PR agency advisor. Non-exec. Industry tinker, and tinkerer. Podcaster.
Build an agency people can’t ignore.
I’m Rich Leigh, and I run PR advisory company: Rich Leigh & Company.
I help founders and leaders of small to medium-sized PR agencies build companies that get noticed for all the right reasons.
I’ve spent 20 years in PR, built a seven-figure, award-winning agency and sold it. Now I offer ongoing advice to people doing it themselves, all around the world.
From new business and adding structure as you grow to building a company people are proud to work for, I’m here to help agency founders and leaders get to the next level. That includes building towards an exit, if that’s part of your plan.
Let’s talk about your business →
Who am I?
For the last 20 years, I’ve helped hundreds of clients build brands that people just can’t ignore, and I’ve protected their reputation.
I founded Radioactive PR at 27. I built it into a seven-figure business and sold it over a decade later. I know what it takes to win attention, build a brilliant team and keep clients happy.
And I did it by starting about as far from the PR industry as is possible.
I was a teenage dad from a council house in a city called Gloucester, England. I fell into the industry after a couple of years working in fitness, as the financial crash took hold.
I don’t have a single A-Level to my name, let alone a degree. And yet, I built a name for myself and then my agency. Clients can’t so much as shortlist your agency if you’re invisible to them.
I ran Radioactive based on the principle that being great at what you do matters, first and foremost. That a happy team does great work, and that great work makes for happy clients. But people need to know about you, too.
-
A quick disclaimer - selling isn’t just about knowing who your target client or customer is - often, it’s knowing who they’re not. So, big corporate agency types, there’ll be the odd exception, but I’m probably not the advisor for you.
I once got a properly sh***y email from somebody from one of the big global agencies that said me changing my name by deed poll to Mr PR - first name Public, last name Relations - was ‘bringing the industry into disrepute’. PAH. He should see some of the stunts I’ve been behind.
How we can work together.
Winning new business and retaining clients is the name of the game - but, for agency leaders, building a successful company, especially in an ever-changing market, can be a long, lonely and uncertain road. I know that all too well.
Nobody cares as much as you do about your business - how could they? But, I can empathise. I’ve been exactly where you are, and I offer hard-earned advice and guidance to help you with culture and your bottom line. I used advisors throughout my career, and the experiences varied. Personality fit is everything.
If you like what you see, bring me in. Let me support you wherever in the company you need me most, and I’ll help you, authentically, and for all the right reasons, reach potential clients - and attract, empower and retain the best talent, too. That can mean working towards an exit, or simply building the option to sell one day.
Ongoing advice
Support for founders and leadership teams building an agency people can’t ignore - and a business people want to work for. Profile, positioning, new business, hiring, culture and profitability. Support with the decisions that keep clients staying and paying.
Non-executive roles
An outside perspective from someone who has built, run and sold an agency. A sounding board for you and your leadership team, with the experience to challenge, encourage and help you decide what comes next.
Creative counsel
Pitching for a big potential client? Bring me in for one-off creative counsel and support. I can help you develop and sharpen the ideas that make people pay attention.
Brands and industry suppliers, too.
I help brands build and improve their in-house PR and comms functions, with or without agency support. I also help industry suppliers understand what PR buyers actually want and need, drawing on my experience from the agency side. Surprise me.
Let’s talk about your business →
Recommended!
“As a busy founder, I didn't need somebody who added to my workload. I needed somebody with experience, who understood my business and could halve a headache or two. That's what Rich gave me.”
Ben Smith, founder, PRmoment
-
“I wasn't looking for an advisor, but when I saw Rich's shout-out on LinkedIn that he had some capacity, we had a chat. Over a few conversations I worked out what I needed. As a busy founder, I didn't need somebody who added to my workload. I needed somebody with experience, who understood my business and could halve a headache or two. That's what Rich gave me.
“I can give him a problem, knowing he’ll do the digging, come back with a clear plan, follow through and sort it. And it's worked a treat. He's helped me get stuff done that, in reality, was very unlikely to get to the top of my to-do list otherwise. Recommended!”
