The useful question arrived without ceremony. Lauren Banyar Reich was interviewing for jobs she ought to have wanted, but the spark had gone missing. She had spent more than a decade learning the peculiar craft of public relations in New York: producing fundraising events, wrangling celebrity talent, promoting books, managing consumer accounts and leading luxury work. She knew agencies from the copy desk to the client call. Her husband, Carter, knew she had been talking about starting one. “Are you going to do this or not?” he asked.
Reich did what many sensible founders do but few origin stories admit. She made a provisional decision. Entrepreneurship would be a six-month pilot. No thunderclap, no vow carved into stone, just enough runway to test whether her notes about better agency life could survive contact with invoices, deadlines and the mysterious moods of reporters.
The pilot refused to end. In January 2015 it became LBR/PR, a strategic communications firm devoted to earned media and thought leadership. More than 11 years later, in July 2026, Geben Communication acquired the agency. The terms stayed private. The reasoning was public: LBR/PR brought deep media relationships, client service and an earned-media practice to a company assembling broader capabilities across social, content, advertising, research and paid media.
The apprentice years
An English teacher first noticed the combination: Reich could write, and she was comfortable speaking in public. At the University of Maryland, journalism gave those instincts a profession. She graduated in 2002 and entered a media world of large printed directories and “smiling and dialing,” when the publicist's telephone mattered more than an engagement dashboard.
Her first roles put her near the machinery of attention. She managed production and celebrity talent for major fundraising events, then spent four years at Jane Wesman Public Relations, a book-publicity agency. Books offered a useful apprenticeship. To publicize an expert, a publicist has to understand the idea well enough to make it valuable to someone who has not read chapter one.
Senior roles followed. At Janine Gordon Associates, she became a vice president and director, helping run the agency day to day while working across consumer and business brands. At Peppercomm, she led luxury accounts in the consumer group. Small firms gave her an unusually wide field of view: team management, business development, client strategy and the actual work all shared the same hallway. She later credited that proximity with making her own company possible.
- Fundraising events and celebrity talent production
- Book publicity at Jane Wesman Public Relations
- Agency leadership at Janine Gordon Associates and Peppercomm
- LBR/PR opens after a six-month founder pilot
- Geben Communication acquires LBR/PR
An agency with a life outside the office
Reich had kept a private ledger during her agency years: practices worth carrying forward, habits best left behind. When she finally owned the rules, one idea moved to the top. Freelance, part-time and full-time colleagues should be valued as whole people. The firm could expect good work without pretending that a wedding, a child or a weekend was an administrative inconvenience.
“I figured, ‘Well, if I'm doing my own thing, then I can make up the rules.’”Lauren Banyar Reich
That sentence sounds jaunty. The operating choice underneath it is exacting. Learn what matters to the people on the team. Accommodate their wants and needs where possible. Treat their personal good news as good news for the firm. Reich used the same phrase for clients and colleagues: their wins are our wins.
Agency culture is often presented as atmosphere, something hovering above the real business. Reich treated it as structure. Public relations can be a churn-and-burn trade, and talented women frequently leave when the job permits no other identity. LBR/PR's answer was not lowered ambition. It was a different arrangement of ambition.
The million-question method
The company describes Reich as the person in a strategy session asking a million questions. This is less a charming quirk than the first stage of her method. A useful media story sits where a client's expertise meets an audience's need. Finding that intersection requires curiosity about both sides. Reich calls publicists translators, ambassadors and brokers. Each job depends on listening before speaking.
The Reich field guide to earned attention
This is why she bristles at the idea that public relations is a synonym for writing a press release. A release is a tool. Relationships are the work. Earned media carries a different sort of weight from an advertisement because somebody outside the company has judged the expertise relevant enough to include. One appearance can lead to another as reporters search for sources who have already shown they can be clear, timely and useful.
The trust stack
Reich's writing applies the same test to LinkedIn, bylined articles, newsletters, speaking and podcasts. The goal is not omnipresence. It is familiarity with a point of view attached. By the time a prospective client arrives at a website or a call, the person should feel less like a stranger and more like someone whose judgment they have already sampled.
A mistake worth keeping
Early in her career, Reich carefully customized a pitch to a New York Times reporter and then addressed him by the wrong name. He responded quickly, chastising her for sending what looked like an uncustomized note. She was mortified. The email could not be recalled, so she reached for humility and a joke. The reporter replied. A bad opening became a decent exchange.
Her lesson is printed in capital letters when she tells the story: check the work before sending. The better lesson may be the one embedded in her recovery. A publicist earns credibility in the uncontrolled moment, after the typo, during the difficult update, when candor is more useful than polish.
“Stories need to be told. Reputations need to be managed.”Lauren Banyar Reich
LBR/PR formalized that candor in its guarantee. The agency would not promise coverage, because nobody honest can command an independent newsroom. It would promise clear and consistent communication about strategy, outreach, feedback, results and problems. In an industry sometimes tempted to make certainty theatrical, limits became part of the service.
Making the service fit
As the firm matured, Reich began turning agency judgment into different shapes. LBR/PR In A Box offered a customized playbook, pitches, a starter media list, training and a strategy session for businesses that could devote a few hours each week but were not ready for a continuing retainer. The point was access without pretending that every company needs the same package.
The offer also revealed a founder willing to productize without flattening the work. A generic course could teach vocabulary. Reich wanted the positioning, outlets and pitches to fit the client's actual business. The middle ground was “done with you”: more guidance than a do-it-yourself scramble, less ongoing support than a full agency relationship.
Outside the firm, she joined grIP Venture Studio as a public relations and strategic communications advisor in 2021. Her public ambition extends beyond client coverage. She has said she wants to speak with people early in their careers, help those moving into PR and bring young women into networks that might otherwise remain hidden behind invitation lists.
When the publicist becomes the announcement
The July 2026 sale gave Reich the kind of defining moment she had spent years preparing other leaders to navigate. Geben Communication had already been expanding through acquisition. LBR/PR added earned-media depth and business-development experience to a platform spanning a wider set of communications services.
For clients, Reich said, the combination meant access to deeper social, content, advertising, AI-enabled research and paid-media capabilities alongside the relationships and earned-media expertise they already knew. She described the decision as commercially sensible and aligned with the values on which she had built the firm.
A transaction makes a clean headline. An agency is the accumulated material beneath it: the millionth question, the uncomfortable client update, the employee who can attend the wedding, the reporter who answers because last time the source was helpful. Reich began with six months and permission to make up the rules. Eleven years later, those rules had produced something that could travel further inside a larger company.
She still likes the human details. Podcasts about entrepreneurship. Helping someone in her network. Flipping tires at the gym. A dry martini with a twist, despite a firmly stated dislike of gin. The contradictions are cheerful evidence that positioning need not sand a person smooth. Trust, after all, rarely attaches to a perfect surface. It attaches to a recognizable one.