Notes on reputation, crisis and PR-agency M&A.
The Sutton Memo, essays
Longer essays most weeks, on Substack, newest first. Subscribe free to get each one by email.
13 October 2026
Before a buyer asks you anything, somebody on their side has probably asked a machine about you. You cannot correct the machine. You can correct what it reads.
11 October 2026
Public relations has put the same difficulty at or near the top of its list for thirty years. It may be time to stop calling it a difficulty.
9 October 2026
If you merge your agency with one its own size, one of you has sold. Here is how to tell which, what the seller gives up, and when it is worth doing anyway.
4 October 2026
When you sell an agency, the last of the price is paid for a promise. The Supreme Court ruled on what happens when it is broken.
3 October 2026
The most quoted line in my trade is true of one kind of wrong and largely false of the other. Forty years of research show which.
29 September 2026
For 170 years two camps have read the same documents about Shakespeare and moved each other not an inch. A company arguing with its critics is in the same position, and usually on the same side of it.
28 September 2026
On its worst day every board reaches for the same sentence. Kant explains why nobody can check it. Schopenhauer explains how everybody will.
26 September 2026
We talk about AI as if it had a life. It reads us as if we were text. Wittgenstein's lion explains both mistakes.
25 September 2026
The best year in your agency's history is the worst year to sell it in.
23 September 2026
The referee is playing its own match this year. Your case is one of the moves.
21 September 2026
You will answer several hundred questions before you sell your agency. Then you will lend your buyer half the price, often more, and ask almost nothing.
20 September 2026
Nobody ever sells an agency. They join, they partner, they take the next step. The plain verb turns up eventually, and it tells you what the soft ones were for.
19 September 2026
Sell your agency to a holding company. Wait. Buy it back. It has been done more often than the industry lets on, and almost nobody will say what they paid.
18 September 2026
A plain read of the deals of 2026 so far, written for the people who own the firms.
15 September 2026
Founders spend months on the price and an afternoon on the name. Here is how long the name survives, and what the day it goes tells you.
14 September 2026
The price of saying no to a client is real. So is the price of never saying it.
13 September 2026
Why boards need to look beyond social media sentiment to understand whose trust is changing, and what that means for the business.
11 September 2026
The machines eat the work that paid the bills. The judgment they cannot touch is the part we always undercharged for.
10 September 2026
PepsiCo moved its media after more than twenty years without running a pitch. Here is what that does to the price of a PR agency.
7 September 2026
Winning the fact, losing the room. What Shell taught me in 1995, and why boards keep making the same mistake.
5 September 2026
Big Tech promised to be water positive by 2030, with dates attached. The planning system is now publishing the real numbers one town at a time.
1 September 2026
American lawyers are re-running the tobacco playbook against the biggest names in food. Britain has not noticed yet.
30 August 2026
Your next crisis statement will be read against ten years of your own words, by machines, in seconds. The verdict lands before your first call connects.
29 August 2026
Agency M&A is up on last year. But the buyer across the table has changed identity, and most founders are still rehearsing the old pitch.
28 August 2026
The $17bn child-safety settlement looks like a famous victory. So did tobacco's in 1998. The lesson is in what happened next.
27 August 2026
AI has never been better. Being believed has never been harder.
25 August 2026
Five essays from the seller's chair. Time to own up to what the other one taught me.
25 August 2026
A reputation gets a price exactly twice in its life. The years in between are the only part you control, and almost nobody manages them.
23 August 2026
You can wait to be approached, or you can run a process. The difference is usually one funding cycle in the price, and the rest of your career in the dignity.
23 August 2026
AI will answer the question you give it. It will never tell you the question is wrong.
23 August 2026
AI is taking the bottom of the ladder. The top has never had more room.
22 August 2026
In a sale or a raise, someone junior will try to break every claim you make about your business. What survives is what you are paid for.
22 August 2026
The deal insures the founder against walking. The people who hold the clients were never on the policy.
Agency M&A
August 2026
Accounts and diligence cannot see founder dependency, so buyers contain it with earn-outs instead of pricing it.
August 2026
Confirmatory diligence arrives around week ten, and the four things that kill a process there were all true on the day it started.
July 2026
An agency sale is won or lost in the eighteen months after signing, on the second tier, integration speed and the founder's own head.
June 2026
What a PR agency is worth, how it is valued on adjusted EBITDA, and who can value it.
August 2026
The four advisers a founder needs, what each one does, and the order to bring them in.
June 2026
A direct answer to who advises on PR agency M&A in the UK, sell-side and buy-side.
June 2026
A direct answer to who advises PR agency owners on a sale, and how that adviser works.
June 2026
From building value years before a sale to getting through the deal on either side.
June 2026
Why agency sales succeed or fail on culture, the second tier, client loyalty and the earn-out, not the price.
15 June 2026
What changes the moment a founder decides to sell, and what a buyer really pays for.
June 2026
Why the headline price and the money a founder actually walks away with are two different numbers, and what closes the gap.
June 2026
Why the mid-market is consolidating, and what it means for founders weighing a sale.
Crisis & reputation
24 June 2026
In a crisis the regulator, journalist and claimant now read you through a model before any human does.
August 2026
The four kinds of adviser, what each is genuinely best at, and the test that separates them.
June 2026
Who to call first, and in what order, when a regulator moves or a story is about to break.
June 2026
A direct answer to who advises UK boards in a crisis, and how to choose.
15 June 2026
The judgment that sets a crisis is made in the first few weeks, not in the courtroom.
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