Parry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR, is helping B2B technology companies offer LLM-digestible messages through earned media, human-centered writing, and strategic communication. Driven by the belief that where people start does not determine where they finish, Parry has built an empathetic, senior-led agency that works exclusively with good companies and empowers its people to share their expertise openly.
In this conversation, Parry introduces The LinkedIn Cheat-code Framework: Post every day, Tap into news stories, Weave in audience impact, and No-CTA. He explains how consistently sharing valuable ideas and expecting nothing in return helped him build an audience, generate most of his leads through LinkedIn, and shorten the sales cycle from three months to one week. Parry also discusses how LinkedIn thought leadership creates a virtuous cycle of earned media and LLM citations, why websites and PR content must be readable by both humans and machines, and how a senior-led agency can scale without sacrificing quality. He also shares why human writers will become more valuable as AI-generated content creates a growing sea of sameness.
—
Offer LLM-Digestible Messages with Parry Headrick
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Parry Headrick, the Founder of Crackle PR, a B2B tech public relations agency that works with good companies only. Crackle PR is a senior-led B2B tech PR agency built for the LLM era, where earned media is no longer just a brand builder, it is the vital infrastructure that feeds foundation models. Parry, welcome to the show.
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Well, it’s great to have you, and you are all about LLMs and how to get through the AI filters, which is relevant for all of us. But before we jump in, I’d like to ask you my $64,000 question. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Crackle PR?
Yeah, that’s a good question. And I haven’t really been asked that question in that way before, but if I had to nail the answer, it would be this. So I started out with humble beginnings. My family didn’t have any money really to speak of. We wore secondhand clothes. It was the typical scratching and clawing our way up story. And I had a difficult childhood with divorces and everything, and I ended up getting kicked out of high school. Seventh grade was the last grade I actually completed. I was kicked out of two different schools three different times.
And the last time I was dismissed, I was told by the principal that I would have a long life working at McDonald’s. It was a real dagger that he put in my heart as he showed me the door. And I just thought at that point that didn’t seem like something that someone in power should say to someone who had none. And that kind of informed everything that I’ve done since, including being a reporter where I covered stories trying to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, all the way into how I’ve tried to create an agency that is predicated on doing it with empathy.
And we have an ironclad no-assh*les policy. I hope you don’t mind the swear there. That means internally and externally. We won’t work for jerks, and we won’t tolerate brilliant jerks that work with us because that tends to be very cancerous for an organization. So that’s the Why, is where you start doesn't really dictate where you finish, and I'm determined to prove that that's the case. Share on X
Yeah. I love it. And that’s one of the benefits of being in business for yourself. You can select your own clients. You don’t have to accept the ones that you don’t like. But few people actually put a stake in the ground and actually declare it, right? It’s harder to do it than to just make some compromises.
Yeah.
So tell me about Crackle PR. I really like the name of Crackle PR. I kind of sense what it might mean, but why don’t you explain how you came up with this?
Well, good question. I like these layups you’re giving me here. So I started Crackle during the pandemic, actually, when most of us were staring at the walls of our home thinking, “What the heck is going on?” There were riots in the streets. People couldn’t go anywhere, and it was really this sort of just dark malaise that covered the world. And it was that time that I thought, “What if I were to start a PR agency that is the antithesis of the large ones that I had built?”
So prior to Crackle, I had built a couple of the largest privately held tech PR agencies in North America. The models at these large agencies, as you probably know, are very hierarchical, where you trot out the Parrys of the world and the VPs, and then the model demands that you have most of the work done by juniors because that’s how you make the money. And I thought, what if we just, instead of trying to get big at all costs, what if we instead had a very prescriptive model where, instead of paying for offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, what if we just put that money into our talent and had a senior team that did the work, and we didn’t have a whole bunch of overhead? Wouldn’t that be cool?
