In the latest episode of the PRCA Fuse Podcast, Heather Blundell, UK CEO of Grayling, shares an unusually honest account of how her career unfolded, including the moment she walked into a meeting expecting to be fired and walked out as Managing Director.

From joining a global firm straight out of university to leading major UK agencies, Heather reflects on the role of luck, hustle, and courage in career progression, and why women so often talk themselves out of the very opportunities that could change everything.

The conversation goes far beyond job titles. Heather speaks candidly about leading through uncertainty, carrying responsibility for hundreds of people, and balancing senior leadership with motherhood.

She also explains how Grayling achieved a 0% gender pay gap and 50/50 gender representation at board level, why diversity of thought is a commercial necessity, and what leaders must do differently if they want talent to thrive.

Packed with practical advice, hard truths, and moments of humour, this episode is essential listening for anyone navigating a career in PR or stepping into leadership for the first time.

Listen to the full episode:

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Adrian Ma

Thank you very much for joining us today.

00:00:02 Heather Blundell

Thank you for having me.

00:00:03 Adrian Ma

So you’ve had an extraordinary career.

You are the youngest CEO of a top 20 PR agency.

Is that correct?

00:00:11 Heather Blundell

Yes, I think so.

Probably not for much longer.

00:00:16 Adrian Ma

So do you mind, how old were you when you became the CEO?

00:00:22 Heather Blundell

So I was 29 when I became a managing director at Webbishamwick.

And then I was deputy UK CEO at Ketchum.

But when I came here, I was UK CEO.

I don’t know, what was I?

35, 36.

00:00:40 Adrian Ma

That’s amazing.

That’s published.

0:00:43 Heather Blundell

And now I’m 45.

No, I’m joking.

00:00:46 Adrian Ma

I’m not.

But tell us through, talk us through the story.

What I’d love to hear for our listeners is what they might be able to learn from your path to becoming a CEO.

In such a short amount of time to get from, when did you, how old were you when you started in PR?

20?

00:01:06 Heather Blundell

Fresh out of university and I joined Edelman.

So how old are you then?

21?

00:01:11 Adrian Ma

21, so 14 years from grad to CEO.

What happened?

00:01:18 Heather Blundell

I did eight years at Edelman, which was amazing, and then I left and joined, obviously their biggest competitor, Weber Shandwick.

I did about seven, seven and a half years at Weber Shandwick.

And that’s when I had my break into leadership and became a managing director.

I would say the biggest learning or lesson – it’s like anything in life – half of it is luck and chance and being in the right place at the right time.

There was a leadership opportunity available, but I, would have never ever have even have thrown my hat in the ring.

I was an associate director.

I wasn’t even a director.

And I had quite a few people above me at that time.

And credit to, with my absolute thanks, always Colin Byrne, who was the head of Europe for a long time at Weber Shandwick and also John MacLeod, who was the chairman, took a punt on me.

We’d worked very closely on several new business briefs.

It was to run their office in Manchester at the time, which they were both very fond of and it had been very, very successful, but it was going through a very hard time.

And I think there were probably, conversations about the future of the office.

I mean, it is alive and well now.

But I think they just took a chance on me.

And I think there are three key takeaways I would say is, one, you get those

moments in your career, maybe once or twice if you’re lucky, which are those breakthrough moments.

They can take you into a different stage.

It’s quite overwhelming.

I remember, I thought they were going to, obviously, because this is the way women think, I thought they were going to sack me because they’d asked for a meeting with me and I was pretty new in and they’d lost quite a big client.

I just thought, oh, last in, first out.

I remember I just went to this meeting and s sat down and had my list of bullets and they said, we’d like to make you the managing director.

I just hadn’t prepared for that.

00:03:47 Adrian Ma

You came as an associate as well, so from a lateral move from Edelman into Weber, yeah, and they said…

“We want to make you…” imagine!

00:03:54 Heather Blundell

I was never a director, so I jumped, and I actually said that in the meeting, “you do know I’m not even a director, don’t you?”

They had no idea.

I mean, that’s just the way they were just like, Well, you know, we’ll just take a chance.

So, but when you do get those moments, I do think quite often for women, we don’t often put ourselves in those situations where we do just take a leap.

I think men are much better at it.

And I see that quite a lot in interviews and the chances that we take.

And I understand that and I’m still like that now.

But those chances don’t come up very often.

