Why PR Founders Are Bad Spokespeople for Their Own Brand (And What To Do Instead)

PR people are very good at telling other people what not to say.

Don’t lead with the product.

Don’t over-explain. Don’t use seven adjectives when one fact will do. And then… somebody asks us what makes our own agency different. Suddenly, we are “passionate”, “integrated”, “strategic”, “boutique”, “full-service”, “insight-led” and somehow also “agile” – ALL IN THE SAME AGONISING SENTENCE. I agree. It is not our finest hour.

There is a strange thing that happens when PR professionals become founders. We spend years learning how to create distance from a client’s own enthusiasm. We know that the founder’s favourite fact may not be the journalist’s favourite fact. We KNOW that being emotionally invested in a business can make it harder to see what is actually interesting about it. Then we start our own company and immediately lose that distance.

I know this because I have done it. Ask me what The Other Circle (TOC) does and, on a bad day, I can attempt to explain our philosophy, our work, our categories, our team, our evolution, and possibly the meaning of life before you have finished your coffee.

Passion is useful. Unfortunately, it is not always concise. The problem is that we know too much. And we feel too much, too. PR founders have too much context about their own businesses. We know why the agency was started, which client changed the way we work, why a certain capability exists, what went wrong five years ago, and why we never do it that way anymore. All of that feels important because, to us, it is. To someone hearing about the company for the first time, much of it is background noise. This is exactly what we tell clients.

A client says, “But you need to understand the history.” And we say, “I do. The audience doesn’t. Yet.” Somehow, when it is our own company, we forget the second sentence. A spokesperson’s job is not to tell people everything. It is to decide what matters now. We oversell. Or, in my case, occasionally undersell spectacularly.

For some PR founders, pride turns into overstatement. You start explaining why the agency is different, then why the team is different, then why the thinking is different. Before long, you have become the communications equivalent of somebody at a party who has been describing themselves for twenty minutes.

But there is another version of the problem. Some of us go completely the other way. We downplay. We qualify. We say, “We’ve been lucky.” We mention the work but not quite the scale of it. We talk about the client but not the part we actually played. We soften the achievement before anyone has even had the chance to decide whether it was impressive.

I do this more than I should. There is usually a small voice somewhere in the background asking: does anyone actually care? Imposter syndrome is very efficient that way. What is ridiculous, of course, is that I would never advise a client to communicate like this.

If a founder came to me underselling what they had built, I would immediately start asking: What can only you credibly own? What have you done that gives you the right to say it? Where is the proof? What is the niche that nobody else is occupying? I would happily spend hours finding the sharpest, most defensible version of their story.

Then, when it comes to my own company, I can become oddly committed to making sure nobody thinks I am showing off. Very strategic, isn’t it? But both extremes create the same problem. Overselling makes people suspicious. Underselling makes people overlook you. Neither is positioning. The job is not to make yourself sound bigger than you are. It is also not to make yourself smaller.

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We are too close to know what is interesting. One of the most useful things a PR person does for a client is to identify the part of the story the client has stopped noticing. A founder says something casually in a meeting, and we interrupt them. “Wait. Go back. That’s the story.” They have lived with it for so long that it no longer feels remarkable. PR founders need somebody to do exactly that for them. Because the things we think make our agencies interesting are often the things every agency says.

The better questions are usually:

• What clients do you refuse to take on?
• What argument do you keep having with clients?
• What do you believe about PR that others may disagree with?
• What do your longest-standing clients actually come to you for?

Those answers tell me far more than a capabilities deck ever will. So, what should PR founders do?

Treat yourself like a client. Ask someone else to interview you. Really. Genuinely. Don’t nod your head now. Do it. Actually, do it.

Ask your team what they think the company stands for. You may be mildly horrified. Useful data. Look at the words clients use when they recommend you. Pay attention to the sentences they repeat back. Then narrow it down.

You do not need ten messages. You need a few things you genuinely want to be known for, proof that you have earned the right to say them, and enough discipline not to add six more midway through the conversation. The real problem is not that PR founders lack communication skills. It is that we are too close to our own story. Too much context. Too much attachment. Too much awareness of how we might sound.

Some of us compensate by saying too much. Some of us, like me, occasionally compensate by saying far too little. The fix is distance. The same distance we create for clients every day. We are very good at helping other people find the story they have earned the right to tell. Every now and then, we need someone to do the same for us.

– Written by Aakanksha Gupta, Founder & CEO of The Other Circle and a PR professional with experience across public relations, brand communication, and storytelling. She founded The Other Circle in 2013 and has built her work around helping brands find authentic narratives and communicate them with clarity.