Page 14 - BusinessWest July 11, 2022

At left, the kitchen in Lisa Ekus’s home doubles as a studio for training chefs om how to cook before a TV audience. At right, one of the rooms in the Cooks Chateau.
there wasn’t, until recently, a focus on the chefs, the authors of these cookbooks, said Sally, noting that the Ekus Group devotes its energies to putting them front and center, and making them, as much as their reci- pes, the stars of the show.
It’s a package of services that, together, make the company unique and has enabled it to assemble a client list that is a veritable who’s who in the culinary world, with luminaries such as Haile Thomas, Toni Tipton-Martin, Davis Olson, and many others.
Turning back the clock 40 years, Lisa Ekus said she started her company to fill a need for a business that focused on book PR. She moved to the valley from New York City and brought with her an extensive portfolio of connections and experience.
“I developed the business because of, and through, my connections in New York publishing,”
she explained. “So, I had a great base upon which to draw clients and get recommendations.”
In essence, she was doing remote work before anyone knew what remote work was, she went on, adding that she loved the lifestyle in Western Mass. and was committed to building a business here and traveling back to Gotham — or anywhere else she needed to go — when needed.
Over the next several years, the company would develop a culinary niche and become, in her estima- tion, the first and only culinary PR book agency in the country.
“There were agencies that did book PR,” she went on. “But we really honed in on chefs, cookbooks, food companies, and understanding the evolution and growth of what was happening on a very vast global stage. Our niche was putting it forward in book form.
“We worked to put our authors and their expertise out there through the covers of their books,” she went on. “No one had really focused on the personalities, the experts within the categories they wrote about — like Rose Levy Beranbaum and desserts; she wrote The Cake Bible, or Lynn Rosseto Kasper, who founded and was the host of Splendid Table for decades; she was an expert on the Emelia-Romagna section of Italy.
“Books were just put out there,” she continued. “And we really brought the expertise forward on a national level. And I really love personally to under- stand where someone comes from and what they write about. It’s not simply another book about cook- ies or Italy or wherever; it’s understanding and taking a deep dive
into food.”
Continued on page 44
Ekus
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14 JULY 11, 2022
WOMEN IN BUSINESS
BusinessWest