The Publicists Who Prefer One Good Story to a Hundred Pitches

The easiest way to misunderstand Paragon PR is to begin with the letters P and R. They suggest the familiar machinery of publicity: a press release, a list of reporters, a hopeful afternoon spent refreshing Google. Paragon begins one step earlier, with the awkward conversation in which a financial-technology executive explains a genuinely useful product in language only six prospective customers can decode.

That is the puzzle Simon Hylson-Smith chose in 2012. A former reporter and editor, he founded the agency after the financial crisis, when a new group of fintech companies had plenty of technical intelligence and rather less practice turning it into a public argument. Fourteen years later, Paragon works across financial services, crypto, market infrastructure, data and emerging technology. It sells public relations, certainly, but also the things that make public relations possible: positioning, research, editorial work, executive coaching, websites, search strategy, digital campaigns, events and sales material.

The customer is rarely short of facts. The customer is short of hierarchy. Which fact comes first? Who should care? What larger change makes it urgent now? Paragon's job is to find the sentence that organizes everything else.

“One great article can be used for many months or a year or two. So it's more about quality and getting the right story out there.”Simon Hylson-Smith, founder and CEO

The translation desk for market plumbing

This specialization matters because many Paragon clients make products that sit beneath more photogenic products. They handle voice trading, blockchain analysis, fixed-income marketplaces, fund data or cloud infrastructure. Their buyers are sophisticated, their claims are scrutinized, and a cheerful lifestyle pitch would be absurd. The agency therefore competes less on sheer reach than on fluency. It must know why a market-structure detail matters without sanding off the detail that makes it credible.

Consider Chainalysis. The company's research connected cryptocurrency to law enforcement, compliance and financial risk. Paragon did not treat its reports as PDFs to announce and forget. It turned the annual Crypto Crime Report and the 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency report into recurring opportunities for major newspapers, financial television, security publications and crypto trades. In January 2021, the client recorded more than 150 media hits; over a quarter were in tier-one outlets. The compelling product was partly software. The compelling story was original knowledge about an unruly new market.

The first thing to fail is usually the old explanation

Paragon's case studies share a useful pattern. Before the publicity problem comes a definition problem. CanDeal had grown multiple products and business lines, but its brand architecture no longer made the whole company easy to understand. Paragon reorganized the masterbrand, redesigned the website and rewrote the positioning. Siepe had cloud infrastructure and software services that looked like separate businesses; Paragon presented them as one scalable technology partner. CIA Omnigage had worked with large banks for years but lacked a sales and marketing department, leaving new products largely invisible.

In each case, buying more attention before fixing the explanation would have spread the confusion. Paragon changed the order of operations: clarify the company, build the proof, then distribute the message. For CIA Omnigage, that meant a rebrand and website, a lead dashboard and sales funnel, regular search-friendly content and paid campaigns. The client's case study reports a 338 percent lift in organic search traffic, a 19 percent rise in demo requests, 900 users onboarded and 40 new client firms between March and May 2020.

A pandemic changes the argument

Sometimes the company does not change its product. The world changes the reason to care. Cloud9 Technologies provided cloud-based voice trading at a moment when electronic trading seemed to make voice look old-fashioned. Then offices closed in 2020. The ability to give traders secure voice access anywhere was no longer an eccentric defense of an older medium; it was part of the architecture of a virtual trading floor.

Paragon attached Cloud9's product to that structural change and pitched the argument across mainstream, financial and trade media. From March through December 2020, Cloud9 reported business growth above 50 percent, connections with nearly 30 new buy- and sell-side institutions, more than 80 trade placements, four awards and a $17.5 million funding round. Again, those outcomes had many parents. But the communications decision is clean enough to copy: do not begin with what the product is. Begin with what has changed around it.

Paragon gives this progression a tidy name: Recognition, Relevance and Respect. It is marketing language, but it contains a sharp distinction. Recognition can be purchased. Relevance requires an argument. Respect accumulates only when the argument survives contact with customers, reporters and time. That sequence explains why the agency combines press work with content, analyst relations, brand systems and executive training. A founder cannot outsource expertise, but can learn to make it portable.

The price of specificity

The model is best suited to organizations with something defensible to say: proprietary data, deep operational experience, a distinct product or a credible view of where a market is moving. It is particularly useful when a technical team is selling to a small, informed audience and cannot afford to sound careless. An internal marketing group might know the product; a generalist agency might know distribution. Paragon's pitch is that it can stand in the inconvenient middle.

Paragon itself is a small private agency - LinkedIn places it in the 11-to-50 employee band - with an international team and roots in New York, New Jersey, London and, through Hylson-Smith, Colorado. That size shapes the proposition. Clients are buying senior attention and domain memory rather than a giant network. They are also buying an integrated shop: the same central story can guide the CEO's interview, the analyst briefing, the website copy, the conference panel and the search campaign.

The firm has collected agency awards, including a 2018 Gold Stevie, and Inc. named it a Best Workplace in 2021. More revealing is the photograph from its 10th-anniversary offsite in Colorado Springs. Several colleagues were meeting one another in person for the first time. A remote transatlantic agency gathered to discuss how stories travel between people, while discovering the same thing about itself.

PR is often caricatured as the manufacture of noise. Paragon's more interesting work is editorial: deciding what deserves to survive the noise. The answer is not always a dazzling invention. It can be a research report, a cleaner product architecture or an old technology made newly urgent by a changed world. The craft lies in noticing which one it is - and resisting the urge to send the other ninety-nine pitches.