Ben Smith, founder, PRmoment
SOME personal industry accomplishments
Author, #1 Amazon best-seller
#1 most influential pr person on twitter
In top 25 pr innovators
top 100 Most Influential pr tech leaders In The World
built and sold UK’s #1 pr blog
Top 100 Most Influential PR Agency Professionals In The World
Top 20 pr thought leader
29 under 29
(Note - I wasn’t going to include this, but hey, I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now. It showed young me I was doing the right things).
PR Week (2012)
nice things people have said about me
(And I didn’t even have to pay them (yet). in fact, some were clients and paid ME)
“Rich Leigh’s passion, experience and creativity sets him aside as one of the top PR professionals in the country.”
Patrick ‘Paddy’ Power, Head of Comms, Paddy Power
“If I could marry a book, Rich’s would be the one! I love it so much, I wish I’d written it.”
Gini Dietrich, CEO, Spin Sucks
“A pleasure to work with! Always going above and beyond.”
Shula Rael, Head of Comms, Bath Rugby
“One of the wisest and most positive people I’ve come across in PR”
Gary Preston, CEO, Coveragebook
“An industry original: talented, creative, entrepreneurial, and generally just an all-round good bloke.”
Andrew Bloch, Lord Sugar’s PR advisor (and man with finger in many industry pies)
“If PR is in the dock, I’d choose Rich to represent us over any large agency MD.”
Max Tatton-Brown, founder, Applied AI
“Rich Leigh is one of the good guys of PR.”
Alex Myers, Global CEO, Manifest
“The brain stem we never knew we needed! His advice and support was always timely, practical and relevant. Always available when we needed him most.”
Matteo Bergamini MBE, CEO, Shoutout UK
“Mr PR himself! An inspirational creative powerhouse, with a sharp, strategic mind.”
Lizzie Earl, CEO, Stakked
“Genuinely one of the best people I know. He has uplifted, inspired, and motivated me and countless others for almost 20 years.”
Angharad Planells, director, APT Marketing (disclaimer - I DID pay Angharad when she worked with me, but not for this).
Doing things differently.
The experiences that shaped how I advise today.
-
I made Radioactive PR one of the first companies in the world to introduce a 4 day work week for 5 days’ pay in 2018, and I was public about all of the ways it impacted the business along the way, from the impact on profit to recruitment - including when we stopped it in 2022, in the wake of Covid.
Our enhanced maternity pay was matched for fathers and adopting families too, and I’ve helped other agencies implement similar.
We established a Day to Make a Difference at the agency too - offering our time freely to local charities once a quarter.
And in 2024, as I heard about people missing the benefit of working alongside others, I offered spare Radioactive desks and facilities to Gloucestershire creatives without charge.
-
Alongside running the agency, I was a founding trustee of children’s charity Superhero Foundation, leading the comms charge to help children access paid-for treatment that isn’t available on the NHS. We raised more than £1 million for treatment for a dozen or so children over a number of years, with zero ad spend, relying heavily on PR to tell the stories of our work and families. I’m incredibly proud of what we did here.
-
In late 2021, a friend told me about the seven year old son of one of his friends. This little boy’s name is Olcán Wilkes, and he needed a bone marrow donor urgently. It really was as serious a matter as life and death. I met his parents, and straight away, I and my wonderful team pulled together, and threw our PR efforts at the challenge, immediately developing an entire social media and press push. The campaign had one aim: more people needed to sign up to the Stem Cell Register. That was Olcán’s only hope of getting a donor match, as covered here by the BBC.
Our strategy was so successful that, within six weeks, not just one, but TWO matches had been found, with a huge rise in overall donors to the register - and by April, as reported by his local paper The Forester here, he’d had the treatment he needed to save his life. People often say PR isn’t ER, and for the most part, it isn’t, but our ability to reach people and have enormous influence can be quite the powerful thing. We can’t know how many other people have since been helped by this combined effort for one special boy and his family.
-
I’ve recently become a member of the advisory board for Action on Male Suicide. More on why in the ‘podcast’ section below.
PR Land shenanigans.
Ever since joining this industry I feel lucky to be part of, I’ve looked for ways to create, celebrate and give back, alongside the day job. Sometimes that’s meant writing or building something useful.
Sometimes it’s meant posting a gold-spray-painted turd on a plinth to a respected national journalist.
I’ve used AI to jog my memory for some of this, and it’s been quite good fun looking back through.
Pick a year. There’s a story behind each one.
