The remote agency gets another look after COVID-19 disruption

The fully remote agency is nothing new for the PR world. For smaller outfits, there has always been a benefit to shrinking overhead by forgoing the traditional office space and offering remote work flexibility to attract talent.

However, after the remote work experiment of the COVID-19 pandemic, some who had never considered remote work are embracing it more fully—and PR pros who had already committed to remote work are feeling validated.

“We’re feeling a tremendous sense of validation,” says Curtis Sparrer, principal of Bospar. “When we started in 2015 as a work-from-home remote agency with no thoughts of an office, people were really skeptical,” he adds. It’s an approach that cost them in pitch meetings and with industry peers who couldn’t see the vision.

Now, the commitment to a virtual agency is coming through in spades.

“We’ve always been resolute that we would never get an office,” says Sparrer. “And that’s in part, because we saw during the dot-com boom and bust what happened is that agencies would be in this horrible position of losing clients. And then you have to decide, do we pay the rent, or do we pay staff?”