The DMV Daily Interviews: Sabrina Holder & Coach Q

A Conversation With Sabrina & Quinelle Holder

We should always strive to make the most of every opportunity we’re given in this lifetime. Following a recap of Mannywellz outstanding homecoming show, I was  offered a chance to interview his publicity team Medium PR’s Sabrina Holder and Quinelle Holder (a.k.a Coach Q). I had a golden open opportunity to ask anything to an entrepreneurial couple making their way in the music industry. Even groggy and exhausted from a week-long cold, this was a call I had to make. It’s not often you get to talk to a power couple, after all.

During this conversation, I learned a host of things: the history of Medium PR from a loose concept to full-fledged LLC, going from the security of a 9 to 5 job to full-time self-made entrepreneurship, working smarter not harder, and much more.

Juneil: How exactly did QuinelleHolder PR get started?

Sabrina: Q is the founder … before we started dating, we worked together professionally. would help him out with his website, The Red Tag Society, by taking photos and editing interviews.
One of the biggest interviews we did for that site was with Kendrick Lamar. That led him to an internship with Cornerstone Agency, which owns The FADER. Interviews with A$AP Rocky, Lupe Fiasco, EarthGang, and a handful of other artists soon followed. During one of my many road trips to DC I ran into Brandon Wyche, the owner of HipHopSince1987. Brandon ended up giving him a job. He quickly went from writer to editor to content manager. He built some of his strongest relationships during his time there.

In 2013, he met fellow HipHopSince1987 writer and Virginia native Cymande.  She soon plugged him with 757 elites like Point Guard (of 1500 or Nothin’), HighDefRazjah, Lex Luger, Batman and Pusha T’s former protegee Young Money Yawn. Yawn was Q’s first official PR client. One year later, that’s when Q and I got married in 2014 and he met IDK. Shortly after he became his day-to-day manager and also started handling publicity for BIA (iamother/RCA), Choo Jackson (REMember Music/Warners. Bro), and Clay James (Doggy Style Record/EMPIRE).  The next artist we started working with was Desiigner. Q digitally integrated his Grammy-nominated career starting single “Panda” prior to him signing with Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint.


Mind you, [our] PR Agency, on paper, is going on 3 years old, but Q has been doing it since 2008. He started a streetwear brand with his business partner, LA Gholson, called HeroVillain. His passion for fashion led him to blogging, blogging developed into journalism and journalism evolved into public relations. We became familiar with each other when he did an interview on my website (MaTunes) with one of my writers. Fast forward, we officially met in person at a Tabi Bonney concert in Richmond. Our friendship grew from there.

Juneil: What is a CCO and what do you do at Medium PR?

Sabrina: Chief Creative Officer. Basically, I overlook everything creative on anything you can think of. Like visuals, the story, behind, whatever is going on, our social media. So just everything creatively, I’m the one that says the yay or nay when people come to us seeking creative marketing.

Juneil: What are some of your favorite concertsyou’ve attended?

Sabrina: Oh, my most favorite of all time has to be Jadakiss’s when he was on the Top Five Dead or Alive Tour. That was my all-time favorite because I was working at Sirius XM at that time as a producer, and I can say this now because I don’t work with them anymore, but basically, I used my email to get in contact with Jadakiss’s manager … his nickname was Icepick, he passed away just recently(rest in peace). I showed him my portfolios like, “Hey, I would love to take photos for Jadakiss.” He was like, “Alright. Cool.” I guess he saw SiriusXM . . . they were just like, “Yeah cool for sure I can get you in there.” I was like, “Alright cool!” So, Q got in there and sent the photos to Jadakiss’s tour manager Brother Hassan Sharif and he was texting me the next day.

