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Join for freePosted: Fri 2nd Oct 2026
Many businesses are building relationships, reputation and influence from the moment they begin, whether they recognise it as PR or not.
In this Lunch and Learn, PR strategist Kristel Valaydon explains how to connect your PR activity with your wider business goals, helping you focus your efforts, build the relationships that matter and create more meaningful opportunities for growth.
Kristel shares her Five Spheres of Connection® framework, showing where PR can be applied across your business and the different groups who can influence its success.
Leave with greater clarity of what PR means today, where it can create value and how to use your limited time and resources more purposefully at your current stage of business.
Understand why PR is a key business strategy and leadership capability, rather than simply a route to media coverage or promotion
Identify the people and relationships that can influence and contribute to your business growth through the Five Spheres of Connection® framework
Decide where to focus your PR activity now, based on your business goals, priorities and stage of growth
Kristel is the founder of KV Comms. With more than 25 years’ experience in PR and communications, she helps founders, entrepreneurs and leadership teams build trust and turn disconnected activity and comms into aligned action that supports growth from the inside out.
Her Five Spheres of Connection® framework reframes PR as a leadership and business strategy, not simply a route to visibility. It connects an organisation’s vision and commercial goals with the people who influence how they succeed.
If you have any questions you'd like Kristel to answer during the webinar, please send them to events@enterprisenation.com.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, happy Friday, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm very pleased to introduce Kristel Valaydon, who is the founder of KV Comms. In this session, Kristel explains how to connect your PR activity with your wider business goals, helping you focus your efforts, build the relationships that matter and create more meaningful opportunities for growth.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat or in the Q&A box, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. As always, we are recording this session, and you will receive the recording along with some further follow-up resources by email today. So over to you, Kristel.
Kristel: Thank you, Beth, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me on your lunchtime. After such a great intro from Beth on what this session covers, I'm going to dive right in and hopefully give you some real clarity about PR and how you can use it for your business.
A warm welcome from me if we've not met before. My name is Kristel, and I have been working in PR for 30 years if you include my PR degree, so I think I can officially say I am a PR nerd.
For 25 of those years, I've been working in agencies, which I absolutely love because it's given me access to a multitude of different clients, brands and companies from different sectors and industries. It has definitely kept me busy.
Well, 15 years ago, I actually launched KV Comms, and I have really enjoyed working with founders and entrepreneurs, particularly director-level entrepreneurs. Those are people who have a real vision to change, to move minds, models and markets, and to really find a way of doing better business.
Over the years, what I have found so important is how PR really does function on the power of relationships over transactions in order to deliver meaningful results. Most people think of content as comms, but it lacks the connection.
It's how we actually use the vision and goals and connect them to people through storytelling, creative activity and two-way communication in order to deliver the results needed to drive business success. Seeing the same questions come in from businesses and from fellow PRs about what they'd love their clients to know, I've developed PR Rewired, a webinar and masterclass.
It really tries to show how PR rewires the common misunderstanding about what PR is and how to use it, so that you can get the best value out of it. I'm going to share my own framework, which has come through working with such a range of businesses, to help you visualise that PR is not a tick-box exercise.
It's not one and done. You're building trust, you're building legacy and reputation, so PR really needs to be more of an ecosystem, and I'll show how that's done.
So let's start from the beginning. There's a lot of misunderstanding and underutilisation of PR, and a lot of clients come to me straight away asking, "How do I get into the media? How do I boost my visibility?" because that's what they've been told.
There are lots of definitions, especially recently on LinkedIn, with people asking what the difference is between PR and comms. But I've been doing this for 30 years, and I always go back to our source, which is our industry bodies, and how they define PR.
If you look at the two definitions here from the CIPR and the PRCA, which are our global organisations, they show how it's about building relationships with the people who will help move your business forward. What I love about this is that they're using words like trust and reputation.
It really is about managing that clarity and connection so that you can work together to drive and deliver measurable outcomes for your business, and it's how you manage those relationships. What I find really interesting about the PRCA's most updated definition is the idea of managing volatility.
We are in times at the moment where it's quite difficult for businesses to manage all the changes and uncertainty going on. I think that when we work together through relationships, we build a sense of community, and it ends up being a much smoother process when you're trying to find solutions and implement them.
But let's look at what matters more: measurable outcomes. This has been the biggest downfall for PR, because if you've embarked on a PR campaign, you can get lots of coverage, but I keep on hearing the same thing: "What did that get me? What did that get the business?"
It's been really hard to define. What I've absolutely loved hearing recently is that our industry body, the PRCA, worked with CBI Economics and calculated, for the first time, that PR contributes £7.1 billion to the UK economy.
