The best trade in PR

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

At the end of August, in Berlin, two men bought their own company back.

Benjamin Minack and Andreas Nickel had built an agency called Ressourcenmangel and, in 2009, sold it to the group that is now WPP’s Hirschen Group. For seventeen years it belonged to somebody else. Renamed Rysm earlier this year, it runs to some two hundred and fifty people across six offices. On the twenty-seventh of August the two founders bought the whole of it back, with an outside financing partner behind them and neither side saying what it cost. Minack’s account of why came to four words of German: Alleine geht es besser. It goes better alone.

I want to take that sentence seriously, because it is the newest instance of a trade that has been available in this industry for twenty years and that almost nobody writes down. You sell your agency to one of the great marketing groups for a good price. You work out your time. Some years later, you buy it back. Described coldly, as a piece of dealing rather than a homecoming, it looks like one of the better trades in professional services. Whether it really is turns out to be unknowable, for a reason I will come to. The more interesting questions are why a holding company would ever let you do it, and why more founders are about to try.

What a holding company actually buys

Start with what changes hands in the first place, because it is not quite what the balance sheet records. When a group buys an agency it books goodwill, client contracts, a lease, some furniture. What it is paying for is the founder. In practice the group is renting the founder, and the earn-out is the term of the lease. The three years, or five, in which the founder cannot leave and cannot compete are the years the group needs to move the clients and the reputation off one person and onto its own books. I have argued before that an agency acquisition is, at bottom, the transfer of trust from a person to an institution. A buy-back is what it looks like when that transfer never quite completes.

Because sometimes it does not. The clients stay loyal to the name on the door and the person who answered the phone. The institution never fully takes. The earn-out ends, and the group discovers it owns a business whose entire value can still walk out of the building on a Friday. At which point the founder occupies the one negotiating position nobody sets out to engineer: he is both the asset being sold and the only serious bidder for it.

The quiet history of buying it back

It has happened more often than you might think, and the roll-call is worth laying out, because you will know the firms.

Matthew Freud sold a little over half of Freud Communications to Publicis Groupe in 2005. Six years on, in 2011, he bought Publicis out and took the firm private again. Michael Kempner sold MWW to Interpublic in 2000, and bought it back a decade later; ten years after that he renamed the firm MikeWorldWide, which is one way of settling for good the question of whose agency it is. Qorvis, the Washington public affairs shop, went into Publicis in 2014 and its management led it back out at the very end of 2022, Publicis declining, as these things go, to comment.

APCO is a variation on the theme. Margery Kraus, its founding chief executive, was not the seller in 1991: APCO began as the affiliate of a law firm, Arnold and Porter, which sold control to Grey that year. But she made the buying half of the trade in full. On the thirteenth of September 2004 Grey agreed to sell itself to WPP; a fortnight later APCO announced that its management had bought the firm out through a merchant bank, on terms never disclosed. A buyout of that kind is not arranged in a fortnight, so it had evidently been in train for some time, but the effect was that when Grey passed to WPP, APCO did not go with it.

And, closer to home, Frank. Graham Goodkind, who founded Frank PR with Andrew Bloch, sold it to the Australian group Photon, later Enero, in 2007. Over the following years the firm was bought back in pieces. The last of it came home in 2021, when Goodkind and his managing director, Alex Grier, bought out Enero’s remaining three-quarters, with Bloch still a shareholder alongside them, for a figure that was, set beside the original deal, small change. What happened to the firm next is the part I like most, and I will come back to it.

Why a group ever sells it back

Notice what the public record does not show. It does not show a single one of these agencies being sold back because it was failing. What it shows, again and again, is a group in the middle of changing shape. Grey was selling itself. WPP, as I write, is simplifying itself under a new chief executive. A group refocuses on data, or on healthcare, or on whatever the analysts are rewarding that year, and a perfectly good agency that no longer fits the story becomes, in the language of the quarterly call, non-core.

Non-core is not the same as unharmed. Set Frank’s last price beside its first and it is plain that the business was worth a great deal less to Enero at the end than at the beginning. But that is rather the point. An agency whose value lives in its founder is worth less in anyone else’s hands, and least of all in the hands of an owner whose attention has moved on.

The tell is the silence. When these deals are announced, the group says as little as it decently can. Publicis wished Freud success in his future endeavours and offered no reason at all; asked about Qorvis, it declined to comment. The talking is left to the founder, who says something warm about independence and agility and nothing whatever about the price. Minack, with his four blunt words, is the exception. The reticence is understandable. If you have just bought back the thing you know better than anyone else alive, you do not stand in the street discussing what you paid.

The price you are not allowed to see

That reticence is more than good manners. It points at the strangest feature of this whole trade, which is that you cannot prove it is a good one.

I went looking for a single case, among all of these, where both halves of the deal were public: what the founder was paid on the way in, and what he paid on the way back. There is essentially one, Frank, and even there the original 2007 price is reported two irreconcilable ways in the trade press, so the pair does not really close. On either figure the buy-back cost a fraction of the sale; what cannot be said is how large a fraction. Everywhere else, at least one number is missing. Freud’s sale price was reported; his buy-back price was not. For MWW, APCO and Qorvis I could find a public price for neither leg. The best trade in PR turns out to be the one trade whose profit is never printed.