And what if we also, as I just mentioned, don’t work with any jerks, and we work just with companies that are good people doing good stuff? And that was the true north for the company to start. And so we’ve been very fortunate in the intervening years. We now have 15 full-time employees, another five consultants. We’re hiring prescriptively and slowly. We don’t want to grow for the sake of growth. And we have clients all the way from seed rounds of funding to publicly traded companies. We really run the gamut. It's a B2B tech PR shop primarily. Share on X
But I always thought that the bad people need more PR than the good people.
Well, they may, but we’re not here to put lipstick on pigs. I had somebody that told me in my life one time that you don’t get into the mud with the pigs because the pig will love it, but you’ll both get dirty. And that’s not a game I’m looking to play. So I didn’t actually answer the question about Crackle itself. So the idea was that during that dark, dark time—COVID, riots, craziness everywhere. We wanted to represent a bit of goodness in the world. So I just pictured the world being this heap of ashes Share on X and under those ashes was a little spark, a little crackle of life, a little ember of goodness that was going to come out of all this. And that was really the impetus for the name, and it’s really guided the true north of the company.
Love it. That’s really fun. And your hat looks good, too.
You see the little spark, the little crackle right there?
I see it. Yeah. It’s like a Christmas cracker. So, okay, this podcast is called Management Blueprint because we are looking for, or I’m looking for, frameworks that people came up with, that they stumbled upon, which other listeners might apply to their business. So what’s a framework that you could share with us which can be explained in three to five steps that helps you get an insight or communicate better or organize better, something that helps you be more effective?
Yeah. So this may not be a big surprise. Some of your listeners may follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my cheat code. When I first started this business, I went to LinkedIn with my full self. Share on X Determined to tell everyone the good, the bad, the ugly about the industry that I’m in, which is public relations. And a surprising thing happened. At the time, there weren’t a lot of people kind of being truth tellers in their respective industries. But I stuck to that same framework, speaking truth to power, which goes back to my Why.
An interesting thing happened, which is I tended to get a bunch of followers really quickly, and they would DM me saying, “Finally, someone’s just saying it like it really is in the industry. Finally, someone is lifting back the curtain. Finally, finally, finally.” And so I just doubled down on that approach. And so fast-forward to today, I have 82,000 followers on LinkedIn. The majority of my business comes in through DMs on LinkedIn from them having read my posts, my thoughts.
And by the time they actually come to me, they already have a good sense for my ethos, how I think, how I operate, that I work with good companies only. They know me. So the vetting process is 75% of the way done by the time they ever reach out. So that’s the cheat code. I’ve shortened the sales cycle from my old world being three months down to a week. If we have a phone call, we put together a quick proposal, and then it’s done because they are already looking to hire me when they reach out. So that’s the framework, that’s the cheat code, that’s the hack, and it’s applicable to just about any industry.
Okay. So I love it. So let’s break it down. So how do you create this effect where people pick up the phone or DM you and within a week sign you up? What is the process?
Yeah. So the process is just I post literally every day of my life. Maybe weekends I’ll take a break, it depends. But every work weekday I am posting. It is not a nice-to-have, it is a mission-critical function of Crackle PR. I would say up until recently, about 90% of my leads came in through my commentary and writing and posting on LinkedIn.
And it's really me just sharing everything that I know, including commenting on the news of the day tapping into the zeitgeist about issues that are happening from a public relations standpoint, and sharing real-time thought leadership across my… Share on X And so it’s not a simple process of, like, I do A and then B. It’s really more like, what’s happening today? What’s a story that I should tell and comment on today? And then how is that going to positively impact my key audiences?
I’m always doing it with the intent to simply share value and expect nothing in return. I almost never ask for anything. Occasionally I’ll say, “Hey, does anybody know a good account manager?” But I’m not out there selling my wares on LinkedIn. I’m very simply ungating my brain and letting everyone have access to it, and the right people find me at the right time.
Love it. Love it. So the four steps I heard were: post every day, tap into the zeitgeist or the story of the day, how to impact your key audience, so essentially the story and how can you turn it into something that helps people, and no CTA at the end.
That’s right.
Yeah. Love it. That’s a great framework.
