Every agency leader has lived some version of this moment: a senior account lead resigns, and within two weeks it becomes clear that half of what made the client relationship work existed only in that person’s head. The preferred approval workflow. Which executive hates being CC’d. The unwritten history of why a campaign angle got killed eighteen months ago and can’t be revisited. None of it was ever written down, because there was never a reason to write it down — until suddenly there was, and it was too late.
This is happening more often, and it’s happening faster, because PR account teams have quietly become some of the most distributed teams in any professional services industry. Account leads work from three cities. Creative sits in a fourth. The client’s internal comms contact is remote too. Nobody planned this structure; it accumulated, one flexible hiring decision at a time, and most agencies still run it on processes built for a team that used to sit in one room.
Why This Problem Is Uniquely Bad in PR
Other professional services industries have faced distributed-team growing pains and mostly adapted. PR has adapted more slowly, for a reason specific to the work: client relationships in this industry are unusually personal and unusually undocumented by design. Good account people build trust precisely by being flexible, informal, and responsive in ways that resist being turned into a process document. Nobody wants to hand a client a workflow chart. The relationship is the product.
That instinct is correct for the client-facing side of the job. It’s a liability for everything underneath it. The informal, relationship-driven style that makes a great account lead effective is the same style that makes their departure catastrophic — because nothing about how they worked was ever captured anywhere a colleague could pick it up.
Add distributed teams into that mix and the risk compounds. In a shared office, a junior account executive absorbs institutional knowledge by proximity — overhearing calls, sitting in on impromptu client debriefs, picking up the unwritten rules simply by being in the room. Remote and hybrid structures remove that ambient learning entirely. If the knowledge was never written down and the junior staffer was never in the room to overhear it, it simply doesn’t transfer. It evaporates with whoever resigns.
The Turnover Numbers Agencies Aren’t Talking About Enough
Account management has long carried some of the highest churn of any function in professional services, and the pressure has only intensified as client expectations for always-on availability have climbed. Burnout among account-side PR staff is a well-documented, ongoing industry concern — not a fringe complaint, but a structural feature of how the work is currently organized.
What gets less attention is the compounding cost. Replacing a mid-level account lead typically costs somewhere between half and double their annual salary once recruiting, ramp-up time, and lost productivity are factored in. But that figure understates the real damage in PR specifically, because it only counts the cost of the hire — not the cost of the client relationship quietly degrading during the gap. A new account lead who inherits a client with no documented history, no written context on past campaign decisions, and no record of what’s already been tried is essentially starting the relationship from zero, while the client experiences it as starting from negative — because they remember everything the agency apparently forgot.
Agencies rarely track this second cost, because it doesn’t show up as a line item. It shows up eighteen months later as a client quietly declining to renew, and nobody connects it back to the staffing gap that started it.
What’s Actually Fixable, and What Most Agencies Get Wrong
The instinct when this problem surfaces is to blame the departing employee, tighten offboarding, and move on. That misses the structural issue. A few things separate agencies that handle this well from ones that keep relearning the same lesson:
- Client knowledge gets written down as a habit, not a crisis response. The agencies that handle transitions smoothly treat documentation as part of the job itself — brief written recaps after key client calls, a living document per account covering preferences, history, and known sensitivities — rather than something that only gets built hastily during a two-week handoff.
- Institutional memory is deliberately spread across more than one person. Single points of failure aren’t just a technical-team problem. Any account run by exactly one person who holds all the context is one resignation away from a crisis, regardless of how talented that person is.
- Onboarding assumes zero ambient knowledge transfer, especially for distributed hires. The agencies getting this right build structured onboarding that explicitly replaces the hallway conversations a new hire would have absorbed in an office — recorded context sessions, written client histories, a deliberate first-30-days plan — rather than assuming a new hire will pick things up by osmosis.
- Hiring and staffing decisions account for geography and continuity from the start, not as an afterthought once a team is already distributed. Agencies that scale their teams intentionally — including when they decide to hire remote employees to fill specialized or overflow roles — build the documentation habit into the role from day one, rather than trying to retrofit it after someone’s already three months into a client relationship with nothing written down.
None of this requires exotic tooling or a large budget. It requires treating documentation as a genuine job responsibility with time allocated to it, not an optional extra squeezed in when nothing urgent is happening — which, in agency life, is functionally never.
The Broader Shift This Points To
The deeper issue here isn’t remote work, and it isn’t turnover on its own. It’s that PR as an industry built its operating model around information staying in people’s heads, at exactly the moment client expectations, team structures, and staffing models have all become less stable and less centralized than they used to be. The industry’s comfort with informality was an asset when teams were small, tenured, and physically together. It’s a liability now that none of those three conditions reliably hold.
Agencies that treat this as a documentation and knowledge-management problem — not a personnel problem to be solved by trying to reduce turnover to zero, which is neither realistic nor entirely desirable — will handle staff transitions, client handoffs, and distributed growth with far less friction than agencies still assuming the next hire will just absorb everything the last one knew by being present. The agencies still operating that way aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong today. They’re just building up risk that shows up later, usually at the worst possible moment: during a client crisis, when the person who understood the account’s full history happens to be the one who just left.
For an industry built on managing narrative and protecting reputation for its clients, it’s worth turning that same discipline inward. The next resignation letter shouldn’t be able to take a client relationship down with it.
