Publicist Sarah Findlay-Blakeney: “I’ve Planted a Million Stories, and Now It’s Time to Plant a Million Trees
…While I care deeply about social justice, my work with philanthropists showed me that environmental causes receive a tiny percentage of global funding and awareness. Without a healthy, sustainable planet, everything else falls by the wayside.
Jane Goodall inspired me regarding the importance of hope. Without hope, we fall into apathy. Hope inspires action, and if each of us contributes in our own small way, it creates a collective impact. I volunteer with Reef Check to monitor ocean health, and I focus heavily on environmental mindfulness — whether that is composting, reducing food waste, or reusing items.
I also feel strongly about the environmental impact of technology like AI data centers, which require vast land and resource consumption. We need to remember that humans, animals, and nature are interconnected. Simple actions like reducing meat consumption, recycling, and supporting regenerative farming make a difference.
My primary focus is planting trees to help restore wilderness areas that have been lost over recent decades. I want to inspire people to make conscious, daily choices that protect our planet. The ultimate goal is a sustainable world for ALL beings…
I had the pleasure of talking with Sarah Findlay-Blakeney. The most revealing image in Sarah’s story may not be a red carpet, an awards show, or the moment she escorted George Clooney through a crowd of sponsors at an event. It is a tomato.
Findlay-Blakeney grew up in a small Australian town of roughly 20,000 people, surrounded by farmland, animals, and the vegetables her father grew. Tomatoes still remind her of him. More recently, she watched her own son pick them with his grandfather, extending a family ritual that has little in common with the high-speed entertainment world where she built her career.
That distance between the soil and the spotlight helps explain Findlay-Blakeney. She has worked approximately 150 red carpets, represented professional athletes, promoted independent films, and built international campaigns for a heritage audio company. Yet she has never seemed interested in becoming part of the social machinery surrounding those rooms. She surfs, hikes, volunteers to monitor ocean health, and prefers to step out of the publicity world when the work is done.
“I jump into that world for work and then step right back out,” she says.
Her position as both participant and outsider has become a professional advantage. Findlay-Blakeney understands the spectacle, but she does not appear seduced by it. She approaches publicity less as a gatekeeper than as a journalist, looking for the story, the angle, and the audience that might care. That flexibility has allowed her to cross categories that are often kept rigidly separate in the United States.
Entertainment publicists have sometimes told her that one person cannot credibly work across film, sports, technology, and lifestyle. Her response is characteristically direct: “What do you mean I can’t do it? It’s happening right now.”
Findlay-Blakeney began building that career earlier than most. After starting university at 17 and graduating at 20, she spent two years applying for jobs she wanted and collected rejections. The experience left her discouraged and, as she describes it, in “a bit of a depression.” Then the manager of Australian recording artist Ricki-Lee Coulter invited her to dinner and asked whether she would handle publicity for upcoming singles and an album.
The assignment gave Findlay-Blakeney a direction. When Coulter traveled to the United States to write and record, Findlay-Blakeney realized that representing a national artist from a Gmail address would not do. She formally established Dawn til Dusk Publicity at 22, though she had already secured two clients before the company officially existed.
A few years later, she found herself attending events alongside people who had once rejected her job applications. “You missed out on me,” she remembers thinking. She was no longer seeking a position at their agencies. She was meeting them as a peer.
The ascent was not free of mistakes. At an early agency job, Findlay-Blakeney had repeatedly warned the owner that the company needed a reliable backup system. Then, while preparing to work remotely, she misunderstood the shared network and deleted every client folder that did not belong to her accounts. Fashion clients and other files disappeared. The office descended into chaos.
The company finally fixed its backup system. Findlay-Blakeney learned a less satisfying lesson: “Ask more questions.”
Her career since then has been built on precisely that kind of alertness. She has coordinated publicity around award seasons, Netflix events, NFL and PGA players, film festivals, and independent productions. She recalls standing on an NFL field in Atlanta, teasing players about the artificial surface, and coaching Catherine O’Hara through an attempt at an Australian accent. “Keep trying, Catherine, keep trying,” she teased back.
The celebrity encounters make good stories, but Findlay-Blakeney speaks with equal pride about the patient, less visible work of building a client’s credibility. Her relationship with Tivoli Audio began when she was a junior publicist in Australia. Years later, after she had moved to the United States, the American company asked her to lead its North American publicity.
She was starting without an established network in American technology media and competing for attention against companies such as Amazon, Google, and Bose. Through persistent pitching and careful positioning, she helped secure coverage in outlets including Wirecutter, The Strategist, and Forbes, while placing Tivoli Audio products in major film and television productions. What began as an early-career account expanded into work across North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
The harder part of publicity, Findlay-Blakeney says, has rarely been the media strategy. It has been navigating insecurity, insincerity, and adult bullying inside an industry built around reputation. She has seen accomplished actors confess that they feel they do not belong on a red carpet. Because she recognizes that anxiety, she believes she can help people feel safer inside an environment designed to expose them.
