It was a hot St. Louis summer day — one that was about to get even hotter for Laurna Godwin. As the senior news reporter for KPLR-TV/WB 11 she was doing on-the-spot coverage from a crime scene. A man had allegedly killed his girlfriend, driven to a nearby gas station, and then turned the gun on himself. Because the crime had occurred on the border of St. Louis City and St. Louis County, police were arguing over jurisdiction. And as usual, for Godwin it was a waiting game.

“In broadcast journalism you spend a lot of time waiting to get that one shot,” she explains. “And it was so hot and the body just sat in the car for hours while the police argued. Obviously we drew a crowd.”

As the day dragged on and temperatures continued to rise, more and more people gathered to witness the scene. Police eventually placed a large blanket around the car in hopes the crowd would get bored and disperse. It didn’t happen, and Godwin became fed up.

“I had to be there. I was getting paid to be there,” she says. “I didn’t understand why these people were here. I started going around asking, ‘Don’t you have something better to do? Why is this so important to you?’ It got to the point where I was yelling at people. It was then I knew it was time for something else.”

Godwin’s frustration that day led her down an unlikely career path to her current position as co-founder and partner of Vector Communications, an award-winning public engagement and communications consulting firm with a reputation for excellence.

Set on journalism

For Godwin to even consider leaving TV broadcasting is amazing. All her life she had dreamed of being a network reporter, traveling the world, meeting interesting people and maybe doing segments for The Today Show. That she would succeed was undeniable. Both her parents were engineers, something unheard of at the time for either women or African-Americans. And both were devoted to community projects and volunteerism. From a very early age they instilled in their daughter the importance of giving back to the community and getting an education. “With a good education you can do anything,” they told her. And she took it to heart.

A chance meeting with a journalist during a high school career day set the stage for Godwin’s future in broadcasting. She already knew she wasn’t corporate material. The prospect of working a 9-to-5 job, sitting behind the same desk doing the same things every day simply didn’t interest her.

Journalism on the other hand, seemed exciting. It also offered the opportunity to learn new things and be involved. And because what she really wanted was to be a professional student — which wouldn’t pay the bills, she thought journalism would be the next best thing. Her parents, however, didn’t.

“Being engineers they just didn’t understand it,” Godwin recalls, smiling. “Even after I had been in the business awhile they kept asking me, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’”

Dead set on a journalism career, Godwin applied to several colleges that had communications programs. She also applied to Princeton University, which did not. That was her parents’ idea. She was accepted at all of them but wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania. Her parents wanted her to get what they considered a more prestigious education. So when their daughter chose Pennsylvania, they played the money card.

“They told me, ‘If we’re paying the bills, you’re going to Princeton.’ I thought it would be disastrous. I’d never make it. Princeton was simply too hard,” Godwin says. “I told my parents I’d go but they’d be embarrassed when I was kicked out after the first year.”

But she wasn’t kicked out and it wasn’t as disastrous as she thought. A comment made by a professor during freshmen orientation put things in perspective for her. He told the new students, “You are here to learn how to think.” It was something that stayed with Godwin. “I thought, This is the very essence of getting an education. As it turned out, my time at Princeton was some of the happiest years of my life,” she says. “Tough, but happy.”

Although disappointed that Princeton didn’t have a communications department, Godwin compensated by working at the campus radio station doing the news and interning at Rolling Stone magazine. She also spent her college summers working at Monmouth Park, a thoroughbred racetrack close to her home in Shrewsbury, N.J. She was an “Ask Me” girl wandering around the grounds answering people’s questions. Although this didn’t seem like much of a career move at the time, it developed into something very worthwhile. She ended up getting the job of press box manager, helping journalists gather information for their stories. She also hosted a live nightly half-hour cable TV show, where she reviewed the day’s races and interviewed the jockeys. “It was fun because I’m 6 foot tall and all those jockeys are so tiny,” she says laughing. “It was a great experience.”