I remember after that conversation, I phoned my dad and I just said, oh, they’ve offered me this, but obviously I need to tell him I can’t do it.

He was like, you are absolutely not telling them you can’t do that.

“You need to do this. You have very few moments like this in your career.”

We have a breakthrough moment.

So if it all goes wrong, then it’s all gone wrong.

And it’s just one of those lessons in life.

You’re surrounded by people that will help you, Colin and John themselves were very committed to helping me, but I, I’d never seen a P&L, let alone run one.

But you get to grips with it and you learn on the job.

I was surrounded by just the best team ever in that office.

I saw one of them when I was in Abu Dhabi over Christmas and New Year, I saw a member of that team who I hadn’t seen for several years.

There is a connection there forever.

Then the final thing that I think it really taught me is I now think about my talent in that way.

I look at junior people all the time, and I think, oh, you’ll be amazing at running that team one day or you’ll have my job.

It’s made me think about talent in a different way.

It doesn’t need to be this linear way.

I can see sort of opportunities for people all the time because it happened for me.

00:05:54 Adrian Ma

Let’s zoom in on that moment.

So you were brought into that room.

They offered you that role of MD, which you weren’t expecting.

00:06:02 Heather Blundell

No, quite the opposite.

00:06:03 Adrian Ma

What was that about you, do you think they saw?

00:06:06 Heather Blundell

I don’t know really.

I think I had probably demonstrated a bit of hustle.

I do like new business and even now I still am very, very client facing.

I really love our craft.

I’m very fortunate, as many of us are in this industry, that we’ve fallen into it and it’s just great fun and we’re really good at it.

I think they probably needed someone, with a bit of energy behind it and was going to shake it up a little bit.

And like I said, we had done quite a few pitches and things together and we’d won quite a lot of business.

So yeah, I guess it was that.

And they were just confident and secure enough in themselves to be able to take a risk.

As a leader, that does take time.

You don’t always want to roll the dice on someone that you’re not completely sure about, especially if you’re more junior in terms of your leadership.

But they were very seasoned professionals and just thought, well, if it all goes horribly wrong, we’ll just close the office.

It was no big deal but within two years, we won seven Cannes Lines in the office.

It was the absolute crown jewel of that UK network, and we had the best time doing it.

00:07:20 Adrian Ma

Amazing.

Frank from Frank.

I was speaking to him.

He has a sales background and he talks about the importance of hustle in a PR career.

Is that something that you seek out?

Are you looking at that when you’re looking at your staff around him?

00:07:38 Heather Blundell

Oh yeah, all the time.

And I think it comes in loads of different ways.

You get people who are naturally brilliantly networked and well-connected.

And then you have other people who are brilliant in the room and new business, and you have other people who are brilliant at pulling together new business pitches and creatives.

Hustle doesn’t need to just be out there getting the checks, and it can be, a hustler in terms of whatever you’re brilliant at.

It’s really important to me.

00:08:11 Adrian Ma

Are there enough people in the industry with it, do you think?

00:08:13 Heather Blundell

Do you know, I think this is an industry of hustle now, more so than it’s ever been.

If you would have told me a couple of years ago that we would regularly be pitching against six to eight other agencies in a new business pitch, you would just count yourself out for it, but absolutely not, and now those lists are getting even longer.

We’re all competing against each other in different ways.

It used to be just the big agencies competing against the big agencies.

And now we’re competing against mid-size and boutique and freelancers.

00:08:50 Adrian Ma

Definitely.

So we talked about your switch, your rise and switch to Weber.

What about Grayling?

00:08:58 Heather Blundell

The opportunity came up to be the UK CEO at Grayling.

I’ve been here for just over 2 years, that transition’s been very different because this certainly wasn’t an agency or office that was in crisis or needed saving, an extremely established offer, which has been a privilege to walk into.

I always describe the culture in this way, but genuinely very kind and generous culture.

Culture is not, I don’t believe, something that you can enforce or create.

It is who the people are and the philosophy of the business.

And I’m really pleased that I, when I first started, I actually started in December 2023, which was quite a nice time to start.

Although I’d been on gardening leave, so I came in absolutely raring to go and everyone else was like limping across the finishing line.

I looked at everyone, I was like, who on earth is this?

But, you know, my intention was to just spend at least a month, getting to know people and listening and rather than just arriving on day one with a plan, because I’ve seen people do that and it doesn’t work.

If I had done that, the plan that I would have written would have been very different to the one that I ended up doing.

