WTF is the WTF Agency Method? Its creator, Tim Kilroy, reveals all with host/journalist Ed Garsten on the landmark 150th episode of Tales From the Beat.
They also discuss how Tim works with PR and marketing agencies to help them become more successful at pitching and placing stories with reporters, and Tim talks about his weekly newsletter.
TTAC Creator Ed Garsten hosts " Tales from the Beat," a podcast about the automotive and media worlds. A veteran reporter and public relations operative, Garsten worked for CNN, The Associated Press, The Detroit News, Chrysler's PR department and Franco Public Relations. He is currently a senior contributor for Forbes.
The TTAC Creators Series tells stories and amplifies creators from all corners of the car world, including culture, dealerships, collections, modified builds and more.
An AI-summarized transcript and edited by a staffer is below.
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Summary
In the 150th episode of Tales from the Beat, host Ed Garsten interviews Tim Kilroy, an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and agency consultant. The conversation focuses on how PR and marketing agencies can improve their performance by understanding their clients, their audiences, and the business functions that drive growth.
Kilroy discusses his career, the development of his WTF Agency Method, the importance of building genuine relationships with journalists, and how artificial intelligence is changing the PR landscape.
1. Tim Kilroy's Entrepreneurial Background
Kilroy has spent approximately 30 years working in sales and marketing, including retail, telephone sales, digital marketing, and traditional marketing.
His entrepreneurial career began accidentally following the dot-com crash. In January 2001, he lost his job at a technology company shortly after purchasing a home and anticipating the birth of his first child.
Unable to find another job, he began accepting freelance marketing projects. Those projects grew into an agency that eventually expanded significantly. However, Kilroy admitted that he struggled as a CEO because he became too involved in the company's daily operations.
After that agency failed, he returned to employment, eventually became a chief marketing officer, and subsequently founded additional agencies. He scaled and sold two more agencies, including one to Tenuity.
In 2018, a friend asked him for help growing her agency, which had stalled at approximately $1 million in revenue. Kilroy realized that helping agencies become more effective and profitable was the work he wanted to pursue.
His current focus is helping agencies:
- Communicate and deliver their best value.
- Build more effective business operations.
- Grow without making their owners miserable.
2. The WTF Agency Method
Kilroy developed the WTF Agency Method around a simple observation: entrepreneurs frequently encounter frustrating situations because they misunderstand their businesses, their employees, or their customers.
The method emphasizes understanding two audiences:
- The internal audience: Understanding how the business owner works best, what responsibilities they should retain, and what should be delegated.
- The external audience: Understanding the people and organizations the agency is trying to influence or sell to.
Kilroy argues that many marketers understand their clients' audiences better than they understand their own.
His approach encourages agency owners to stop viewing themselves primarily as the people who perform the work and instead focus on managing the business as a collection of functions.
For example, business development should be understood as a system of inputs and outputs designed to generate a desired result — not simply as something the CEO personally does.
This distinction helps agencies identify bottlenecks, delegate responsibilities, and create systems that can operate without constant executive intervention.
3. The CEO's Role in Business Growth
One of Kilroy's strongest points is that agency owners frequently prevent their own businesses from growing.
Founders often become involved in every decision, including reviewing employees' emails before they are sent to clients.
Even highly capable entrepreneurs can struggle to relinquish control because they identify themselves with the work they originally performed.
Kilroy emphasizes that the CEO's job is to run the business, not personally perform every function within it.
He describes this as the difference between being a chief executive officer and acting as the chief selling officer, chief doing officer, or chief client services officer.
The biggest obstacle to growth, in his view, is the founder's inability to move beyond personally owning every responsibility.
4. Building Better Relationships With Reporters
The discussion then turns to how the WTF Method applies to PR agencies and media relations.
Kilroy introduces the concept of return on understanding: The better an agency understands the person it wants to influence, the more effective its communication will be.
When pitching a reporter, agencies often focus too heavily on their client's story.