Still wanting to get some communications courses under her belt, Godwin convinced her parents that she should study abroad. She traveled to London through Temple University’s broadcasting program during the spring semester of her junior year. In addition to the courses she took, she interned at London Weekend Television. This was actually her first taste of hosting and producing a talk show. It helped develop her professional skills in a way that Princeton could not.

Godwin graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and American history. She then set her sights on Columbia University in New York and a master’s degree in journalism.

“People told me I didn’t need to, because in this business they like to groom you themselves. But I just didn’t feel confident enough in my abilities, so I applied,” she explains.

Godwin was immediately accepted into Columbia’s graduate program, a credit to her abilities and her hard work. Columbia generally doesn’t accept students who have not worked for a few years. But Godwin’s jobs and internships paid off. She entered the one-year program and on her first day was covering a press conference given by then New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

“That’s where I really learned the true power of what we do,” she says. “It was up to me to decide what was most important to report. I knew right then this was it.”

Following the dream

Godwin’s first real job as a broadcast journalist was with WVIR-TV, the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, Va. She was one of only two in a class of 165 at Columbia who got on-air jobs after graduation. It didn’t matter that Charlottesville was the 199th station in a market of 200 at the time, that there were only five people in the newsroom, or that she was only getting paid $8,300 a year. Godwin was thrilled. Her parents were not.

“My parents were so proud,” she says laughing. “They said, ‘We paid all this money and here you are, a double Ivy League graduate working at a tiny television station in Charlottesville, Virginia.’ But I didn’t care. I was happy.”

Godwin went on to work for WNET-TV in New York, the Public Broadcasting System’s flagship station. Then in 1987 she relocated to St. Louis and went to work for KETC-TV, the local PBS station. She hosted and produced Postscript, a weekly minority affairs program that won her an Emmy for Best Discussion/Interview series.

She received a second Emmy for a 30-minute national documentary for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Association of Black Journalists. The video, designed to interest minorities in journalism, is now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s collection and is still presented at many colleges, high schools and job fairs across the country today.

“I didn’t get into television because it was glamorous. I got into it to help educate people, and to empower them with knowledge,” Godwin says. “That’s what made public broadcasting jobs the best. They gave you the opportunity to do the stories you wanted to do.”

Public broadcasting seemed perfect for Godwin. But in 1990 TV news came calling, offering more money and more viewers. She made the switch back and wound up anchoring the weekend news desk and doing on-the-spot reporting for KPLR-TV (Channel 11). She also hosted the public affairs program St. Louis Agenda, which brought her a third Emmy.

But after a few years Godwin remembered the words of a mentor, who said moving around the country looked good on your resume. It showed you could move to a city, master it, and do excellent work. She started looking around for the next job in a new city.

Everything changes

While in the midst of a big interview, Godwin met Sam Hutchinson, a St. Louis businessman. He wanted to get married and although Godwin was willing, she was adamant about not staying in St. Louis. “Of course he couldn’t move because of his business. So I told him we’d just have to commute,” she says. “I know lots of couples who do that. I was still holding on to my dream.”

But that dream began to fade once the pair tied the knot. “It surprised me,” Godwin says. “I really enjoyed being married.”

She forgot about commuting and settled down in St. Louis. Then a close friend died of breast cancer and Godwin began to take stock of her life.

“I suddenly realized that what was important to me was quality of life, my relationships and my marriage,” she says. “And I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do. So as I stood at that crime scene that day watching and waiting, I decided it was time to move on. Life was just too short.”

After a brief hiatus from work, Godwin started a media relations and production business, which she ran out of her home. It was during that time that she met Jessica Perkins, who was also going through a metamorphosis of sorts in her professional career. Perkins had left the corporate world to pursue a doctorate in public policy and to form her own consulting firm. They joined forces on the “Listening Tour,” a public engagement project for St. Louis Community College and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Their job was to engage the public in finding grassroots solutions to environmental issues.

The project was such a huge success that Godwin and Perkins suddenly found themselves with around $300,000 worth of projects.