That's a huge number, and it's so good to see it, because when we're talking about PR relationships, we're talking about soft skills, and it's very hard to equate those to hard numbers. What I aim to do is help you think about your business strategy: how do you measure it, what do you measure, and how can you plan accordingly to meet it?
By the end of this, hopefully you'll realise that PR does not start with a press release – it starts with strategy. Now, I want to look at how PR has really changed because of the attention evolution we've experienced, and I'm sharing some slides from my PR Rewired webinar to show that evolution and what you need to be aware of at the moment.
First of all, we have what we now call traditional media – papers and magazines – but we saw a change in the publishing model. When I started KV Comms 15 years ago, I knew that we had to look at PR differently and far more broadly, because we saw the rise of clickbait headlines and the pay-to-play model.
We also saw a decline in trust in media, and people weren't reading it as much. That's because of the boom in digital, which is the next picture, where more content became available for us to consume, whether from blogs or YouTube.
We're also seeing more communities where we can be active, and more publishing outlets like Substack, away from traditional media. So the numbers for traditional media have gone down; it's not as effective and, unfortunately, there's also distrust.
But it's still going to be important, because when AI is searching for brands and businesses to recommend, it's still pulling from owned media. Your own blogs and the content you put out there haven't died, but it's important to know where people's attention is actually lying.
Then we go on to social media, which we all know is declining in engagement – I think it's only TikTok that's reversing the trend. From the wave of social, we have also seen some unfortunate effects, like online fatigue and real isolation.
Even though we're so connected, we've never felt so isolated and lonely. Because of that, we have seen the need for more community and a sense of belonging, and a rise in offline experiences – a little bit of a rebellion.
Just as we've seen that grow, AI has entered the chat. We're seeing a speed of content that we have to consume and, with it, unfortunately, more AI slop that we're not happy about or appreciating, so we're requiring quality in what we consume and what we want to experience.
So what is AI using for its search? This is a really important question for PR and businesses today: it's using media and what it's reading across digital to make its analysis.
But we're also seeing the downside, because it means your reputation has never been more exposed, so a lot of brands are investing in media relations to make sure their brand is protected. I think PR is going to split two ways.
You'll have PR for AI – how you protect your business reputation and get your references and SEO aligned. Then there's going back to the relationship approach, which is what we want for our businesses when it comes to growth and success, and that's PR for humans. It's exposing a gap in trust and authenticity, which I think is really important to address when we're thinking about PR, what you want and how it needs to work.
So let's start with the first question I get asked: where does PR actually fit in the business? I like to show the importance of the three things any business really needs, and first of all, that's your business strategy – the bare bones of how it needs to work.
If, for example, you have no product, no operations, no research or no sales, you don't have a business. These are the core elements of what you want to deliver, whether it's a product or a service, and what you have to do to make that happen.
Then, obviously, we've got brand, which provides a personality to your business so that we attract people who are more aligned with us, our values and what we want to achieve, and who want to work with us. That's how it looks, how it's positioned, how it's talked about and, really importantly, the values we work with and our non-negotiables.
That is becoming increasingly important to customers and who they choose to work with, as is the know, like and trust factor. Then, of course, we've got marketing, which is a beast in itself now because it's so performative – it has so many opportunities and its own ecosystem, and it's so important for companies to understand.
Nine times out of 10, we put PR under marketing because, when we're talking about promotion, we're looking at how we capture and nurture, and then create that system for PR to work. It's brilliant when you see campaigns where marketing, PR and social work in alignment, and how that can amplify campaigns and messaging and grow awareness.
So if you think about business health, the strategy is the bones, brand is the mindset, and marketing is the pure muscle behind it all. So where does PR fit?
If you've got big marketing budgets, it's great when you use PR to help amplify them. But because it's usually tucked under marketing, it's still a very reactive way to approach PR, and it's underutilised.
What I want to share here is that, for me, if you're thinking about health, PR is the nutrition. You've got the bones, the mind and the muscle, and this is the nutrition – it's what's going to feed in those really good opportunities for you.
What I find interesting is that PR is a multidisciplinary skill set in itself. Imagine a big company: it has to factor in all these elements of comms to make its comms work, and it's from the top down.
When you're looking at strategic comms and leadership comms, these are all business skills and PR skills, but also careers in their own right, and it literally works its way down. What's really interesting to me is that sometimes you go into big companies and they still work in silos, not connected, because each has its own tasks and goals.
What I want to share today is how you can use this to your advantage if you're a smaller business. This is why I want to share the framework I use whenever I'm working with a client: to focus on what you need to focus on as a business and help strategically support your business.
