Erin James Murphy

The question I am hearing from PR and marketing agency founders more than any other right now:

"My clients are starting to ask why they are paying agency rates for work AI can do. What do I tell them?"

Here is the honest answer.

If your only response is "we use AI too," that is not an answer. That is a race to the bottom you will not win.

The agencies that are going to hold their rates, and raise them, are the ones that can articulate what the AI cannot do.

The judgment call on which story is worth pitching and which one is not.
The relationship with the journalist that gets the email opened.
The strategic read on why a campaign is landing flat.
The experience to know what a client actually needs versus what they asked for.

AI can produce a first draft. It cannot produce those things.

But here is the part most founders miss. You have to be able to say it that clearly. Not in a defensive way. Not in a "we are different because we care" way. In a specific, concrete way that a client who just saw an AI demo can actually hear.

The agencies losing clients to this conversation are the ones who never built a clear answer to it.

The ones winning are the ones who already knew exactly what made them worth the invoice.

I worked with a PR agency founder two years ago who had crossed $1M in revenue.

She booked a week off for the first time in four years. She was gone for three days before she flew home early.

Not because of an emergency. Because nothing could move without her.

Client questions were sitting unanswered. A pitch had stalled because no one knew if it was ready to send. A team member had made a call on a client issue and was not sure if it was right, so they waited.

The business had grown to seven figures but it was still running like she was the only person in it.

When we dug into it, the problem was not her team. Her team was capable. The problem was that nothing had ever been decided in writing. What the team could handle alone, what needed her sign-off, how to respond to common client situations. It all lived in her head.

So when she was not there, the team defaulted to waiting.

We spent three months building out decision frameworks, approval thresholds, and escalation protocols. What sounds boring is actually the thing that sets founders free.

She took another week off six months later. Came back to a business that had run fine without her.

If you cannot take a real week off without your phone running your agency for you, the business is not as built as you think it is.

"We already tried AI. It did not work."

That is the first thing a PR agency founder said to me when we got on a call last spring.

I asked what they tried.

They had hired a consultant to come in and train their team on ChatGPT and Claude. Two days of sessions. Everyone got a login. The founder paid around $8,000 for it.

Six months later, two people on the team were still using it occasionally. The rest had gone back to how they always worked.

Nothing had changed about how the agency operated.

That is not an AI failure. That is a training-versus-systems failure.

Teaching someone how to use a tool and building the workflow they use that tool inside of every day are two completely different things.

One changes what people know. The other changes how the work gets done.

When we came in, we did not touch the tools. We mapped their three highest-volume delivery workflows first. Pitch development, media reporting, and client onboarding. Then we built AI into those workflows so the tool was not something people had to remember to use. It was just part of how the work moved.

Three months later, those workflows were running consistently without the founder in the middle of them.

AI is not a training problem. It is an infrastructure problem. And you cannot infrastructure your way out of it with a two-day seminar.

A digital marketing agency founder came to me six months ago. $900K in revenue. Team of eight. Margins at 12%.

That margin number is what got my attention.

When we went into the agency and started mapping how work actually got done, we found the same deliverable being built differently by every account manager. Same type of client. Same type of campaign. Eight different approaches.

No standard intake. No brief template. No review process that anyone actually followed.

So every month the team was reinventing the wheel. And every month the founder was cleaning up the inconsistency in the output.

The founder thought she had a team problem. She did not. She had a workflow problem.

Nobody had ever written down how the work was supposed to get done. So everyone made it up, and the founder paid for it in rework, in client escalations, and in margin.

We spent six weeks building out the core delivery workflows. Not revolutionary. Not AI-powered. Just documented, consistent, and actually followed.

Margins moved to 24% within a quarter.

That is not uncommon. Most agency margin problems are not pricing problems. They are process problems dressed up as pricing problems.

If your team is doing the same type of work differently every single time, go find out why before you touch anything else.

Every agency founder I talk to right now is worried about AI.

Not in a curious way. In a "what if this replaces what I sell" way.

And honestly, that fear is not wrong. But most of them are solving for the wrong thing.

They are rushing to add AI to their services so they can say they do it.
They are training their teams on tools so they can check a box.
They are watching competitors post about AI so they feel like they need to post about it too.

None of that changes the underlying business.

The agencies that are actually going to win are not the ones who added AI to their deck. They are the ones who figured out what they are uniquely good at, rebuilt their delivery model around that, and used AI to make that thing faster and more consistent.

AI does not save a broken operating model. It just makes the broken parts run faster.

