Most founders think about their first PR agency as something they need for a phase: useful now, replaceable later. That is usually the wrong way to think about it and evidence suggests that instinct is expensive.
According to a 2025 joint report from the ANA and 4As, the average client-agency relationship tenure has more than doubled since 2016, from 3.2 years to approximately seven years. Independent agencies now average 7.3 years with the same client. The relationship that begins at your first significant moment is, statistically, more likely to still be running when you scale than most founding teams expect, which means the first agency choice is not a campaign decision, it is a compounding business decision.
Narrative is an investor signal, not a marketing asset
The first thing a good communications partner builds is not coverage. It is the story the market will use to understand you. And that story travels further and faster than most founders anticipate. Research shows that startups with coherent brand narratives aligned to a clear mission attract 35% higher investor engagement, and those with consistent professional brand positioning report valuations approximately 23% higher than comparable companies without it.
In MENA, where investor circles are smaller than they look and reputations travel quickly, this is not a marginal advantage. The narrative your first agency sets does not disappear when a campaign ends. It becomes the ambient impression that investors, journalists, and potential partners carry about your company. That impression gets priced in, positively or negatively, long before your next round.
I have seen founders spend their first year in market saying technically accurate things that were strategically wrong. Course correction, when it eventually happens, costs multiples of what getting it right from the beginning would have.
First brief becomes the operating system
The single biggest predictor of a successful first PR relationship is the quality of the brief. Not the budget – the brief.
Founders who brief an agency on what they want to announce get activity. Founders who brief around what they need to become get strategy. Founders who brief an agency on what they want to stand for get something more durable: a strategic partner who is invested in the same outcome they are. Those two relationships feel identical in month one and are unrecognizable from each other by month twelve.
The agencies that serve founders well at the earliest stage ask questions that feel almost impertinent: What is your revenue model? Who are your actual decision-makers, and how do they think? What does a win look like in six months, and why? And what needs to move commercially because of communications? If those questions are not happening before scope is signed, they probably will not happen at all. And without them, the agency is executing, not advising. Those are different things, and founders who pay agency rates for execution eventually notice.
Return business is the metric most agencies do not talk about enough
There is a metric that rarely appears in agency credentials decks but tells you more about an agency’s actual value than any campaign case study: return business. Specifically, whether the founders they have worked with come back.
The best PR relationships in this market do not end when a funding round closes or a launch cycle wraps. They evolve. The pre-seed founder who trusted you becomes the Series B CEO who calls you first when the next challenge arrives. The entrepreneur who built one brand with you starts a second company and brings you with them. That pattern, repeated across a client base, is the only honest proof that a first PR relationship delivered more than deliverables.
From the agency side, return business and referrals from existing clients are the strongest indicator of genuine performance. Not retention driven by inertia or contract lock-in, but the active choice of a founder who could go anywhere and comes back. Agencies that chase constant newness at the expense of depth are building the wrong kind of reputation. Founder communities notice.
For founders, the inverse is equally true. If you worked with an agency that you would not call again, that is worth reflecting on. Was it the work, the relationship, or the brief you gave them? The answer usually points back toward the original choice and what you were actually asking for when you made it.
What this means in practice
Choosing a PR agency when you are early, still figuring out your market position, and under pressure to show momentum is one of the highest-leverage decisions a founder makes, precisely because it happens at the moment when it feels least like a strategic decision. The instinct is to optimize for speed, outputs and immediate visibility, but the better instinct is to ask who can build with you.
Do they understand your business model, not just your product? Are you getting access to experienced minds, or are you being sold on senior credentials and handed to a junior team? Is the engagement structured around your actual stage, or around what keeps their retainer in place?
These are not checklist questions. They are the shape of a conversation that will tell you, faster than any credentials presentation, whether you are looking at a campaign vendor or a communications partner. The distinction matters. Everything the market comes to believe about your brand begins somewhere.
Make sure it begins with a partner who understands what you are building, where you are going and what needs to move now.
Choosing your first communications partner is not about who can make noise fastest, it is about who can help you build the narrative, credibility and market understanding that will still matter when the company is bigger, the stakes are higher and the audience is less forgiving. The first campaign will pass but the story it leaves behind will not.
(Bianca Riley is General Manager of RF Thunder MENA)
