Delighted to announce...

By Tim Sutton, senior reputational adviser and PR-agency M&A counsel · September 2026

There is a ritual to the sale of a public relations agency, and the strange thing about it is that it never mentions a sale. The founder posts a photograph, usually of himself, sometimes of a skyline. He is delighted, or thrilled, or, for reasons never explained, humbled. He has news to share. And then, in the announcement itself, the thing that has actually happened is described in every way but the one a dictionary would reach for. He has joined. He has partnered. He has begun his next chapter, taken his next step, found the right home for his people. Somewhere a larger company has agreed to pay him a sum of money for his firm, and he will spend the next few years earning the rest of it, but you will not hear that from him. You will hear it from the buyer.

I have written a few of these myself, from the other side of the table, in the years I was buying agencies rather than advising the people who sell them. The drafting could sometimes be tortuous: trying to justify our strategic reasons for the acquisition and then trying to reconcile them with the very different perspective of the seller on the same transaction. And the biggest challenge of all was avoiding the usual clichés: the X enhances the Group’s ability to help clients... and the Y extends our offering across crucial capabilities including.... So I offer what follows as someone who has drafted the euphemism more times than I care to remember, not merely noticed it.

Eleven announcements, and a clean sweep

To be sure I was not simply remembering the deals that suited me, I did something anyone can do in an afternoon. I went through this year’s acquisitions of public relations and public affairs firms in one trade archive, O’Dwyer’s, in date order, and kept the deals in which the seller was quoted anywhere at all, in the trade report or in the release behind it. That gave me eleven. (I left out a twelfth because I know the people involved. It would not have changed the score.) I read each announcement twice. Once for the headline. Once for the words of the person selling.

In all eleven the headline, the buyer’s own or the trade paper’s, used the plain word: acquires, or acquisition. In none of the eleven did the seller use sold, sale, acquired or bought, anywhere in the words attributed to them. Eleven to nil. As a sample it is small. As a scoreline it is emphatic. You are welcome to run the search yourself.

What they say instead

What the sellers said instead sorts into a small and repeating vocabulary. Five said they were joining, and two of those called it a next step in the same breath. One more called it a next step and left it there. One was partnering. One was being part of something larger. The remaining three kept to what I have come to think of as capability language: what the deal will let them do for clients, and how little will change for them, which quietly declines to say what kind of event it is. It is the seller’s cousin of the cliché I spent years trying to keep out of the buyer’s paragraph.

They are worth hearing in their own words, because the drafting is good. Bob Schultz, selling The CauseWay Agency to 4media group, offered that joining 4media group allows us to offer our clients expanded support. Bruce Hennes of Hennes Communications knew partnering with a larger agency would be of great benefit. Jon Rossi of Modern Advocacy found that being part of Actum allows us to scale that work. John Anderson, whose firm went to FGS Global, fitted two of the soft verbs into a single sentence: joining FGS is the perfect next step for RFA and for our clients. Not one of them is lying. Each has sold a firm, and each has described the sale as a form of arrival.

My favourite came from Stephen Shiver, co-founder of a Florida firm bought in August, who said that reputation is earned over decades, not transactions. It is a good line, and I expect he means it. It is also about as close as any of the eleven sellers came to a plain commercial word, and the word is there only to be told that it does not matter.

Two languages, one signature

Here is the part that took me longest to see, for someone who has written these documents. The two vocabularies are not kept in separate rooms, the buyer’s in one and the seller’s in another. They sit in the same release, three paragraphs apart, under one date and one approval.

Take Next Fifteen’s announcement that it had bought M Booth, the New York agency, in 2009. Because Next Fifteen is a listed company, it is obliged to be plain with its shareholders, and it is: the initial consideration is $4 million, paid in cash at completion, with deferred consideration of up to a maximum of $13.25 million payable over the course of the next four years. That is the sound of a business changing hands. And then, further down the same page, the founder, Margi Booth, describes the same day in another language altogether. This, she says, is an important step in our evolution. The nouns of the acquisition and the language of the arrival, in one document, signed off together.