Godwin told Perkins, “I think we’ve got a business here.” And after a little prodding, Perkins agreed. They gave up their individual home offices and in 1998 officially teamed up as Vector Communications, one of only a few public engagement and communications consulting firms in the United States.

“There are several PR firms that say they do public engagement but, as Jessica says, ‘PR is selling and telling, and public engagement is cocreating,’” Godwin explains. “And the key to being a good public engagement specialist is that people trust you.”

Perkins agrees. “Our partnership is successful because we have independent talents and skills and we complement one another. If a project is in a particular core competency, the person with the most experience will handle it,” she says. “That takes a lot of trust. Laurna always delivers. Whatever it takes to get the job done, she will do it. And if she is not capable, she knows how to pull together the resources to get it done.”

That’s because over the years Godwin has, in a sense, been branding herself. “I’ve always realized that my name and what I do is all I have,” she explains. “That’s why my business has done so well. I apply the same things to my business that I did when I was in television. People in St. Louis have to like you. That’s why they watch. They speak highly of you. And that’s everything.”

How she became such a well-respected and well-liked individual is partly due to her networking skills. Dubbed the “networking guru,” Godwin has contacts that amaze even her husband. “She has a stack of business cards from some of the most influential people in town. These are contacts most people would kill to have,” he says. “How does she do it? She’s incredible. She remembers names, faces, when she saw you last and what your hobbies are. And people love it. They’re so pleased that she remembers them. She’s just a really bright woman.”

Perkins says Godwin is also a compassionate woman — one of her greatest strengths. “What you are initially struck by is her warm and compassionate heart,” Perkins says. “And then her persistence. She is much attuned to getting this work done and making a difference in the community. It’s important to her.”

New challenges

Godwin, 46, may be out of the journalism game, but she’s still facing new challenges. The biggest was starting Vector Communications. For one thing, she says partnering with someone in a business is like a marriage, so you need to make sure it’s right. And owning a business is a 24-7 job, one with a whole new set of responsibilities.

“You worry about getting new business, about satisfying clients and about cash flow. And because it was just the two of us, we had to do everything. We put in some very, very long hours.”

Then there was the obvious: They were two women starting a business and both of them African-American. “We knew from the beginning that being two women and being African-American, we were only going to get one chance. And if we blew it with a client that was it,” Godwin says. “I’m proud of being a woman and I’m proud of being an African-American. I know this means working harder for everything. It’s frustrating at times. But in the end it’s paid off. It’s made me a better and stronger person, and it’s made my business stronger.”

To say Godwin is motivated is an understatement. Hutchinson says to understand what motivates his wife, you have to know her mother. “Corrynne Godwin was a fencer in college. Now who ever heard of a black woman fencing? And she was an electrical engineer. It was unheard of at that time,” he explains. “And she is also someone very devoted to community projects and volunteerism. That’s her mother. And that’s Laurna. She is a person who wants to be involved. She wants to help.”

And Godwin not only commits herself to making a difference, but she also wants Vector to be known for its community involvement. Each of the company’s employees receive one paid workday a month to volunteer with a local nonprofit organization.

In 2004, Godwin was recognized for her community leadership as one of the 10 St. Louis Women of Achievement. The St. Louis Business Journal also named her as one of the 25 Most Influential Business-women in St. Louis. Still, she’s surprised at her success. “If anyone had suggested that someday I would own my own business I would have laughed,” she says.

Now that it’s happened, Godwin has some advice for women interested in taking on this kind of challenge.

“If you get a good educational foundation, then you can take advantage of any opportunity. Also, go with your instinct, with what you feel is right,” she says. “I believe if your heart is in the right place, then things will work out. If they don’t, it’s OK. Something better will come along.”

And what is her philosophy on life? “I’m a religious person, so I believe God has a purpose for everyone,” she says. “And I’m a strong believer that everything happens for a purpose. Just take a look at the things that happen in your life. They happen for a reason. You may not know it at the time, but you will. And as we like to say at the office, there’s no such thing as coincidences.”