Home › Blog › New business for PR agencies: retainer consultancies vs paying per meeting
Four UK new business consultancies vs pay-per-meeting outbound: cost-per-client maths, P1's campaign scale, and when the consultancy is the better buy.
By Moe Alhosni · Published 13 October 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026 · 9 min read
Short answer: A UK new business consultancy sells you a team and a process for a monthly fee, and the meetings are a hoped-for output. A pay-per-meeting agency sells you the meeting and nothing else. For a 5-25 person PR agency the comparison comes down to one number: how many qualified meetings a month the fee actually buys. None of the four consultancies below publishes a fee, a minimum term or a meeting count, so get all three on the call before you compare anything.
Two PR agencies we have run outbound for
PR Noir, a New York PR agency, got 27 leads and 10 qualified meetings in its first 45 days. P1 Communications, a UK travel PR agency, got 20+ qualified meetings.
I run ROI Maximizer. We book meetings for PR agencies by cold email and charge per qualified meeting, so I have a side in this. Some of you should hire a consultancy instead; that section is near the end.
This is one of four pieces on PR agency growth: the hub, lead generation for PR agencies, plus cold email for PR agencies and how many follow-ups a sequence needs.
Before you compare who to pay, look at where PR clients come from. Outbound, the thing both models below sell, sits near the bottom.
The rest of this page is about who you pay to run outbound when referrals go quiet: a consultancy on a monthly fee, or an agency paid per meeting. If your new business is pitch-led, read the section on when the consultancy is the better buy first.
Everything in this table comes from each firm's own website as of October 2026. I have not guessed.
| Firm | Trading since | What they say they do | Fees published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Future Factory | Not stated | "a dedicated new business team working two days per week on your agency growth"; targets digital, creative, design, comms and live experience agencies; says "80% of the meetings we generate are with senior decision-makers at major brands" | Outreach: no. Training only: "Bespoke session: £2,000 + VAT", Business Development Accelerator "Group session: £5000 + VAT" (services page) |
| Alchemis | "Since 1986" | "New Business Development Agency for Agencies"; "Initial outreach via highly targeted phone calls"; "all prospects are fully qualified against your specific criteria" before a meeting (home); positioning and proposition work; "We don't send mass, unsolicited emails to untargeted prospects" (what we do) | No |
| Touchstone Growth | "since 1988" | A business development team that "builds up relationships and secures qualified meetings with your target prospects"; bespoke list building, data cleansing, consultancy to "strengthen your new business processes" (what we do) | No |
| Unstuck Agency | Launched April 2020 | "Personalised email, LinkedIn, and targeted cold calling campaigns", "sent manually by our team, without the use of automation"; "over 3,000 campaigns globally", "over 100 B2B businesses"; several PR agencies among the case-study logos (about page) | No |
Three things stand out. Alchemis and Touchstone have done this since the 1980s, Alchemis by phone, Touchstone by what it calls building up relationships; the £100k account I describe later is the kind they are built for. The only prices I could find on any page of theirs are The Future Factory's training courses. And Unstuck is the only one that names email as a channel, alongside LinkedIn and cold calling, and says it is "sent manually by our team, without the use of automation". Hand-sent email caps the volume one team can do, which matters in the P1 section below.
| Term | Retainer consultancy | Pay per qualified meeting |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | A team's time and process | A meeting that happened and met the written definition |
| When you pay | Every month, from day one | A one-off setup fee at the start, then only after a meeting is held and you approve it |
| A zero-meeting month | Costs the full fee | Costs nothing |
| A no-show | Not mentioned on any of the four sites; ask | Not charged |
| Minimum term | Get it in writing; none of the four publish one | None with us |
| Who defines "qualified" | Varies; Alchemis says "against your specific criteria" | Written definition agreed before outreach starts |
The longer version is at pay per meeting vs retainer. The short version: a retainer moves the risk of a slow month to you, a per-meeting fee keeps it with the agency. Lead generation agencies outside PR, on the same terms, are compared in B2B lead generation agency UK.
Four assumptions, written out so you can change them.
Retainer consultancy, cost per won client = F ÷ (M × w). Contract length cancels out.
Pay per meeting, cost per won client = P ÷ w.
The break-even is simple. Per meeting is cheaper whenever P is less than F ÷ M. A consultancy quoting £3,500 a month and three meetings is charging £1,167 a meeting before any of them becomes a client, which at w = 20% is £5,833 per won client. Put that next to the per-meeting quote and you have your answer. If the consultancy will not commit to an M, you cannot do the comparison, and that tells you something too.
One caveat. I have used the same w for both models. A firm that phones and qualifies first, as Alchemis describes, may hand you better conversations than a cold email that got a "sure, send me a time". I do not have their data and will not pretend to.
P1 Communications is a UK hospitality PR agency, eighteen years old when we started. The published result is 20+ qualified meetings with travel and property brands, with about half of the first calls moving to deeper commercial discussions, and a projected £12K a month of pipeline.