Yeah. It’s great. And you know what’s interesting is that it’s multifaceted in the sense I’ve told you already that the majority of my business comes from LinkedIn, okay? Because I share what I know. It’s thought leadership in real time, and it’s a captive audience. The byproduct of that is interesting, which is that I am constantly written about in the news by, like, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, you name the publication. Because they’re finding me on that platform and reading what I have to say and reaching out for comment to expand on those ideas.
So it's got this virtuous cycle where, as a PR guy myself, it's interesting that I'm putting thoughts out into the world and I'm attracting earned media Share on X which is the coveted thing that all of the LLMs I talk about rest on, because 82% or something of citations across LLMs come from earned media. So it’s a really virtuous cycle that I’ve stumbled upon and that I’m trying to refine and hone over time.
So basically, you’re drinking your own Kool-Aid. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, a lot of marketing agencies, they sell marketing, but they are not able to market themselves well.
“The cobbler’s children have no shoes” is the common expression.
Exactly. But you are the cobbler’s child who found a pair of shoes, and this is actually doing what you’re preaching others should do. So that’s kind of very, very counterintuitively intuitive.
Well, just to add on that quickly. So public relations, we’re about promoting and publicity and all of that. The bizarre irony is that the vast majority of people who are great at writing, great at promoting, like me, don’t post on LinkedIn. They’re not sharing their thoughts out there. They’re not doing what they were born to do, which is a really fascinating thing.
And I think part of it is where they work and they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing or maybe lose a client or whatever it may be. But my idea is, and I tell my team this, my staff this, is like, “I want you out there sharing how smart you are every single day. I’m under no illusions that you’ll be with me until the end of your life, okay? But while you’re with me, I want you sharing what you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly about our industry, because that’ll help you gain a brand, and it’ll help me attract an audience.”
It’s a win-win. So I wish more people had that mindset where they weren’t stingy about who has a voice but rather empowered everyone across the organization to use that voice for the better of the organization and for themselves.
Yeah, but it takes discipline to write every day. It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all.
It’s easier for others than some. I mean, I was a journalist. I came up writing, so for me, it’s just a natural thing, and most PR people are writers. So you’d think it would be pretty easy for us because we write every day for our clients, but I would say probably 85-plus percent of the people in my profession are either afraid or don’t have time or just don’t want to do it, and I just think it’s a shame. They’re leaving a lot of at-bats on the field.
No, absolutely. Absolutely. So you kind of half answered my question that I’m going to ask, but I’m going to ask it anyway because I’m curious about other aspects to it. So what drives growth in your business?
Yeah. So if you asked me this six months ago, I would’ve said primarily it’s LinkedIn and referrals. Today, I’m happy to report that it’s referrals and LinkedIn, and also my optimized website, my website that’s optimized for the LLM era. Again, another example of eating my own dog food here, where I’m making my website readable both to humans and the machines that cite, and I’m preemptively going after the earned media pieces that will then fuel citations for my company and for my website.
So again, I’m trying to create this flywheel here, and I think I’ve been pretty successful so far. I would argue probably among the most successful in PR agencies, where I’m feeding the beast constantly and prescriptively doing so, so that my website, my LinkedIn work, my earned media hits all effectively get scraped and cited by these LLMs, which is the future of search, obviously.
Yeah.
I still use Google occasionally, but even Google is just the AI explanation up top. You’re not even going down, scrolling anymore. You’re just getting the quick explanations. And so everything is headed that way, and I think that being a first mover on that front is particularly important. And I think any marketer that is not looking at the LLM landscape as the next great frontier is missing the boat.
Oh, yeah. I love it. So how do these LLMs work? Do you have an insight, a deeper insight as to how to create these quotes or how to show up? Is it just writing every day, making original posts, or is there more to it?
There’s a bunch of things, and this could be a topic for a podcast in and of itself, but I’ll just talk in basic terms to not have your audience’s eyes glaze over. It used to be that, for example, we would write in PR a press release that was very narrative in structure. X company today announced, and the CEO is proud, and all of that kind of stuff. And then that was used to then go pitch the media.
