Most growing businesses treat PR as something they buy when there’s news to announce. Matt Phillips thinks that’s the wrong way round.
Matt is a Fractional Director of Communications and the founder of Full Funnel PR, a consultancy working with the founders and CEOs of growth-stage tech companies, B2B SaaS and AI businesses, and growth-oriented SMEs – based in Oxfordshire, England. Over 25 years he has been lead spokesperson for the UK record industry at the BPI, worked in corporate communications at the BBC around the launch of iPlayer, sat on the leadership team at b2b media and technology PR agency Propeller, and founded and ran his own agency.
His argument is that smaller businesses can’t buy attention the way big brands can, and struggle to generate ROI from a classic PR agency retainer, so they need to invest in building an internal growth-communications system, rather than look to run disjointed campaigns. Full Funnel PR, his nine-pillar method, is that system: linking the people a business needs to engage to grow (whether that’s customers, investors, business partners, regulators and industry thought-leaders, or employees) with the people inside the business who are responsible for growth. In this Q&A he explains how it works, and how a boutique property firm ended up quoted in the Financial Times without a single pitch.
The interview
Q: CB Herald found you through a 2023 press release about a commercial property firm, but many of your clients are growing tech businesses. What’s the connection?
Matt Phillips: I suppose the first point here is to consider the impact press releases can have, even for smaller firms. If you look at a press release solely as a vehicle to generate news coverage, you’re missing its main value which is to be found at a later point.
That release went out in October 2023, announcing that Ashdown Phillips had been appointed to manage five of AshbyCapital’s London office and retail buildings – part of an ongoing programme to raise the company’s online profile, of which PR was a part. Generating news was only a small part of it, comment and thought-leadership style opinion is often a stronger route to coverage as it’s hooked to the issues and events the world is paying attention to, rather than trying to directly attract interest in your own products and services.
Ashdown Phillips may not be a tech company, but it has exactly the problem my tech clients have. It’s a boutique, founded in 2004, competing with much bigger names that have bigger budgets and more market power. That’s where most scaleups and SMEs sit. They can’t outspend the incumbents, so they have to out-think them.
The sector changes. The problem doesn’t.
Q: What’s the most common mistake growing businesses make with PR?
Matt Phillips: Forgetting that, for the most part, journalists are not really interested in what your company does, what the product is. They are interested in stories, people and ideas.
Often PR discussions start with a forthcoming announcement that may be a big deal for the business, and hence hopes are pinned on high volumes of coverage. A founder gets in touch with news, wants coverage next week, and the whole conversation is about which journalists to pitch.
But you can’t communicate in a direction you haven’t chosen. If the business hasn’t settled who it’s for, what it believes and why it’s different, the press release has nothing to stand on. The work has to be done to earn the right to be heard, relationships have to be built if you’re a small company with limited proof points.
The second mistake is treating PR as a marketing channel: something you rent from an agency for a campaign and switch off when money gets tight. The coverage stops, and so does everything you learned getting it. In my experience, clients get more value when they build a system in-house, a capability they own, as this helps them leverage the big moments more effectively.
Q: You’ve built your own method, Full Funnel PR. How does it work?
Matt Phillips: Broadly, it’s a nine-pillar methodology that builds PR capability across three main areas; strategy (how the business will use communications, how it’s described, and who its people are), narrative (what the specific messages are, how to get them across, and the content that carries them) and activation (the nuts and bolts of getting it done; the campaigns you run, the distribution of content and the people you’re engaging).
The method is built on many of the PR and marketing principles I’ve learned over the years, combined with what I’ve learned from using the EOS Worldwide system; an operational system for growth businesses. Using the smartphone analogy EOS is an ‘operating system’ for a business, Full Funnel PR is in effect an interoperable app for external communications.
It sets a deliberately high bar for the quality of your communications, using journalists as the bar to meet. In many ways they are the toughest crowd around – partly as your value proposition for them is very limited, and they are overwhelmed by inbound requests.
But if you can develop a story that gets them to care about your business, everyone else you need, customers, investors, partners and your own team, is easier. So we design for the hardest audience and use what works on everyone else.
It also lives as a working system, not a slide deck. Each client has their own workspace holding their messages, spokespeople, stories and media contacts, and AI tools help us draft and check work against it. Longer term I intend to capture the method in a book, and build more self-service tools for the website that can offer customers good ‘first answers’ to their PR questions in a way that’s simple, actionable and affordable.
Q: Back to Ashdown Phillips. How does a boutique firm end up in the Financial Times?
Matt Phillips: Not by pitching it directly, as it happens. In Autumn 2023, alongside the day-to-day work of running commercial property, Ashdown Phillips was building a flexible workspace offer. That’s a market WeWork had dominated, and WeWork was heading for bankruptcy. That’s what I call an Attention Trigger – a moment in the mainstream news that would draw the focus of journalists. We could see the story coming.
