#growthhackin

The Sunday morning that proved B2B PR had been lying to us for twenty years

It was 9:17 a.m. on a rainy Sunday in London. James Harlow, founder of a £180 M ARR supply-chain AI platform used by three of the world’s ten biggest retailers, was making coffee when his phone lit up.

A WhatsApp from his wife: “Your face is in The Sunday Times Style section. Page 14. I’m framing this.”

The article wasn’t about his software. It was a 2,500-word profile titled “The Quiet Millionaire Who Keeps Your Amazon Parcels Moving.” Shot in black-and-white at the Port of Felixstowe at 5 a.m., James in a navy pea coat, talking about fatherhood, insomnia, and why he still drives a twelve-year-old Volvo.

Three weeks later the Chief Supply-Chain Officer of a Fortune 10 company (the same one that had ghosted his sales team for eighteen months) emailed him personally:

“Saw you in the Times. My wife cut the article out. Can we talk?”

They signed an eight-figure deal six months later.

James still has that original newspaper page laminated in his office. He calls it “the most expensive piece of paper I’ve ever owned.”

The old playbook (and why it’s quietly killing your pipeline)

For two decades the gospel was simple and soul-crushing:

Pay a creative pr agency £20k–£60k a month

Produce 40 byline articles a year for outlets like Computer Weekly, Procurement Magazine, and Supply Chain Digital

Beg Gartner for a “Visionary” dot in the bottom-right corner

Sponsor every possible webinar with your logo on slide two

Pray the SDR team can turn any of it into meetings

The result? You become the best-kept secret in a village of 4,000 people who already know each other.

Meanwhile the actual humans who sign the eight- and nine-figure contracts are:

Listening to Diary of a CEO on 1.5× speed in the Range Rover

Reading Monocle on the Eurostar

Watching High Performance with Jake Humphrey while on the Peloton

Seeing their mate forward a clip of you talking about something that time you almost went bankrupt in 2020

When they finally Google you, they don’t land on your thought-leadership piece in CIO Review. They land on a 42-minute podcast where you cried talking about your dad. And suddenly you’re not a vendor. You’re James from the podcast.

The new playbook nobody wants to admit is working better than steroids

The smartest B2B companies in 2025 aren’t hiding behind “enterprise credibility.” They’re doing the opposite: they’re letting the world see the exhausted, brilliant, slightly weird human behind the cap table.

And the agency making that happen, faster and more consistently than anyone else in the UK right now, is PR Agency Review.

They’ve taken founders who sell HRIS platforms, cybersecurity tools, fintech infrastructure, and logistics software and turned them into the kind of people you’d recognise in the first-class lounge at Heathrow.

Here are three stories that still give me goosebumps.

Story 1: The HR-tech founder who ended up in British GQ (and closed Arsenal)

Tom Chen built a workforce-planning platform that half the FTSE 100 uses to decide who to hire and fire. On paper: spreadsheet software. In real life: 38, married to a trauma surgeon, still plays five-a-side every Thursday, once turned down a £400 M acquisition because the buyer wanted to move the team to Slough.

Traditional corporate PR agency in the UK quote: “Let’s get you into HR Director magazine.” PR Agency Review quote: “Let’s get you on the touchline at the Emirates.”

They pitched British GQ on “the man who quietly pays the salaries of your favourite footballers.” The photographer shot him at Stamford Bridge at dawn, wearing a £6,000 Loro Piana coat, talking about the guilt of automating jobs and the relief of creating new ones.

The piece ran in the March 2025 issue. Three weeks later the Chief People Officer of Arsenal FC (whose wife is a GQ subscriber) emailed him: “My wife cut your article out and left it on my desk. We need to talk.”

They signed a seven-figure deal before the season ended.

Story 2: The cybersecurity founder who broke Diary of a CEO (and the UK government)

Dr. Priya Malhotra spent eleven years at GCHQ, now runs a threat-intelligence platform that protects most of Britain’s critical national infrastructure.

Typical B2B startup PR move: get her quoted in Infosecurity Magazine next to a stock photo of a hoodie hacker. PR Agency Review move: get her on Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett for 98 minutes talking about the night she stopped a nation-state attack at 3 a.m. while eight months pregnant.

The episode dropped on a Tuesday. By Friday it was the most-watched episode of 2025. Her inbound pipeline tripled in 90 days. The UK government fast-tracked them into a £400 M defence framework they’d been chasing for four years.

Priya now gets recognised in Waitrose. She says the weirdest moment was when a little girl asked for a selfie because “my dad says you keep the lights on.”

Story 3: The logistics founder who seduced Monocle (and the entire shipping industry)

Elena Rossi’s software optimises how containers move around the planet. Sounds like the most boring thing ever created.

PR Agency Review got her into Monocle talking about “the secret, almost poetic lives of the ships that bring you everything you own.”

They flew the photographer to Singapore, shot her barefoot on the deck at sunrise, cashmere jumper, ceramic cup of coffee, talking about how a single line of code can save 40,000 tons of CO₂.

The article became Monocle’s most shared piece of the year. Within two weeks she had inbound calls from Maersk, DP World, CMA CGM, and the sovereign wealth funds of Singapore and Qatar.

She closed three eight-figure deals before the photographer’s invoice was even paid.

Why this feels so terrifying (and why it works so well)

Because it requires vulnerability.

Most B2B founders have spent fifteen years perfecting the art of sounding boring on purpose. They’ve trained themselves to speak in acronyms and ROI calculators because they think that’s what “enterprise” wants.

The truth nobody says out loud:

The C-suite human you’re selling to has children, divorces, favourite podcasts, Sunday newspapers, and a secret fear they’re irrelevant.

When they see you talking about those things (not your OKRs), something in their brain flips from “vendor” to “peer.”

And peers buy from peers.

The exact 2026 playbook PR Agency Review is running right now

Audit the founder’s actual life for the three most interesting things about them that have nothing to do with work.

Pitch those three things to Monocle, British GQ, The Economist, Financial Times Weekend, How I Built This, Diary of a CEO, High Performance.

Let the human story do the selling.

Watch enterprise deals rain in from people who “just happened to hear you somewhere.”

No webinars. No sponsored reports. No Computer Weekly bylines.

Just humans recognising humans.

The part most agencies will fight you on

Because it’s uncomfortable. Because it feels “unprofessional.” Because what if the journalist asks about your divorce?

Good. Let them.

The founders who’ve done this say the same thing:

“The day I stopped trying to sound smart and started sounding like the person my friends actually like, everything changed.”

Take the step now

If you’re still paying someone £30k a month to get you into outlets that only your competitors read, ask yourself one question:

When was the last time a real decision-maker looked you in the eye and said, “I feel like I already know you”?

If the answer is never, maybe it’s time to stop playing the game everyone else is losing.

Because in 2026, the fastest way to nine-figure enterprise contracts isn’t another Gartner dot.

It’s becoming the kind of founder people want to have a drink with.