The questions to ask a PR agency before you sign, from a founder who answers them in public every month.
There is a home video of Riannon Palmer at eight years old, trying to sell her photography services to her dad’s old video camera. She found it this summer and posted it. “Apparently, my sales strategy back then was pretty simple,” she wrote. “Tell people what I could do. Tell them how to contact me. And then beg them to get in touch.” Twenty-two years on, she has a PR agency, and by her own account the method has been refined. “I’ve swapped photography for PR, the video camera for LinkedIn and thankfully improved the sales technique slightly,” she wrote. “Although I’m pleased to report that ‘please, please, please get in touch’ is no longer part of Lem-uhn’s new business strategy.”
What replaced it is a number. In August, by her count, Lem-uhn secured an average of 21.5 pieces of coverage per client, in The Sun, Daily Express, Stylist, HuffPost and Harper’s Bazaar among others. She put that figure on LinkedIn because it’s the question she gets on new business calls, and because she’d rather be judged on it than on anything older. “One of the reasons I talk so openly about our recent results is because I want prospective clients to judge us on what we are doing now,” she says.
It is also the figure she thinks every agency should be asked for, and most are not. A founder choosing one for the first time is usually shown logos instead. “Agencies can show you an impressive slide of logos or a brilliant case study from years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you what they’re delivering for their clients today,” she says. “PR can be quite an opaque industry.”
Riannon is the founder and managing director of Lem-uhn, the London PR agency she started in May 2021 and describes in one sentence as “the feel-good PR agency, helping purpose-led and changemaker brands grow through positive, results-driven PR.” It is a certified B Corp. What she wants from a piece like this one is to “make more people question what they should actually expect from a PR agency,” and, she adds, to introduce the agency to businesses that share its ethos. “If a few of them decide we’re the right PR agency for them, I won’t complain!”
The Questions to Ask
“I think it can be really hard to choose a PR agency because you can see all these shiny logos and big companies an agency has worked with before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the right agency for you,” Riannon says. “If they haven’t worked with companies in your industry or businesses of a similar size, they might not actually be best positioned to help you.”
So she gives founders a short list. “Ask what they actually got for their clients in the past month. Who will actually be working on your account? Can you see examples of results for businesses like yours? Can you speak to an existing client?” The other half of the test is how the agency reacts. “And agencies should be comfortable answering those questions.”
If someone is considering spending thousands of pounds a month on PR, they should feel completely comfortable asking: What are you securing for clients right now? What results have you delivered in the last month? Can I speak to your existing clients?
The number of pieces isn’t the point on its own, and she says so in the same breath as she publishes hers. “I’d also never tell someone to choose an agency purely because they secure the highest number of pieces. One brilliant article in exactly the right publication can be much more valuable than 20 irrelevant pieces of coverage.”
Price is the other trap. She remembers a prospective client who chose a cheaper agency over Lem-uhn. “About a year later, they came back because it hadn’t worked out and they ended up working with us instead,” she says. “So I’d also say don’t automatically choose the cheapest agency. Make sure you know it’s the right agency for you. It can be much more expensive to waste money with the wrong agency than to invest a little more in the right one in the first place.”
What she means by the right results is easiest to see in one client.
What Happened Beyond the Coverage
Purpl is a savings platform for disabled people, “exactly the kind of changemaker business we love working with,” Riannon says. Over twelve months Lem-uhn secured 312 pieces of coverage for it, including BBC News, The Independent, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Metro, The Sun and Mail Online, using what she describes as “a combination of data-led stories, personal insight and storytelling to build the brand.”
The figures she cares about come after that. Purpl saw an average monthly rise in web traffic of 75%, Google searches rose by 182%, and the company quadrupled its members. Those are Riannon’s figures, from her own reporting on the account.
Coverage is the output, not the end goal.
“That’s what good PR should do,” she says. “Obviously I love seeing our clients in brilliant publications, but ultimately we’re doing PR to help their businesses grow.” Which businesses get that work from her is a deliberate choice.
Feel-Good PR in Practice
Lem-uhn works with purpose-led and changemaker businesses only. “Feel-good PR is all about using the power of PR for good,” Riannon says. “We want to grow companies that are building a happier world and share our ethos.” In practice, she says, “it’s about finding the positive elements of a company’s story and using them to drive press coverage. People increasingly want to buy from good brands, so if you can show that you’re not only selling a great product or service, but that you’re also a great business, that can help drive sales too.”
The buying pattern she describes shows up in the research. Edelman’s 2025 brand trust report, a survey of 15,000 people across 15 countries, found that 64% choose brands based on their beliefs, up four points on the previous year, and 68% say it is very or extremely important that a brand makes them feel good.
