Company: Hard Numbers
Co-founders: Darryl Sparey (Co-founder and Managing Director), Paul Stollery (Co-founder and Creative Director)
Website: https://www.hardnumbers.co.uk/
About Hard Numbers
Hard Numbers is a London-based performance-driven marketing and communications agency, founded in June 2020 on one premise: PR should be measurable, accountable and commercially driven. Our founders have run businesses, carried sales targets and managed marketing budgets, so we judge our work by its commercial impact.
We back that with commitments few agencies make: KPIs are written into client contracts, and we hit them each quarter or work at our own cost until we do. We price on the value we create, not the hours we spend working on our clients’ behalf. Every retained client invests 8% in measurement and reporting, funding best-in-class evaluation recognised with multiple AMEC awards. Our team of 22 now serves clients from seed-stage start-ups to FTSE-listed enterprises, but we start every relationship with the same question: what does this organisation actually need communications to achieve?
As a result, our work often extends beyond a conventional agency remit. We combine PR, research, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), content, social, training and measurement, working alongside communications, marketing, digital and sales teams.
Launching in 2020 meant starting out in a pandemic. Then Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, directly affecting 50% of our clients or their investors. We entered 2025 facing spiralling interest rates, inflation, trade disruption and a new threat: AI, with boards telling agencies to just use AI instead of outsourced service providers.
We treated that as an opportunity. In 2024 we invested £11,000 of our own money researching how large language models form opinions about companies. Our Reputation in the Age of AI study found earned media sources in 61% of AI responses analysed, before GEO became an industry term. We turned it into a GEO Audit and AI visibility monitoring service, generating £250,000 of pipeline, six new clients and seven GEO engagements.
The result: revenue grew 15.5% to £1.67m, our best year yet, with £350,000 of organic growth from existing clients and a 92% Net Promoter Score. We closed 2025 with our lowest staff churn on record and no redundancies. When four cybersecurity PR professionals faced redundancy elsewhere, we hired them and built a dedicated cybersecurity and enterprise technology practice. Within two months, revenues rose 20% and we added four cybersecurity clients.
However, we’ve responsibilities beyond our clients. Seeing that PR teams lacked confidence in AI search, we wrote a 3,000-word GEO primer for communicators and gave free training to thousands of in-house professionals at more than 100 companies. Our founders have spoken at multiple events and podcasts in the last two years, including an AMEC Global Summit keynote. We delivered eight university lectures to over 200 future communications professionals and fund Socially Mobile, creating pathways into PR for talent from lower-income backgrounds.
We demonstrate our commitment to professional standards through continued investment in corporate-wide memberships with the CIPR, PRCA, AMEC and BIMA. All staff are encouraged to log CPD points. Our team includes one CIPR Fellow, four Chartered practitioners and three Accredited practitioners.
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