By Disrupt PR | 2025 Bulldog PR Awards Gold Winner, Best Boutique Agency
A founder messaged me last week. She’d been paying her PR agency $14,000 a month for eight months. Total placements: two. One trade blog. One “contributor” byline she paid extra to promote.
She asked me one question: “How do I know if my agency is actually working?”
I gave her three questions to ask her account lead. She sent them. Her account lead couldn’t answer any of them clearly. She canceled her contract that week.
If you’re paying for PR right now, whether it’s $5,000 a month or $25,000, this is the test. It takes five minutes, and the answers will tell you more than any monthly report ever will.
The short answer
Ask your PR agency these three questions:
- When was the last time your senior lead personally called a journalist on your behalf?
- Can they name three reporters covering your space this month, what they wrote, and what they’re likely to write next?
- In the last 90 days, has your coverage run in a publication your actual buyers read?
If they hesitate on any of these, you’re not in a PR relationship. You’re in a subscription — and subscriptions are the easiest thing in the world to cancel.
Why most founders don’t know if their PR is working
PR is one of the only line items on a marketing budget that most buyers can’t independently evaluate. You can look at a Google Ads dashboard and see cost-per-click. You can look at an email platform and see open rates. PR reporting, by contrast, is often a PDF full of “media impressions” and “share of voice”, numbers that sound like progress but don’t actually tell you whether the work is landing.
That gap is exactly where underperforming agencies hide.
Question 1: Who is actually doing the work?
Every PR agency proposal features the senior partner, the person with the big bio, the recognizable clients, the credentials that made you feel confident signing the contract.
Ask directly: “When was the last time [senior partner] personally called a journalist on my behalf?”
Not “reached out.” Not “sent an email.” Called.
If the honest answer is “the senior partner sits in on the strategy call, but a junior account executive handles the day-to-day pitching”, that’s not automatically disqualifying. Plenty of agencies operate this way. But you should know it going in, and you should be paying accordingly. If you’re paying senior-partner rates for junior-associate execution, that’s the gap costing you.
Question 2: Do they have relationships, or a spreadsheet?
Ask: “Can you name three reporters currently covering our space, tell me what they wrote this month, and what they’re likely to cover next?”
A real answer sounds specific: a name, a recent byline, an editorial angle they’re tracking. A weak answer sounds generic: “we have relationships with top-tier media” with no names attached.
The difference matters more than it sounds. A media list is a spreadsheet of email addresses. A relationship is a reporter who opens your agency’s email because they trust what’s inside it. One of these gets you coverage. The other gets you filtered into spam.
Question 3: Is the coverage actually working for your buyers?
Ask: “In the last 90 days, where has our brand appeared that our actual customers would see?”
This is the question that separates real PR from PR theater. A “contributor” byline on a site that sells placements isn’t earned coverage, it’s paid content wearing an editorial costume. A trade blog with 400 monthly readers might be technically “press,” but if none of your buyers read it, it’s not moving your business.
Real coverage should be traceable to something: a spike in branded search, a sales conversation that references the article, a candidate who applied because they saw the story. If your agency can’t point to any business impact from the last quarter of coverage, that’s the clearest signal of all.
What “good” actually looks like
To be fair to the agencies doing this right, here’s the other side of the test. A PR relationship that’s working usually looks like this:
- Specificity in reporting. Not “12 media touches this month” but “here’s the Forbes piece, here’s the reporter who wrote it, here’s what she’s covering next that we’re already pitching.”
- Senior involvement you can verify. Not just senior names on the proposal, but senior people showing up on your weekly calls and personally sending the pitches that land.
- Coverage your buyers would actually see. Publications your customers read, not obscure trade sites that pad a monthly report.
- A narrative that compounds. Each placement builds on the last — the same 2-3 messages showing up in different outlets, not a scattered story every month with no throughline.
If most of that sounds like what you’re getting, you’re likely in good hands. If none of it does, the three questions above will confirm it either way.
The math on staying in a bad PR relationship
Here’s what most founders don’t calculate: a $10,000/month retainer that produces nothing costs you $120,000 a year — not in the invoice, but in the opportunity you didn’t take. That’s a senior hire you didn’t make, a product feature you didn’t ship, a founder story that never got told while your competitor’s did.
Bad PR isn’t neutral. It’s actively expensive, because the budget and the attention it consumes could have gone toward something that worked.
If the answers weren’t good
If your current agency failed this test, you have three options, roughly in order of effort:
- Have the direct conversation. Sometimes a candid conversation with your account lead resets expectations and fixes the problem in one meeting. Worth trying first, especially if you’re mid-contract.
- Downgrade to project-based work. If the retainer isn’t earning its keep, some agencies will shift to a single defined project (a launch, an audit) so you can evaluate quality before recommitting to a monthly spend.
- Move to a senior-led agency built to pass this test. If the pattern has repeated for more than one quarter, it’s rarely a one-off — it’s usually structural, tied to how the agency staffs accounts. That’s worth solving with a change, not another quarter of hoping.
The honest bottom line
You don’t need to become a PR expert to know if your PR agency is working. You need three specific answers, and five minutes to ask for them.
Most agencies that are actually delivering will answer confidently, with names and specifics, because the truth is on their side. The ones that hesitate are telling you something too — you just have to be willing to hear it.
Disrupt PR is the 2025 Bulldog PR Awards Gold Winner for Best Boutique Agency, the only PR awards program judged exclusively by working journalists. Founded by former Emmy-nominated broadcast journalist Marin Richardson, our team specializes in earning press coverage in top-tier outlets including The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC, and Good Morning America, for growth-stage companies, funded startups, and established brands. If your current PR isn’t passing this test, book a discovery call to talk through what senior-led PR actually looks like.