The person who shaped how she thinks about that came from outside PR. “Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble,” she says. “She built Bumble around the idea that online dating could work differently, with women at the centre of the experience. What I find particularly inspiring is that the purpose wasn’t something added afterwards as a marketing message. It was part of the business from the beginning.” Seeing that, she says, “gave me confidence that purpose and commercial success don’t have to be separate.” She is careful about the comparison: “Obviously Lem-uhn is operating on a completely different scale, but that idea has definitely influenced how I think about the business.”
The agency she built on that idea had a specific starting point.
The Agency She Wanted to Join
“Before starting the agency, I was working incredibly long hours,” Riannon says. “At one point I was working around 65 hours a week and experiencing panic attacks. I wanted to work for an agency that cared about its employees, and eventually I realised I needed to build it myself.”
Her experience is not a rare one in her profession. The CIPR and PRCA’s 2023/24 Mental Wellbeing Audit found that 91% of PR professionals reported poor mental health in the previous twelve months, against 63% of UK workers as a whole.
She started Lem-uhn in May 2021. About six months in, the company nearly ended. “A company with a similar name threatened to sue us,” she says. “A lengthy legal letter landed, and I was terrified. For a moment, I genuinely considered closing the business before it had really begun.” The response was a rebrand, and the name that came out of it is the one the agency carries now. “Looking back, it was probably one of the best things that could have happened. Our original branding wasn’t particularly distinctive, whereas people now regularly tell us how memorable Lem-uhn is. Sometimes the thing that feels disastrous in the moment ends up pushing you somewhere much better.”
The case she makes for the agency now rests on its own figures. “Five years later, we’ve shown that treating people properly doesn’t come at the expense of commercial success. We grew 20% last year, and our latest employee happiness score was 9/10.” She has written about it from a distance, too. In September she posted about a family holiday in Puglia on which she worked for a total of twelve minutes, to send some urgent contracts. “Turns out the business is perfectly capable of surviving without me,” she wrote.
Running it has changed what she thinks a client is buying.
What Clients Are Buying
“I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is how important it is not to overpromise,” Riannon says. “As the founder, I see the whole journey. I see the initial enquiry, the sales process, the proposal, the client’s expectations, the work itself, the results, their feedback and whether they ultimately decide to keep investing with us.”
“It has also taught me that clients aren’t only buying coverage. They’re buying trust. They want a team that communicates well, responds quickly, brings them ideas and genuinely cares about their business.” When Lem-uhn asks its clients what they value, she says, “the team, communication and proactivity come up alongside the quality and volume of coverage.”
That is where her line comes from, the one she has said to BBC News and repeats on her own page. “I genuinely believe happier employees do better work,” she says. “PR is a people business. You need people to be creative, proactive and excited about what they’re working on.”
I don’t think you get the best out of people by burning them out.
She keeps one habit that applies the same idea to herself. “I write down three happy moments from my day. They don’t need to be big things. It might be a great piece of client coverage, seeing my nieces, a good gym class or having lunch in the sunshine. I’m naturally ambitious and always thinking about the next thing, so it forces me to stop and notice what’s already good.”
Where Riannon Is Now
Alongside the agency, Riannon mentors early-stage founders with Virgin StartUp and Digital Boost. She has been named in Management Today’s 35 Under 35 and won the Women in Marketing Changemaker’s Award, and Lem-uhn was named Micro Agency of the Year by PR Moment in 2023. Each summer she gives one small business owner a free PR Power Hour, an hour on the stories they could be telling and the journalists who might want them, and this year she is also looking to build a network of US consumer PR freelancers the agency can work with on client projects.
Outside work, she travels. “I’m a big traveller. Our Work From Anywhere policy came partly from wanting the team to have the freedom to experience more of the world without having to squeeze everything into annual leave.” Closer to home, her entry for the diary is this: “When I’m not working, I can be found at my local CrossFit gym or padel court. I love keeping fit, and often work from the cafe nearby afterwards.”
What’s next, in her words: “I want to keep growing Lem-uhn, work with more brilliant companies that are making the world better and create more great jobs for people in PR.”
“I want to prove that you can grow a successful agency, get brilliant results for clients and have a happy team at the same time.”
Five Lines from Riannon’s Diary
- “Happier employees do better work.”
- “Coverage is the output, not the end goal.”
- “Clients aren’t only buying coverage. They’re buying trust.”
- “Don’t automatically choose the cheapest agency. Make sure you know it’s the right agency for you.”
- “When life gives you lemons, make lem-uhn-ade.”
