Rachel Kay sold the agency. She kept the instinct.

Two years after selling her agency, Rachel Kay found herself looking into an office toilet. It was making the wrong noises and failing to refill. She considered calling a plumber. Then she opened the tank and worked on the hose and chain until the thing behaved. Ownership had changed. Apparently, the instinct to sort it out herself had survived the paperwork.

Kay told the story while reflecting on RKPR’s second anniversary inside FINN Partners. It is an appealingly unceremonious scene for an acquisition retrospective. There is no ceremonial bell to ring, unless the plumbing has deteriorated further. There is simply a problem, an available pair of hands and the question of what happens next.

Her account of founding and growing Rachel Kay Public Relations has that same practical texture. The business involved consumer brands and media attention. It also involved learning payroll, negotiating leases and keeping an office functioning. The glamorous and the inconvenient shared a calendar. Anyone considering an agency career might profit from remembering both.

The first pitch was for a colleague

RKPR dates its founding to 2007. Kay brought experience from both agency work and in-house communications. The brands in her earlier professional background ranged from Kashi to Givenchy, Samsung, Kodak and Clinique. That is a useful spread for someone whose later business would revolve around the different reasons people want things.

Her route into ownership was less deliberate than the finished company might suggest. An in-house job proved a poor fit. She began freelancing, and her former employer became her first client. A relationship from one working arrangement became the foundation of another. The eventual founder had a customer before she had an elaborate founder mythology.

“I never intended to be an entrepreneur.”

Rachel Kay, Exit Right, 2025

One early recruitment story brings the scale of the operation into focus. Natalie Terashima applied for an internship. Kay wanted her, then discovered that established firms wanted her too. She had to make a case for a business working from a room in her house. The proposition required some persuasive confidence about the future.

Terashima stayed. Years later, she remembered working there with cats as colleagues. Kay’s own biography is perfectly happy to acknowledge her affection for cats, along with travel and wine. It is a welcome detail in a profession so frequently obliged to find just the right language for somebody else’s personality.

An education in the grocery aisle

Kay’s agency developed particular depth in food and beverage. The appeal is easy to understand: these products belong to ordinary routines, yet introducing a new one can require considerable explanation. A packet has only so much room. A shopping trip has only so much time. The communications have to make an unfamiliar proposition understandable.

The agency’s published work extends across household products, beauty and consumer technology as well. Its home territory, though, offers an unusually concrete test of storytelling. Someone can enjoy the story and leave the product on the shelf. Someone can remember the brand and be unable to find it. Attention leaves practical questions behind.

RKPR’s service offering reflects those questions. Alongside media relations are social campaigns, creator relationships, affiliate programs, messaging and support around trade shows. Different assignments ask for different kinds of work: explaining a product, placing a founder in a wider conversation, reaching an audience or helping a business respond when the conversation turns difficult.

There is a particular discipline in this range. A communications professional has to understand the company’s version of its story, then consider what will interest somebody who has no obligation to care. Founders can be deeply attached to the details of making a product. The public gets to decide which details travel.

Kay has also made a practice of explaining the profession itself. She has guest lectured at San Diego State University, where she studied, and spoken about public relations and social media. Her commentary on new media has appeared in Effective Public Relations and Ready to Launch: The PR Couture Guide to Breaking into Fashion PR.

Teaching creates a different audience for the same accumulated judgment. A client wants a useful decision. A student needs to understand how a practitioner arrives at one. Being able to move between the two suggests a career spent thinking about the work as well as completing it. RKPR also received a Silver Stevie Award for Women-Run Workplace of the Year in 2021.

The exit with a working day attached

On September 6, 2022, FINN Partners announced that it had acquired RKPR. The agency had 19 people and a presence on both coasts. Kay became a managing partner and joined the leadership of FINN’s Global Consumer Practice. Her business had reached a point where a larger organization wanted the expertise it contained.

The announcement named clients including Simple Mills, NotCo, Country Archer Provisions and Tofurky. It also described a combined FINN consumer practice approaching $25 million in annual fees. That figure belongs to the combined practice. The distinction matters: a transaction has several measures of scale, and they answer different questions.

For Kay, the decision also had a human dimension. She later described Terashima’s opportunity to advance as a motivation for selling. A longtime colleague’s future was part of the calculation. An agency can carry its founder’s name while containing careers and ambitions that extend well beyond the person on the door.

Kay explored possible buyers before choosing FINN. Her later account describes continuing to run her unit while gaining access to a wider organization and international collaboration. The arrangement allowed her to keep working close to the business she had built. An exit, in this case, came with another working day attached.

There is something useful in that sequence for anyone inclined to treat a sale as a final scene. The date of the deal answers who owns the company. The following months answer how it feels to work there. Decisions about colleagues, clients and responsibility continue after the congratulatory messages have slipped down the inbox.

A shorter trip from story to shopping basket

Kay’s public commentary shows a continuing interest in what happens after attention arrives. In a 2022 interview, she discussed affiliate links as a way to connect coverage with purchasing and to observe sales through dashboards. She also emphasized combining public relations, social activity and creator work rather than treating each as an isolated assignment.

That interest gives her consumer expertise a commercial edge. A product recommendation can now sit close to a buying opportunity. The work of earning interest and the work of enabling purchase may meet on the same screen. For an agency, that creates opportunities to ask more specific questions about what a campaign accomplished.

One RKPR campaign for Bubbies Mochi makes the connection visible without requiring a screen at all. The team brought branded ice cream carts to beaches in Los Angeles and San Diego. People receiving samples also received coupons directing them to Whole Foods and Sprouts. The route from pleasant encounter to grocery purchase was built into the activity.

The campaign combined press outreach, creator partnerships and local activation. Its published account reported weekly sales lifts during the promotion in both markets. Those are campaign-reported results, and the work belongs to the team. The example matters here because it gives Kay’s broader interest in purchase a concrete setting: an ice cream cart, a postcard and a shop.

By September 2025, her writing was exploring TikTok Shop. She encouraged consumer brands to use recipes, demonstrations, behind-the-scenes material and live interactions to show how products fit into people’s lives. She also discussed creator affiliate relationships. The format had changed, but the practical concern remained recognizable: help people understand an item and give them a straightforward way to act.

A recipe is useful because it supplies an occasion. A demonstration answers a question the packaging might leave open. A founder explaining a process can make the work behind a product visible. These are small acts of translation. In aggregate, they describe a profession that needs to keep learning how its audience encounters things.

The founder remains in the room

Today, Kay’s FINN Partners biography lists her as managing partner. It is a different title from founder and CEO, and a different set of resources surrounds it. Her career still connects the judgment of a consumer communications specialist with the experience of having run an independent firm.

The most revealing detail may be her willingness to put the awkward jobs into the story. Agency life has plenty of polished descriptions. Kay’s recollections allow the lease, the payroll and the broken fixture into view. They make the business easier to recognize as a place where people actually worked.

She has described continuing to pursue business through networking, events and cold calls. That willingness to initiate a conversation fits the rest of the account: the first client, the early hire, the decision to seek a buyer. Each required another person to see a possibility and agree to take part.

There is no need to turn the office toilet into a management doctrine. It was a toilet, and it needed fixing. Still, it makes a persuasive last image for a founder who sold her company and stayed. The paperwork was complete. There was work to do. Kay opened the tank.