Erin James Murphy

Most agency owners I have talked to over the past eight years have never had real accountability.

Not from a coach. Not from a peer group. Not from anyone.

They set goals. They miss them. They reset. They miss again. And there is no one standing close enough to their business to notice.

The weekly accountability rhythm inside Boardroom is simple. Share your top focus for the week. End of week, share whether you finished it.

It is not complicated. It does not need to be. It just needs to actually exist.
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Eight years of working with agency founders. Here is something I have seen more times than I can count.

A founder spends months trying to land a client. Finally closes them. Gets on the onboarding call excited.

The call is 30 minutes. They cover the basics. Everyone leaves thinking they are aligned.

By week six the client is frustrated. Deliverables are not what they expected. Communication is inconsistent. The agency is scrambling to course-correct on a relationship that started sliding from day one.

The founder blames the client. The client blames the agency. Neither of them realizes the problem was built into the first 30 minutes.

What a 30-minute onboarding cannot do:

• Establish what the client is responsible for versus what the agency decides
• Set a real communication cadence with expectations on both sides
• Walk through what good feedback looks like and what bad feedback costs everyone
• Align on what success looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days
• Give the client enough context to trust the process when results take time

What you skip in onboarding you pay for in escalations, scope creep, and early churn.

The founders who figured this out have onboarding processes that run 60 to 90 minutes minimum and cover every one of those things deliberately.

They also have fewer problem clients. Not because they got lucky with who they signed. Because they built the relationship the right way from the start.

The first few Boardroom members are not joining a finished program.

They are shaping it. What the roundtables focus on. What the accountability structure looks like. Which guest experts show up.

That is not a consolation for being early. That is the advantage of being early.
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Every agency mastermind I have ever looked at is built for digital marketing agencies.

Paid ads shops. Performance marketing. Lead gen.

Nothing against them. But that is not PR.

PR agencies run differently. The client relationships are different. The margins work differently. The pressure is different. The way AI is hitting the work is different.

If PR is part of the core of what your agency does, and you have been trying to fit into rooms built for a different kind of agency, you are not the problem.

The room was.
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There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with running an agency once you cross a million dollars.

You are past the scrappy founder stage. Nobody feels sorry for you. Your team thinks you have it figured out. Your friends outside the business have no idea what you actually deal with every day.

But the problems got harder, not easier.

You are making decisions about leadership hires, pricing models, client concentration risk, whether to take on work you know will stretch the team. And you are making most of those decisions alone.

The weird part is that there are probably a few hundred other agency owners within 50 miles of you dealing with the exact same things. But you will never meet them. Not in the right context. Not in a way that actually helps.

I spent years watching this play out with agency founders I advised. Smart people. Capable people. Solving the same problems in isolation that a peer at the same stage could have shortcut in five minutes.

That is why I built Boardroom. A small peer group for agency owners where PR is part of the core offering. Monthly roundtables. Weekly accountability. Quarterly roadmap sessions. The room most agency owners say they have never actually had.

Not content. Not a course. Not another Slack group you will mute in two weeks.

Real peers. Real accountability. Real numbers shared openly.

If you have been carrying the weight of running this kind of agency mostly alone, that is not a character flaw. It is a structural gap. And it is fixable.
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The question I am hearing from PR and marketing agency founders more than any other right now:

"My clients are starting to ask why they are paying agency rates for work AI can do. What do I tell them?"

Here is the honest answer.

If your only response is "we use AI too," that is not an answer. That is a race to the bottom you will not win.

The agencies that are going to hold their rates, and raise them, are the ones that can articulate what the AI cannot do.

The judgment call on which story is worth pitching and which one is not.
The relationship with the journalist that gets the email opened.
The strategic read on why a campaign is landing flat.
The experience to know what a client actually needs versus what they asked for.

AI can produce a first draft. It cannot produce those things.

But here is the part most founders miss. You have to be able to say it that clearly. Not in a defensive way. Not in a "we are different because we care" way. In a specific, concrete way that a client who just saw an AI demo can actually hear.

The agencies losing clients to this conversation are the ones who never built a clear answer to it.

The ones winning are the ones who already knew exactly what made them worth the invoice.

I worked with a PR agency founder two years ago who had crossed $1M in revenue.

She booked a week off for the first time in four years. She was gone for three days before she flew home early.

Not because of an emergency. Because nothing could move without her.

Client questions were sitting unanswered. A pitch had stalled because no one knew if it was ready to send. A team member had made a call on a client issue and was not sure if it was right, so they waited.

The business had grown to seven figures but it was still running like she was the only person in it.

When we dug into it, the problem was not her team. Her team was capable. The problem was that nothing had ever been decided in writing. What the team could handle alone, what needed her sign-off, how to respond to common client situations. It all lived in her head.

So when she was not there, the team defaulted to waiting.

We spent three months building out decision frameworks, approval thresholds, and escalation protocols. What sounds boring is actually the thing that sets founders free.

She took another week off six months later. Came back to a business that had run fine without her.

If you cannot take a real week off without your phone running your agency for you, the business is not as built as you think it is.

"We already tried AI. It did not work."

That is the first thing a PR agency founder said to me when we got on a call last spring.

I asked what they tried.

They had hired a consultant to come in and train their team on ChatGPT and Claude. Two days of sessions. Everyone got a login. The founder paid around $8,000 for it.

Six months later, two people on the team were still using it occasionally. The rest had gone back to how they always worked.

Nothing had changed about how the agency operated.

That is not an AI failure. That is a training-versus-systems failure.

Teaching someone how to use a tool and building the workflow they use that tool inside of every day are two completely different things.

One changes what people know. The other changes how the work gets done.

When we came in, we did not touch the tools. We mapped their three highest-volume delivery workflows first. Pitch development, media reporting, and client onboarding. Then we built AI into those workflows so the tool was not something people had to remember to use. It was just part of how the work moved.

Three months later, those workflows were running consistently without the founder in the middle of them.

AI is not a training problem. It is an infrastructure problem. And you cannot infrastructure your way out of it with a two-day seminar.

A digital marketing agency founder came to me six months ago. $900K in revenue. Team of eight. Margins at 12%.

That margin number is what got my attention.

When we went into the agency and started mapping how work actually got done, we found the same deliverable being built differently by every account manager. Same type of client. Same type of campaign. Eight different approaches.

No standard intake. No brief template. No review process that anyone actually followed.

So every month the team was reinventing the wheel. And every month the founder was cleaning up the inconsistency in the output.

The founder thought she had a team problem. She did not. She had a workflow problem.

Nobody had ever written down how the work was supposed to get done. So everyone made it up, and the founder paid for it in rework, in client escalations, and in margin.

We spent six weeks building out the core delivery workflows. Not revolutionary. Not AI-powered. Just documented, consistent, and actually followed.

Margins moved to 24% within a quarter.

That is not uncommon. Most agency margin problems are not pricing problems. They are process problems dressed up as pricing problems.

If your team is doing the same type of work differently every single time, go find out why before you touch anything else.