Sometimes even the buyer will not say the flat word. When WPP acquired The Glover Park Group in 2011, its own release used the plainest possible verb in its headline, acquires, and again in its first sentence, acquire the stock of, and then, further down the same page, described the firm as joining the roster of WPP’s public relations and public affairs companies. The company writing the cheque reached for the very word the people cashing it prefer. Which tells you the euphemism is not the founder’s vanity. It is a joint production.

The first work the deal does

So what is it for? I argued in an earlier piece that what a group is really buying, when it buys an agency, is trust: the transfer of a relationship from a person to an institution. The soft verb is the first instrument of that transfer, and it does its work on the clients.

Consider what the two words tell a client on the morning of the deal. Sold says the founder has been paid, the meter is running, and the person you hired has a new set of masters and a clock on the wall. Joined says nothing has moved. It is a holding statement, in the crisis sense, and like all good holding statements it is true, incomplete and designed to buy time: time in which no client reprices the relationship, no rival rings round your accounts to ask whether they are still in safe hands, and no account director dusts off her CV. I can say from the buyer’s chair that the buyer wants that stillness at least as much as the seller does, because the buyer has just paid for it and would prefer it did not walk out of the building. In my experience the most carefully negotiated sentence in an acquisition release is not the one about money. It is the one that says the founder will continue to lead. It is the sentence a buyer insists on and a seller is glad to give, and it is the truest thing in the document, for a while.

The vanishing seller

There is a related pattern worth noticing, and it concerns who gets quoted at all. When I went past the archive’s summaries to the full releases, I noticed something small and telling. The condensed version of a deal, the paragraph the trade press actually prints, keeps the buyer’s quote and drops the seller’s. Five of my eleven only yielded the seller’s words once I went to the release behind the report, and several other deals fell out of my count because the seller was not quoted anywhere I could find. The disappearance of the founder’s voice starts on day one, in the editing.

The word arrives late

The plain verb is not banished for ever. It is merely on a delay, and it is worth waiting for.

Go back to Margi Booth. In 2009 the sale was an important step in our evolution. Years later, on LinkedIn, describing the same transaction to her own network, she began a sentence this way: “when I sold M Booth to Next Fifteen over 10 years ago...” Sold. The word that could not appear in the announcement turns up, unforced, once the announcement has long since done its job. I do not read that as a confession. It is simply the truth, told plainly by someone with no release to draft.

She is not alone. Michael Kempner’s firm, MWW, was bought by Interpublic in 2000 and bought back a decade later, and the buy-back release his own side wrote refers, without flinching, to the original sale. The original sale. I have not been able to find the announcement from 2000, which has gone the way of most press releases of that age, but I would be surprised if the word sale was in it. A decade on, the same firm, writing about the same deal, could call it what it was. The euphemism, it turns out, has a shelf life, and the shelf life is roughly the length of the reason it was needed.

How long is that, honestly

Here I have to be careful, because it would be easy, and wrong, to tell you that founders leave the instant the earn-out ends, as though the language ran on a timer. The record is messier than that, and I would rather show you the mess than a tidy line.

Where the earn-out term is actually on the public record, the change at the top does tend to follow it. Red Consultancy’s founders stood down in 2003, when the trade press reported that their two-and-a-half-year earn-out had run its course. The deferred consideration on M Booth ran, on Next Fifteen’s own numbers, for four years from August 2009; the report that its founder was moving to a chairman role is dated September 2013. At a Washington lobbying shop, the Federalist Group, some of the early partners, according to Roll Call, left once they had collected their portion of the sale through the earn-out. Three deals, three clocks, and in each the change came at about the time the last payment did.