It’s really important for anyone starting a new role, whether it’s in leadership or whatever level is to actually take a little breath when you first start somewhere and get to know the people and the culture and what’s important, and to listen before you go all guns blazing.

00:10:35 Adrian Ma

Right.

And in your career, so you’ve had that meteoric rise, you’ve come into Grayling, you’ve listened, you’ve put together a plan.

It all seems to be going very, very well, you know, on paper it looks incredible, but it must have been difficult moments for you.

00:10:52 Heather Blundell

Oh, of course, there’s difficult moments, there are difficult moments all the time in everyone’s career. And I’m sure we’ll talk about this more.

The economy is difficult, the industry is difficult. We’ve spoken about hustle.

Half the new business pictures you think you’re going to win, you lose.

The ones you think you’re going to lose, you win.

We’ve had quarters where we’ve absolutely sailed through.

We’ve had quarters where we have just about scraped through.

that’s the nature of business.

That is a lot to bear because you look at around 200 people in the UK and you feel very responsible.

And people want to be in an agency that’s thriving and they can get promoted and they can throw their hands up for stuff and they want to work for interesting clients and have new opportunities.

I sat on a panel with Mary Berkait quite recently, who is the CEO of YMU, an amazing woman.

She said this sentence and he has absolutely just stuck with me.

We have to realise nobody is coming to save you.

So, you know, when it’s difficult, when business is difficult, when it’s a difficult month, there’s these kind of like no one to look around to and point at anymore.

It’s like, oh, kind of stops with me.

That’s a real responsibility.

But also I feel it’s a little bit like I do with my family and my children.

That’s what keeps my fire going.

I’m responsible for them.

And I look at the team in this agency in the same way.

And the minute I stop caring, I shouldn’t have this job anymore because it is my responsibility to make sure that we are hitting our numbers and that we have amazing clients and we have opportunities.

As long as people are meeting me halfway, then we’re all doing our jobs.

But no, of course, there are very difficult moments and challenges.

00:12:51 Adrian Ma

Well, absolutely in leadership, you know, like you talked about and describe that.

What about those moments that might have been challenging in the course of your career leading up to where you are now to, what have you come up against?

00:13:05 Heather Blundell

I’ve definitely come up against it I’ve always stayed in roles for quite a long time, with agencies for quite a long time.

So like I said, I was at Edelman for eight years and Weber for a long time as well.

And actually that’s knowing sometimes when to leave and when to try something different is always a challenge and it’s scary.

I loved both those agencies.

But you know, when you feel like actually I’ve still got something I need to go and do.

That’s not something going wrong, but it’s always a lot to weigh up.

I remember Carolyn Paul, who’s an amazing lady who works at Edelman and is still the Chair of Europe Healthcare at Edelman.

I was thinking about making a move. She said this in a very honest way, and it’s always stuck with me, and I do say it to people, is wherever you go, and this can be amazing as well, you have to start all over again.

It’s not like you walk in and people know what you’re great at, know you’re a great pitcher, or know you’re great at deck, or know your connections with media.

You have to show everyone again.

You have to start all over again, which is amazing if you’ve got a fresh start, of course, but you don’t walk in with those stripes earned.

Even if people have heard of you, they’ll want to see you in action.

It takes a good two years to really settle into a role and show people what you’re made of.

And that can be really challenging, especially juggling a family and other commitments.

I then I left Weber and I went to Ketchum and I had a really good time and I loved the clients I was working with.

We had really good new business opportunities.

But that was a shorter stint for me and I had an opportunity that had come up here to be the UK CEO and probably to take the agency in a different direction and to have a bit more autonomy.

I felt very weird about leaving after two years because I’d been sort of such a loyalist and a lifer.

You worry about what people will think and what people say, and the honest answer is that people don’t care.

No one cares.

That’s all just it.

That’s just all on you.

And actually, if you’re not particularly happy or if you aren’t able to be the person that you want to be or the leader that you want to be, there’s another opportunity that is a brave decision to make.

But I guess that was probably a challenging time for me because I guess that wasn’t what I thought was going to happen.

00:16:08 Adrian Ma

Yeah. You’re taking these opportunities, you’re leading UK very large organisations.

We’re here sat in London talking about this, but you live in Manchester.

Did you make the move from London to Manchester, for the Weber job, or were you based in Manchester then?

00:16:25 Heather Blundell

I did it in between Edelman and Weber.