Well, the LLMs are scraping these press releases now, and what you want to try and do is make it as easy as possible for them to lift the essence of that information Share on X in an attributable way to the author or the company that is in question here. So it’s about making it digestible and ingestible for the LLMs, and there’s a variety of techniques and tricks that you can do this with, and your audience can do a quick search and find those tricks. But there’s a whole playbook now about how to do that, and it’s not even just things like press releases, but it’s how you structure your bylined articles that you place, and it’s how you frame your conversations with reporters so that you’re saying things in such a way that the LLMs will ingest these and then in turn cite these for respective audiences.
And by the way, whether it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, all these different models, they all look for different things. So some of them rely heavily on places like Reddit. Some of them rely heavily on places like YouTube. Some of them ingest things more frequently than others. So there’s a whole cornucopia of things that has to be done if you’re really going to dial it in because no two LLMs are alike, and they value different things, and they weight them more heavily. So it really is a science, more so than an art form, which is what I think PR is largely known to be, more of an art form. Share on X
Yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning of this conversation, you shared that you have been part of big PR companies, and you wanted to do it differently. You wanted to have a senior people-heavy agency where, I guess, people get straight from the horse’s mouth what they want to have. So is this model scalable? And if so, how?
Yeah, it is scalable. And I think there’s a distinction. So when I say senior talent, I’m not talking about only VPs. So we have account directors, we have account managers, we have senior account executives. So they’re a little further down on the scale.
But what we don’t have is interns and account coordinators and the very earliest players. So everybody has at least four to five years of experience on the team. And so in that sense, it is scalable, provided that the minimum retainers are sufficient. So we have a $12,000 minimum monthly retainer, and that’s very intentional because we know what we need to do to be able to be profitable and to continue to hire and scale, to your point.
So yeah, it is scalable, but it takes work, and it took a lot of hand-wringing and mistakes along the way to get to a point where we’re able to do it now. But it’s kind of beautiful in the sense that I don’t want to be a huge 250-person agency. I think I’m comfortable in the 20- to 50-employee range, and then I’ll probably, in a few years, ride off into the sunset, having made a very good earning or good living, rather and I’m not trying to become a billionaire here.
So who are your ideal customers that you’ll hire?
Yeah. Typically, it’s, first of all, good companies doing good things. We don’t want to work with tobacco companies or people that are negatively contributing to the world. And it’s typically B2B technology companies in A round, B round, C round, D round of funding, or even publicly traded companies. It’s a pretty wide swath, but the common thread is B2B tech is the sweet spot. And again, we’re looking for largely challenger brands. There are some that are the leaders that we have, but I think it's much more interesting to help build a brand than it is to maintain one. So those are the kinds of clients we tend to look for. Share on X
So do you do the same thing for them that you do for yourself, for your agency, or is it a different approach?
Yeah. No, I mean, we focus a heck of a lot more on earned media for our clients because that still is the lifeblood of a traditional PR program. But the earned media, as we just talked about, inform the LLMs that are now citing them in their answers. So we got thrown kind of a bouquet in PR. Everybody’s talking about AI being difficult and losing jobs, and a lot of that is true. The PR industry got kind of fortunate in the sense that earned media is more important than it’s ever been because LLMs rely on them to cite their sources.
And it’s an unfortunate problem because at the same time PR is more important than ever, reporters in the media landscape are dwindling faster than ever. Share on X There are reporters getting laid off everywhere. There’s all kinds of restructuring. There’s reporters bouncing around, going to Substack, trying to eke out a living. And I just wish there was a way to create more parity where 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the media landscape was really strong, and now it’s really struggling.
Now, this isn’t to say there aren’t opportunities out there to pitch the media because there’s more people, and it’s just more diffuse. So you have all these different audiences that you didn’t have before, like Beehiiv and Substack and podcasts and all of these disparate groups, whereas it used to just be, “Here’s my 25 newspapers and magazines we’re going after,” and that was the entirety of it. So now it requires a lot more work, a lot more research to find out where your audiences are and who they’re reading or what they’re watching or which podcast that they’re looking at.
