Reputation cannot be speed-run

Technology has developed a pacing problem

This summer, I ran my first ultra trail, 60 kilometres, and I think I probably learnt more about pacing over the course of that race than I had in years of running before that. You obviously know going into something like that that you cannot go flat out from the start, but actually sticking to that when you feel good, people are passing you and you still have a huge amount of ground ahead of you is another thing entirely. There are moments where you have to push, moments where you have to slow down, and quite a lot of the time you just have to trust that keeping moving at the right pace is more useful than trying to prove how fast you can go.

I was thinking about that afterwards, and it felt surprisingly familiar to some of the conversations we have in communications.

Everything in technology feels faster. Companies are emerging from stealth and raising extraordinary amounts of money, new categories are appearing almost overnight, and businesses few people had heard of six months ago are suddenly across every feed and on the lips of every tech reporter.

AI has accelerated that feeling even further. This year alone, seven-month-old AI infrastructure startup Volta raised funding at a $2.4 billion valuation. Seven month old humans are barely eating solid food. At the ripe old age of three, DeepSeek has been seeking new funding at a valuation close to $74,000,000,000. Easy to forget the number of zeroes in billions. OpenAI, Anthropic and others are operating at a scale that would have seemed almost unimaginable for private technology companies not long ago.

For founders building alongside them, that can distort the sense of what ‘normal’ progress looks like. They see the companies currently winning the attention race and understandably start asking why they aren’t moving as quickly, why they aren’t in The Wall Street Journal yet, and why journalists aren’t recognising the transformation they’re bringing to the table.

Technology has developed a pacing problem, and communications has inherited it.

Reputation works on a different clock

There are moments when communications should move incredibly quickly: a major funding round, a key product launch, a regulatory change, an acquisition or, of course, a crisis. Those moments require speed, coordination and a willingness to push hard while the opportunity is there.

Running an entire communications programme as though every week is race day, however, is something else entirely.

A company can start a new PR programme full of energy and try to do everything immediately: pitch every journalist, push every announcement, pursue every opportunity and start looking for the next idea before the previous one has even had time to land.

The problem is that activity can create the impression of momentum without necessarily creating any reputational weight.

You don’t train for a marathon by trying to run one every Monday

Yet companies sometimes approach communications in exactly that way, expecting every week to produce a front page story, every launch to break through and every month to stack the sales pipeline. Eventually, you exhaust the story, and you risk exhausting the people you want to tell it to as well.

At that point, the constant push for visibility can begin to work against the reputation you’re trying to build.

The first few kilometres are supposed to feel easy

I definitely felt that during the race. At the beginning, you feel fresh, the adrenaline is doing a lot of the work and it is very easy to get carried along by the people around you. The difficult part is reminding yourself that feeling good at kilometre five says very little about how you are going to feel much later, and that using up energy simply because you have it available isn’t necessarily a good strategy. Then, at some point, the kilometres start to feel very different.

Building reputation has some similarities.

At the beginning of a communications programme, there is often plenty to work with: a company has a story that hasn’t yet been properly told, executives haven’t been introduced to the media, and there may be customer examples, product milestones, data, perspectives and ambitions that have yet to reach the market. The temptation is naturally to push all of it at once.

A strategic programme gives the story room to develop.

A journalist who doesn’t cover the company today may remember its CEO six months from now when the right story appears; a trade interview can establish credibility before a larger business publication becomes interested; and a thoughtful contribution to an industry conversation can begin a relationship that eventually turns into the feature you’ve been pining for.

Similar to race training, the race itself is the visible part, but most of the work happened long before you reached the start line, through all the training sessions, early mornings and kilometres that nobody else would have seen. Communications can work in much the same way. The big feature, major announcement or breakthrough moment might be what everyone notices, but it is often made possible by months of smaller conversations, smaller stories, proof points and relationships that came before it.

One story creates context for the next and one conversation creates familiarity for another. The accumulated mileage matters.

Good communications needs patience, not passivity

Playing the long game does not mean moving slowly. It means understanding what you are building towards.

As we say a lot, for clients, coverage isn’t the ultimate goal, a stronger market position is.

Pacing yourself is not the same thing as taking it easy. In my race, there were plenty of points where it was hard, and plenty where I had to push, but you are constantly making small decisions about what is worth spending energy on now and what you’re going to need later. I think the strongest communications programmes work in much the same way: the objective is not to do less, it’s to be a little more deliberate about where you put the effort.

There should still be ambition, creativity, urgency and clear targets, as well as moments when the team pushes extremely hard. Those moments are simply more effective when there is something underneath them: a clear story, credible proof, executives with genuine points of view, relationships with people who understand the company, and a history of showing up consistently in the right conversations.

That foundation is what allows a company to accelerate when the opportunity actually arrives.

Sometimes the job is to tell a company not to sprint

This is also an important part of what a communications partner should provide, because the value of good counsel isn’t simply finding more things to do. Sometimes the right advice is that an announcement isn’t strong enough yet, that the company doesn’t need another press release, that a journalist needs a better reason to care or that a competitor’s coverage doesn’t mean the entire strategy suddenly needs to change.

Sometimes the right answer is simply: not yet.

That can be difficult advice to give in an industry where activity is easy to measure and patience is not, but a good communications partner should clearly understand and innately care about where the company is going rather than only how much ground it can cover this month.

Reputation is built through many small signals that accumulate over time: the stories a company tells, the proof it provides, the relationships it develops, the conversations it contributes to and the consistency with which it continues to show up.

There will be opportunities to sprint.

The important thing is having enough left in the tank when they arrive.