The question is not what AI tools you are using.

It is what does your agency do better than any tool ever could, and are you building a business around that.

A PR agency founder reached out to me last year. Seven years in business, $600K in revenue, a team of six.

She was working 60-hour weeks and had no idea why.

We spent the first hour just mapping her week. Here is what we found:

• She was approving every pitch before it went out
• Every client question went to her directly
• She was doing the first draft of every media strategy
• Billing, reporting, and new business all sat on her desk

Her team of six was essentially working around her instead of with her.

The agency had grown but the operating model had not. She had hired people but never built the systems that would let those people actually work without her.

So her team would start something, hit a wall, and wait. And while they waited, she handled it herself because it was faster.

That loop is the thing that kills agency growth. Not revenue. Not clients. Not the market.

The founder becomes the ceiling and does not realize it until they are exhausted and wondering why the business does not run without them.

If your team asks you the same questions every week, that is not a team problem. That is a systems problem.

The answer is never to hire more people. It is to build the infrastructure that lets the people you already have actually do their jobs.

I stopped checking my project management tool every morning.

Claude does it for me.

Every weekday at 7am, before I open my inbox, I get a 5-point brief:

→ Every deliverable past due — client name, item, owner, days overdue
→ Client emails unread more than 4 hours
→ Tasks due today across all active projects
→ Anything that needs my specific decision before the day starts
→ My top 3 CEO priorities for the day

It took 2 hours to build.
It costs $0.08/hour to run.

The key: it's read-only.

It never moves a task, sends an email, or takes any action.
It just shows me what needs attention — so I can decide, not discover.

This is Agent 1 in a 3-agent stack I've built for my agency.

Comment "AGENT," and I'll send the full build spec — system prompt, deployment steps, costs, and the other two agents in the stack.
(Must be connected to receive.)

What's eating your first hour every morning?

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The most expensive part of winning a new client isn't acquisition.

It's the first two weeks.

Here's where the hidden cost lives:

→ 3–5 hours chasing brand assets across email threads
→ 2–3 hours writing a client brief from scratch after a call
→ 1–2 hours manually setting up the project in your PM tool
→ 30–60 minutes writing a welcome email
→ A kickoff call where nobody has the brief because it wasn't ready

Total: 7–12 hours before a single deliverable is produced.

At a blended team rate of $80/hour, that's $560–$960 in cost — on every new client.

Most of this is completely systematisable.

The intake form replaces the asset chase.
The Claude brief generator replaces 2 hours of blank-doc staring.
The automation triggers replace the manual PM setup.
The kickoff agenda replaces the "where do we even start" calls.

We brought onboarding time under 2 hours. Total.

Comment "ONBOARD" and I'll send the full system — intake questions, Claude prompts, Zapier triggers, kickoff agenda, 17-item checklist.
(Must be connected.)

How much time does onboarding cost your agency per new client?

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Claude just dropped Managed Agents.

I spent the weekend building one for my agency.

Here's what it does while I sleep:

→ Checks my PM tool for overdue deliverables every 4 hours
→ Tags the responsible team member in Slack when something goes red
→ Escalates to me directly if nothing moves in 48 hours
→ Runs a 7am ops brief every weekday before I open my inbox

Total infrastructure cost: $58/month.

The equivalent contractor doing this manually: $800–$2,000/month.

Here's what most agency owners get wrong about AI.

They're using it to write faster.

The actual opportunity is using it to watch things you can't watch.

A well-run agent doesn't replace human judgment.
It surfaces the problems before they reach your clients.

I wrote out the full build spec — system prompts, deployment steps, guardrails, exact cron schedule.

Comment "AGENT" and I'll send it to you.
(You need to be connected for me to DM you.)

What's the first thing you'd hand off to an agent if you could?

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If you're still writing deliverables at $200K/month revenue, you haven't built a business.

You've built a job with overhead.

I know this isn't comfortable to read.

I know staying close to the work feels like how you maintain quality.

But here's what actually happens when the founder stays in delivery:

→ Revenue is capped by your available hours
→ Team skills stop developing because they're waiting for your input
→ You're always one bad week away from everything falling behind
→ You hire people to assist you instead of replace you

The transition isn't about trusting other people to do it perfectly.

It's about building the systems and standards that make acceptable output the default.

Your job at this stage isn't to produce great work.

It's to define what great looks like — and make sure the system produces it.

That's a completely different skill set from what got you here.

And it's the one that actually scales.

What's the last deliverable you worked on that someone else should have handled?
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