I moved to Manchester and I started at Weber Shandwick. It’s great actually, great because we’re such a networked agencies, we’ve got nine offices across the UK.

London is our headquarters and I spend 80% of my working time here.

But it is nice to have that outside of London thinking in my personal and professional life.

00:16:56 Adrian Ma

Yeah. Do you think that the PR industry is quite London centric?

00:17:01 Heather Blundell

I think it really can be. I spoke to a client about this very recently that said that a lot of creative can be very London-centric and actually, this was a food retailer that really has to consider outside of London thinking and they just saw agency after agency that just wasn’t getting that right, particularly in terms of diversity and socio-economic and etc.

Maybe I’ve got a skew view on it because we are so networked and we really have a one UK approach to all that we do.

And also when I was a Weber, it was quite similar as well.

They were like a networked agency.

So I hope not, but probably, yeah.

00:17:47 Adrian Ma

And how do you find working between London, because you have two young boys.

00:17:53 Heather Blundell

Yeah.

00:17:53 Adrian Ma

So your mum as well, you’re coming up and down the country.

00:17:57 Adrian Ma

Yeah.

00:17:58 Adrian Ma

How do you deal with that?

What does your work week look like?

00:18:02 Heather Blundell

I normally work from Manchester on a Monday.

I will come to London on a very early on a Tuesday morning and then I stay and I go back Thursday afternoon/evening in time to put them to bed, and then I normally work from home on a Friday.

00:18:29 Heather Blundell

But you know no week looks the same you know I’m in Davos next week, I travel a lot and I try and get around the other offices in the UK as well.

That would be a sort of fixed week, but it really varies.

00:18:44 Adrian Ma

It’s a lot to juggle. How do you, how do you do it?

00:18:50 Heather Blundell

Certainly, every mum will talk to you about juggling children and lots of dads and men in PR will as well.

It’s really hard.

I have to make the same sacrifices that any other sort of male UK CEO will have to make as well.

I think you have to be really quite intentional about where you’re going to put your time and spend your time because we have spent an awful lot of time telling women that they can have it all and, actually they can’t and that’s very difficult.

Women carry a mental load that is, very different. There’s constant, in your head of like, I need to buy that shepherd’s outfit and that birthday present on Saturday and do the spellings and, actually I think from conversations I’ve had, that gets more and more and more.

And the older my boys get, the commitments they have in terms of activities and sports and, even homework, that gets greater.

They start sort of sleeping a bit better, but actually the commitments become even more so, of course there is, sacrifice in terms of stuff that I can’t do at work that I’d want to do or stuff that I can’t do at home that I want to do.

But I also think I am getting, certainly in the last couple of years, better and better at putting sort of boundaries in place on both sides in order to be able to, create a balance.

But it is a constant juggle, as you said.

00:20:35 Adrian Ma

Do you think that other mothers in the agency are looking at you for modelling what this might look like in their careers in leadership?

00:20:44 Heather Blundell

Yeah, for sure.

when I joined this agency, I remember thinking, I have to get better at this now, because if I don’t fix it now, I’m never going to fix it.

People are looking at me thinking, well, if she does X&Y, then I can do X&Y, and if she doesn’t do X&Y, then I can’t, then I won’t be able to do it.

And that then means that brilliant women leave this industry and I have seen that so much.

I know that Women in PR have done, or is it CIPR, have done that missing women study.

I mean, the stats around that are absolutely shocking and we have seen in our industry over the last year, the majority of top jobs are going to men.

And so we have to be, if you can see it, you can be it.

Perhaps this is because I’m getting enough, I’m, older and, more comfortable in terms of my leadership, but I am very open now,  I’ve brought my kids into the office when I’ve had childcare issues.

My son didn’t want to go to those God, awful camps they have to go to during summer and they like them until like Wednesday and then they’re like, I don’t want to go anymore.

And so no, I did, I had to bring my eldest in and he was having a bit of a tough time and he needed to be with me and they have to be without me for a lot of time.

We can’t tell our children, you always need to tell me if you don’t want to do something or you feel unsafe and then when they do, you don’t listen.

So he did come here with me. It was quite close to Christmas and I think he came all the way.

Yeah, he was here all day.

He was in client meetings.

We had a whole agency meeting.

I think there was a party in the evening.

And then on the way back home, he said, gosh, mummy, your work is like a party.

I was like, oh God, no.