He was like, “These photos are dope, who shot these?’ I was like “I did,” and he said, “Okay cool, send me the photos and put the name of the photographer on the email”. The whole time they thought my husband Q was the photographer and not me because of course a female photographer. What is that, right? When he finally got it through his head that it was me that shot them he was like “Yo, get into your car and get to Norfolk, Virginia.” Mind you, this was the day of the show. . . I told Q and he was like “JUST GET INTO THE CAR!” and] we got into Norfolk right when the doors opened and ended up meeting brother Hassan face to face. Then, he introduced me to Jadakiss and to the rest of the crew. It was pretty dope. Just imagine: I went from begging people to take photos of the artists performing to here I am meeting one of my favorite and my husband’s actually top five– Jadakiss is one of Q’s top five rappers. It was the best concert . . . “Here’s one of the best rappers,”

Juneil: I was watching the stream of #The Jump and in that, you talked about when you first made the job you only had $500. How did you invest in yourself with having just $500 at the time?.

Sabrina: When I made the jump from working as a producer to an entrepreneur? It felt like I was jumping out of a plane without a parachute .. . Q has been an entrepreneur his whole life. I finally decided to make that jump at the beginning of 2017.

Coach Q:  The last job that I had was around ‘11  has been an entrepreneur his whole life. I finally decided to make that jump at the beginning of 2017.or ‘12 or something like that.

Sabrina: This is nothing to him. I was a producer at Sirius XM when we moved to the DMV, and by the second year I was like, “I can’t see myself doing this forever and working for somebody. I need to make a change,” plus everything was going crazy for Medium PR Agency. So I went ahead and put in my two weeks.  Q was like, “Do what you have to do to make the changes.” When I had my last day at the radio station I was like, dumb scared. I felt like almost everything was going wrong the week before I quit. At the end of the day, it was like Q was there coaching me and I was crying [laughs]. It was kinda crazy around that time. As far as how I invested in myself, I was in grind mode; answering emails and helping Q with anything he needed. I also had had a photo gig like every other day.

Juneil:  I was reading through an Instagram post you did a while back where you were talking more about how you learned a lot of things in 2017. What sort of lessons did you learn last year that helped you out?

Sabrina: We learned a lot of lessons on how to build this team. How to build a team and time management. Those are two major lessons.

Juneil: So where you bad at time management before that?

Sabrina: It wasn’t that we were bad at it, we were prioritizing the wrong things. That’s what it was. It was either too much work and not enough me time or us time cause being married to your business partner you can forget easily to set time aside for both of us. That was one thing that we are still learning but– I don’t think we were bad at it we were just didn’t prioritize it.

Coach Q: I’ll put it like like this: You think expansion, so you “need” more hands because eventually, you’re going to get a point to where you don’t have time to personally do the work, and you can’t do it all yourself; which is a great problem to have. But, what we realized was we made the jump prematurely.


Because when you own the company as you build your team, the reason why you’re building your team out is so you can oversee what goes on, [so] you’re not supposed to be doing the same exact thing you were doing when you started the company. You were putting in the groundwork to lay in the foundation. For example if you’re a manager of a McDonald’s you’re not building up that McDonald’s so you can be working the fries, that’s not the point. . . at the end of the day, to successfully run the business and for you to go get another McDonald’s on top of that, you need to be in the situation to where the people really know what’s going on

Juneil: When did Medium PR really start to be successful?

Coach Q: I guess the best way to look at it is I was already extremely successful as a publicist by myself before Medium came about. The reality is that when Medium started to make money was when Medium became . . . an LLC. The best thing about doing business digitally and living in that space is there’s no overhead cost or there’s an overhead cost that was real cheap. . . other than that it ain’t like you weren’t paying for the office, you don’t have to have a whole bunch of stuff, I don’t have to be in anything but my pajamas and a laptop to do what I need to do. It was off the top and it was profitable. That’s really the best thing about being in the culture where we’re at. That would have been right around 2015

Sabrina: 2014 for the LLC?

Coach Q: To keep it transparent. I was operating as Medium PR agency before I even had the LLC. That was when we went on ahead and we got the LLC so it was automatically profitable. I already had a good string of clients . . . it was to the point I was having to turn people down; which we still do to this day. The reason is that I had a two-part system: I had clients that I was working with that I was getting paid for, but I would make sure every week when I would drop a release with a less known artist, I would do a mainstream artist for free. I would reach out to these teams.