Running her own company has allowed her to choose collaboration over proximity to power. She has fired clients when the relationship violated her standards. Public relations, in her view, does not require abandoning ethics simply because the deadlines are unforgiving or the personalities are difficult.
Her next venture, SEZ PR, extends that philosophy to filmmakers and actors who cannot afford traditional representation. Findlay-Blakeney wants to teach creators how to plan publicity before a project becomes old news, using media coverage to support visibility, credibility, festival strategy, and even professional visa applications.
The company also connects her professional skill to the landscape that shaped her. For every story planted, she wants trees planted too. Her stated ambition is both promotional and corrective: “I’ve planted a million stories, and now it’s time to plant a million trees.”
It is an unusually fitting goal for a publicist who learned her craft in glamorous rooms but still measures continuity through tomatoes, family land, and the natural world. Findlay-Blakeney has spent more than two decades helping other people become visible. The question now is whether she can turn that visibility toward something designed to outlast the spotlight.
Yitzi: Sarah, it’s such a delight to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Sarah Findlay-Blakeney’s personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood, how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the creativity that has come since then?
Sarah: It’s lovely to meet you in person too, Yitzi, because we’ve been communicating for quite a few years, so this is great. I grew up in a very small town in Australia. I often describe it as similar to a small town in the Midwest — we eat similar food, have farming land, and it’s very comparable overall. There were about 20,000 people there.
I grew up surrounded by nature, which I love to this day. That is where I get a lot of my creativity and inspiration. It was a standard family: mom, dad, two younger brothers, dogs, birds, guinea pig, and a lot of land. It was a very simple upbringing. My dad grows vegetables, so I know all about them. Tomatoes always make me think of my dad, and now my son, who recently picked tomatoes with him too. They both love eating tomatoes!
The town felt small to me, and there was a limited mindset where I never really felt like I belonged. As much as I deeply appreciate growing up there and being in nature — which is core to who I am — I wanted to get out and explore the big wide world.
Yitzi: Please tell us the story of how you became a successful publicist.
Sarah: There are so many stories! That is what I love about my industry: everything needs public relations. I have had the opportunity to work with amazing people across so many different industries.
What is funny over here is that when I tell some entertainment publicists what I do, they tell me I can’t do it. I thought, “What do you mean I can’t do it? It’s happening right now.” I was working on big red carpets, representing NFL and PGA players, and working on indie films. It is such a mixed bag for Americans to see. I suppose I am a generalist, but a specialist with media. For me, it is all about acting like a journalist, finding the story, working out where it belongs, or coming up with creative angles for it.
I have had so many “pinch-me” moments over my career. When I started, I represented Australian music artist Ricki-Lee Coulter, who is now very well known. I remember being at my first record label party as a country girl thinking, “Wow, this is cool.” Then I was on magazine photoshoots and music video shoots — the big stuff. It was incredible to be part of that in the background and put those projects together.
When I moved to the US, I was in Atlanta working with NFL players, helping them raise money for the Boys & Girls Clubs and standing on my first NFL field. I was working with players from the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Denver Broncos, and New York Giants, and I liked to tease them: “What’s this, rubber? You aren’t running on real dirt like us Aussies!” It was funny and we had a great laugh and then handled some media interviews. I like to keep the energy light-hearted for people.
I have worked roughly 150 red carpets for Netflix, award seasons, and all sorts of events. I got to take George Clooney around one-on-one, and I met Catherine O’Hara during an award season. I had a funny moment with Catherine where she was trying to imitate my Australian accent, asking me to talk and then critiquing the way my mouth moved, and then she would speak back to me. I eventually told her, “Keep trying, Catherine, keep trying!” She was such a hilarious comedian and kind person. I’m so lucky to have had special moments with her on many different red carpets.
I have had so many experiences like that which money simply cannot buy. Even a billionaire doesn’t get to do some of the things I get to do — and I get paid for it.
Yitzi: There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a funny mistake you made when you were first starting your career and the lesson you took away from it?
Sarah: The one that always stands out to me was when I was working at a small PR agency. I kept telling the owner that she needed to fix their IT setup because they weren’t backing up their system. I warned her that something could go wrong, but they didn’t pay attention because they were a bit more stereotypical PRs.
This was back in the day when print magazines were king and social media didn’t exist. I had to go to Sydney a lot, which is like New York in Australia, Sydney is where all the major magazines are based. Before a trip, the IT guy set up my computer so I could access files, but I didn’t properly understand how it worked. I was in the office before everyone else and deleted every single folder that wasn’t related to my clients, thinking I was just cleaning up my view.
