When the World Changes, Just Pivot: Mary Lou Thiercof '70

Things were going well for Mary Lou Thiercof ’70 in early 2020. Her personal and professional life showed promise for a bright year ahead. Then the COVID-19 crisis that began in March brought unexpected changes to her plans. For one thing, she had been looking forward to her 50th class reunion with classmates from Santa Catalina School. The event was ultimately canceled due to the pandemic, but the friendships and professional foundation she had built during her time at Santa Catalina helped her immeasurably in 2020.

Mary Lou came from a small farming town in the San Joaquin Valley, where, as she says, “everyone knew each other.” She recalls that it had been hard to leave her family and friends when she came to Santa Catalina as a boarding student. But when she arrived at Catalina, she knew she would have to make it her new community. As she puts it: “I had to pivot. I talked to everyone and really believed that every person I met on the campus mattered to me and my new life.”

After graduating from Santa Catalina in 1970, Mary Lou attended college at UCLA and UC Berkeley, where she earned a BA in psychology. For a few years, she worked in public relations at Chevron before deciding that corporate America wasn’t for her. As a sole proprietor, she ran the boutique PR agency Working Images for many years. Then in 2013 she started a business in the tourism industry.

Mary Lou launched San Francisco on the Bay during America’s Cup. The web-based travel hub offers information about local businesses within the Bay Area and links to 12 sister sites. It provides “a curated experience of the community through art, music, food and drink, style and the outdoors.” More than 1,600 businesses are part of its online directory, and the brand also offers tours, events, and listings for locals, visitors, and the sailing community.

According to Mary Lou, the business at the start of 2020 was “forging ahead to produce four more curated tours of cities around San Francisco Bay based on our successful tourism efforts in 2019 and 2018.” That momentum was short-lived as hospitality became “a whispered word.” One client canceled its long-standing four-day event in April. Then in July one of the business’s largest clients, a visitors bureau, folded.

Mary Lou recalls: “The hotels and restaurants on our maps were in distress. So we elected to write stories to help the restaurants around the bay communicate that they were following COIVD-19 protocols and were open for to-go orders only or outdoor dining. Tourism destinations including hotels, museums, and art centers were closed. Some were able to offer virtual events, but they were only bringing in about 10 to 20 percent of their usual income. Businesses had to jumpstart their online capabilities, and communication was essential on all platforms. And everything was digital. Sadly, it will be a long while before the hospitality industry comes back.”

Life had changed, the world had changed, and I had changed.

The pandemic forced Mary Lou to pivot, just as she did back in her days at Santa Catalina. “In my business, listening and connecting with people is very important,” Mary Lou says. At Santa Catalina, she learned that relationships matter. She explains: “I knew that when I cared about someone and listened to them, they stayed in touch and cared about me. So, when the pandemic hit and my small-business clients were shut down, I thought I just needed to listen to them and stay in touch and help them however I could. It was a different world.”

Mary Lou found the pandemic to be isolating. “Isolation affects your soul and the soul of my business, too. I’m used to being out in the world, networking with people and sparking creativity. When the world stops, you don’t have that opportunity anymore. I ended up depending on nature for my inspiration.” Mary Lou lives in the Oakland Hills, and one way she found respite was to go on hikes regularly with family and friends, including with her Santa Catalina classmates. “We were a very tight class, so I’m lucky to have a good handful of friends.”

Amid the global economic shutdown, as Mary Lou was attending webinars on available business relief programs, she realized she wanted to relaunch her public relations firm, Working Images. “Life had changed, the world had changed, and I had changed,” she says.

Mary Lou has been active within the communications field, having served on boards of the Solana Beach and Emeryville Chambers of Commerce and holding leadership positions in business associations such as the Public Relations Society of America. Leadership is a skill she began to hone during her time at Catalina, where she was on the student council and served as class president twice. “I liked creating visions with our class and executing those visions,” she recalls of her time at the school.

Now that she has relaunched her own PR firm and is “in the midst of a restart,” she looks forward to the year ahead “unfolding in a positive light for all the businesses affected so deeply by the pandemic of 2020,” she says. Indeed, Mary Lou is looking forward to a post-pandemic world. She remarks: “For me, virtual networking just didn’t do it. Some of the platforms were not very good, some were really good. But still, I just missed that conversation in person. There’s just something about it.”

At her core, she remains an advocate for small businesses. Summing it up, she declares: “It is what I love.”