That is not why I’m doingbut I had so many messages about it because he was just following me around all day.

I was like, Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got child care issues, and he was just, you know, sat at the end of the table, you know, doing his colouring in, and I had so many messages from people saying…

That was really honest of you.

Thank you so much for doing that.

And I actually put a post about it on LinkedIn.

So I thought, actually, we have to be honest about these situations.

And maybe a couple of years ago, I might have said that I was sick, or I might have said he was sick, and I might have stayed at home.

I might not have put us in that situation.

I have spent a long time trying to cover up those kind of messier sides of my life because I just thought I needed to look like the perfect leader.

And perhaps that is because I went into it so young.

And I have held myself to a very high standard.

But perhaps I’ve got older, I’ve got more confident that actually they are part of me.

And if they appear on the occasional video call, or you can hear them in my car, or they have to be around the office sometimes.

And I would say the same for anyone if they need to come in.

Danny’s allowed to bring his dog in occasionally.

00:23:53 Adrian Ma

Really nice.

00:23:55 Heather Blundell

So I think we have to work really hard as an industry.

This is not a nine to five industry.

I’m not going to sit in front of anyone and say that everyone here has a brilliant work-life balance.

and can go to every yoga class they sign up for.

So in order to make it work, we do have to have the flexibility and the openness to be able to deal with those when life throws us hurdles.

00:24:17 Adrian Ma

Yeah. And does your eldest son, is he thinking, maybe I want to go into PR now?

00:24:23 Heather Blundell

No, obviously he’s going to be a professional footballer in his eyes.

He will not entertain anything otherwise.

I think he’d be quite good at PR, but anyway.

00:24:33 Adrian Ma

You’ve done quite a lot of work here in terms of trying to make an impact and change, making our industry more inclusive.

00:24:40 Heather Blundell

Yeah.

00:24:40 Adrian Ma

Your latest gender pay gap report showed zero disparity between men and women.

00:24:47 Heather Blundell

Yeah.

00:24:47 Adrian Ma

That’s quite a feat.

Can you talk us through how you’ve achieved that?

00:24:53 Heather Blundell

Yes, we’ve got a 0% pay gap and we have 50-50 representation on our UK board. I also have a senior, a UK senior advisory board, which is 50-50 gender and 25% non-white.

We have been very, very intentional about it and it’s painstaking.

I’m not going to lie about it. We do quarterly promotions and we review every single person in the agency line by line. We have over 200 employees.

It takes all day, and within that, we will go through, if we are planning to give, promote someone or give someone a pay rise, we will look at everyone else at their level across the whole of the office, and we will look at in make sure we’re not promoting.

all the men in one team and, it’s, and that’s why I have to, the credit really has to go to our finance team and our people team who sit and do that work.

And, that’s why I would say to anyone to do it as an exercise, even if you don’t have to, if you’re not at the qualifying threshold or whatever it is, 250 employees, to do it to see where you are, because at least where you have to move.

Because it is so easy to, it’s not easy to close, but it’s, so easy to fall into a very bad place with it.

We always include women and men that are on maternity and paternity leave every time we do that round because all what happens is, if someone is on, maternity leave, they can be overlooked for four cycles and then, they may have two, they may have three maternity leaves or time off for other reasons.

And all of a sudden, you’re three years behind, somewhere else and we’ve got a big gap and you’re at the bottom of a pay band instead of, and it’s rarely performance related.

It really is not performance related when we have a look at, and we’ve had to be very honest with some employees where we’ve brought them into a room and given them a pay rise and said we had to level it out because you won’t be paid what you should be being paid.

And no employee is going to be annoyed about that.

I’ve had such a positive response when I have done that or us saying to people, we recognise right now you’re not where you need to be, we’d like to get you here by this time because there is not a, as Theresa May said, a magic money tree and sometimes we’re very transparent with employees about our intention to get them somewhere and how long we think that will take.

So, we are very intentional about it.

You have to do it very regularly because, I mean, we submit our data to people, PR week and you don’t want to have that, I can’t remember when we do it, probably halfway through the year, all of a sudden, run the pay gap report and it’s awful.

You know, you need to do it very regularly in order to make sure that you don’t need to make those big shifts right before you release that data.

00:28:09 Adrian Ma

And that process that you go through, you talked a little bit about those meetings that you had to have.

There’s a process of correction isn’t there, and equity and being quite intentional about equity in that process.

Was there any pushback at all from anyone?

