PR Without an Agency

The Problem

In 2021, ReadySpaces had no name recognition outside its own customer base. Co-warehousing was a category most journalists had never heard of. We did the standard thing: hired a PR agency. For nine months I treated the retainer as an apprenticeship. I watched how pitches got shaped, how journalist relationships got managed, how press releases got written, and what data a reporter actually wants attached to a story. That era produced two real placements, the LA Times in August 2021 and The Real Deal in November 2021, and I studied both until I understood why they worked.

Then the retainer ended, and PR became my job alone. Since 2022: one operator, no agency, no placement fees, cold inboxes.

The Process

The core insight is that company news is boring and almost everything around it isn’t. No journalist wakes up wanting to cover a warehouse company’s announcement. They wake up needing a trend piece, a data point, a human story, or a credible source to quote, whatever their editor will approve. The job is to find the version of your news that is actually their story.

I learned that sorting from the agency era before I ever ran it myself. The LA Times piece in August 2021 wasn’t about ReadySpaces at all. It was about a pop-up bookstore, one of our customers, barely surviving the pandemic; ReadySpaces was the setting, and that was exactly right. The Real Deal placement in November 2021 tied the Great Resignation to our New York expansion. The trend carried the pitch and the company rode along. Both were agency placements. Both were lessons I took apart line by line.

The five placements since have been the process running on its own, each pitched and landed by me. National tech press wants funding and trend angles: TechCrunch covered ReadySpaces securing $20M in debt in November 2022 because a funding round is a story they already publish daily.

Trade press wants market data and category shifts: RENX covered the industrial sublease concept expanding to Toronto in January 2024, CRE Daily ran a piece on co-warehousing reshaping the industrial market in June 2025, and GlobeSt covered a new platform helping businesses find flexible warehouse space in July 2025.

And there’s a third story type beyond the trend and the human story: expert commentary, where you become the source journalists quote. In September 2025, Bisnow, national CRE press, featured me as one of five practitioners in “Is AI for Commercial Real Estate a Tool or a Toy? 5 Power Users Explain,” a profile built on how I actually use AI in the marketing operation. Same sorting, no agency in the room.

Nobody covers your announcement. They cover their story. Your job is to show up already holding it.

Compounding Credibility

Earned media compounds in a way paid never does. Each placement made the next pitch warmer: a journalist who can see The Real Deal and TechCrunch in your history reads the second paragraph. By the time the 2025 placements landed, pitches were opening with a track record instead of an explanation of what co-warehousing is.

The placements also outlive the news cycle. They became sales collateral: press logos on the site, links in outbound sequences, third-party proof in enterprise conversations where a self-description convinces no one. A skeptical prospect won’t take our word for what co-warehousing is. They’ll take the LA Times’ word for it, or TechCrunch’s.

Five placements pitched and landed personally, on top of the two the agency era produced, and zero dollars of agency spend since. A sorting process, learned once, then run repeatedly by one person who kept pitching.