Reactive isn't a weakness, it's a strategy - Pietro Ranieri, Ranieri Agency
Episode 26 - THAT MOMENT
Most agency founders tell you about the plan. The vision, the five-year strategy, the moment they knew.
Pietro Ranieri doesn't have that story.
"I'm not a business guy, I don't understand any of this stuff. It's just kind of trying to figure it out as you go."
That sentence is doing more work than it sounds like. Because the business Pietro built by figuring it out as he went grew to 65 people across Europe. And the business he nearly lost, through no fault of his own work, taught him more about running a company than any plan ever could have.
From Farming College to Fleet Street
Pietro went to Harper Adams, an agricultural college near Telford. He wasn't from a farming family, his father was a barber, so farming itself was never really on the table. He was there for rugby as much as anything else.
There was no plan to end up in PR. A girlfriend was contracting in marketing, and the world of daily rates got mentioned to him almost in passing. He landed a placement with an agency for what he assumed would be six months. He'd get paid more for less work than his account director salary. That was the whole rationale.
"At the time, the only reason why I went that way is because I just thought, well, I am getting paid more money to do far less work."
The six-month placement never really ended. It just kept extending into more clients, more retainers, more work he hadn't gone looking for. This is the pattern that defines Pietro's career: not chasing opportunity, but recognising it when it was already standing in front of him.
The Wave You Didn't See Coming
Pietro's early agency work was in the Mac press, back when journalists received press releases on 35mm slides and faxes still mattered. He knew that world and the people in it. So when Apple launched the iPod, at a point when Apple itself wasn't the giant it is now, Pietro was already positioned in exactly the right place.
A wave of accessory brands appeared almost overnight. Silicone cases, small speakers, Bluetooth transmitters for cars. Cheap electronics that felt, at the time, genuinely exciting. And because Pietro knew the journalists who covered that world, the brands kept finding their way to him.
"These accessory brands started to appear. But back then... the brands would ask, you know, who can do the PR for this stuff? But obviously my name just kept coming up because I knew the journalists."
This is not a story about strategic foresight. It's a story about depth of relationships paying off in a moment nobody could have predicted. Pietro didn't build a five-year plan around the iPod. He simply already knew everyone who mattered when the wave arrived.
When the Foundation Isn't There
By around 2014 and 2015, the agency had grown to 20 people with genuinely good clients. But there was a pattern Pietro kept running into: clients he'd won and served well would eventually need a pan-European partner, and the agency would lose them to bigger competitors, not because of the work, but because of a spreadsheet decision made somewhere above the client's head.
So Pietro faced a choice. Sell the business, do something else, or find a way to grow into Europe himself.
The opportunity that appeared was a public company offering to convert his shares into theirs, using their capital to buy agencies across Europe under one roof. Pietro went down that road. French agency, German agency, two more lined up, a sponsorship agency thrown in. The business was approaching 65 people with real European reach.
Then the foundation gave way.
"The share price is going through the roof... I recognise now what that is. I mean, some would say Ponzi scheme, some would say they're over-inflating the share price."
Of all the agencies the public company had acquired, Pietro's was one of only two actually delivering its numbers. The rest weren't performing, investors began dumping shares, and the capital that was meant to fund everything simply wasn't there any more. Pietro ended up negotiating an insolvency deal with the bank, the administrators, the shareholders and his own agency partners, all at once, to buy his businesses back out.
He closed the deal on the last possible day. He was on a family holiday at the time, surrounded by friends who were millionaires, not knowing whether he'd be able to pay his own mortgage that month.
"I was in the situation where I was trying to close this deal with the administrators because I didn't know if I could pay my mortgage at the end of the month. And I'm having to put a big smile on."
What You Learn From Failure
Pietro is direct about where he thinks real business knowledge comes from, and it isn't from people who've never been tested.
"I'd rather talk to someone who's failed at things, because they'll be a lot more knowledgeable about what to do and what not to do than someone who's just sailed through and been successful. Because they haven't been tested."
That belief shapes how he talks about his first hire, too. Taking on your first employee, he says, effectively grows the business by 100 percent overnight, and it's the hardest recruitment decision anyone makes, because you don't yet know how to recruit, and you have to trust someone else to protect a reputation you built alone.
It's the same instinct that got him through the insolvency deal. Not a masterplan. Just a willingness to trust the numbers over the impulse, and to keep going when the story he'd been sold turned out not to be real.
About Supo:
Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.
For more information about Supo: www.supo.co.uk
About Ranieri Agency:
Founded by Pietro Ranieri, Ranieri Agency is a London-headquartered communications agency working across consumer, technology and gaming brands, with additional offices in Paris, Munich and Dusseldorf and partner agencies further afield. The agency covers the full spread of modern brand communications, from PR and influencer work through to social, content, digital marketing and paid media, and counts KEF, the hi-fi brand with over six decades of heritage in sound, among its current clients. Ranieri Agency has been named among PR Week's Top 150 agencies, and describes itself as boutique in ethos despite operating on a genuinely international scale, taking on both established giants and challenger brands with the same level of attention.
For more information about Ranieri Agency: https://ranieri.agency/
Not every founder story ends with a plan that worked. Pietro's ends with a plan that collapsed, and the deal he had to negotiate to come out the other side. Listen to the full conversation.