Megan Bennett Built a Career on the Seventh Call

The glamorous life, as Megan Bennett first encountered it, involved sitting beside a swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills while strangers hung up on her. She was 22, newly hired by the publicist Bette Light, and armed with a printed list of magazine contacts. The account was Rembrandt Whitening. The assignment was to call beauty editors. Five might dismiss her in a row: not interested, on deadline, no time. Then number seven would pause. Yes, an October issue was taking shape. Yes, send a sample.

There are entire management books hiding inside that seventh call. Bennett chose the brisker lesson: keep going. The next yes does not care how many noes preceded it. Rejection, once stripped of its melodrama, becomes a denominator.

This proved to be unusually durable advice. Bennett joined Light Years Ahead shortly after college, learned the business from the floorboards up, stayed for 18 years, and bought the agency with her business partner, Chloe Licht. Today she is its president and CEO, based outside Kansas City, running the sort of national boutique firm where senior people still write pitches, send samples, and know which producer changed jobs.

“For every no, you’re going to get a yes if you keep trying.”Megan Bennett

An education in the wrong rooms

Bennett did not march toward public relations with the confidence of someone obeying a childhood prophecy. At Skidmore College, where she studied communications, she thought she might work in entertainment, perhaps even act. Los Angeles internships sharpened the idea by subtraction. A talent agency was interesting. Celebrity publicity was not. She liked helping a message travel, but had little appetite for the celebrity machinery carrying it.

After graduating in 2001, she moved west and found a job with an online clothing company. The role was meant to involve PR. Too much of it involved shipping. She quit. Within a few months, Light hired her to work from her house.

Light greeted the arrangement with a line worthy of a demanding aunt: Bennett should be paying her for everything she was about to learn. Bennett now says she was right. The job was graduate school conducted at client speed. As Light’s assistant, she was handed unfamiliar tasks, real accounts, and the expectation that she would learn while doing. There was no ceremonial period in which mistakes remained theoretical.

The long apprenticeship matters because it complicates the fashionable version of entrepreneurship, in which an idea arrives before breakfast and the founder has disrupted an industry by tea. Bennett inherited a practice before she inherited a title. By the time she took ownership, she had spent years winning business, managing clients, and watching editors migrate from print to websites to television. Some of those relationships are now 20 years old.

The hot dog that moved the meter

Public relations is full of results that refuse to sit still for measurement. Awareness rises. Credibility accumulates. A customer encounters a brand in three places and remembers only one. Bennett will not promise a particular placement or a guaranteed sales number; in her view, that belongs to advertising, where certainty is part of the purchase.

Then there are the hot dogs.

Light Years Ahead represented KC Cattle Company, a Kansas City seller of Wagyu beef. The agency had already helped attract attention from the New York Times and the Today show. Bennett pitched the company’s hot dogs to a Food & Wine editor preparing a roundup, sent samples, and followed up. The product was named the best beef hot dog. Soon the client called to report that sales were going off the charts. Bennett says the company sold more than a quarter-million dollars of hot dogs in two weeks, with the traffic traceable to the article.

Figures are Bennett’s public accounts of the campaigns. They are useful precisely because she describes direct attribution as the exception, not the rule.

The comedy of the case study is its scale beside its subject. A modest cylinder of beef briefly became the cleanest chart in her portfolio. But the lesson Bennett draws is not that one article is a lottery ticket. The client had inventory. Its website worked. Samples could reach the press. The product suited an editor’s live assignment. The spectacular result depended on an unphotogenic amount of readiness.

Persistence with table manners

Bennett’s self-appointed job description is “the squeaky wheel of PR,” which risks conjuring an inbox menace. Her actual method has more manners. The pitch is short. The subject line does work. The contact covers the right beat. The message is conversational and personal enough to prove that it was meant for a person rather than a spreadsheet. If email fails and she knows the editor, she might send a text. If the answer is no, she may return months later when the story has changed.

Occasionally someone replies “unsubscribe” to what was plainly an individual email, or orders her never to write again. Bennett says she sends those notes to coworkers for a laugh. Humility, like publicity, improves when shared. Then she approaches someone else at the outlet.

She is equally blunt with clients. Do not launch outreach before the site functions. Do not ask the press to admire a product it cannot try. Do not confuse urgency with readiness. A founder who needs one story to save the company is, by Bennett’s standard, arriving too desperate and too late. Media calendars move according to their own weather.

Her agency was distributed before remote work acquired capital letters. Licht works in New York, close to the media meetings. Light remains in Los Angeles as founder and strategic adviser. Other colleagues work in Kansas City and Dallas. The team shares clients rather than assigning each account to one publicist, a rotation Bennett believes prevents the pitch from going stale. It is an all-women group. “And we’re all feisty,” she once added, laughing.

As a manager, she favors the same emotional economy she learned from Light: praise good work, communicate often, accept useful critique, and do not build a furnished apartment inside somebody else’s rejection. Thick skin is not indifference. It is simply the ability to stay available for the next attempt.

The publicist makes a product

In 2026, after more than 24 years of promoting other people’s ideas, Bennett wanted to use another part of her brain. She and her sister, her junior by 20 months and one of her closest companions, had been trading app ideas and experimenting with AI-assisted building tools. Bennett owns four cats and enjoys dressing up pets. The pets possess their own labor policy and decline to sit still.

The solution became Glam Your Pet, an app that applies extravagant wigs, hats, glasses, jewelry, and themed looks to an uploaded animal photo. There is an adult version with martinis and cigars in the visual joke, plus a kid-oriented version with gentler accessories. Her parents’ dog Winston has appeared as a biker and with Rapunzel hair. His artistic opinion remains unavailable.

Bennett taught herself the process with an AI-assisted app builder. She had to follow instructions, revise, resubmit, and wait for approval. The first release took roughly two weeks, she says, and reached both Apple and Google platforms through Megles Studio. She and her sister began considering more apps.

“I wanted to do something more technical yet creative, and so it was just kind of a passion project.”Megan Bennett

The project is small, playful, and revealing. Bennett’s professional doctrine traveled intact into unfamiliar work. Prepare the thing. Learn the gatekeeper’s requirements. Do not mistake a rejection for a verdict. Resubmit. The woman who once waited through six hostile phone calls now waited through software reviews. Her persistence did not need a new wardrobe, though the cats certainly got one.

The seventh answer

A career assembled over two decades resists the neatness of a viral moment. Bennett has watched phones yield to email, print pages yield to digital commerce, and a package sent to an editor acquire the baffling new name “a PR” on social media. The tools keep shifting. The useful human behavior changes less.

Pay attention before asking for attention. Bring a story, not merely a product. Know when to follow up and when to leave the room gracefully. Build enough trust that an editor who has moved three times still recognizes the name in the inbox. Keep the operation ready for the day the answer is yes.

Bennett’s story offers no guarantee that call seven will work. It offers something less glamorous and more portable: the confidence to make it.