Maybe you turned it around, clawing it back from the brink of insolvency into a multi-million-pound operation. Or maybe it started off as a side hustle — weekends, late nights, lunch breaks stolen in service of something that now feeds your family, defines your identity, and occupies your every waking thought.
Perhaps your business has become your baby. Your legacy. Your lifeline. An entity in its own right for which you have personally sacrificed. You think about the missed birthdays; the mental burnout; the friendships tested, and even the marriages lost.
So when the time comes to tell your story — to “put it out there,” as the saying goes — it’s only natural to believe that others will care as deeply as you do. That they’ll see the sleepless nights. The hustle. The triumphs and traumas baked into your every decision.
The brutal truth is that no one cares about your business more than you do, and when it comes to publicity, that’s precisely the problem. Too many founders undertake PR under the dangerous illusion that the media should care — that journalists are waiting for the next great rebrand, product launch, or personal founder story. This is a common error often made by entrepreneurs and business leaders who confuse passion with newsworthiness and self-importance with public interest.
The one question every founder must answer before they think about PR is: Why should anyone else care about you and your business? Not just your customers, who might need a different kind of persuasion and pitch to the cynical, overstretched editor fielding hundreds of feature proposals each week. It is vital to ask Why should your story be reported here? Why now? Why this?
Having worked with various SMEs across sectors for nearly twenty years, a significant part of the guidance I offer focuses on how to answer these questions with impact and resonance. Because when PR and thought leadership are done right, it’s not advertising — it’s authority. It’s strategy with soul. It’s the moment a business stops shouting about itself and begins demonstrating what it stands for. It gives your brand a voice, a perspective, and a personality. It makes you human — and relatable — in ways that few other marketing and advertising tactics can ever achieve. Done correctly, it doesn’t just attract attention; it earns trust, builds credibility, and turns indifference into engagement.
The problem with founder-led publicity
Founders are often deeply (and rightly) passionate about what they have built. But passion alone isn’t newsworthy. The media isn’t here to validate your mission or echo your internal narrative. Their role is to serve their readers, and their first filter is almost always indifference. I think of them as a bored Medieval king, slumped in his throne. He’s seen it all — endless parades of eager entrepreneurial jesters, each desperate to perform, to be noticed, to win favour. Some come juggling buzzwords. Others cartwheel in with “disruptive”, “ground-breaking”, “game-changing” launches: an Uber but for cats; a Grindr for amorous vegetarians; a Netflix but for PowerPoint presentations. Many trip over their ego.
So what does get cut through?
Definitely not hyperbole, nor the fifth award you’ve won in 18 months. The best founder stories show us the person behind the brand: the skincare founder who developed her formulas in a borrowed kitchen while living in a women’s refuge. The care-leaver with zero GCSEs, who now lectures on entrepreneurship at Oxford. The student who developed an award-winning sweet for dehydration after visiting his grandmother in a care home. The former office cleaner who got her lightbulb moment while scrubbing toilets during a 12-hour night shift.
Where did you grow up? What shaped your earliest view of the world? What moment taught you your most humbling lesson — and how did you recover? Founders who can articulate not just the what of their success, but the why and who behind it are the ones people remember. Because those are the stories that reflect our own fears, ambitions, and contradictions. They carry emotional weight.
Of course, not every entrepreneur has a rags-to-riches story. Some come from privilege. Some had access to elite education, industry networks, and even startup capital. This is predominantly the scenario for most of the clients I work with: boarding school, ex-Russell Group or Ivy League, cutting their teeth at a stint in McKinsey.
That’s not a flaw — it’s just not a story in itself. Because privilege, unlike struggle, doesn’t build narrative tension. But it can still yield editorial value if it’s paired with reflection, insight, or impactand is also underpinned by a genuine, universally relatable, human-interest story — the fear of failure, imposter syndrome, trauma as a catalyst for success or self-acceptance and identity. These are internal or relational struggles that reveal the person behind the brand and beyond just business milestones. It is such stories that foster trust and respect in audiences.
From narcissism to narrative
This is the issue I find most challenging when managing some entrepreneurs: educating them about the architecture of a thought leadership piece. While it’s true that thought leadership enables greater control over messaging, control itself does not equal unfiltered self-promotion. I sometimes find myself grappling with entrepreneurs about the rationale for maintaining an unbiased stance and the necessity, in some cases, for even referencing competitors in a piece. Even when I’ve had direct feedback from an editor that corroborates this advice, there are occasions when a business leader flat out refuses: “We appreciate what the editor says, but we can’t do this.” It results in the loss of a valuable PR opportunity.
Editors aren’t looking for brand monologues. They want insight, provocation, evidence of change. They want to know why this story matters now, not why you’re amazing. If you’re not willing to quote competitors, acknowledge industry tensions, or offer real-world implications, you’re not writing thought leadership. You’re writing marketing copy.
Self-referential hype belongs in advertisements and advertorial. Constructively drawing upon wider industry work, including that of your competitors, to illustrate your point beyond the realms of your own business examples is a critical part of the process, and it’s simply non-negotiable.
The key is that true thought leadership requires restraint and objectivity. Of course, founders understandably want to protect their brand’s narrative — but the irony is, credibility comes from letting go of that control, at least partly. It’s about earning trust by showing the whole landscape — not just your own highlight reel. Referencing competitors, acknowledging market tensions, or even sharing a personal misstep doesn’t weaken your authority; it builds it. Thought leadership is about saying something that matters to people outside your business. And that means being useful, reflective, and occasionally vulnerable.
What good thought leadership actually looks like
When done well, thought leadership isn’t about ego but editorial empathy and understanding what your audience is grappling with. You offer perspective, not promotion; a chance to say: here’s what we’ve learned, here’s what we’re seeing, and here’s what we believe needs to change.
The harsh truth is this: no one will care about your business until you give them a reason to. And that reason has to extend beyond you. Great PR isn’t about exposure. It’s about relevance. And great thought leadership isn’t about who you are — it’s about what you have to say.
Get that right, and you’ll stop chasing attention and start earning it.
