At age 24, Lana Rushing had an office in Santa Monica, Calif., with a view of the ocean.
“It was fabulous,” Lana says.
The 1994 journalism/mass communication grad got her start with Engineering Animation, Inc., in Ames. When the company launched its entertainment division, Lana, a Des Moines native, jumped at the chance to move to California.
Engineering Animation closed its Los Angeles entertainment offices in 1998, but Lana stayed in California, working for public relations firms and building a client network.
Today Lana heads her own firm, Rushing Public Relations, and specializes in technology and entertainment PR. During her career, her extensive client list has included LG Electronics, Netflix, and Hewlett-Packard, and she’s branched out to provide services to clients as far away as Italy and France. She describes Rushing PR as “boutique-style service with big-agency thinking.”
“I’m very diversified,” she told me when we met for coffee at Caffe Luxxe in Santa Monica last month. “I’ve been surprised by the power of my network. I like being the boss.”
Lana’s staff consists of a “flexible, virtual team” of PR professionals whom she hires as needed to help manage accounts. She works from her home office in West Los Angeles and says she has a better work/life balance now than ever before.
Living and working in Los Angeles has its perks, too.
“I got to watch ‘Baywatch’ being filmed on the beach when I first moved here, and I see people like Jane Fonda all the time in Whole Foods,” she says. “It’s an extra level of fun.”
On the road 
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