00:28:28 Heather Blundell

No, I haven’t had any.

I haven’t had any pushback from that at all.

I think the main thing we can do in order to correct and level the playing field.

And I think this would be transformative is actually around paternity leave.

Because the biggest cause of this is women not able to progress their careers because they’ve had significant time out of the business and they’ve missed those opportunities.

They’ve, you know, and then a woman has to come back from maternity leave and then you start all over again.

So you need to win a new business pitch in order to get to the next level or you need to be this amount billable.

You’re all, you know, the whole thing starts again, whereas your male counterparts have just been able to do that.

But actually, I have seen, including here, where we have introduced generous paternity leaves and, they aren’t always taken.

00:29:27 Adrian Ma

Yeah. Is that a cultural thing? Not within the agency, I mean, just a British culture.

00:29:32 Heather Blundell

Yeah, I think so.

I spoke to a friend who described it, he had six months paternity leave and I said how amazing and he was obviously I’m not going to take it that would be career suicide.

I just felt like saying well is it career suicide for every woman that has to do that?

And actually women often take a lot longer than six months you know most women take between 9:00 and 12 months, and but perhaps in some, I had two very short maternity leaves and somewhere inside me it did resonate.

I thought, yeah, I felt like I had to do that because it would be career suicide.

You know, it certainly wouldn’t be, well, certainly wasn’t the agency enforcing that on me at all, but it’s somewhere inside me.

I just thought, well, things will never be the same when you go back and you know.

But I’ve seen generous paternity leaves, but a lot of men, and I see this all the time, will chunk it up, so they’ll have a month here, then they’ll come back for a couple of months, and they’ll have another month off, and then they’ll come back.

It can be quite disruptive to business, and women can’t do that.

Women can’t have a baby and say, I’m going to stay here for a week and a kind of come back, and then I’ll go back.

You know, we could do it, but I have never seen a woman chunk up her maternity leave.

So, actually, if we had, equity in terms of, or parity in terms of our, maternity and maternity leaves, and then we’re out of business for as long as women were out of the business, then I would say, I think we’d see pay gaps completely disappear.

00:31:07 Adrian Ma

Yeah, I think it happens in other countries. I think I agree. It’d be great to do that.

And from what I understand about grading as well, so representation is important across the agency.

We talked about senior on a board level, leadership level, advisory level, not just with gender, but with race as well.

Have you seen any impact of that commercially within the business?

You’ve made all this effort to do this. What impact has it had?

00:31:40 Heather Blundell

I think it’s absolutely had commercial impact.

I always refer to it as kind of diversity in thought and experience.

If you look at our, even if you take our top 10 clients, which range from National Grid to Birmingham Football Club to Grindr to Visa, you know, it’s completely obvious that we need to have a diverse workforce in terms of thought, experience, background, socioeconomic, sexuality, gender. If we put the same person on all of those counts, or type of person on all of those accounts, it would be an absolute disaster.

Not only is it the right thing to do in terms of society, but it’s been absolute transformative for our business.

00:32:36 Adrian Ma

So that’s with client acquisition, client retention and the quality of the work.

00:32:40 Heather Blundell

Yeah, 100%.

Even if you take Birmingham Football Club, we need people who, and it’s a big house.

There’s a lot of staff from London that work on it, but we had to have an office in Birmingham.

And it’s a huge, I had to have people that were interested in sports.

I need to have people that understand that local area.

And it’s a massive regeneration project and a community that we need to be able to understand and reach.

You have to have people that were, interested and connected to government because we needed to unlock some funding in terms of, transport issues and sperm.

That account in itself is a perfect case study of why you need different people with different thought and experience and, your cultural backgrounds and the interests as well and expertise to work on that account.

It’s one of my favourite accounts to work on all of the different attributes that the team bring to that account.

00:33:47 Adrian Ma

Do you think you would have got that had you not had such a diverse team?

00:33:50 Heather Blundell

No, absolutely, they said that.

00:33:52 Adrian Ma

Really.

00:33:53 Heather Blundell

And also not even got it if we hadn’t had a presence in an office in Birmingham, they wouldn’t have gone for an agency that was had pure presence in London.

So no, not at all.

We have to continue to make sure that we maintain that and we have brought in.

Different people from different backgrounds and different expertise where we’ve really needed to dial up in a certain area.

That’s a constant project.

I would say that the makeup of the agency has really changed in the last two years, but it has absolutely had an impact on us commercially, for sure.