A lot of the clients I work with say they don't do PR, and yet they really value relationships and how they nurture these different groups. So you could very well be doing PR without realising it, and that's a great place to start.
No matter what your budget or the size of your business, look at how you can identify the gaps in what you're doing or what you could be missing. We're going to use this as a visual framework for this session to show how you can open up more opportunities, whether you're planning your campaigns or nurturing different groups of people to support you on your business journey.
This isn't new. The jargon behind it all would be stakeholder mapping, and a lot of my PR friends would say, "Brilliant. This is what we want our clients to understand."
We're all in agreement on this: the more you understand that this is interconnected rather than one and done, the better your results. This visualisation makes it more accessible to what you need to deliver for your business.
I'm also always happy when people come along to the PR Rewired sessions or see this framework and say they didn't think of working with that group of people or didn't realise it could be an opportunity. It gives your business a solid foundation to work from.
So how do we start? Aligning your PR to your business strategy. Whilst we're going through all these different groups, think about your business priorities for the year ahead, who can help you deliver those goals and how you will build connection and understanding between them.
When we think about strong relationships, please remember this is a two-way conversation. This isn't marketing, broadcasting and promotion – this is nurturing that relationship so you can get better and stronger together.
Then, most importantly, how will you measure success? Usually, when you're looking at a PR campaign – say, for example, you're doing media relations – you're basing it on the outcome of the media coverage, and that doesn't mean anything for your business goals.
There is an association for the measurement and evaluation of communication, and most really good PR companies will ask you what your business priorities are, how you're measuring success and how they can align back to that. I'll go through that in the spheres briefly.
Once you've got this plan, also remember how you maintain this trust and growth ecosystem, because that's what it is – it's not one and done. It's how you nurture and develop this, and that's how trust, confidence and legacy grow.
So let's start with visionaries – I'm looking at leaders. I love a good quote, so you'll see me drop these in quite frequently.
You are a leader in your own business, and I think your role as that leader is to translate your vision into reality. You give that vision of your business, that purpose, that trust and that direction.
Ultimately, people do business with those they know, like and trust, and you need to be really clear on how you communicate that. Trust is built through people, so imagine how much easier and more valuable it would be if you could communicate so clearly that you bring a team, a tribe or a community around you who want to support you.
You can only do that by communicating what you want to build. You've heard about the rise of the personal brand, and I know a lot of business owners are not really comfortable with it.
But this is why it's so important: there's a lot of storytelling behind this process. It shares where your positioning is and what values you work with, and that means people want to work with you.
If you're more established, you might have your own brands, or you might be in the process of developing the next one. This is where you make that statement: this is how this business works, this is how we live, and this is how we're going to build our reputation based on the actions to support that.
You want to be the authentic anchor, not the swing. You may have a brand that sits on a server, away from your teams, and is only used once during the launch, but it's how you live out those values in everything you do in the business.
That's so important because 84% of customers say they choose to work with brands that share their values. That happens with us all – we want that alignment.
The second sphere I call the trailblazers, so think about your teams. Their role is to get in alignment with what you want to achieve, and also to execute that.
I think this is really undervalued, especially in bigger corporations, as my internal comms colleagues know. It's so important because when you think about the cost of employee acquisition, training and retention, you have to think, "Crikey, that is a cost to the business."
So you want them to be engaged with what you're doing, so that they can help move the business forward on your behalf because they're so supportive and enthusiastic. Yet, surprisingly, only 10% of UK employees are engaged at work, and this is a massive opportunity when it comes to relationship building.
Think about how you're doing it – it's not just HR, which is the compliance side. You actually want to see that engagement, care and relationship built so that you can trust your teams to take your vision and goals forward.
You might think, "I'm a solopreneur. I don't have that – I'm the main employee in my company." But I work with my freelancers, and I make sure they're clear on how I work and what I think is important.
Even my website developer knows so well what I'm doing that whenever I'm coming up with changes, she also challenges me. Anyone I work with in my inner circle, I treat as my inner team, and that's something to think about, because ultimately they're representing you and they can also recommend you.
We're doing so much more now with how we use our employees to help promote us as companies. On LinkedIn, for example, you're far more likely to trust and follow an employee than a company page, and employees who are most aligned with leadership goals are 78% more motivated than those who aren't.
With so much change going on – whether it's AI, tech, or having to update and move with the times because of what's going on financially in the UK and globally – this is the important factor. When you have strong communication, change management is seven times more likely to meet its objectives.
The next group we have to think about are what I call champions and advocates, who amplify and endorse what you do. I love Seth Godin, so think about how you would build your tribe in and around your business or your community.
