The problem with hiring a PR agency six weeks before a fundraise

The timing may seem sound: you are about to talk to investors, so you should be visible. Make some noise, get some coverage to arrive in the room being noticed.

In practice, postponing PR engagement until the last moment, right before a fundraise, reliably makes things complicated.

Your new PR consultants will default to what is available: the product story, the founding moment, the market size — information gathered quickly from a brief and a website. It's highly likely that any rushed superficial narrative will contradict the investor deck version your CFO has been refining for three months.

Journalists who your fresh PR team is urgently pitching will check who you are, whether your story is worth their attention, and if so (which is far from guaranteed) will draw connections between your public claims and your competitors'.

Investors who read the coverage will test it against the model. If the numbers and the story were not aligned before media got involved, they will be far less aligned after. Things may start getting messy.

To use communications effectively in a fundraise, you need to have your story fixed and verified before making it public. You need to be in a place where the investor narrative and media narrative do not live separate lives, and what the CEO says on a podcast is consistent with what the CFO has in the assumptions tab.

That alignment is not produced in six weeks. It does not happen after a briefing. Your communications team needs to be in the right context to bring the right output — for you to be ready.