Darryl Sparey, co-founder
In this post, I’m sharing some good (and quite baffling) news:
Last week, Hard Numbers was named by PR Moment as the B2B PR Agency of the Year. I'm sure you're beside yourself with delight for us.
Comment and content about award wins are amongst the most cliche-strewn of all corporate communications. Colleagues are thanked, fellow nominees are acknowledged, and humility is laid on thick (but always topped with a Salt Bae-style sprinkling of smugness).
There will definitely be some of that here. But, in an effort to turn this into something helpful, I'll also be sharing our award entry and offering some post-hangover thoughts about why - despite the natural cynicism - awards can be important for businesses like ours.
Thank you to the ‘Numbers, past and present, and to all of the clients who’ve taken a chance on a new (and a bit disruptive) agency proposition.
Thanks also to everyone who’s supported us or shown an interest in our journey (that includes you, by the way). And to Ben Smith and the organisers and judges of the PR Moment Awards for making 2025 a year to remember for the ‘Numbers.
This award was made all the more surprising and flattering by the calibre of the other nominees - Nelson Bostock, Babel PR and Axicom - all of whom are powerhouses who won't lose too much sleep over this.
PR Moment isn't just one of the UK's leading PR and communication outlets. It also has a special place in my heart as they gave us the very first award we won as an agency.
Our first “Best New Agency” award was received, during lockdown, via Zoom, and I'll cherish forever the feeling as I ran into my back garden and jumped up and down to celebrate. My then two-year-old daughter, who had no idea why Daddy was jumping up and down, just started joyously jumping up and down with me.
One of our brand values as a business is to “continuously improve”. We’re in the constant pursuit, however improbable, of perfection. This award doesn’t represent a destination for us, but it does represent a very important milestone along the way.
As the award organisers, riffing from our very own award entry, say in the write-up for their site: "They say cobbler’s children have the worst shoes. Hard Numbers say that’s a poor excuse. When markets turned tough in 2024, it chose to shine its own footwear first, using the same marketing approaches it recommend to clients”.
This is, and has, always been critical to us as Hard Numbers. We enter awards to help gain recognition of the work we do and the innovative nature of our agency proposition.
We invest time, effort and money in creating research content, like our Coverage to Capital research series.
We produce (three now!) newsletters about start-ups and scale-ups (also called “Coverage to Capital”), agency life (Scaling Service) and our monthly thought pieces that we’ve creatively called 'The Number'.
We post content regularly to our founder LinkedIn channels as well as our corporate channel. We PR ourselves, regularly getting bylines, podcast interviews and comments with industry trade titles.
We do all this because it’s what we recommend to our clients to do. We want to be the agency that walks the walk.
This award feels like an acknowledgement that the PR we do for ourselves has worked.
If you want to read our award entry, it’s right here.