You can think about different ways of who they might be, and it varies for businesses. If you're in a large company, it might be an internal stakeholder.
I've found such success when I look across a company and see that we can collaborate on something that will help a shared business and branding goal. We collaborate, we unify, and we make the campaign even better, and we're both reporting back up to leadership, who are really happy to see this connection and to see us work together.
It really does make such a difference when they're so keen to work with you. Or you might look at investors as another champion – they're not just giving you money, but opening up doors, conversations, opportunities and networks for you, so making sure you've built that relationship up clearly with them is so important.
And let's not forget, when we go through times of crisis, where do we look? Sometimes we fail to invest in the local community, which can really provide that support, especially on a local level, so it's really important to get that collaboration going.
Finally, trade and industry bodies are massively overlooked. Not only do they deliver the credibility and knowledge for you to learn and improve your trade, but they also have access, speaker opportunities and ways they can profile you.
It's often where journalists, who are so stretched for time, look to see what's new, what's coming up and who's leading the charge. So if you're doing something innovative in your business, make sure your industry and trade bodies know about it, or if it's a market you need to tap into, make sure you're engaged with them to see how you can reach their industry.
Then we go on to discoverers as we're wrapping up. Think about customers not just as recipients, but as active participants – we're seeing a real shift in this need for connection.
I think it was the last Edelman Trust Barometer, in 2025, that found 85% of customers don't even value institutions – government, the media – anymore. They actually look to brands for where their values might lie and where they want alignment, and that purpose and meaning is what we're looking for.
That's why we're seeing so much investment in communities, where brands are using their customers for research, development, loyalty, referrals and content. It's so important to engage with them on a different level.
But it requires a village – it's not just you and your business pulling them all together. It could be sales or partnerships getting involved, or different partners, comms and experts who are really trying to get into the fold and give them a quality experience.
If you don't have a community and you're wondering where your customers are, join one. There will be somewhere you can join if you're a small business – you don't necessarily have to build one yourself, especially if your resources are tight, but go join and engage.
Then finally, there are pathfinders, which I always say are external partners with open channels. At this stage, that could be media, but also don't forget partnership brands.
As I said earlier, media is the most cited source for AI search, so it's really important to use media here. Just remember that you will have PR for search and PR for humans, and whether it's media, partner brands or sponsors, great partnerships have shared goals.
So that's how you link back to your objectives. What do you want to achieve, what is your mission, what are your goals, and do you have some sort of shared connectivity there?
Every partner you have is a channel and an opportunity to promote yourself, to get out there and to look for opportunities for growth, trust and reputation. Reciprocity is key – this is the one thing that keeps on being missed.
Make sure you're asking questions and developing the right relationships, and giving back just as much as you're benefiting. So perhaps your step four after today is to look and review.
Ask questions about how people are perceiving your company, what you want to achieve and how well they know how to support you. Review it, look for the gaps and see where you could discover and create opportunities.
Work with them and ask them what would work for them. Then don't forget to plan – I would advise doing it now, in this quarter, for the year ahead.
It's a great time to ask questions, as you might be doing reviews or gathering customer feedback, which are all really good opportunities to find out what you can do for the year ahead. I love that phrase: fail to plan, plan to fail.
So make sure that throughout the year you've got activities – campaigns you can amplify through these different groups – or that you can say, "Right, we're not doing really well with our employees right now. What can we do to enhance that and embed it regularly?" Maybe it's our stakeholders or the local community.
Don't forget to ask for support – it's right here, folks, and we've got some great PRs in the community. By following this process, you know what you need to achieve, and then you know what support you need to ask for.
As I said, I run PR Rewired sessions. You've got the QR code for the next one, which is later this month, or you can book a call with me – I have a range of services when you're trying to figure it out.
It might be a clinic session, or we can do a review to help you on your way and plan for the year ahead. I'm also part of Enterprise Nation, so you can contact me through my profile there or through LinkedIn, and I'm more than happy to connect.
Thank you so much for your time. Beth, do we go straight into questions?
Beth: Yes, let's do it. Thanks so much for that session, Kristel – that was brilliant. We've got a few minutes for questions.
Kristel: Sorry, I've just noticed my internet's not great, but let's go ahead anyway.
Beth: Okay. So how can founders identify which relationships will have the greatest impact on their business?
Kristel: I think it goes back to your goals – think about what you really need to achieve. Think about your vision and look at your short-term and long-term goals.
If you have employees, or if you need referrals or to build up your reputation, think about your network and where you're going to get the most benefit. Employees, to me, are non-negotiable: if you have them, they're an extension of you, and that's what's going to move it forward.
