Lauren Banyar Reich went looking for another job and discovered that she could not summon the appropriate enthusiasm. The interviews should have interested her. She knew public relations. She had worked in small agencies, managed people and helped bring in business. There was every reason to keep going along a familiar road. Except that she had been keeping notes about how she would run an agency herself, and familiarity was beginning to look like a rather expensive substitute for choice.
Her husband asked whether she was actually going to do it. Reich gave herself six months to find out. It is an appealingly modest beginning for a founder: a trial period, with permission to reconsider. In January 2015, she founded LBR/PR. The experiment continued for more than eleven years, until Geben Communication acquired the business in July 2026.
The distance between those dates contains a career argument. Reich wanted to make experts more visible, but she also wanted control over how the work got done. An agency could serve ambitious clients and leave room for its employees to have lives. That proposition sounds agreeable at a lunch. Running a company requires giving it a calendar, a budget and consequences.
The education inside the small agency
A teacher helped point Reich toward a profession that joined two things she enjoyed: writing and speaking. She studied journalism at the University of Maryland, graduating in 2002. Public relations offered a place for those skills to work together. The job required a story worth telling and enough interest in other people to discover what that story might be.
Her early work included celebrity talent and production for fundraising events. She spent four years at Jane Wesman Public Relations, learning book publicity, then held leadership positions at Janine Gordon Associates and Peppercomm. At Peppercomm, she led luxury accounts within the consumer group. These were different assignments, with a common demand: understand what makes somebody else's work interesting to an audience.
Small firms also gave her a view beyond her own desk. Winning business, managing teams and delivering work happened close enough together for her to see the connections. She later credited that exposure with preparing her to start a company. The training was practical. Someone had to find the client, someone had to organize the people, and somebody still had to write the pitch.
Book publicity supplied an especially useful foundation. An expert could know a subject thoroughly and still need help making it accessible. Reich liked learning from people with something to teach. The publicist's work began in that gap between knowledge and an audience's attention. A good idea needed a route into a conversation already taking place.
Making up the rules, then living with them
By late 2014, another agency job was only one of the available answers. Starting her own firm would let Reich decide what the workplace expected of people. She had two young sons. Time outside the office mattered, and she wanted flexibility to be part of the company's design.
“I can make up the rules.”
Lauren Banyar Reich, on starting her own business
She described wanting colleagues, whether freelance, part time or full time, to be valued as whole people. That carries an everyday obligation. A company cannot celebrate a person's judgment while treating everything that matters to that person as an interruption. Flexibility becomes meaningful when it survives a busy week, rather than appearing only in the recruitment conversation.
Reich has counted building a good place to work among her proudest accomplishments. She has also described her own arrangement of work and family as integration, something that needs repeated adjustment. The word matters because a perfectly balanced day is a demanding little fiction. A business and a household both have a habit of developing opinions about the schedule.
There was another kind of company to build around herself: peers. Entrepreneurial independence had a lonely side, and Reich deliberately sought people who understood it. Her early marketing relied on relationships and referrals. That makes community both a human need and a business resource, with the same caution attached to each: it takes participation to keep it alive.
A journalist has a job to do, too
Reich's account of PR starts with an exchange. A journalist needs a useful expert; the expert needs a way to reach people. The agency has to understand both interests well enough to bring them together. Clients do not earn coverage merely by wanting it. Someone on the receiving end must see a reason to care.
On the Cash Flow CFO podcast, she explained the distinction between buying an advertisement and appearing in editorial coverage. The first purchases space. The second involves another party deciding that the expertise belongs in the story. That decision can give a reader an introduction to a business before the reader ever speaks to it.
It also changes the brief. An audience looking for practical advice has little use for a company biography in disguise. Reich's work connects business goals with opportunities for expert commentary, contributed articles and appearances. The most useful question is often smaller than “How do we become famous?” Who needs to hear this, and what would help them?
Her agency's services extend into original content, speaking and partnerships. Those formats perform different jobs. An interview places an expert inside a reporter's story. A contributed article offers more room to develop an argument. An event creates a chance to address a particular room. Choosing among them requires knowing what the client hopes will happen after the attention arrives.
Reich also argues that good work can remain obscure beyond a trusted network. A prospective client may encounter only scattered signals: an article, a talk, a profile, a recommendation. In her April 2026 writing, she described the risk of leaving that public picture incomplete. Reputation can exist inside a circle long before it becomes legible outside it.
A box for businesses that cannot use a retainer
That attention to fit produced a different kind of offer. LBR/PR In A Box packages strategy, materials and training into a defined engagement. The agency's published offering includes drafted pitches, a targeted media list, interview training and a follow-up session. Its listed one-time price is $6,500.
The format gives a business tools it can keep using. It also puts responsibility back in the client's hands: somebody must continue pitching. A playbook cannot make the calls or notice every opening on its own. For a founder willing to do that work, the arrangement makes the division of labor unusually clear.
The product reveals something about Reich's approach to agency ownership. The familiar monthly relationship is one possible shape for the work. A smaller, specific engagement can be another. The business problem determines the container, even when the container happens to have a rather literal name.
The wrong name in the right pitch
For someone whose profession depends on careful introductions, Reich has a useful cautionary tale. She once sent a carefully prepared pitch to a New York Times reporter with the wrong name in the greeting. He replied. She was mortified, acknowledged the mistake and used humor; the exchange recovered. It is hard to find a more economical demonstration of why proofreading belongs before the send button.
Her public personality has similar directness. Describing herself at a networking event, she listed being loud, laughing and asking plenty of questions. She had attended the New Jersey Business Assembly meeting on her birthday and discovered two other members shared the date. Apparently, even a birthday can become a networking event if the company is agreeable enough.
Questions are a working habit as much as a social one. Her grIP Venture Collective profile describes experience with founders, consumer brands, advisory businesses and nonprofits. Moving among those settings requires learning the particulars again. A practiced publicist arrives with methods; understanding the business still takes a conversation.
What the buyer wanted
The July 2026 sale brought those relationships into Geben Communication, led by Heather Whaling. Geben had already acquired TorchLight Marketing earlier that year to strengthen media planning and paid media. LBR/PR added earned-media experience and relationships, making the two acquisitions complementary pieces of a broader communications business.
For Reich's clients, the announced change meant access to more capabilities, including social, content, advertising and research. For the team, she framed it as a path forward inside an agency with compatible values. Culture remained part of how she explained the decision. After years spent deciding how the company should work, the identity of the buyer mattered.
Geben's rationale gives the founder story a useful final turn. Tools can accelerate the production and distribution of content. Relationships, editorial relevance and credibility remain things a company has to develop. The assets Reich had spent years assembling were valuable enough for another owner to buy.
She has since spoken publicly about putting more energy into a speaking platform and sharing what she has learned. Mentoring younger women has long been part of her ambition, too. The person who began by asking whether she could run an agency now has eleven years of experience to bring to somebody else's question. The six-month pilot has finally changed shape. She still seems interested in the next conversation.