00:34:34 Adrian Ma

We’re sat here in London, January, start of the year, 2026.

You’ve done a big piece of work into what we can expect this year in terms of what’s going to be shaping the comms landscape.

Briefly for our listeners, what is going to be shaping the comms?

00:34:51 Heather Blundell

Yeah, well, it won’t surprise you, but there’s a lot of uncertainty.

We’ve run our trends report.

This is our third one now.

There’s always that, oh, this is the year of uncertainty, political upheaval and fragmented media and AI.

There is so much that is unknown.

But actually, the data shows, 52% of business leaders are optimistic about this year.

That means that our clients are having loads of different changes in policy, and almost having to take sometimes quite a short-term view of who to hire and how to run business and what change might be coming.

But, with the, this is to be caution, of course, but, AI is a complete game changer and can open us up in terms of, different experiences and expertise.

But also, the main finding of that report is that reputation matters and it’s far better for us to be looking at challenges that might be coming than to be managing a crisis in three months’ time.

I think that’s, a piece of work that we excel at and that we continue to prioritise for clients in terms of that reputation management.

It would be a really interesting year in that respect.

00:36:26 Adrian Ma

So in terms of preparedness for difficult situations.

00:36:30 Heather Blundell

Yeah.

And also, opportunity for reputation.

You know, if you’ve got a particular campaign or opportunity within your business or something to own, that’s reputation.

What do you want to be famous for?

What’s your purpose?

And how can we help you get there?

How can we define your business and own that space and protect you within that, but also you promote you?

There’s a lot of opportunity with that.

Even with fragments of media, like what we’re doing now in terms of a podcast, there ar, more and more of our clients doing, regular podcasts with, high profile, business podcasts and listeners, because it’s an opportunity for them to be able to, really speak with authority, but honesty and for us, for their consumers and their audience to get to know them as people, because we trust people.

00:37:29 Adrian Ma

Yeah, let’s flip that.

You talked about your clients this year.

Let’s say we were sat here a year from now doing this podcast again, and we’re looking back at Heather over the last 12 months.

What would have had to have happened in those 12 months for you to feel 2026 was my year?

00:37:47 Heather Blundell

Yes, that’s a good question.

Like I said at the start of the podcast, the responsibility of the agency, I feel that.

That’s exciting, but it’s also, when we look at, the commercials and the economy still being difficult, any business, that agency leader that tells you they’re absolutely flying through it, I mean, I don’t think many of them do anymore.

I think, we’re really honest about it, and it can be really tough, but, for us, for commercially, for us to have delivered, and that will mean that, we can, we promoted over a third of the agency last year.

I’d love to be able to do that again this year.

I want people to really feel like their careers are progressing and they’re progressing as individuals and that they are able to put their hands up for amazing new business opportunities and feel like they’re doing stuff in their career that they’ve never done before.

I think if I can be able to turn around and deliver that to the team by the end of the year, then I’ll be really happy.

00:38:51 Adrian Ma

Brilliant.

Final question: if you were speaking to someone who’s just starting their career in PR, and they would come to advice, what advice would you give them, apart from think about think about a different career?

00:39:04 Adrian Ma

No, I’m joking.

00:39:05 Heather Blundell

No, I’m joking.

00:39:07 Heather Blundell

My bit of advice for that, I worked on a really big client at Edelman and it was a very defining client.

I did it for years and it really shaped my professional career.

That happened because a very senior person came out of our office one day and just said, I need someone to do some media monitoring for me.

I was the super junior and I just threw my hand up.

And that media monitoring needed to be delivered very late at night and over the weekends and it was 24/7, but I really got to know the media, I really got to know our craft.

And that message is not all weekends and work nights and whatever.

The message in that is to throw your hand up for stuff.

If you hear about a big new business opportunity or a big client opportunity in your agency, no senior leader will bite your head off for going and saying, can I work on that?

Or I’d love to be able to support on this, or we’ve got this event, or I’ve met this journalist.

And just this, there is so much opportunity within this industry to meet people, to try different things, to be a creative, to be good with numbers, to be really good at budgets and scopes and to, as we said earlier, be a hustler, just throw yourself into it.

It can be incredibly rewarding.

You’re in charge of that and that opportunity is there.

00:40:35 Adrian Ma

Brilliant.

Thank you so much for joining us.

00:40:37 Heather Blundell

Thank you for having me.

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