A while ago I joined Steve Baker and Louise Parker of Propellernet for a live recording of their Digital PR Podcast. We covered a lot of ground: what’s easier and harder about running an agency now compared to 2015, why AI has given digital PR a new lease of life and what actually protects your career when the tools keep getting better.
It also got personal. I talk about the client who came back to the agency years after I’d made a mistake on their project, with one condition: “We don’t want Paddy.” There’s the time I stood in front of my team and announced a goal of 100% team retention (yes, really). And the hosts asked the question every agency wrestles with but rarely says out loud: can you, and should you, have friends at work?
The full recording is below, with the key takeaways underneath if you want the short version.
Key takeaways from this episode
The agency business model is built to be stressful. You’re two lost clients away from disaster and two won clients away from taking off. It goes in cycles of easier and harder, and right now digital PR has more opportunity than it’s had in years thanks to LLMs making its value easier to demonstrate again.
AI has (partly) solved digital PR’s biggest problem. For years the hardest part was proving the impact of links and coverage on revenue. Now that visibility drives mentions in LLMs, the value conversation has become easier to have, not harder.
Soft skills are your protection against AI. The core PR skills (creative, outreach, ideation) are becoming table stakes. What AI can’t do is manage an angry client, say no constructively, or spot what’s going to go wrong on a project before the client does. Owners and managers notice these skills more than you think.
If you’re early in your career, lean into AI rather than avoiding it. You have to understand what it can do to your job before you can understand how to stay valuable alongside it.
Carrying the whole team’s mortgages on your shoulders isn’t healthy. Paddy talks honestly about the pressure of growing to 25+ people and feeling personally responsible for every mortgage, wedding and first child in the room, and why founders need to be kinder to themselves through the difficult periods.
Pick a lane on remote vs office and commit to it. Fully remote, fully in-office and hybrid can all work, but only if your policies, culture and ways of working actually support the choice. The mistake is choosing hybrid and not defining what it means, then finding your teams deliberately coming in on different days to avoid each other.
Going above and beyond gets noticed, whether we like it or not. It doesn’t have to mean crazy hours. Helping a colleague outside your remit counts. But doing your job strictly to the letter while expecting rapid progression doesn’t reconcile.
The three traits of a good leader: listening, empathy and trust. Most people who think they’re listening are actually rehearsing their reply. And none of these have to be natural. Paddy is open about learning them deliberately, partly as a result of a childhood speech impediment that made him a listener by accident.
People leaving your agency usually isn’t about you. Paddy shares the cringe of once standing in front of his team and announcing a goal of 100% team retention, and taking every departure personally for years afterwards. Exit interviews taught him that most of the time, nothing could have been changed.
And into Room 101 goes: GEO, made-up PR data, and domain authority. The hype around GEO doesn’t yet match its impact (though it will matter eventually), fabricated surveys and spokespeople are making a comeback thanks to AI and doing the industry no favours, and it’s time to judge sites on whether they’re actually valuable to a human rather than a metric.