So it requires PR people to be more resourceful, to spend a lot more time researching who they're going after and making sure they're very precise in their outreach Share on X versus the old days when it was this spray-and-pray approach, knowing that some amount of people will cover it and so therefore it’s worth it. Today, it’s about you have to make sure you’re not wasting anyone’s time and making sure that you’ve done your homework.
Yeah, it’s becoming a very fragmented business. So what is your expectation of the future as these big media outlets are disintegrating, consolidating, or even disappearing? Is it just going to be more atomized, or is this a cyclical thing where you have the fragmentation, and then it’s going to consolidate again?
Yeah. The answer is I’m not sure. What I would like to happen is what some—I know some countries actually fund the free and fair media to make sure that it’s a healthy ecosystem where there are checks and balances. I am not under the illusion that that’s going to happen in this country anytime soon, although I wish it would, because it’s really for the betterment of everyone.
But I think what will happen in the short term is more of what’s happening now, which is the atomization of all these folks going to different platforms to try to eke out a living on their own. They’re taking agency of their lives. But I would like to think against that backdrop there’ll be a movement, because businesses are going to require it at some point, that there’s third-party validation from trusted sources.
I would like there to be a consortium of some sort built where companies of a certain size are all contributing to the same pool to try to get this healthy landscape that we need. I don’t know the answers. I haven’t solved it. If I did, I’d be a very, very wealthy man. But I know that the government in some countries are actively funding a free and fair press, and I really wish we would do that here.
So let me switch gears here and ask you a very different question.
Okay.
If you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your company in the next 12 months, what would that be?
I think it would be that I could adequately teach everyone in the organization how best to utilize tools like Claude Code and others to automate much of the grunt work that takes time away from strategy. So we are really strategic. We do a lot of brainstorming. We are great at our thinking and our writing and pitching and all of that. Share on X
But there’s a whole heck of a lot of stuff that’s related to reporting and research and stuff that just takes a whole lot of time. So I wish everybody could just instantly understand how best to use these tools to eliminate the drudgery from our jobs, to focus instead on the strategy.
Why do you think it’s not happening?
There’s a learning curve, and frankly, there is an expense. These tokens are not inexpensive, so you have to pay a bunch of money for these things. You have to put the time in. You have to have an appetite to learn it, and then you have to have the aptitude to learn it. Now, I’ve gotten pretty, pretty good at this stuff. I’m self-taught. I built my own website using these tools. I mean, I’m pretty deep myself. But at the end of the day, most of my employees are working their butts off on their client stuff, and this stuff I’m talking about is kind of extracurricular and difficult to do.
And so what I’m trying to do. We just talked about this last week is putting aside office hours for everyone to figure out these big, hairy projects they want to get better at and learn and devote time to it on my dime. Share on X I’m happy to pay for it, for them to put the work in, get the skills that they need to be able to make shorter work of the stuff that just takes too long and isn’t, frankly, satisfying professionally.
Yeah. I mean, it is uncomfortable when people have to learn something that is completely different from the skills that they have been making their money with, right?
Yeah. Well, and I’ll take it a step further. So I’ve been quoted in a couple of, like The Guardian recently, about some of these commencement speeches where you have one of the heads of Google and all these bigwigs at college commencement speeches talking about AI and ushering in this new revolution, and they’re getting booed. They’re getting booed while they’re speaking because the students in these halls recognize that there’s an existential threat right now in the form of AI.
They already have enough challenges relative to affordability and buying a home and all these different things, and now you’re telling them that AI is going to take a huge chunk of their jobs before they even get out of the gate. And against that backdrop, they’re not being equipped in college to be able to come out into the real world with the coding skill, the Claude Code skills I’m talking about now.
So they’re coming out handcuffed and kneecapped out of the gate into this world that they’ve been foisted upon. And I think that’s a big challenge. And so bringing it back to my office, or anybody who’s in the situation we are, everybody’s kind of grudgingly learning how to do this stuff or else. Or else you’ll fall behind, or else you won’t have a job, or else someone will take your job. And I think that’s a very real angsty feeling that a lot of people have.
