Agency bosses need to accept that “failure is part of the journey”, says Alex Myers, founder and chief executive of Manifest.
When it comes to growing a PR agency, the CEO thinks failure is where he’s learned the fastest, adding: “When we’ve stopped doing things that might fail, that’s when we’ve slowed as a business.”
“There are people with the guts to try new things, and there are people who are just going to follow what everyone else does,” he tells PRWeek. “I would say agencies need to fail more. They need to try more shit out.”
No one can accuse Myers of being afraid to take risks; having launched his comms agency in London in 2009, the business has since expanded and now has six offices worldwide.
So how did this start-up business, which Myers claims was built on a “heady mix of naivety and bravado”, expand globally? He’s “making this shit up as [he’s] going along, same as everyone else”, he jokes.
When Myers wrote his business plan 16 years ago, he said he wanted an office in New York by the end of year five, for no other reason than it would be “cool.”
According to Myers, everyone said he couldn’t open a successful indie PR business in the US, as others had tried and failed before. Describing himself as “annoyingly northern” when it comes to proving people wrong, he attempted it anyway by approaching other start-up businesses that wanted to expand into the US market.
The New York office was launched five years after Manifest opened in London. Since then, the group has opened offices in Stockholm, Manchester, Melbourne and Los Angeles, and the majority of the sites were led by existing employees.
“I think part of the plan has always been to take the opportunity when it arises,” says Myers (pictured, below).
“It’s been a necessity for us; it’s not been about commercial growth. Commercial growth is the result of real, human growth and creating an effective legacy as a team,” he explains.
Another agency boss who has achieved business success by investing in her team is WPR’s managing director, Jane Ainsworth.
After completing a management buyout of the Birmingham-based agency 19 years ago, Ainsworth’s first priority was to review the business sectors alongside staff skillset.
As a result, she hired Tom Leatherbarrow, now WPR’s b2b director, whose background in engineering and manufacturing companies helped expand the agency’s remit.
“We recognised that by breaking into new sectors, we could accelerate growth. So Tom was the first risk I took at the time,” explains Ainsworth, whose firm was named Best Agency Outside London at the 2024 PRWeek UK Awards.
However, she experienced a “true Sliding Doors moment” when faced with the option to either open in London or invest and grow WPR’s sector experience from its home in the Midlands. She opted to remain and invest in the agency’s social media credentials, which she claims now accounts for an “enormous percentage of its income”.
Like Myers, Ainsworth has focused on her team to help grow her agency. She says that “over half of its leadership team joined as interns” and that the PR firm has “benefited hugely” from growing talent from within the business. During her tenure, WPR has gone from a 20-strong team to just under 60 members of staff.
Nonetheless, as an agency grows, duties should be delegated to specialists. When should an agency boss hand over the reins?
Delegation
“There is certainly a point, and it will differ according to each agency, when the brilliance of the founders reaches its limit”, says Jane Fordham, partner and head of people and culture at public affairs and corporate comms agency Hanbury Strategy.
“They need to have the maturity to bring in additional resource that can grow in other areas.”
Fordham, who has 25 years of experience in comms, originally started in the PR industry working for the likes of Firefly Communications and Golin, but switched from running accounts to supporting talent later in her career.
“If you’ve got really strong growth momentum, and the founders are willing to do it, I think there is an upside to getting specialist help earlier,” says Fordham (pictured, below).
“Although there’s a thrill of the chase that you get exposure to everything in a smaller team, I get that, but I do think enabling people to specialise in their specialism and focus on the delivery, I think there’s a strong rationale for that.”
But it isn’t always easy to make that switch, as Myers explains. “I now enjoy delegating because I know people are going to be better at it than I am. When you start and found an agency, it’s a journey… because you’ve done everyone’s job – badly,” he admits.
When his agency hit the 10-employee mark, “one of the biggest crests to get over” was the mental and emotional weight that leaders face worrying about staff and payroll, he explains.
Myers warns other agency bosses not to stop taking risks because they are worried about other people’s jobs. He believes: “You’ve got to keep moving forward because that’s going to help them more.”
“As the agency grows, the worst bit of it all is you have to become a much more process-driven business,” explains Ainsworth.
“On a practical level, I suppose I don’t really do much client-facing delivery work anymore. You have to accept that you are in a leadership position, and you’re there to facilitate and inspire and get things done.”
She admits she misses picking up the phone to a journalist to pitch a story. “You have to give up a lot of what drew you to the industry in the first place.”
