Sabina Gault and the clients who followed her home

Sabina Gault was going home. She had lost her job, and the immediate plan was considerably smaller than the business she would eventually build. Then clients called. Where was she going? They wanted to come along. There is something wonderfully inconvenient about customers who refuse to let a publicist retire from the conversation. Gault had work, people who trusted her, and a problem: she would have to become a business owner.

She tells the story with little interest in making herself sound destined for the corner office. Two jobs had ended in dismissal. She was opinionated, she says, and had a habit of speaking at the wrong moment. Her husband’s verdict was brisk: unemployable. It is an excellent line for someone whose subsequent occupation would involve employing other people. It also leaves room for the uncomfortable parts of the story, which she seems quite willing to keep.

Today Gault is the founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Konnect Agency, working across consumer brands, food and beverage, franchises, family and lifestyle businesses. The official founding year is 2009, following an earlier period of client work. In 2026, Entrepreneur ranked Konnect second among public relations suppliers to franchises. Between the departing employee and the established agency lies a long education in what happens after somebody says yes to a pitch.

A language skill becomes a plane ticket

Gault grew up in Romania and began her career in the film industry at MediaPro Studios. Her mother was a French professor. Languages became a practical qualification early, allowing her to work with international productions and the people making them. A studio can have costumes, stages and locations; it still needs someone who can make a conversation work when the participants arrived with different vocabularies.

Publicity was an occupation she could enter through that useful skill. She handled international talent and press, and has spoken about working on Cold Mountain. An offer from an American producer brought her to the United States. Film work had supplied both an apprenticeship and a connection to the next job. The move was personal, but its mechanism was professional: somebody had seen what she could do and wanted her nearby.

Los Angeles suited her. In a 2016 account of her life there, she recalled feeling at home almost immediately. That detail gives the usual relocation story a pleasant twist. The sprawling city that can make newcomers wonder whether they have mistakenly moved to a motorway felt like a place she belonged. She continued in entertainment before finding herself increasingly drawn to the public relations of products and brands.

The business arrived before the instruction manual

Knowing how to represent a client left plenty of other things to learn. Gault’s first steps toward independence included working under someone else’s business arrangement, with space and accounting support supplied for her. She brought in the work and began hiring. The arrangement gave her an interval in which to learn what an agency needs behind the scenes before she carried the whole operation herself.

Then came the assortment of jobs concealed inside the word founder. Account work, accounting, human resources and administration could all land with the same person. Gault described learning those functions by doing them. Being able to win business did not exempt her from discovering how to run it. The glamorous part of publicity had acquired a less glamorous companion: the obligation to make sure the company itself functioned.

“I learned all the functions of my business by executing them myself.”

Sabina Gault

Her early agency grew, and growth produced a problem more awkward than an empty calendar. New clients demanded more than the existing teams could comfortably deliver. Turnover climbed. Gault took a line of credit to make crucial hires. Winning the account and serving the account were separate accomplishments, and the second required an investment the first could easily obscure.

That episode gives her origin story its weight. Clients following her demonstrated trust in her work. Scaling the agency required her to extend that trust to other people and put money behind it. A founder can answer one more email, attend one more meeting, squeeze another task into the evening. Eventually the arithmetic becomes absurd. More assignments need more capacity, however flattering the assignments may be.

The publicist who tastes the competition

Consumer products gave Gault a world she could be interested in beyond the assignment. She has described bringing an early food account to her company because she already liked and ate the product. Representing something she cared about made the work easier to believe in. Her enthusiasm also extended to trying rival products. Competitive research, in this version of the profession, has the agreeable possibility of being edible.

Her agency’s client history includes KRAVE, Sweet Leaf Tea and Stubb’s. These are businesses with founders, buyers, distribution questions and competitors, rather than merely names waiting for a press mention. Working alongside their development gave Gault a view of the long stretches behind apparently sudden success. A product can look new to a shopper who has only just noticed it while being very old news to the person who has spent years getting it onto that shelf.

Konnect’s own description changed as the work broadened. In 2016 the firm dropped Public Relations from its name and became Konnect Agency. Social media, digital marketing and content creation were part of the offer. For Gault, keeping pace meant changing the company’s capabilities, not simply adding another fashionable service to a proposal. Clients needed their stories to travel through more than one channel.

The campaigns can be playful. Maple Hill’s virtual “Name a Cow” event invited a kind of participation a product announcement rarely offers. The PR Net singled it out when recognizing Gault in its 2025 Marcomms’ Most Influential selection, alongside Cracker Barrel Cheese’s Game Day activation. A cow is an unusually obliging campaign character: recognisable, connected to the product, and unlikely to insist on approving the caption.

A national brand still lives in a neighbourhood

Franchising adds another practical complication. A familiar name can appear across many locations, yet each location has its own audience. Gault’s work in the sector addresses that tension between a consistent brand and local circumstances. Community events, partnerships and locally relevant campaigns have to fit the wider business without sounding as if they were mailed indiscriminately to every town in America.

Her advice on franchise marketing allows for differences between regions. That sounds modest until it reaches a company trying to coordinate many owners and openings. Uniformity is convenient for headquarters. Local relevance matters to the person deciding whether to walk in. The agency has to understand both points of view, then produce something that can survive the journey from national strategy to a particular street.

The franchise ranking supplies a recent measure of Konnect’s standing, but Gault’s relationships with colleagues explain more about how the work gets done. Amanda Bialek became executive vice president in 2019 and is now the agency’s president. Gault has also publicly celebrated longtime business partner Monica Guzman Escobar, who leads sister agency Startr Co. The founder’s story has become inseparable from other people’s careers.

What people take home from work

Gault can be funny about agency life, but her view of employment gets specific quickly. Games and drinks at the office have their place; compensation and time off follow employees home. In her discussion of company culture, she questioned the value of entertaining perks when someone’s salary disappoints or their holiday is interrupted by repeated messages. A ping-pong table is a poor negotiator on those subjects.

She has put a similar practicality into helping immigrant women enter the industry. Konnect has supported visas and green card applications. Gault connects that commitment to the support she received from an early employer, who offered to help her finish her degree. Someone else made room for her future. As an employer, she has been able to make room for other people’s.

More recently, her writing about hiring has allowed for an employee’s valuable contribution to end without turning the departure into a verdict on the whole relationship. Five good years can still count as a successful hire. The company must also offer something worthwhile to the person joining it. Those are useful concessions from a founder accustomed to demanding a great deal: standards can coexist with the fact that people’s lives change.

Outside work, there is snow. Gault learned to ski as a child in Romania and has taken family trips from Los Angeles to Jackson Hole, Big Sky and Whistler. She has described booking late to improve the chances of good conditions. For somebody paid to plan campaigns, there is a certain pleasure in letting the weather have the last word.

The clients who followed Gault helped set her company in motion. They could not supply all the answers ownership would demand. Those came through doing unfamiliar jobs, borrowing to hire, changing the agency’s services and keeping relationships alive. Her account remains appealing because she leaves the learning visible. The publicist knows how to tell a story. In her own, she has kept the awkward first chapter.