I caused absolute chaos that morning because I deleted all the clients on the network that weren’t mine. If you worked on my accounts, it was fine, but all the fashion clients and other accounts were completely gone. It came full circle: I had warned them to set up backups, though I certainly didn’t mean to become the problem! Safe to say, they got their IT fixed and backed up after that. I felt terrible, but the lesson was to ask more questions.
Yitzi: What a great story. There’s a related idea that a “no” is not rejection, but redirection. Do you have a story where you got a “no” to an opportunity, but that led to an even better opportunity or success?
Sarah: I think back to the start of my career. I founded my company in Australia when I was 22. I started university at 17 and graduated at 20, so I was quite young. For two years after graduating, I interviewed for jobs and received a lot of rejections from places where I would have loved to work.
It was a tough time, and I fell into a bit of a depression because I wasn’t happy with where I was. Then, Ricki-Lee’s manager — whom I had become friendly with — invited me to dinner. They asked if I would handle the public relations for Ricki-Lee’s upcoming singles and album. I agreed, and that pulled me out of my rut and gave me purpose. It led directly to creating my company at age 22.
When Ricki-Lee traveled to America to write and record in studios, I realized I couldn’t use a Gmail address while representing a national star. That was the moment I officially established Dawn til Dusk Publicity. I actually had two clients before the company officially launched.
Because I was so young, everyone else who had studied with me was working a regular job, while all the prominent women leading the PR industry were essentially double my age. I worked so hard with my head down that I didn’t even realize how successful the company had become until I moved to America and saw it through other people’s eyes. And I had some time to slow down and reflect.
In my 20’s, I remember attending events and running into some of the people who had previously turned me down for jobs. I thought, “You missed out on me.” I was no longer applying to be their employee — I was running my own company and standing beside them as a peer.
Yitzi: What has been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far, and why?
Sarah: Rather than a specific project, the most challenging aspect of this industry has been navigating personalities and insincerity. Bullying in the industry can make it cutthroat and nasty. People assume bullying ends in high school, but it can continue well into adulthood.
It was challenging learning how to fit in. People sometimes find me a bit unusual: I surf, hike, and love the outdoors, yet I’m standing in the middle of a Vanity Fair Oscar party. I don’t spend my weekends trying to be seen out and about; I jump into that world for work and then step right back out, which keeps me grounded.
I am a spiritual person, so I use grounding practices before entering high-energy events. That awareness gives me strength because I can sense anxiety in well-known actors walking down a red carpet, and I know how to make them feel comfortable. Very famous, award-winning actors have admitted to me that they feel like they don’t belong on the carpet.
Navigating those dynamics is why running my own company suited me so well. I don’t have to hire people whose vibe I don’t align with, and I don’t have to keep clients I don’t enjoy. I have fired several clients over my career. My focus is on win-win collaboration, teamwork, and lifting people up rather than tearing them down. I want to show that public relations can be run with strong ethics and morals, even when managing crises, deadlines, and reputation management.
Yitzi: You’ve mentioned a lot of great experiences, but do you have two stories from your public relations career that stand out the most?
Sarah: Something that has been really cool in my journey is my work with Tivoli Audio. I started working with them at my very first agency — the one where I made the IT mistake! I got along well with my client, Philippe. He always said he felt I was the smartest person at the table, even though I was a junior in my early twenties.
When I went out on my own, he wanted to continue working together. Over the years in Australia, tech journalists associated me so closely with Tivoli Audio that they would still email me about the brand even when I wasn’t actively representing them.
After moving to the US and focusing on entertainment, the CEO reached out. Tivoli Audio is actually a 26-year-old American brand based in Boston. They weren’t happy with their New York agency, so he asked if I would take over their PR in North America. I told him I was starting from scratch with US tech and lifestyle media, but he liked my approach and urged me to give it a shot.
Suddenly, Tivoli Audio was in the mix alongside my work with the NFL, PGA, and entertainment events. It was tough competing against big tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Bose for editorial space. But after years of persistent pitching, angle-building, and relationship building, I secured placements for them in The New York Times Strategist, Wallpaper and Wirecutter. Major tech journalists now include Tivoli Audio alongside the giant brands.
I also get their products placed on major film and TV sets, including big Marvel, Netflix, Hulu, and HBO productions. I eventually expanded to handling public relations for them in North America, the UK, and Australia, landing coverage in outlets like Forbes. Building that presence over time as an Australian coming to the US has been incredibly rewarding.
Yitzi: Do you have any exciting new projects or initiatives in the pipeline right now?
