One of the most persistent misconceptions in Nigeria’s public relations industry is that being a great PR practitioner automatically qualifies you to run a successful PR agency.

Hassan Abdul, CEO Drawbridge CM Ltd, dismantled that assumption with clarity and conviction at the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations Lagos State Chapter Monthly Clinic, held virtually on Thursday, delivering a session that gave PR professionals some of the most practically useful insight the clinic has offered this year.

Abdul’s central argument was one that the room of NIPR Lagos members needed to hear. Most PR professionals who start agencies fail not because they lack communication skills but because they lack the business skills that running an agency actually demands.

“Most PR professionals fail not because they are bad at PR, but because they are bad at being CEOs,” he said.

The moment you hang your own shingle, he argued, you stop being a craftsperson and are required to become an architect. That shift in identity, from practitioner to business owner, is what Abdul described as the most difficult mental leap any professional can make.

To explain this transition, Abdul introduced what he called the Three Hats concept. Every agency founder must wear three distinct hats simultaneously. The Technician does the actual PR work, writing press releases, coordinating events, handling crises and supervising content. The Manager ensures the work is delivered on time and profitably, managing freelancers and client expectations. The Entrepreneur looks at the future, asks where the next client is coming from and whether the business model is sustainable.

The problem most founders face, Abdul said, is spending nearly all their time as Technicians. “If you spend one hundred percent of your time being the Technician, you do not have a business. You have a high-stress job where you are the boss,” he said.

His recommendation was for founders to conduct a weekly audit of their hours, labelling every hour as technician, manager or entrepreneur time, with the goal of shifting entrepreneur time to at least 40 percent within the first year.

On positioning and client strategy, Abdul challenged the widely held idea that a new agency should cast the widest possible net. He argued that specialisation is what keeps a new agency alive in the early years, noting that a PR agency trying to serve everyone ends up trusted by no one. He was equally clear about what clients are actually paying for. “Clients do not buy PR services. They buy outcomes,” he said, listing reputation equity, visibility, risk mitigation, crisis resilience, stakeholder alignment and market positioning as the real products a PR agency sells. That reframing of what the agency actually offers changes everything from how proposals are written to how retainers are priced.

Financial discipline was another area Abdul addressed with force. He identified a cluster of behaviours that quietly destroy young agencies before they have a chance to grow.

These include starting work without signed contracts, offering friendship discounts that erode margins and devalue the agency’s brand, accepting every client that approaches regardless of fit, ignoring compliance requirements including NIPR and PRCAN registration and tax filings, and running without a dedicated finance person.

“PR practitioners are often great with words but optimistic with math,” he said, making the case that having someone manage burn rate, taxes and accrual accounting is not a luxury but a non-negotiable requirement from day one.

Abdul also presented a practical three-phase roadmap for building an agency in the first 90 days. The first 30 days are about transitioning from professional to business entity, completing legal and compliance requirements, defining a niche backed by proof of market demand, setting up a separate business bank account and creating a clear service menu with defined deliverables.

Days 31 to 60 focus on building infrastructure, selecting a tech stack covering a CRM, project management tool and accounting software, identifying a core team of freelancers, crafting a positioning statement and launching on LinkedIn with value-led content rather than sales pitches. Days 61 to 90 focus on outreach and securing the first anchor client through warm list activation and disciplined pipeline management.

The session’s most memorable moment came when Abdul reframed the entire conversation about starting from nothing.

“You are not starting from zero. You are starting from years of experience,” he told the NIPR members. The professionals on the call had already done the hardest work of learning the craft. What remained was building the system that would allow that craft to work for them rather than requiring them to work for it endlessly. It was a perspective that recast what can feel like a daunting beginning as something considerably more grounded and achievable.

The NIPR Lagos State Chapter Monthly Clinic has become one of the most consistent platforms in Nigeria for the kind of honest, practitioner-to-practitioner professional development conversation that the industry rarely has in more formal settings.

Abdul’s session on building a PR agency from ground zero was precisely the kind of contribution the clinic was designed to host, practical, experience-backed, commercially grounded and delivered without the vagueness that too often surrounds conversations about agency entrepreneurship in Nigeria.