Entrepreneurship in PR: Is it really all it's cracked up to be?

Every few months, someone messages me, usually a bright, slightly exhausted corp comm lead, asking what it's really like to start a PR firm. They want the inspiring version. I am, unfortunately, contractually incapable of giving anyone the inspiring version without the fine print attached. So here are seven hard truths, delivered without the customary sugar-coating this industry loves to apply to itself.

One: Your clients will love you most on the day they leave. Nothing sharpens a client relationship like a resignation email. Suddenly they remember every campaign that landed, every crisis you buried before it made the news, every 11 p.m. call you took without complaint and they'll tell you all of it, warmly, on their way out the door. PR is one of the few businesses where the exit interview is more generous than the annual review. This is true more often than you think.

Two: You will build teams you love and lose them anyway. You will train someone for two years, watch them find their voice, hand them real accounts and then watch them leave for a marginally better title somewhere else, six months before you were going to offer them exactly that. My first such resignation made me really doubt my abilities, came with a lot of heartache and a neon sign lit up around my personal failure. This was a hard one to learn but learn I did, that is not a flaw in your leadership. This is the business. Grieve fast, hire again.

Three: The media will treat you as essential and optional in the same phone call. "We need this story placed by Friday" and "we don't really carry agency bylines anymore" can, remarkably, come from the same journalist in the same conversation. You will learn to hold both truths without flinching, because flinching shows, and showing costs you the next pitch. While in a job you can just chalk it up to ‘ that’s just how the cookie crumbles’… as an entrepreneur you will be pressurised to deliver every single time. Your clients, media and teams will hold you to your word.

Four: The ecosystem will applaud your boutique status right up until it wants scale. Everyone loves a founder-led, independent PR firm in theory, in panels, in LinkedIn comments. In practice, RFPs quietly favour the agency with forty people and a fancy deck over the one with better judgment and half the headcount. You will spend real energy defending a model the industry claims to admire.

And of course, when it comes to cutting a cheque, you will be leading a losing battle, and you will quickly learn that its always the size of the cheque that matters and brand equity counts for nothing. 

Five: Upskilling is no longer optional homework - it's survival, and it never ends. This year its AI tools rewriting first drafts in nine seconds. Next year it'll be something else entirely. The founders who assume their 20 years of experience is a permanent moat are the ones who'll be quietly out-pitched by a three-person shop that learned the new tools faster. Experience earns you judgment; only continuous upskilling keeps that judgment relevant. You are your own L&D department, and no one books your learning slot. You have to pay attention.

Six: The personal toll is real, and nobody puts it in the pitch deck. Founding a firm quietly rewires your relationship with rest. You will answer a client crisis from a hospital waiting room and tell yourself it's "just this once," several times a year, for years. This is not a badge of honour. It is a cost. Pay it consciously or it will collect itself without asking. However much you read or hear about it from someone else, you will only realise the truth that comes with it when you go through this ring of fire yourself. Despite being high on EQ … I somehow managed to have a share for everyone but me. Till of course the bill came due. Literally.

Seven: Some days, you will want to scream into a spreadsheet. Not metaphorically. There will be a Tuesday where cash flow, a client's last-minute scope change, and a team member's resignation letter all land before lunch, and the appropriate professional response will not exist. You will want to scream. Occasionally, you will. This, too, is the business. As you progress ahead in this journey , things don’t get easier and your to-do list does not get shorter. You just get better at it.

And here's the part that surprises people: knowing all seven of these, in detail, from experience, I would not have it any other way. This industry, done on your own terms, gives you a front-row seat to your own growth that no corner office ever offered me.

Parting advice, for anyone considering this leap in 2026: don't build a business that depends on you being the smartest person in the room about PR, build one that depends on you being the most honest person in the room about what others ( including AI ) still can't judge. That's the actual moat now.

• But a moat only helps if you’re still standing behind it, and that comes down to stamina, not motivation.
• Motivation gets you to register the company and fades somewhere around the second quarter, usually when a payment goes missing or a client decides to send you a termination notice based on conditions beyond your control, but stamina keeps you thinking clearly through the months of wondering whether you’re too early, too stubborn or just unlucky. Yes, you will think of all three.
• Keep your finances boring: spending money is easy, and getting someone to pay for what you do is the actual job. Evaluate every opportunity to understand how it impacts your brand. You will understand why a client thinks the way they do when you have to decide where to spend your own money.
• While we are on that subject, it’s important for you to learn how to carry high self-esteem and a low ego in the same pocket, so you can admit a mistake and change direction without calling a committee. Cannot tell you how essential this learning curve is.
• And most importantly learn to lose, whether it’s a pitch, a person or a year, without letting the loss become your identity, because you will lose all three.
• Learn to have fun with it !

Twenty-six years in PR, out of which nineteen spent running the business of PR and none of this has made me want out. It has only made me surer that this business rewards the founders who can keep thinking when everything around them has stopped making sense.

Go on then. The madness is hiring.