Most companies ask this question backward. They assume the choice is in-house versus agency, pick one, and then wonder six months later why coverage is thin. The better first question is whether you have enough recurring, newsworthy activity to justify either option yet. If you do not, the founder should be doing the pitching directly. Once you do, an agency is almost always the right second step before an in-house hire, because it gives you reporter relationships and pitching capacity on day one, something a new hire needs months to build regardless of how good they are. An in-house hire earns its cost once the volume of work is steady enough to keep one person fully occupied, and even then, most companies that reach that point keep an agency running alongside the hire rather than replacing it.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Public Relations Specialists (2025 data), linked in the article.
Who actually does this work, and where?
Not mostly at agencies, which surprises people who assume PR is an agency business.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 314,500 public relations specialist jobs in 2025, with a median annual wage of $74,750. Only 12% of those jobs sit inside advertising, PR, and related services firms, meaning agencies. The rest work inside the companies, schools, hospitals, and government bodies they represent. The BLS projects a 2% growth rate for the occupation from 2025 to 2035, slower than the average for all jobs, which tells you this is a mature, steady profession rather than one expanding fast enough to assume talent is easy to find on short notice.
That one number, 12%, is worth sitting with. It means the default state of this profession is in-house. Agencies are the exception that most companies reach for specifically because they need something an internal hire structurally cannot provide on day one: a web of existing relationships with the reporters covering your industry, built over years of pitching other clients in your space.
What does founder-led PR actually cover, and when does it stop working?
It covers more ground than most early-stage founders expect, and it stops working the moment pitching becomes a part-time job nobody has time for.
A founder who understands the product and the market can write a strong pitch, answer a reporter's follow-up question accurately, and show up for an interview without coaching. That covers a surprising amount of early-stage PR strategy: a launch, a funding announcement, a handful of trade press placements. What it does not cover is volume. A founder has a company to run, and pitching twenty reporters, following up with twelve of them, and building a media list from scratch takes real hours every week, hours that come directly out of building the product. The moment you are turning down coverage opportunities because nobody has time to chase them, you have outgrown founder-led PR.
What does an agency buy you that a new in-house hire cannot?
Immediate reporter relationships and capacity, which is exactly what a new hire spends their first several months building from zero.
An agency that already covers your industry has spent years learning which reporters at which outlets care about which kind of story, and what each of those reporters has written recently. That knowledge is the actual product you are buying, not just a pair of hands to write releases. What a PR agency does day to day is largely this: matching your news to the right journalist, at the right outlet, with a pitch angle that reporter has not already seen a dozen times. A new in-house hire, even an excellent one, needs real time to build that same map of relationships for your specific industry, and in the meantime, your news is not getting pitched anywhere.
An agency also absorbs the lumpy demand that a single in-house hire cannot. If three announcements land in the same month, one person internally hits a wall. An agency team can flex around that, because pitching is their only job and they are staffed for it.
What does an in-house hire buy you that an agency cannot?
Full-time attention to your company specifically, and institutional memory an outside team has to be briefed on every time.
An in-house communications hire lives inside your meetings, knows your roadmap before it is announced, and can react to a reporter's question or a sudden news cycle in minutes rather than a call and an email thread. How long PR actually takes to show results depends partly on this kind of speed, and an internal hire who already understands your product's nuance can move faster on a fast-moving story than an agency account team juggling several clients. Over enough volume, the math also tends to favor a hire: paying one salary for someone working on your company alone usually costs less than an agency retainer sized for the same hours, once there is enough recurring work to fill their week.
Is this really an either-or choice?
For most companies that reach meaningful scale, no. The two roles end up doing different jobs at the same time.
Across the companies that reach a steady drumbeat of news, the common pattern is not replacing the agency with a hire, it is adding the hire on top. The in-house person owns the daily relationship with the business, writes the internal brief, and handles fast-turnaround requests. The agency keeps bringing the external reporter relationships and the pitching capacity that built the coverage in the first place, and keeps that capacity available for whatever the in-house team cannot cover alone. Dropping the agency the day you hire someone internally often means losing exactly the relationship map that made the hire's job easier.
How do you actually decide, right now, for your company?
Answer three questions honestly.
- Is there enough recurring, newsworthy activity to occupy someone full time? A funding round and a product launch a year is not that. A steady stream of customer wins, research, hires, and product news might be.
- Can you brief and manage an outside team well, or do you need someone embedded? If your news moves fast and needs context only an insider has, lean toward in-house sooner.
- Do you have the budget for one strong hire's full salary and benefits, or is a flexible retainer a better fit while you are still finding your story? A retainer scales down when things are quiet in a way a salary does not.
If the honest answers point to low and inconsistent volume, keep pitching yourself a little longer. If they point to steady volume but no internal relationships worth building yet, hire an agency. If you already have both volume and a mapped set of relationships an agency built for you, that is usually the moment to add an in-house hire, not replace what got you there.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
Start founder-led if your news is occasional, move to an agency once pitching becomes too much work for someone already running the company, and add an in-house hire once there is enough steady volume to occupy them full time, keeping the agency running alongside that hire rather than dropping it. The right order protects the thing that is hardest to build quickly: real relationships with the reporters who cover you. If you want help figuring out which stage you are actually at, tell us about your company and we will give you a straight answer.
