Is small beautiful? We don't think so
PR is a funny game. There are no barriers to entry, which means that anyone with a mobile and a laptop can set themselves up as "a PR". And many do.
So our industry is fragmented and largely disorganised. Quality control is rarely applied in the sense that a law firm or accountancy practice would recognise it and audit benchmarks such as Investors in People, the PRCA's Consultancy Management Standard and ISO 9001 are as rare as hens' teeth.
The result is that most agencies are congenitally unable to grow - or manage growth. It simply isn't built in to their corporate DNA.
A few bright bunnies have recognised that if they build scale and underpin that with quality systems then they can clean up - and they generally are. So you have a relatively small number of large agencies dominating the industry, with a quickly diminishing long tail of small agencies behind them.
We want scale not for ego, nor even for the extra profits and earnings. We want it because (a) it means that any ambitious person looking in on us can see that there's room for them to build a career with Paver Smith; and (b) because growth is infinitely better than the alternative. Oh, and scale gives us more resources to invest in training and development and in sales people. As such, size begets size.
So yesterday we completed our acquisition of Factory Communications and today we'll continue talking to other agencies about doing deals with them.
What constitutes 'big', then? In my eyes, at least 60 staff. And we could achieve that with one mid-sized deal. So clearly we can grow bigger than that. Watch this space.
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