In 2026 the main P1 campaign went to 8,227 hotel and travel contacts across Europe and Turkey over a seven-step sequence: 46,201 emails. It produced 360 human replies. Those are human replies of any sentiment, declines included, not positive replies, and 4.4% of contacts replied at some point. Two smaller segments, Caribbean and Indian Ocean, added 2,196 and 4,558 sends and 63 more human replies. Call it 53,000 emails for one client so far in 2026.
The positive side comes from a separate dataset: 1,543 people who replied positively across all our campaigns between August 2025 and July 2026. The UK hospitality PR vertical, which is P1, accounts for 208 of them, 13.5% of the set. Going by reply previews, of those 208, 8% asked about price, 7% said they were interested, 5% asked for a call and 5% referred us to a colleague.
Two things follow. No two-day-a-week team phones 8,000 hotel and travel contacts, and no team sending each email by hand gets through 53,000 of them. Phone is a narrow, deep channel; email is a wide, shallow one. A known list of 150 brands wants narrow and deep. A few thousand hotels across three regions does not. And a human-reply rate, any sentiment, under 1% per email is exactly why the pricing model matters. On a retainer you are paying for the sends and the silence. Per meeting, you are not.
I would send you to Alchemis, Touchstone or The Future Factory, not to us, in three situations.
Your growth is pitch-led. If the accounts you want come through formal pitches, intermediaries and agency-search consultants, your problem is pitch conversion and getting on the longlist, not first meetings. That is consultancy work. We do not do it.
Your target account is £100k a year or more. In my experience a brand spending that on PR buys from people it already knows. Alchemis has phoned its way into those rooms since 1986 and Touchstone has built those relationships since 1988. Cold email opens the door to the founder-led brand and the marketing head at a mid-size company. It does not get you into a roster review.
You need positioning work before anyone reaches out. If you cannot say in one sentence who you are for and what you do that the agency down the road does not, outreach will only make the vagueness louder. Alchemis and The Future Factory both sell that work. Do that first.
A fourth case rules out both of us: nobody on your team is free to take six meetings a month, so do not pay for meetings nobody can attend; here is how long outreach takes to produce them.
Under PECR the ICO says "you can email or text any corporate body". Sole traders and some partnerships are treated as individuals, so the consent rules apply. Every message must give what the ICO calls "a valid contact address so they can opt out or unsubscribe". The soft opt-in "does not apply to prospective customers or new contacts (eg from bought-in lists)" (ICO guide to electronic mail marketing, as of October 2026). So we email corporate subscribers at work addresses, honour every opt-out, and never use bought consumer lists. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests, which the ICO says "can apply for direct marketing but only where the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR) don't require consent", and the right to object is absolute (ICO guidance on legitimate interests, as of October 2026).
The ICO notes its PECR guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act, so check the page and take advice from a solicitor, not from me. Then ask every firm on your shortlist and listen for a specific answer.
Pay per qualified meeting. No retainer required on the per-meeting plan, no minimum spend, nothing charged for a no-show. The published terms are a one-off setup fee of $1,000–$3,000, then $200–$500 per qualified meeting — billed in arrears, only for meetings that happened and you approved, nothing for a no-show — or, if you would rather carry the volume risk yourself, a flat $5,000 a month with no per-meeting fee. Where in each range depends on deal size; the full terms are on the pricing page. Cold email only: no phone, no letters, no positioning or pitch support. Two PR case studies are public, P1 Communications in the UK and PR Noir in New York, where the first 45 days produced 27 leads, 10 meetings and one $90K close. Hold us to the same checklist you hold everyone else to.
How PR agencies win new clients, and what lead generation costs a PR agency, are both answered in lead generation for PR agencies.
None of the four UK consultancies on this page publishes an outreach fee, a minimum term or a meeting count, as of October 2026. The only published prices are The Future Factory's training courses: £2,000 + VAT for a bespoke session and £5,000 + VAT for a Business Development Accelerator group session. Get the monthly fee, the minimum term and the average qualified meetings a month in writing, then divide the fee by the meetings to see what each meeting costs you.
Yes, to corporate subscribers at work addresses, within the rules. The ICO says you can email any corporate body, but sole traders and some partnerships are treated as individuals, every message needs a valid address to opt out, and the soft opt-in does not cover new contacts from bought-in lists. The ICO notes its PECR guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act, so check the current page and take advice from a solicitor.
Pay per meeting is cheaper whenever the per-meeting price is below the consultancy's monthly fee divided by the qualified meetings it delivers each month. Hire the consultancy instead if your growth is pitch-led, your target accounts are worth £100k a year or more, or you need positioning work before anyone reaches out. If nobody on your team is free to take the meetings, hire neither.
Get three things in writing, from a consultancy or from us.
The first item is the one most agencies get wrong, so I have written out what counts as a qualified meeting in full. Then put your deal size and close rate into the ROI calculator and see what a meeting is worth to you. That is the number every fee has to beat.
Moe Alhosni, founder, ROI Maximizer (M Ventures LTD).
About the author: Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. He runs the campaigns behind the first-hand data on this site. LinkedIn
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