But set beside them the founders who make a nonsense of the pattern. Gershon Kekst sold his firm to Publicis in 2008 and never left: he was still there, as chairman emeritus, when he died in 2017. Al Golin was still working at the agency that bears his name, long since part of Interpublic, when he died at 87. Roland Rudd founded Finsbury, sold it to WPP in 2001, and chairs its distant descendant today, twenty-five years on. Earn-outs in this trade run, on most advisers’ reckoning, somewhere between one and five years. Some founders stay a great deal longer than any contract could hold them. For them the soft verb was simply true.

The exception I could not find

I looked, in all of this, for a single agency that broke ranks and announced its own sale in the plain word, on the day, in its own voice. I did not find one. I will not tell you none exists, only that I cannot remember reading it. The nearest I came was the report of a firm with no outside buyer at all, an internal succession, and even there the word sale never appeared. It was an ownership change. Even with no buyer in the room, the reflex held.

None of this is a charge against the founders. The soft verb does honest work. Staff and clients are owed reassurance, and panic is expensive. Sometimes it is even the more exact word: a founder who takes part of the price in the buyer’s shares, and a partnership in the enlarged firm, really has joined something as well as sold something. The release merely declines to mention the second half. And a founder who leaves the day the covenant lapses is no traitor. That is someone whose contract has ended, behaving exactly as the contract designed them to. The euphemism is not the danger.

The danger of believing it

The danger is the founder who comes to believe his own release. Who reads the announcement, decides that yes, this is a partnership, a next chapter, business continuing as usual, and is genuinely surprised in year two to discover that it is a job, that the clients he thought were his are now assets on someone else’s balance sheet, and that the clock his announcement so soothingly left out was running for him too.

What a founder can actually do about it

Three things, and none of them costs anything.

First, treat the words as a term of the deal, not a courtesy to be sorted the night before. Who drafts the announcement, who approves it, which verb it uses, and above all when your staff and your key clients hear it, and from whom: settle all of that before you sign, in the room where the money is being discussed, while you still have leverage. It sits beside the point I made about the name of the firm: if you care how the thing is said, you make it a term, not a hope.

Second, tell the clients who matter yourself, and first. What a good client resents is almost never the sale. It is finding out about it from a group email, or worse, from a competitor who read the trade press before they did. Ten phone calls, made the moment you are allowed to make them, are worth more than any sentence in the release. (Where the buyer is listed, the lawyers will have views on when that moment is. One more reason to settle it before you sign.)

Third, and this is the cheapest diligence there is, read your buyer’s old releases before you become one. Take the last five agencies it bought. Find the joining announcement for each. Then find where each of those founders is now, and go back and read the leaving release, if there was one, and notice which words it used and how long after the first. An afternoon of reading will tell you more about what your next few years actually hold than any number the buyer puts in front of you.

A line for the buyer

I have sat on that side too, so let me send the buyer a note rather than an accusation. If the deal you are announcing only works so long as the word sale is kept out of the room, you have quietly told yourself what you bought. Better to write a first release you will still be able to stand behind on the day you have to write the second one.

Back to the beginning

Which brings me back to Margi Booth, because her arc is the whole argument in one firm. In 2009 the deal was an important step in our evolution. Four years later a new chief executive arrived and she moved, in the trade reporter’s phrase, into a chairman role; we also want, she said then, to become more global, and to grow and flourish there needs to be an infusion of new ideas. And then, more than a decade on, in her own voice and unprompted, the plain word at last: when I sold.

The word was always going to arrive. It just waited, as it always does, until the announcement had finished its work.

First published in The Sutton Memo on Substack on 20 September 2026. New essays go out by email weeks before they appear here: subscribe free.

If you are weighing what happens once the deal is signed, that is the subject of the number is the easy part, the eighteen months after are the deal.

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Tim Sutton is a senior reputational adviser to boards in their hardest moments and counsel to PR-agency principals on one side of any given transaction. timsuttonpr.com · LinkedIn · Privacy · Legal