Control
Relinquishing control of the numbers is hard when you’re the founder, says Myers.
He admits he was “too slow” at bringing in an external accountant and a financial director (FD), because “they were the hardest things to delegate”.
“If the FD is not panicking, then you’re not panicking… I have learnt that the hard way. It’s really hard not to go in [the bank accounts] every day and see if you’ve got enough to cover payroll. That’s start-up mentality. If you are a £10m business, you cannot do that.”
Ainsworth agrees. Her decision to appoint Don Skoyles as WPR’s full-time finance officer was an “absolute godsend”. “Working in PR, that kind of finance element of it was never going to be my forte.”
Ainsworth says the fact that Skoyles came from a “very different background” helped the agency expand. It was very easy to focus on “growth, growth, growth every year”, she says, but he challenged her thinking and demonstrated that “you could have growth and profitability going very much hand-in-hand”.
Myers also advises that non-executive directors are the “biggest investment that people forget to make”. He says he didn’t bring in non-executives soon enough, in his opinion.
Specialist hires
At what point should you hire someone to lead an agency’s people division, for example?
Depending on the makeup of your founding team, the journey through to hiring third parties may look slightly different, explains Fordham.
“You’ve either got the choice of using internal resource and redirect [current employees into the role], or piecemeal external providers,” she says.
“If it looks like there’s a really strong growth trajectory, and you’re quite confident that that’s going to continue, then I think investment and getting ahead of the curve, maybe when you’re only a few years old with a 20 to 30 headcount, is a bit of a tipping point, especially if you can get somebody in part-time and grow them into it [the role],” advises Fordham.
“If you’re an agency whose ambition isn’t to empire build, then you can keep with some internal expertise and really good advisors,” she adds.
But if you have the structure set up for an internal person to move into the role, it can work, says Fordham; however, CIPD training will be key if the agency can dedicate the time and financial investment.
In the case of WPR, Ainsworth (pictured, below) says promoting Rebecca Williams from heading its consumer PR team to director of people and planning was “one of the best things” she ever did.
Recognising that WPR needed somebody who could look at “where the pressure points were”, Williams has been able to look ahead at where the agency needed to recruit, understand the talent that was out there in the market, nurture existing talent and improve the agency’s DE&I activity, says Ainsworth.
So, how many people should you have in your HR team or finance team, for example? Is it based on a revenue ratio? Or is it a headcount ratio?
“I think it’s probably a mixture of both,” says Fordham. As agencies grow and expand into new markets, leaders need to remember that they will face challenges such as new employment law, recruitment in different jurisdictions, managing internal communications and varying time zones, says Fordham. “It becomes quite complex.”
For many agencies, 50 employees and 100-plus members of staff are the two tipping points, and “if you’ve got multiple practices or multiple locations, that obviously adds a different dynamic”, she says.
Cultural relevance
How can an agency maintain its company culture as it grows and expands? “Culture is not something that happens organically,” argues Fordham. “In a small startup agency, culture is obviously set by the founders and the team, but you need to maintain that deliberate focus on it, and course correct as you grow.”
It’s about “culture, having a deliberate set of values, having the measurement regularly to check in and see how you’re doing on those values and culture, and then having the strategies to deliberate, maintain and cultivate where need be”, concludes Fordham.
“Managing the culture as the team gets bigger… is a real challenge,” says Myers, “but the way we’ve met that challenge is not systemising culture but baking into your processes objective frameworks”.
Both Myers and Ainsworth agree that having clearly defined roles within the senior leadership, alongside set objective frameworks, is the key to success, agency growth and team retention.
Fordham also advises that direct line managers should manage no more than five employees to actively help staff with their career development.
Advice
When asked by PRWeek what she would do differently if she had her time over again, Ainsworth says: “I would embrace processes (eg: employee handbooks, policies and procedures) quicker, rather than fight them, because you need them as you grow.” It’s also important to remember “teams want consistency and fairness”, she adds.
Her advice for agency leaders is to decide on the metrics and targets you want to measure. Don’t just get “hooked on growth”; focus on other metrics like team retention rates or operating margins – all of them are intrinsically linked and demonstrate a strong business, she adds.
What are Myers’ top tips for a PR leader who wants to grow their agency? “Embrace the fact that you are not defined by a channel. Embrace innovation and technology. Embrace agency consolidation.
“The best advice is to follow the fun. If staff are having fun, they’ll stay. And if they are having fun, they’ll tell their friends, who might become clients. They’ll only have fun if they are trusted,” he concludes.
