Article by Jason Fell

For the full article link click here: http://entm.ag/1CJaFVj

For on-the-go entrepreneurs, finding love isn’t easy. When every waking hour is spent growing a business and chasing your dream, how the heck are you supposed to squeeze in time for anyone else? Even the most successful people in business discover that dating and romance can be a tricky task.

Just ask 28-year-old Kris Ruby, founder of New York City-based public relations firm Ruby Media Group. She and longtime friend Alex Goldman — an entrepreneur himself, having started Five Senses Catering in New York City — starred on Bravo’s Friends to Lovers TV show. The idea, unless the title gave it away, was to find out if friends could indeed develop a successful romantic relationship.

“I encouraged him to start his own business and was intrigued when he followed my direction and started his company,” Ruby tells Entrepreneur. “That piqued my interest.”

Over the course of about a year, Bravo’s TV crew followed Ruby and Goldman around Manhattan and Ruby’s hometown in Westchester County, N.Y., chronicling their path to love. Unfortunately, they weren’t destined to be more than just friends. Goldman eventually got back together with an ex-girlfriend, and Ruby is back to work and also working on herself — personally and as an entrepreneur.

“[The show] was a tremendous growing opportunity,” Ruby says. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t like about myself after the show and definitely want to focus on fixing those character defects.”

Here are five lessons Ruby learned from the show about being better personally and professionally:

1. Always shower clients with attention.

Whether it’s a love interest or business client, people invest time and money with you and deserve your attention. You can’t fake it or put people off.

“This reality show took a year for me to film while I was simultaneously running an agency and doing TV news segments,” Ruby explains. “I thought I could juggle everything and keep clients happy while filming, but I learned that it was nearly impossible to do it all.”

Just like with personal relationships, if you let things build up in business relationships for too long without any attention, the relationship will sour. “I now realize that it’s the relationship that keeps the client happy in addition to all of the work. If you don’t keep up the personal relationship with your client, the business relationship will eventually fall apart,” Ruby says. “As my business coach Drew McLellan said, ‘Clients are a lot like boyfriends or girlfriends. They need a lot of tending to and love. No one wants to feel like they are not the most important thing in the world to you.'”

2. How you are one way is how you are every way.

If you have trouble making or keeping commitments in your personal or dating life, you will most likely have the same issues in business. “I used to think there was such a separation between my personal life and business life,” Ruby says. “My business life was completely put together — my personal life needed a lot more work, as evidenced on the show.”

While finding true work-life balance can be difficult, Ruby believes entrepreneurs should have stability and happiness in their personal lives, otherwise that imbalance “will pour over and your clients will eventually feel it.”

3. Put the smartphone down.

As a PR and social-media strategist, Ruby is often on her smartphone texting, tweeting and sending emails. But even in this always-on, hyper-connected world, in-person communication trumps digital messages when it comes to keeping clients (and love interests) engaged and happy.

“I was totally wrong on this one and thought texting and emailing would suffice. … I learned my lesson,” Ruby says. “Clients need real in-person love and just texting will get you canned. You actually make it harder on yourself and the relationship by turning it into a long distance relationship when it doesn’t have to be.”

4. Success is an illusion.

Just because you may be successful in one area of your life — such as your business — it doesn’t mean success in your personal life will come easy.

“People automatically assume that if you are a woman in business who has reached a certain level of success, you have everything together,” Ruby says. “As leaders, we need to come out and admit that we don’t always have it together.

“Even if every episode did not show my most glowing moments,” she continues, “I at least showed other women that you can be successful in one area of your life and totally unsuccessful in other areas — in my case, love.”

5. Know the breakup signals.

In many ways, romantic relationships mirror professional ones. When a client wants to talk about the future or go in a different direction, you are about to be fired, Ruby says.

“Break ups with clients can hurt just as much as personal relationship break ups,” she says. “If a client wants to move on, you can’t force them to tell you why. You have to accept that you don’t control the situation and move on.”

