Why Top PR Talent Is Leaving Agencies to Build Their Own Brands

The public relations industry has a retention problem at the top, and it has nothing to do with salaries.

Over the past five years, a pattern has emerged across major agencies in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Senior vice presidents and managing directors with fifteen or twenty years of experience are not jumping to rival firms. They are leaving the agency model entirely, using the brand-building skills they developed for clients to launch their own consumer companies.

The shift is visible in the numbers. A 2025 report from the Institute for Public Relations found that executive-level turnover at the ten largest global PR firms hit 23 percent, the highest rate since the institute began tracking the metric in 2016. Exit interviews cited the same reasons in roughly the same order: creative constraints, client politics, and the growing conviction that the skills required to build a brand are the same skills they had been selling to other people for decades.

Andrew Garson followed that exact trajectory. He spent eight years as a vice president at Cohn & Wolfe in Los Angeles, running integrated campaigns for entertainment and consumer brand clients. He then moved to WME, the talent and entertainment conglomerate now operating as Endeavor, where he served as senior vice president of brand marketing from 2014 to 2017. In 2018, the same year PRWeek named him to their 40 Under 40 list, he left agency life to found Albany CT Creative, a marketing consultancy based in New York.

What happened next is the part that distinguishes Garson’s path from the typical agency-to-consultancy pivot. Rather than simply advising brands, he started building them. He became a partner in Ahh Gave’ Spirits, an agave-based spirits company, and later joined 4GuysBeverage, which operates in the wellness beverage category alongside brands like Orange Toucan.

“The moment I realized I was spending my best creative energy making other people’s brands successful while not owning any of the upside, the math stopped working,” Garson said. “I had spent twenty years learning how to position a product, generate earned media, build cultural relevance. At some point you have to ask yourself whether you want to keep renting those skills out or put them to work on something you own.”

The economics support the decision. Agency margins have been compressing for a decade, driven by client procurement pressure and the unbundling of services that once justified large retainers. A 2025 analysis from R3, the consultancy benchmarking firm, found that average agency operating margins fell to 11.4 percent, down from 16 percent in 2019. At the same time, the direct-to-consumer and wellness sectors have been generating returns that make agency profitability look modest by comparison.

The wellness beverage market alone is projected to reach $2.1 trillion globally by 2028, according to Grand View Research. Garson’s bet on the category reflects a broader thesis shared by several former agency executives interviewed for this article: the sectors where storytelling matters most are the same sectors where PR people have an asymmetric advantage.

“A CPG founder who came up through supply chain or product development often treats marketing as a line item,” Garson said. “Someone who came up through PR treats it as the product’s central nervous system. We understand that a brand is a story people tell each other, and if you get the story right, the distribution follows.”

The pattern is not limited to New York. In South Florida, where the wellness and spirits industries have been expanding alongside the broader migration of business headquarters from the Northeast, several former agency principals have launched or relocated consumer ventures in the past three years. Miami’s emergence as a hub for health-conscious consumer brands, from functional beverages to clean beauty, has created a market where the PR-to-founder pipeline is becoming a recognizable career path.

Not everyone in the industry sees the trend as permanent. Some agency leaders argue that the current wave of departures is cyclical, driven by a period of cheap capital and venture enthusiasm for consumer brands that may not survive a market correction. Others point out that running a consumer brand requires operational skills, supply chain management, retail distribution, regulatory compliance, that most PR professionals have never encountered.

Garson acknowledged the learning curve but pushed back on the premise.

“The hardest part of building a consumer brand is not the operations. You can hire for operations. The hardest part is getting anyone to care that your product exists. That is a communications problem. That is literally what we do.”

His consultancy, Albany CT Creative, now serves as both a client-facing practice and an incubator for his own brand interests. It is a model that several former agency executives have adopted, maintaining advisory revenue while investing time and capital into owned ventures, a structure that hedges the financial risk of leaving a guaranteed paycheck while allowing them to build equity.

As the Jersey Ledger recently reported, Garson has also been vocal about how AI tools are reshaping the marketing function itself, arguing that new technology is making it possible for small brand teams to execute campaigns that would have required a full agency roster five years ago. That thesis, if correct, further undermines the traditional agency value proposition and strengthens the case for the PR-to-founder path.

The next twelve months will test whether this generation of agency expatriates can translate reputational capital into consumer revenue. For Garson, the answer will come from the wellness beverage aisle. For the agencies they left behind, the question is whether the talent pipeline can replenish itself fast enough to replace two decades of institutional knowledge walking out the door.