The idea was every time you were getting something from me you were like, “Man, Q is working with this artist,” so he’s just assuming I’m getting paid . . .  you would assume that the lesser artist was somebody that was popping that you just weren’t familiar with because I’m already doing something with a major artist.
Then, depending on the bigger artist that I was doing stuff for free or for cheap, they liked me so much that they just started paying my rate. It just all depends, but that was one of the biggest things about us, and that’s one of the biggest things about business especially in a business that’s about your reputation, presentation, handling business the right way and how people perceive you.

If you’re not working on science that people coming on, a project that people deem valuable, and with clients that people look at as successful, you’re not standing beside that. Who are you? What are you?
It’s about who and what you know. . .  even before I jumped in the PR when I was doing urban street wear. My background is urban streetwear and then hip-hop journalism. I blogged and all of that.
Coach Q: Even when I did that, I always thought about the portfolio. For our generation, the biggest problem I see is nobody is doing nothing for a portfolio. They’ve got no real experience . . . especially these college kids. [College kids are] coming out of college feuding like they can’t get a job, but it’s like: What have you done? Who did you work with?


Diddy don’t care that you went to Harvard and you have a degree, Diddy cares about who do you know that can vouch for you or what type of work are you willing to do that’s going to help further his company? Because if you’re not in-tuned with the culture and just because you have a degree, you can’t answer Diddy’s phone, end up talking to Quincy Jones and you don’t know who Quincy Jones is, you start to say something crazy. Now you just screwed up a five billion dollar deal just because you don’t know how to answer the phone right because you don’t have a certain respect level because you don’t know your history.
That’s what companies are actually doing. I couldn’t start telling people or charge people or do a certain thing until I had really done a lot of this stuff myself. I’m not taking like I’ll be making things out of my behind at the end of the day. I’ve really done that stuff but I realize that your value is in your portfolio. It’s like people want so much respect, credit or they really want to get paid for stuff but they don’t have anything to show for it.
So many people I see are jealous they want more of this, “Oh man I should be the one with this.” I saw a quote the other day.

Charlemagne, he said, “Some people can’t recognize an opportunity unless a paycheck is attached to it.” Don’t get it twisted, that doesn’t mean don’t get what you’re worth, that means to build up your worth. That’s the problem: people haven’t built up their worth but they’re expecting all these things. I see so many young writers, so many young whoever. I see a young writer, fresh out of college, “I want to write for Fader.” Dope. What have you done, or what can you do–what have you done to put yourself in that position? If you’re in Virginia, and you said you want to write for Fader, why don’t you pitch a story about somebody you can get to in Virginia? Can you get to a Bink!? Allen Iverson? Jay Pharoah? You get to a-[crosstalk] Pitch that story. Dangle your story right, then you in Fader. There you go. But they’re not even thinking about that. Their mind is just like, ain’t nobody wants to give me an opportunity, make the opportunity, man.

Coach Q: Some people only care about money. That’s why all their stuff is wack. You see people with wack graphics, a wack presentation, they can’t send an email, they can’t get themselves right, they can’t do all of these things, and they got money, but people don’t think they got money because they not presenting themselves right . . . they don’t understand how important that stuff is. . . the presentation, all of those type of things.

Juneil: What are some habits you have that help you to be successful?

Sabrina: Good question. What habits I have to be successful? Organizing. I’m starting to develop my habit of researching, which Q has been trying to get me really good at. So that’s another one. Health. I’m big on making sure I get my seven to eight hours of sleep. I’m big on when I travel I make sure that I eat the best that I can, and just take care of my body because we only get one shot in this life and, I don’t want to suffer from the life that God gave me.


Juneil: I want to say, thanks for giving me a chance to interview you.


Sabrina: Of course.


Much love to Sabrina and Coach Q go follow them on Twitter at

( @QuinelleHolder ) & ( @sabrinafvholder    )