-
Good and Bad PR
At 10 Yetis, alongside founder Andy and as the agency’s first (forever-grateful) employee, I contributed to Good and Bad PR, celebrating brilliant campaigns and picking apart the occasional spectacular own goal. It was already a well-established feature on the agency’s blog when I took it to Ben Smith at PRmoment, where it became a regular column - and thanks to Andy’s utter professionalism/incredible staying power since - it remains, 15 years on!
My first ever column still exists, remarkably. Please make allowances for 23 year old me. I wasn’t to know what Steve Jobs’ ‘indefinite medical leave’ was to mean, 10 months later. I stand by the subheading and snigger.
-
The CRAPPs
Empowered by 10 Yetis boss Andy Barr to come up with ways to have some fun AND promote the agency, I dreamed up The CRAPPs (The Communicative Relations Awards from PR Professionals, obviously).
They celebrated the ever-unique relationship between PRs and journalists in the way only a free awards scheme sending out gold-spray-painted turds could.
-
PRexamples.com & bloggabase
PRexamples.com - 2012
Then came PRexamples.com, a site I created, dedicated to celebrating the best PR and marketing stunts and campaigns from around the world.
With hundreds of eventual contributors - some messaging in later years to say it helped them get jobs and promotions! - it became the UK’s best-read PR blog, reaching more than 60,000 unique monthly visitors at its peak (and I-forget-how-many-thousands in the newsletter database).
We had many wonderful birthday parties, bringing thousands of PRs together over the years. If you met a significant other at one, I need to know. Were there any PRe Party babies!?
I sold it in 2018 to focus on the agency. It’s now even bigger and better as Famous Campaigns, under James Herring’s stewardship.
bloggabase - 2012
Knee-deep in media lists as I was at the time, I thought - there has to be something that exists for bloggers, surely?
Well, there wasn’t, so I took the idea to the at this point long-suffering Andy, and together, we co-founded bloggabase, a database connecting PRs and marketers with relevant bloggers.
The idea was simple: bloggers could tell us what they actually wanted to hear about, and marketers could find people whose interests matched what they had to offer. Fewer irrelevant pitches. Better relationships. Less shouting into everybody’s inbox and hoping for the best. It was used by some of the biggest agencies in the world, and brands including Disney and Ralph Lauren.
One for over a beer - we almost sold this, you know. Today me would have a few lessons to teach 24 year old me, let me tell you.
-
Founded Radioactive PR
I founded Radioactive PR - actually, I founded Rich Leigh & Company Ltd, the name I'm now using for my advisory business, going full-circle. My first client was Gocompare.com, ridiculously, and the next few years were preeetty busy, as you can imagine.
-
Myths of PR & Radioactive Roundup
Myths of PR - All Publicity is Good Publicity and other Myths - 2017
The problem with PR books, I thought, was that too many of them were theory-laden tomes. Heavy. When publisher Kogan Page came to me to ask if I’d ever want to write a book, I jumped at the chance to inject the genre with a bit of character. It landed well, quickly becoming the #1 best-seller in the Amazon PR category.
Radioactive Roundup - 2017
At Radioactive, we launched Radioactive Roundup, a daily WhatsApp digest of useful news, articles and advice for startups.
The team pulled together things worth knowing and delivered them in one manageable morning message. It helped subscribers keep up, kept us curious and gave us somewhere to put our enthusiasm for sharing useful things. And emojis. So. Many. Emojis.
-
Fortnite and PR / FIFA and PR
We offered founders and marketers a free PR consultation while playing an online game with us. First Fortnite, then FIFA.
The Fortnite version attracted friends across the industry, which was great fun and all, but precisely zero potential clients. Naturally, we expanded the offering to FIFA, which I was better at.
It was a bit of fun and a different way to invite a conversation about someone’s business.
-
PR in a Car podcast
Before my Project Possible podcast (scroll to the bottom of this page), there was PR in a Car.
A PR. In a car. You don’t need a brand workshop when you have rhyming.
The podcast and video series covered the realities of running an agency: building a team, keeping clients, losing clients, creative ideas, digital PR and, eventually, navigating Covid.
Candid thoughts from someone figuring things out while doing them. Described by PR Week as “one part Tom Hardy in Locke, one part Alan Partridge”, which I’m choosing to take as a compliment.
