Management Team
Professional Staff
Margy Sweeney Senior Vice President
Why PR?
“So what?” is a simple, but rarely effectively answered question. A wise editor once told me to ask this question of every sentence I wrote—and rewrite if I didn’t understand the answer right away. I love PR because it allows me to work behind the scenes to deliver “Aha!” moments to editors and readers, to create strategic business stories and to shout them from the metaphorical rooftops.
Areas of Expertise and Interest
FIRE! No, please don’t run out of the building—my areas of expertise lie mainly in the FIRE fields: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. I love to write, and enjoy a good challenge, a new complex financial product to write about and promote. Need a good metaphor to explain mezzanine finance? I’m at your service. A passion of mine is promoting executive women, to increase parity in the C-suite. I’m a member of CREW (Commercial Real Estate Executive Women), a Chicago Chapter board member of CoreNet Global, and a regular attendee of International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) events. I volunteer for the Global Arthroscopy Foundation, interviewing and writing about doctors that come to America from all over the world for training in arthroscopic surgery, to widen access to minimally invasive procedures in developing countries.
What I Did Before BlissPR
When I opened the Chicago office of BlissPR in January 2007, I brought with me nearly 15 years in marketing and PR. Long before that, I was the first “foreign correspondent” for my high school magazine—writing a column from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where I spent my junior year as a Rotary Club exchange student. After graduating from Loyola University Chicago cum laude, with a major in Anthropology and a minor in Creative Writing, I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for several years, before spending most of the 1990s as a marketing manager at a national commercial real estate development firm. With the turn of the millennium, I decided to follow my passion to become a full-time writer, and spent a few years as a freelance journalist, writing for places such as Forbes Global, the Wall Street Journal, the Travel Channel, GRID and National Real Estate Investor. I returned to the metaphorical “dark side” by joining a Chicago PR firm, and heading the firm’s commercial real estate practice. I then joined BlissPR, opening a new regional office for the firm in my adopted hometown.
What I Do for Fun
While international travel is a life-long passion for me, most of my free time is spent finding everyday adventures with my two daughters and our large extended family. When I’m not running around town with my teen and tween, I enjoy finding new independent coffee shops with friends and cutting out laugh-out-loud cartoons from The New Yorker.