So Nikki Gibson, the firm’s Director and Head of Flexible Workspaces, wrote a blog for its website explaining how its model differed: landlords going direct to occupiers through a property manager, rather than handing control to a co-working operator. It had a point of view, it was useful to customers, and it wasn’t salesy. An FT reporter found it through search, got in touch, and Nikki was quoted in the FT’s news feature on what WeWork’s collapse meant for flexible working.
Great PR or just lucky? Bit of both. But luck favours the prepared. Three things made it work, and they’re all in the method: tie what you say to something the media already cares about, and monitor the topics in the news. Be different, because a contrast adds tension to the story. And have a genuine point of view, not a product pitch.
It’s also a reminder to put content on your own platforms first. The company’s website didn’t have amazing domain authority. It just had the right content, at the right time, presented in the right way. A press release confirms facts; a point of view is what gets you into the conversation. What’s more, I published the case study on my personal website, which directly led to me winning a big client, so it worked for me too.
Q: When budgets get squeezed, PR is often the first thing to go. Why should a growing business keep investing?
Matt Phillips: I understand the instinct. If it isn’t producing leads this quarter, it looks like a cost. But that misreads how business buying works.
Research by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, published by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, suggests only around 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any one time (Marketing Week). The other 95% will buy later, and they’ll buy from the names they remember.
That’s where PR earns its keep. It’s how you stay memorable to people who aren’t buying yet. And there’s encouraging news for smaller firms: in the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, more than half of decision-makers said brand recognition matters less when a company’s thought leadership is strong (Demand Gen Report). That’s how David beats Goliath.
Cut it first and you’re not saving money. You’re deferring the cost.
Q: You spent years as a spokesperson yourself. What makes a founder good in front of journalists?
Matt Phillips: Preparation, firstly in terms of being crystal clear on your message, being mindful of what the journalist’s agenda might be in the context, and practice in navigating the interview to focus on what you want to get across without sounding like you’re parroting a line.
Let’s start with the message. Going into an interview, you should ideally have a clear sense of what you want the audience to take away from it, anchored in the context. I call this my Six A approach. Within this there should be a number, or a real-world example that carries the story. That number is your ‘north star’ in that wherever the conversation goes, you have in mind to deliver.
Next, the journalist’s agenda. This is typically set by the context and type of interview. In 2007, as the BPI’s spokesperson, I was interviewed by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News after the record industry won a damages award of around £41m against CD WOW, a website selling CDs unlawfully. It was an accountability interview, and a complicated story and it was hard to win the argument. I did OK, but didn’t control the interview as I’d like as the message wasn’t clear enough in my mind. The good news is that most founders will not, early-stage at least, ever encounter this type of questioning as the business by nature is not in a position to cause harm and thereby be held publicly accountable. The vast majority of media interviews will either be about the business’ wider goals and vision, or to offer a take on an industry issue. The context is important.
Finally, the way to avoid parroting lines or ending up on the defensive is to anticipate the key questions (not every question) a journalist may ask and practice acknowledging the question and bridging to a core message. Media training helps in this regard and is useful in most contexts, such as prospect and investor objection handling.
Q: Where do you see PR for growing businesses heading over the next few years?
Matt Phillips: Two forces are starting to converge. First, achieving marketing reach is getting harder and more expensive through paid channels; attention spans get ever shorter, the cost of paid media is getting bigger. Secondly, the commercial model for media is getting more challenging and there are ever fewer quality media titles, fewer paid journalists, and the desire for earned coverage means more people are investing in PR, given its power and value.
There’s also the rise in AI. As well as journalists, customers and investors, you’re now writing for the AI tools people use to research suppliers. When someone asks a chatbot who the best people are in your category, independent earned coverage in quality media titles carries ever greater authority – thus diminishing the value of your ‘owned media’ ie organic social, and blogs.
So the fundamentals matter more, not less: a clear story, real proof, and a steady record of being quoted in the right places. AI makes content quicker to produce. It doesn’t make anyone more worth listening to. That still takes a point of view.
The good news for growing businesses is that they can carry a different, and more challenging and interesting story than a global enterprise, who are often conservative and status-quo in tone as they have more to lose reputationally than they have to gain.
Closing
Matt’s case is that PR works best for growing businesses when it’s treated as a system they own rather than a service they rent. Get the strategy and story right first, build the proof, then pitch with discipline, and a small firm can earn attention well beyond its size.
To learn more, visit mattphillipspr.com and fullfunnelpr.com, or book a call with Matt at cal.com/mattphillipspr.