And so part of me feels guilty for wanting to tell my people, “Look, we’ve got to get skilled up on these things,” because I know a lot of people would rather it just didn’t exist. But pretending something doesn’t exist isn’t the way forward. You've got to look it square in the face, realize what it is, and then do your level best to try to maximize what you can with it. And that's where we're at. Share on X
Do you see a lot of disruption happening in PR, or are agencies just waking up to this issue?
Yeah, I see a lot of disruption, and I think it’s for the worse. I think right now what we’re seeing is there are a whole lot of agencies that are taking the AI slop, spray-and-pray approach. Like, they are literally using these AI machines to pitch all these reporters who, by the way, can tell when they’re getting pitched with AI, and then they’re immediately getting blacklisted because they don’t want to deal with the machine. So yes, there’s disruption, but I think it’s noise instead of a positive disruption. I think there’s not much to be gained from the AI tools that way.
I will say it’s disrupted the way some of the largest agencies have operated because for years they worked on a time-and-materials model. That’s a little difficult to justify now when you have machines doing in seconds what used to take weeks or sometimes months from a research standpoint. So that’s disrupted the whole agency model. And I would argue that’s for the better because the time-and-materials model, I think, was an excuse for busy work.
Yeah. That is true. What do you suggest if someone is looking for a PR agency? What is the criteria that they should apply to evaluate an agency? What kind of agency should they be choosing?
Yeah. So I mean, I think there’s a couple things I would say. One is, make sure that you understand who’s actually doing the work on your team. There’s a classic bait-and-switch problem in PR. I already talked about this, where it’s like you talk to me during the call, and then you have an intern doing your work, and that obviously isn’t very equitable. So there’s that. I think having proficiency in the new world relative to large language models and share of citation.
I think that stuff is really important now because directionally that’s where we’re headed. And then for me, the one thing that is so true it was true the day I started my agency, and it’ll always be true is hire strong writers, real human writers. Because the AI slop is nauseating out there. Something like 60% of posts on LinkedIn are now written by AI, as reported by LinkedIn. And people are just getting really sick of this sea of sameness because AI really is just the average of everything that’s come before it, everything that’s been written before it.
It’s an average of that. And that’s a path to mediocrity really, really quickly. So strong writers, senior leaders who are doing the work, I think, are key, and then obviously prowess around the idea of how to get your products and services cited across the LLMs that are becoming increasingly important every day.
Love it. Love it. That’s very encouraging because what I see is that these platforms, like Claude, they offer to codify your writing voice and write in your voice. What do you think of these approaches?
Yeah. I think probably for some lines of work it might make sense. For our world, it just does not. If you’re a writer and you’ve valued the English language, you can very quickly determine what’s AI and what is not. And that’s the case with all of the reporters that are covering our clients every day. So they know what’s AI. People in our industry know what AI is, and you can just tell when someone is responding with AI.
You’re getting a note in the mail that’s written by AI. You’re getting an email back from AI. It’s just nauseating, and it’s just disheartening. And I think that there is going to increasingly be a premium placed on human writers and human artists and people who are doing human work that has real value and real thought versus the distillation of everything that’s come before it, which is what AI is.
So if people would like to learn more about you or read your posts or connect with your team, where should they go?
So cracklepr.com is the website. I am Parry Headrick on LinkedIn. You can find me there. And I’ve gotten off of most of the other social platforms because I’ve had some issues with the Facebooks of the world, and so I canceled those a long time ago. So Bluesky would be another one. Parry Headrick on Bluesky.
Okay. Well, if you liked what you heard and you want real writers who will be discovered by LLMs, and you want to get your company featured on ChatGPT and Claude and the other platforms, then check out Parry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR. Start reading his posts, which I will be. I think I already am. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then stay tuned because a couple of times a week I’ll bring an exciting entrepreneur who has changed the world and will share their unique frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Parry, and thanks for listening.
It’s been my pleasure. Thanks.