However, reporters are primarily concerned with their own needs, including:
- Finding relevant and compelling stories.
- Meeting the needs of their readers.
- Developing useful and timely content.
- Working efficiently with sources.
Kilroy argues that successful PR professionals must understand what reporters need and provide something that makes their work easier and better.
This requires building relationships beyond individual pitches.
He recommends maintaining contact with reporters even when there is no immediate story to pitch and continuing conversations when a reporter declines a proposed story.
The goal is to establish genuine relationships based on mutual respect rather than treating reporters as transactional targets.
5. Empowering Employees to Build Media Relationships
Kilroy believes that agency leaders should allow employees to develop their own relationships with journalists and publications.
Some agency owners fear that empowering employees will make them more likely to leave and start their own businesses.
Kilroy describes two types of employees:
- Lifers: People who enjoy working for an organization and want to remain there long term.
- Flyers: People who join an organization, contribute their experience, learn new skills, and eventually move on to another opportunity.
He argues that both types can be valuable.
Even when an employee leaves, a positive working relationship can create a lasting professional connection and potentially lead to future opportunities.
For PR agencies, this is particularly important because building awareness and establishing credibility are central to their work.
Kilroy's recommendation is that agency leaders should empower their teams to build genuine relationships and allow them to communicate with reporters in their own voices.
The CEO should be informed about those relationships rather than personally controlling them.
6. Understanding Journalists as Individuals
Garsten reinforces Kilroy's argument by discussing his own experience receiving PR pitches.
He explains that many pitches appear to be generated by AI and demonstrate little understanding of his actual reporting interests.
Some pitches contain generic compliments about his writing or make inaccurate assumptions about the subjects he covers.
By contrast, he identifies two agencies that have established genuine relationships with him.
Those agencies communicate with him even when they are not pitching a story, making him more likely to consider their pitches when they do arrive.
The discussion illustrates a central lesson: Journalists are individuals with specific interests and professional responsibilities, not a single audience that can be approached with the same generic message.
7. AI's Impact on PR and Marketing
The conversation concludes with a discussion of artificial intelligence and its influence on media relations.
Kilroy identifies the biggest problem with AI-generated PR outreach as its ability to scale irrelevant communication.
AI can make it easy for agencies to send enormous numbers of pitches without carefully considering whether the recipient is appropriate.
He argues that AI should be viewed as an amplifier rather than a replacement for human understanding.
If marketers do not understand what they are trying to accomplish, AI cannot reliably provide that understanding for them.
Kilroy explains that marketing and business communication ultimately seek to influence what people:
- Think.
- Feel.
- Do.
AI can generate content and perform tasks, but it does not possess human understanding of the motivations and needs behind those actions.
The resulting increase in irrelevant communication has made credibility even more important.
Kilroy warns that credibility can be destroyed quickly but takes considerable time to establish.
Key Takeaways
1. Agency owners must learn to manage rather than do everything themselves. Delegation and functional systems are essential to growth.
2. Understanding the audience is more important than promoting the client's message. Effective communication begins with understanding what the recipient needs.
3. Media relationships should be built before a story needs to be pitched. Genuine engagement increases the likelihood that future pitches will receive consideration.
4. Employees should be empowered to develop their own professional relationships. This strengthens the agency's network and reduces dependence on the CEO.
5. AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. Technology can increase efficiency, but it cannot compensate for a lack of strategic understanding.
6. Credibility is a valuable business asset. Generic, irrelevant, and poorly targeted communication can damage relationships that took years to build.
Overall Summary
The central message of the episode is that successful agencies are built on understanding — understanding how the business operates, how employees contribute, and what clients, journalists, and other audiences actually need.
Kilroy's WTF Agency Method encourages agency leaders to move away from controlling every detail and toward building systems, empowering employees, and creating meaningful relationships.
In an era when AI makes it easier than ever to produce and distribute content, the ability to demonstrate genuine understanding and maintain credibility becomes an even more important competitive advantage.