-
Free comms advice and shared resources
When Covid arrived and nobody quite knew what to say, I opened up my calendar for free communications advice, helping businesses think through how to talk to customers, potential customers and their teams.
We also compiled and shared a directory of journalists looking for non-Covid stories, organised by sector and updated with contributions from others. What started as something useful for our own team became a resource for PRs and journalists across the industry, with more than 3,500 people reading it in those early days.
-
The Summer PRties
With the Radioactive team’s love and support, and some wonderful sponsors including market research legends Opinium and freelance PR matchmaking lovelies The PR Cavalry, I organised Summer PRties in London and Manchester, bringing people from across the industry together over several years.
They were a chance to catch up, meet people you’d only known through a screen and have a good night out while raising some serious money for charities, including Arts Emergency.
I love how generous this industry can be when people get together. The first ones back post-Covid were pretty special, too. Helping make that happen has been one of my favourite things.
-
The High Flyers PR Course
I co-founded the High Flyers PR Course with friend and strategic genius Alex Wilson to help people showing promise early in their careers build practical skills and confidence.
Then, as the jobs market got tougher and access to training became harder, across the industry for younger talent - basically, we fluffed the timing on this BIG TIME - we made the £895 course free in 2024, with kind support from the brilliant folk at People Like Us.
By January 2025, more than 700 people around the world had signed up for free.
Coming from the background I do, I care about people getting a chance in this industry. There are plenty of talented people who need someone to open a door.
-
AI experiments & a digital treasure hunt
AI tools and experiments - 2023
As ever - like when I created 10 Yetis’ office in virtual worlds Second Life and Google Lively (don’t worry about it) - I’ve also been learning out loud with AI: creating a Press Release Draft GPT, experimenting with a PR stunt generator and making an AI version of myself, trained on my own PR writing.
Some experiments are more useful than others, but I like getting stuck in, finding out what something can actually do and sharing what I learn and how it impacts the industry.
The Christmas Digital Treasure Hunt — 2023
For a bit of festive fun, we created a Digital Treasure Hunt, sending more than 660 people around the internet to solve twelve clues across three stages.
Up for grabs: £1,000 cash (and a bag of Haribo, obviously), plus a £20,000 PR campaign with us. Only twelve people made it to the end. Whether that means it was brilliantly fiendish or I needed to get out more is open to debate.
-
A free, unbranded PR briefing template
I shared a free PR briefing template to help brands get their thoughts in order and give agencies and consultants what they need to put together better proposals.
With useful additions from long-time industry pal Darryl Sparey and PRovoke Media’s Maja Pawinska Sims, we deliberately kept it unbranded. We weren't going to be the right agency for everybody, but better briefs make life easier for everyone involved.
-
AI game and more learning out loud
What started as me creating a daft PR industry kart racing game called Spin Circuit that I never actually shared using AI became a bigger learning out loud project, testing AI’s capability to build sites, tools and games.
Because I get weirdly obsessed with this sort of thing, I’ve actually built the world’s biggest AI-game arcade, called Playground Arcade, housing thousands of vibe coded games at the time of writing, with more than 5,000 unique players in the first month since launching.
Want me to speak at an event?
I’m also available for speaking opportunities, like the one in this photo, giving the keynote speech at the Forum International Media Conference (at the Prague O2 Arena), no less.
I’ve spoken at plenty of universities and industry events, sat on live audience panels, chaired a digital Cannes Lions award panel, judged in countless awards and generally kept myself busy extolling the virtues of public relations… publicly.
If you need me, call me, no matter where you are, no matter how far →
I also host a podcast…
I host an interview podcast called Project Possible. It’s had millions of viewers and listeners to date.
A friend called it ‘Diary of a CEO, but for people who have to do the school run’ - and I quite like that.
After a tumultuous upbringing, I thought and hoped I’d broken a generational cycle, only to lose my youngest brother Jordan to suicide in 2025, and hit rock bottom.
Project Possible is my continued love letter to him, and others who need to hear this one thing: your past doesn’t define you, YOU do.
It’s my way to explore resilience, ambition, reinvention and what we are truly capable of.
I talk to entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers, academics and everybody in-between, asking:
What’s truly possible?
New episodes every Monday.
Watch on YouTube. Watch or listen on Spotify. Listen on Apple Podcasts.
