you need to come up with a really strong job description so that they understand exactly what the job is and what it's supposed to be and how they can grow into the position… there is not only a job description, but there should also be a track that they're on to achieve the kind of success that they want to as well.”

“You've got to be doing something uniquely different. I think it's a lot of due diligence. It's a lot of research. It's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of networking and talking to people. If you've got a great idea, and you're talking to people about it, and demonstrating what the service or the product is, one of the key indicators is early adoption. If you can find some early adopters that are really passionate about what you're doing, and then begin to talk to other people... that's gold. What you can't pay for is buzz on the street. You can buy ads on television and in print or you can do social media and digital strategy, but if at the end of the day, you're not creating any buzz for what you're trying to accomplish just in dinner conversations or lunch conversations, you need to be doing a better job of getting in front of people.”