Sarah: I am working on something new! It is currently in development, but the main initiative I am launching is called SEZ PR. It is focused on teaching filmmakers and actors how to manage their own public relations.
I noticed that unless a studio handles the PR or a project has a massive budget for an individual publicist, many creators are left without PR support. They have great stories that deserve coverage, but they don’t understand public relations or why it matters.
Public relations isn’t just about promoting a project; it plays a role in visa applications, building credibility for industry meetings, and boosting search visibility (SEO & GEO). For instance, actors learn how to present themselves strategically. When I taught at the Acting Mastery Academy recently, many students realized they shouldn’t just drop a trailer or poster on social media for a few likes. Holding content for premiere announcements or festival exclusives creates far more impact. Drop teasers instead. The students commented afterward how they didn’t realize (before the masterclass) that so much of PR is strategy and timing.
Once it’s been six months since a project came out, it’s old news. My goal is to empower creators early in their timeline. This company will be impact-driven with a major environmental goal: for every story planted, I want to plant trees. My motto is, “I’ve planted a million stories, and now it’s time to plant a million trees.”
I am also thrilled to be working with Benjamin and Holly-Anna Mathews, whom you met. They have exciting projects coming up in Australia and bring fantastic energy to the film & tv industry. They just launched Acting Mastery Academy and Ivana Chubbuck recently visited Australia to teach a four-day masterclass with them (in collaboration with Kate Jaggard, The Actors Room). It was a fantastic opportunity for Australian actors as it has been 10-years since Chubbuck last visited Australia. It was an honor to work with an iconic acting coach like Ivana Chubbuck and hear all of her stories.
Yitzi: Amazing. Here is our signature question, Sarah. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success and have learned a great deal from your experiences. Looking back to when you started your business in your twenties, can you share five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today could benefit from?
Sarah: Here are five key lessons:
- Recognize projection. People will often tell you that you can’t do something, but they are usually projecting their own limitations. As a young entrepreneur, I initially listened to opinions from peers who worked traditional jobs and took no risks. Eventually, I realized they were speaking from the sidelines. I stopped taking advice from critics and started listening only to people I respected and admired.
- Every experience builds skills for the future. You might work on seemingly random projects — like government lobbying or diverse corporate accounts — and wonder how it fits into your career. Years later, that exact knowledge becomes relevant and helpful. No experience is wasted.
- Practice active listening. Active listening means present-moment focus rather than planning what to say next. By paying attention to the specific words people choose, you gain a deeper psychological understanding of what they need. This skill helped me read energy on red carpets, connect with high-profile individuals, and guide clients effectively.
- Crises are rarely career-ending. Early on, it is easy to assume a negative story or mistake will ruin a career forever. In reality, while someone may need to step back and reflect for a period, people can and do bounce back.
- Prioritize genuine collaboration and strong business foundations. PR relies on win-win collaboration — raising everyone up rather than competing destructively. Additionally, as an entrepreneur, you must learn the core functions of your business, including accounting, IT, and HR. Understanding these operational foundations prevents others from taking advantage of you and ensures long-term stability before scaling.
Yitzi: Sarah, this is our final aspirational question. Given your influence and platform, if you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be?
Sarah: That is a big question because there is so much that needs attention in the world. While I care deeply about social justice, my work with philanthropists showed me that environmental causes receive a tiny percentage of global funding and awareness. Without a healthy, sustainable planet, everything else falls by the wayside.
Jane Goodall inspired me regarding the importance of hope. Without hope, we fall into apathy. Hope inspires action, and if each of us contributes in our own small way, it creates a collective impact. I volunteer with Reef Check to monitor ocean health, and I focus heavily on environmental mindfulness — whether that is composting, reducing food waste, or reusing items.
I also feel strongly about the environmental impact of technology like AI data centers, which require vast land and resource consumption. We need to remember that humans, animals, and nature are interconnected. Simple actions like reducing meat consumption, recycling, and supporting regenerative farming make a difference.
My primary focus is planting trees to help restore wilderness areas that have been lost over recent decades. I want to inspire people to make conscious, daily choices that protect our planet. The ultimate goal is a sustainable world for ALL beings.
Yitzi: How can our readers follow your work, engage your services, or support your initiatives?
Sarah: You can learn more at dawntilduskpr.com. My new initiative’s landing page is sezpr.com, and you can also find me on Instagram @sarahfindlay @sarahkblakeney
Yitzi: Sarah, it has been such a joy talking with you. I wish you continued success and good health, and I look forward to continuing our relationship.
Sarah: Thank you so much! It is always wonderful chatting with you.
Publicist Sarah Findlay-Blakeney: “I’ve Planted a Million Stories, and Now It’s Time to Plant a… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.