Ruby Media Group Founder Kris Ruby was thrilled to do a LIVE segment on CNBC from The New York Stock Exchange. During the segment, Ruby discussed her top tech predictions in the market. As a 28 year old growth oriented investor, her focus was on buying for future gains. To watch the full segment, click here

To read the full article by Amy Partridge in 914INC. Magazine, click here

“If you’re more likely to tune into CNBC during your off hours, there’s a local element to Friends to Lovers? that might pique your interest: Westchester native and previous 914INC Wunderkind Kris Ruby is one of the show’s stars. Plus, one of the upcoming episodes (the show airs Monday nights at 10 pm) features some familiar Westchester sights.  Ruby says she was so focused on building her PR firm (with good results; the 27-year-old is a leading on-air social media commentator) that she didn’t think much about a potential love match.  Shooting a show about her private life has been challenging for the “all-business” Ruby.  “It has definitely been good exposure for my business so more people on a national scale can see our social media and PR service offering. But doing the show was a tough decision for me to make… this was definitely outside of my comfort zone,” she explains. “Sharing anything about my personal life and exposing that side of my life felt like a huge risk.”

While at Westchester Magazine’s Burger and Beer Blast (Ruby Media Group was hired to increase social media buzz and engagement at the event), Ruby discovers some “digital compatibility” issues (yes, apparently, that is a thing) with Goldman.

She leaves us with this cliffhanger: “Will Alex support me at Burger Bash by posting selfies and using the hashtag we came up with? Or will he be anti-social-media at my event?”

RMG Founder Kris Ruby was recently featured in The NY Post on staying connected with your ex’s after a break-up. Read the full article in The NY Post here 

Appearing happy on Facebook won’t help your break-up

By Jennifer Wright, NY Post 

The next time you’re tempted to show your ex how totally over your breakup you are by posting pictures on Facebook that show you frolicking on the beach with a new suitor, hold off.

Putting on a brave face after a split is nothing new. However, in these social-media-savvy days, people are putting that face online, and it’s not doing anyone much good.

“Staying connected with your exes on social media and bombarding them with a false sense of ‘happy’ or ‘sexy’ selfies is becoming a popular cultural phenomenon,” says Kris Ruby, the social media expert for the Ruby Media Group. “After a breakup, people are increasingly feeling more pressure to make it look like they are doing great on their social media accounts.”

But, she cautions, “I don’t think someone would see a photo of their ex Jet Skiing and think they made the wrong decision about the breakup . . . I strongly feel it always has the opposite effect.”

It can, however, succeed in hurting a past lover and diminishing what you had with them in the first place.

“It makes someone think you moved on faster than they did, and that the relationship wasn’t as meaningful to you as it was to them,” Ruby says.

Amanda Chatel, a 36-year-old blogger from the East Village, definitely fell victim to the trend. After her 2012 breakup, she felt a huge impetus to show her former flame that she was great.

“I hate to admit it, but I actually started my Instagram account to prove to my ex I was fine,” she says. “Oh, look at me being fine in Paris. Oh, now I’m fine in Barcelona. Oh, I’m so fine on this yacht in Lake Como. These aren’t tears. These are splashes of Champagne on my face as I celebrate how fine I am.”

It didn’t make her ex want to jump on a plane to be with her, but he took notice. “He’d occasionally send a drunken e-mail . . . acknowledging something I’d posted,” she recalls.

But it didn’t necessarily make her feel good. “I felt both sad and sort of satisfied that he was falling into my trap. I’d set up that Instagram for him, and voilà, there he was responding! But then I’d remember we were broken up and get shaky and cry.”

Courtney Boyd Myers, 29, the founder of audience.io, a digital marketing company, says that her ex’s reaction was also negative.

“In the early days after my recent breakup, I was sad but would only post happy things,” says Boyd Myers, a Williamsburg resident who ended a four-year relationship last April. “This angered him because he was seeing this upset side of me when no one else was.”

Rather than posting photos of the amazing summer you’re having with a new boyfriend or girlfriend (or someone you just met on Tinder) to show your ex that you have moved on, Ruby says the smartest strategy for all parties is to unfriend one another on Facebook, Instagram and the like. That’s the easiest way to really move on.

“In order to grieve and truly move on you need that time of separation, which includes social media separation as well,” she says.

“When you have finally moved on, you can refriend them.”

*Article reprint from NY Post, by Jennifer Wright.