When it comes to media or partners, it's so much more expansive, and you really have to pick and choose what's right. A lot of people go straight to partners and media and forget their trade and industry, but you can do so much more with targeted trade media relations than maybe with national coverage.
This is where experts come in to help you. As long as you're clear on your objectives and start with your strategy – not what you think you want, which is media coverage – give them your business objectives first.
Beth: Sure. Okay, on that note about coverage, Jasmine has put a question in the chat. Jasmine works for a group of businesses that help employers with their people and HR needs, such as recruitment companies, HR services and staff accommodation, and she's struggling to get journalists to write about the group as a whole, so she wants your advice on how to get more PR and media coverage.
Kristel: Oh, okay. Crikey. What I would say is look at the trends right now, and I think there are two things.
You need to be of value to that journalist, and you have to really look at what they're covering. This is where my PR geekdom comes in: I read everything.
Whenever I'm working with a client, I look at every piece of media and think, "This would fit, this would fit, this would fit." Then you get to know the journalist: how do they write, and what's important to them?
Engage with them on social and get to know them. It really is a bit of geekery, because you have to figure out what is of value to them, so follow what they cover, and look at their media features to see what they've got coming up.
When you're pitching, you have to show what your group of companies or your brand is doing to be ahead of the market. Identify the challenges and rethink how you can position it so that you're a go-to.
Really be available to meet their needs, so that if they ask for any support or help, you're ready and prepared with that information. I think the worst thing is when you pitch to journalists, finally get a breakthrough, and then the client's not around for comment.
There's so much there, and there are some great PR and media relations Lunch and Learns in the system already, so you might want that full breakdown. It's a lot to take in here because we've gone strategic.
Beth: For sure. We've got one in from Vitor as well, but I assume this one might be a good one to reach out to Kristel about afterwards. Vitor runs a creator agency, VC Digital Experience for AI and SaaS companies, and they're just getting started.
They're working on outreach, DMs, writing articles on LinkedIn and making videos, but they feel they need exposure and want advice around that. So, Kristel, is that one to connect with you on afterwards?
Kristel: Definitely. We're going to be saturated with tech developments, and bear in mind that media is shrinking right now.
So you're doing the right thing by creating your own coverage and building up credibility on platforms like LinkedIn – that really is key. But think about what you're offering, and what's groundbreaking and innovative.
It's an overused word, but what is it that I haven't seen before? In this age of AI, you don't want to be doom and gloom, so what are the benefits, and could you provide an alternative view?
So let's have a chat, and we can go through it. If, for example, it's tech I'm not familiar with, there are so many great PRs out there who have those relationships and can pull that coverage and campaign together – but we have to know your business objectives, and so much more.
Beth: Of course. Absolutely. Well, thank you – you do have Kristel's links in the chat, so please do connect afterwards. If I could keep you for just one more question, Kristel – how would you measure what successful PR looks like if the goal isn't immediate sales?
Kristel: Really interestingly, I think some of the best examples outside of sales are about how PR contributes to business growth: how have we built trust and reputation? I've worked with some great brands, and ultimately it will achieve sales.
But PR is about legacy, growth, connection and relationships, so it's like a chess game, and because everyone's so used to fast results, they're treating it like checkers, as I like to say. Ultimately, what you have to think about is how you're contributing to success through solid communication, clarity and confidence, and how that can move things more quickly.
You could be measuring momentum: are you hitting your goals, have you got alignment and is your team on board? You can measure things like employee understanding – 360 reviews are great – and whether your leadership and thought leadership activities are actually being understood.
Are your teams engaged, and are they showing and exemplifying it? At the end of the day, they just want recognition, so are they doing the job, are you rewarding them, and are they feeling happy and content?
That's a big win, especially for internal comms and HR, when you have a big team that really supports you. It's also what investors are now looking for – it's not just money to develop a product; it's how on board your team is to help you drive the business forward.
So there are lots of things you can look at, and have a look at AMEC as well. They do such brilliant work, and I think it's so important when you look at business goals that there's always an evaluation method behind them that's relevant for your business and budget.
Beth: That's great – excellent points, thank you. Lorraine said in the chat: "This has been an excellent session. I particularly like the five spheres of connection – it's made me think about what I am and what I'm not doing."
Well, that brings us to the end of the session. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kristel – that was a really great session – and thank you to everyone who joined us.
Just to recap, we're going to send this recording out, so please do connect with Kristel, either via Enterprise Nation or via LinkedIn, to pick up the conversation. Thanks again, Kristel, and we'll see you soon.
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