Last week I wrote about why so many growth budgets get pushed back. Most of the time it came down to credibility, the wobble underneath the spreadsheet that a board can hear before they read it.

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A few of you wrote back saying some version of the same thing. Same pattern shows up everywhere. PR. Hiring. Agency briefs. Why does the founder always end up doing the deciding?

I've been chewing on that since.

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Last Thursday I ran a closed-door roundtable on strategic PR with about 15 senior B2B leaders. Founders, CEOs, marketing leads, one CRO. Nick Bawden from Words and Pixels led the conversation alongside Simon from our team. Chatham House Rules. The kind of conversation founders normally have in 1:1s, this time in a room with 14 others.

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Three things came up that I want to put in front of you today.

PR is the thing your buyers find before they find you

Here's the stat that landed hardest in the room. Between 40 and 48% of the answers Claude, ChatGPT and the other LLMs return are pulled from earned editorial media. The weighting toward press is far higher than most marketing budgets currently reflect.

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If your buyers are doing what most B2B buyers now do, which is ask an LLM to shortlist vendors before they get anywhere near a sales call, the names that surface are the ones with credible press behind them. PR now sits at the part of the buyer journey where prospects decide whether to put you on the shortlist at all.

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One of the founders pushed back. Hard. He said the best LLM visibility he'd seen had come from cleaning up his Wikidata listing, not from any agency. Free. Twenty minutes. Better results than two PR retainers had given him.

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Both things are true at once. What matters is that the question "where do my buyers actually find me now?" has a different answer than it did 18 months ago, and most marketing budgets haven't caught up.

The startup-or-not paradox most scale ups haven't decided

Two founders in the room held opposite views on the same question.

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One sells into highly regulated enterprise. Her view: she explicitly does not want her business positioned as a startup. Her buyers carry personal liability if her company disappears, and they need to feel she'll still be around in five years.

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Another founder, at an earlier stage, leans the opposite way. He's leaning harder into the scrappy, founder-led, open-source story. Show the team. Show the tech. Show that you're close to the problem.

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Both are right as they're selling to different rooms.

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What stayed with me was how few of the founders present, as well as in general, had explicitly decided which version of themselves they were presenting. Most had drifted into a default. The founder voice on LinkedIn was scrappy startup. The website was enterprise-grade. The pitch deck sat somewhere in between. Three different audiences. Three slightly different stories. None of them deliberately chosen.

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Positioning is plural. VCs need to hear ambitious startup. Enterprise CFOs need to hear safe, credible, around in five years. Trade press wants the founder origin story. The same business can be all three, but only if you've decided which version goes where.

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If you can't answer "what do we want this audience to walk away believing?" for each of those rooms, your marketing is making the call for you. And it usually picks the wrong one.

Most PR fails because the business never made the brief

This was the bit that connects most directly to last week.

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One head of marketing in the room had just watched a portfolio company spend serious money on a PR engagement that delivered mentions, hits, coverage in trade outlets, and zero impact on pipeline or perception. The brief had been "raise our profile." Three words. No spokesperson named, no hook, no measure of success.

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Someone else put the line of the morning: “there are as many fingers pointing back as outwards on most PR failures”. The agency takes the heat. The brief was vague, the spokesperson hadn't been agreed, "what good looks like" hadn't been defined, and the leadership team was split on whether the goal was sales credibility or investor optics.

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Nick had a rule I'm going to steal. Don't start PR unless you can line up at least four months of stories you actually want to tell. A funding announcement on its own is a sugar hit. The compounding starts when the funding round becomes the platform for an interview, then a piece of data-led commentary, then a customer announcement, then a comment on something happening in the market. That cadence requires the business to have decided what it's actually saying.

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Most haven't. So they hire a PR agency hoping the agency will help them work it out. The agency can help shape the story. They can't make the call for you.

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This is the same pattern that kills growth budgets, agency briefs and head-of-marketing hires. The business leaves the decision unmade. Then it outsources the doing. Then it blames the doer when nothing moves.

What this means for your next conversation

The thread running through all three was the same one we keep coming back to. The marketing layer is where the absence of a decision becomes visible. The work that fixes it sits one step earlier.

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If you're about to brief an agency, hire a marketer or sign off a quarter's spend, the first question to sit with is what this needs to do for the business.

The one thing to do this week

Whether you've got a PR retainer in place, a brief out to agencies, or no PR at all, do this exercise before the next round of spend.

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Open a blank page and write down eight stories you could put out over the next four months. Real ones, with names attached, that you'd be willing to stand behind today:

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• A founder interview with a sharp angle and a specific publication in mind
• A piece of data only you have, that says something useful about your market
• A customer announcement with a customer who'd actually speak on the record
• A partnership or product moment that means something commercially
• A point of view on something your industry is currently getting wrong
• Commentary on a news story your business genuinely has a perspective on
• A milestone the business would want to talk about, beyond a funding round
• A team, hire or culture story with a real human moment behind it

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If you can't get to eight, build the story bench before you brief the agency. Most of the work that makes PR pay back happens in the conversation that decides what the business actually wants to say, and the eight stories that follow the headline announcement.

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Drop me a line if you've sat in one of those PR meetings recently and want to compare notes. I read everything, and I'd love to know what's landing where you are.

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‍P.S. We're going to run more of these closed roundtables through the rest of the year. If there's a topic you'd genuinely want to debate with 12 to 15 of your peers under Chatham House, drop me a line and tell me what it is. The next one will be shaped by what comes back.