Late last year, a client came to us to expand their scope of work.
We sent them a quote.
They hesitated.
“I could hire two full-time internal comms people for this,” they said.
And they weren’t wrong.
They could.
So we said: Go for it. Hire the team. Build it in-house.
Call us if it doesn’t work.
And sure enough, a few months later, they did.
Hiring internally feels like the safer bet. More control, more focus, more people “thinking about your brand full time.”
But here’s what most founders miss:
An internal comms hire might spend 40 hours a week thinking about your company.
We spend hundreds of hours each week talking to the media.
That means we’re in more conversations, with more reporters, about more angles, than any single in-house person ever could be.
We’ll be on the phone with a Wall Street Journal writer about AI policy, and while we’re there, we’ll slot in another client with a relevant take.
We’ll be working on a piece about urban mobility for one founder, and realize another client belongs in that story too.
You just can’t do that if you’re in-house—representing a single story, from a single angle, with a single lane of access.
We’re not just doing more.
We’re plugged in everywhere.
When you bring on Bonfire, you’re not hiring people.
You’re buying outcomes.
You’re buying access. Timing. Judgment. Context.
You’re buying the ability to turn a whisper of a trend into a story that moves your entire category.
An internal hire might be able to write a blog post or draft a press release.
We can get you on the record, in the right outlet, shaping the public narrative while your competitors are still figuring out who to email.
That’s the difference.
It’s not about headcount.
It’s about what moves faster, smarter, and more strategically toward what matters.
Can two full-time hires do what we do?
Maybe. But they’d need…
And even then, it’ll take them a year to build the kind of reach we walk in with on Day 1.
So yeah—hire the team.
Try the experiment.
And when you’re ready to stop managing PR like a cost center and start using it as a weapon, call us.
We’ll still pick up.