There is a certain logic to that. The one deal in which the buyer knows exactly what the asset is worth, down to the last client and the last account director, is the deal a founder does to buy back his own firm. It is the most honest valuation an agency ever receives, and it is the one the industry keeps in the dark. So the case for the trade cannot be made in cash. It has to be made the way the founders themselves make it, by pointing at a firm that has survived and grown under its own name again. That is evidence of a kind, and it flatters the trade. We only ever hear about the buy-backs where there was something left worth buying, and nobody issues a press release about the agency he decided not to rescue.

Why this is about to happen more

For twenty years the buy-back was a rare and slightly romantic move, the exception that proved how sticky these acquisitions usually are. I think it is about to become a good deal more common, and the deal in Berlin suggests why. Marketing Minute, reporting the buyout, has Minack framing independence as newly viable because AI now lets smaller shops compete with the networks on capability. That is one founder’s rationale, relayed by one trade report, and I would not hang an industry on it. But I think he is right, and the argument does not depend on him.

Ask what a founder was really buying, in 1998 or 2005, when he sold to a network. Money, certainly. But also scale: reach into markets he could not open himself, a back office he did not have to build, the machinery that let a good small shop punch at the weight of a large one. For a long time you could only rent that machinery from a holding company. A good deal of it, the drafting, the research, the first pass at a plan, is now available to a fifteen-person firm for the price of a subscription. So the gap in capability between the independent and the network, which was much of the case for selling in the first place, is narrowing. (Rysm, I should say, is hardly a garage. It is a creative and digital agency with a communications arm rather than a pure PR shop, it has two hundred and fifty people, and alone turns out to include an outside backer. The principle holds all the same.)

And the groups are shedding agencies

On its own, that would only mean fewer founders selling. What turns it into more buy-backs is what is happening to the groups at the same time. Under pressure from the same technology, among other things, they are consolidating, simplifying and deciding what is core, and I have written in recent weeks about how much of that is already under way: Omnicom absorbing Interpublic, WPP reported to be exploring a sale of Burson. Every such tidying-up leaves agencies on the shelf marked non-core, and for each of them there is a founder or a management team doing Minack’s sum. The supply of agencies to buy back is rising at the same moment as the confidence to do it.

The obvious objection is that the networks get the machines too, and so do the clients: the tools that level a small agency with a large one may equally level the client with both. I have no tidy answer to that. But it is an argument about whether agencies of any size keep their value, not about who is best placed to own one, and on that narrower question the drift seems to me to be towards the founder.

What a founder can do about it

First, negotiate the way back in on the way out. In my experience almost nobody does. In the year of the sale, when the cheque is large and the relationship is warm, the idea that you might one day want the firm back seems faintly ungrateful, so it goes unmentioned. Ask anyway. A right of first refusal if the group ever decides to sell or close the business costs the buyer little on the day and is worth a great deal on the morning the agency is declared non-core. It sits beside the point I made about Shandwick, that if you care whether the name survives you must make it a term and not a hope. The way home is the same: a term, or nothing.

Second, know when the option is cheapest. It is cheapest when the earn-out has ended and the group is refocusing, because that is the moment you are worth more to yourself than to anyone else in the room. You can see that window coming a long way off.

Third, read your non-compete as the price of the alternative. The alternative to buying the firm back is leaving and building another one, and the length and reach of the covenant you signed decides whether that alternative is real. Peter Gummer never bought Shandwick back after he sold it to Interpublic in 1998; he went and built Huntsworth instead. Larry Weber did not buy his firm back from the same group; he built what became Racepoint. Starting again is the other way home, and it recovers everything except the name, which is precisely the thing a buy-back does recover. Rysm’s founders took the opposite course: they kept the firm, name and all (a name, admittedly, not yet a year old), and shed the owner.

A line for the buyer

I have sat on that side of the table too. If, in year six, the only credible bidder for the agency you acquired is the person you acquired it from, you have learned what you bought. You did not buy a business. You bought a lease on a founder, and the lease is up.

Back to Frank

Which returns me to Frank. Having finally got the whole of the firm back, Goodkind and Grier did not sit on it. In the summer of 2024 they moved control of Frank into an employee ownership trust. I do not know their reasons and will not guess at them, but the effect is neat. Any future buyer of Frank will be negotiating with a trust that holds the firm for the people who work in it, which is as close as company law gets to negotiating with the asset itself.

It goes better alone, says the man in Berlin. I would amend him slightly. It goes better when the firm is owned by the people who are the firm, founder included, and the holding companies have spent a good deal of money, over a good many years, establishing the point.

A postscript. The six buy-backs here are the ones I could verify. If you know of one I have missed, I would like to hear about it.

First published in The Sutton Memo on Substack on 19 September 2026. New essays go out by email weeks before they appear here: subscribe free.

If you are weighing what a buyer is really paying for when it buys your agency, that is the subject of what a buyer actually owns when the founder is the business.

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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