PR Agency (Part 1)

How a PR professional turned a career setback into a specialist textiles agency, using a foundation year to bridge the gap between professional expertise and personal passion.

Starting point: Redundancy during maternity leave | Location: London | Year: 2023 | Monthly Strategic Business Coaching

How Cat Came to Work With Me

Cat was put in touch with me by an existing client. Her second daughter was a few weeks old and she’d just been made redundant from an in-house PR role.

She’s not alone in that experience. Research suggests that up to 74,000 women a year lose their jobs for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave. Cat was determined not to become a statistic — but the redundancy had knocked her confidence hard, and she was facing some big decisions at a point when everything felt uncertain.

We met for a half-day strategy session to talk through where she was and what she wanted to build.

What I Found

Cat had a strong professional background in PR, communications, and campaigns. The obvious path was to set up a generalist PR agency and use her existing network to win clients. It would have been the safe choice and, honestly, the one that most business advisors would have encouraged.

But it was clear within the first hour that Cat had very little enthusiasm for that direction. She could do it, certainly. But the energy wasn’t there.

So I probed. I asked about sectors she might want to specialise in. Nothing lit up. Then I circled back to something I’d noticed earlier in the conversation. When Cat had mentioned her degree — in Sustainable and Ethical Fashion — I’d detected both genuine interest and real regret. She’d never used it professionally.

That’s the kind of thing I listen for in a strategy session. I’m trying to understand what my client wants to be known for and who they want to be known by. I’m looking for the values that drive them, the vision they have for their business, and what I think of as their ethical foundations — the things they care about that aren’t negotiable.

When I brought the conversation back to sustainable fashion and textiles, the energy shifted completely. Cat started talking about the industry with a depth of knowledge and a passion that hadn’t been present when we were discussing generic PR. This wasn’t a passing interest. It was something she’d cared about for years and had never had the chance to pursue.

The strategic question became clear: could Cat build a specialist PR agency for the sustainable textiles industry — an industry she knew deeply through her education but had never worked in professionally?

The Challenge

This is the kind of strategic choice that looks obvious in retrospect but feels anything but at the time. Cat had all the PR expertise she needed. What she didn’t have was a professional network in the textiles industry, a track record of delivering PR for textile brands, or visibility in a sector where nobody yet knew her name.

On top of that, she had a newborn and a toddler, her confidence had taken a serious hit, and she needed to generate income.

Telling someone in that position to just leap into an unfamiliar industry would have been irresponsible. But telling her to build the safe, generic agency when her heart wasn’t in it would have been a different kind of mistake — the kind that leads to a business that pays the bills but doesn’t feed the soul, and that eventually needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

We needed a plan that honoured both realities: the need for financial stability now and the ambition to build something meaningful over time.

The Foundation Year

We designed what I think of as a foundation year. The idea is simple: rather than setting arbitrary revenue targets that could set Cat up for failure, we focused on the projects that needed completing — and completing well — to create the conditions for growth.

A foundation year takes the pressure off. But it requires enough money to fund it. So the plan had two tracks running in parallel.

Track One: Financial Stability

Cat would use her existing professional network to win three retained PR clients. These didn’t need to be in sustainable textiles — they needed to be good clients who valued her work and could provide a stable income of around £10,000 a month. This gave Cat the financial foundation to invest in the longer game.

We also set up her financial arrangements properly from the start. Thirty per cent of revenue went into a financial cushion to fund strategic projects — brand strategy, website development, conference attendance — and pension contributions. This isn’t something most founders think about in year one, but it makes a significant difference to both financial resilience and peace of mind.

Track Two: Building Toward the Vision

While the retained clients provided income, Cat would spend the year systematically building her presence in the sustainable textiles industry. This meant attending key conferences — the UKFT Sustainability Conference, the Textile Exchange Conference — where she could meet the people she wanted to serve, understand their challenges, and begin building relationships.

It also meant doing the desk research to validate the market. Was the sustainable textiles industry big enough to sustain a specialist PR agency? Was it growing? Were the businesses in it commercially developed enough to want and pay for professional PR? Cat needed to answer these questions with evidence, not assumption.

And it meant developing a clear positioning, a brand strategy, and the visual assets — including a website — that would signal to the textiles industry that Cat was serious, specialist, and worth talking to.

Track Three: Looking After Cat

This is the part that often gets overlooked in business strategy, and I think it matters enormously. Cat was recovering from redundancy during maternity leave. She had a newborn and a toddler. Her confidence was bruised.

We built support into the plan deliberately. Cat brought in a part-time EA for two hours a day to handle tasks she didn’t need to do herself. She got help with domestic tasks to free up time and mental space. We prioritised her health and wellbeing — not by dwelling on it, but by making it a non-negotiable part of the plan rather than something she’d get round to when the business was more established.

This isn’t a luxury. When a founder is running on empty, every business decision suffers. Creating the conditions for Cat to work well was as much a strategic choice as the market positioning.

Finding the Right Positioning

Within the first three months, after Cat had completed her market research and we’d worked through the positioning together, we arrived at something clear:

We help textile and fabric brands build reputations across design, trade, retail, and export ecosystems. From legacy mills to artisanal startups, our PR unlocks both global and domestic media reach.

This positioning does several things well. It speaks directly to the industry — textile and fabric brands, legacy mills, artisanal startups. It names the specific ecosystems Cat would operate across — design, trade, retail, export. And it makes a clear promise about what her PR delivers: reputation and media reach, both global and domestic.

Notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t mention sustainable or ethical fashion specifically. That’s deliberate. Cat’s values around sustainability are central to who she is and which clients she wants to attract. But the positioning leads with what the client needs — reputation and reach — rather than with Cat’s personal values. The values alignment happens naturally when the right clients find her.

What Cat Achieved in Year One

By the end of her foundation year, Cat had built something solid.

• Five high-value retained clients providing stable monthly revenue.

• A trusted network of specialist freelancers to support client delivery.

• Three industry conferences attended — building the relationships and visibility she needed.

• A pipeline of potential ideal clients identified through her growing industry network.

• A completed brand strategy, website, and visual assets designed specifically for her target market.

• Content created for and relevant to the sustainable textiles industry.

• Financial cushion and proper business infrastructure in place from day one.

Perhaps most importantly, Cat had done all of this while looking after two small children, recovering her confidence, and building a business she actually wanted to run. The foundation year gave her permission to take the time she needed — and the structure to make that time count.

Why This Approach Worked

Looking back, several things were critical.

We didn’t force a choice between stability and ambition. Cat’s existing network funded the foundation year while she built relationships in a new industry. Too many founders think they have to choose between earning money now and building something meaningful. You don’t. You just need a plan that does both.

We exercised strategic patience. Cat didn’t try to win textiles clients in month one. She spent the year learning the industry from the inside — attending conferences, meeting people, understanding their challenges. By the time she was ready to pitch, she wasn’t an outsider asking for a chance. She was someone the industry was starting to recognise.

We validated the market before committing to it. Cat’s desk research confirmed that the sustainable textiles industry was big enough, growing, and commercially ready for specialist PR. This wasn’t a leap of faith. It was an evidence-based strategic choice.

We made Cat’s wellbeing part of the strategy, not an afterthought. The EA, the domestic support, the explicit priority on health — these weren’t indulgences. They were what allowed Cat to show up consistently and do good work during a year when she had every reason to be overwhelmed.

We built from what was true. Cat’s degree in Sustainable and Ethical Fashion wasn’t a random credential. It was evidence of a deep, long-standing commitment to an industry she understood intellectually and cared about personally. The strategic choice we made together didn’t invent something new — it connected what she already knew to what she could now build.

What Comes Next

This is Part 1 of Cat’s story — setting the foundations. In Part 2, I’ll share what happened when those foundations started to compound: how Cat grew the agency, won clients in the textiles industry, and built the reputation she’d spent year one preparing for.

The foundation year is something I come back to often in my work with founders. Not every client needs one — some arrive with the clarity and infrastructure already in place. But for founders starting from a difficult moment, building in an unfamiliar industry, or navigating significant personal circumstances alongside business growth, giving yourself permission to build the foundations properly before chasing the numbers can make the difference between a business that lasts and one that burns out.

If Cat’s story resonates with you - whether you’re building in an unfamiliar industry, recovering from a difficult professional experience, or trying to find the right balance between stability and ambition - I’d welcome a conversation. I offer a half-day strategy session as the starting point for all my client work. It’s where we establish where your business is and where you want it to be.

Denyse Whillier, The Purpose Company,

Helping founders grow their business without losing what makes it special