by Sam Williams, co-CEO and co-founder of Barley Communications
At our team away day earlier this year, we did something I hadn’t expected. We unanimously agreed to change one of Barley’s founding values.
2026 marks our tenth anniversary, and while plenty has changed since we founded Barley in 2016, our mission hasn’t. We established Barley as a social purpose communications agency, committed to using our skills to make a positive difference. Communication that matters was our guiding principle then, and it remains so today.
The same goes for the values that underpin our work. Since the beginning, we’ve had three: curiosity, integrity and energy. They’re embedded in everything from our client surveys to our personal development plans, helping shape how we work and the standards we set ourselves. Of the three, energy was probably the hardest to land on. We knew we wanted something that captured our commitment to delivering brilliant work for clients, but couldn’t quite decide between energy and passion. Energy won in the end.
Ten years later, we found a better word.
The conversation started with a deceptively simple question: why do we win? Not just when pitching for new business, but when it comes to delivering results for our clients. As we talked through examples of our work, a common thread emerged. When things get difficult, we don’t give up. We challenge our assumptions, find different approaches and keep working until we’ve achieved the best outcome we can. What we were describing wasn’t simply energy or passion. It was tenacity.
For us, tenacity in communications means being determined to achieve the right outcome, while remaining flexible about how we get there.
It’s a value that resonates particularly strongly with me. Anyone who’s ever seen me in a quiz will know I’m naturally competitive, driven, I’m sure, in no small part by a sizeable working-class chip on my shoulder. But my own experience has taught me that wanting to win and knowing how to make it happen are two rather different things.
When we started Barley, I’d already spent 15 years in the communications industry, first as a finance director and then as a chief operating officer. I had two decades of strategic planning and delivery experience under my belt and had worked on countless proposals, but I’d never come up through the traditional agency ranks. Which is how I found myself, at the age of 45, doing my first media sell-in. Quite possibly the UK’s oldest account executive.
The story was for Hubbub, the brilliant environmental charity that remains Barley’s longest-standing client. We were working on a food waste campaign and I was determined to secure coverage that would reach the people we needed to influence. Unfortunately, the news agenda had other ideas. I’d been pitching the story since Monday, it was a tough news week and nothing was landing. By Friday, it would have been easy to blame bad luck and move on. Instead, I reworked the angle and approached the weekend papers. The result was a terrific piece in the Mail on Sunday, reaching exactly the audience the campaign needed to engage.
That experience taught me something I’ve carried with me ever since. Tenacity isn’t about doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result. It’s about being determined enough to find a better way.
And in today’s communications landscape, that distinction matters more than ever. Cision’s 2025 State of the Media report found that 86% of journalists reject pitches that aren’t relevant to their audience or area of coverage. The same research found that 62% consider just one follow-up appropriate. In other words, repeatedly chasing a journalist with a story they don’t want isn’t tenacity. It’s a failure to listen.
Reaching audiences beyond the media is becoming increasingly challenging too. According to the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 40% of people across 48 markets sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. When so many people are actively disengaging, simply shouting louder isn’t going to work. We need to understand what matters to them, what might be stopping them from engaging and how we can make our communications more relevant.
Of course, I’m not suggesting we should all become models of quiet restraint. I’ve got some pretty tragic taste in television, including a love of Australian Survivor, and I rather like the sentiment behind the ‘go get or get got’ philosophy that was hammered home in the latest season. Sometimes you do need to roll up your sleeves and go after what you want. But there’s an important difference between being tenacious and being stubborn, particularly when you’re responsible for delivering results for someone else.
That’s why good communications strategy has to come first. Before we start, we need to understand the challenge we’re trying to address, the audiences we need to influence and the barriers that might stand in our way. Whether we’re developing a stakeholder engagement approach, planning a media relations campaign or designing a behaviour change programme, our approach needs to be rooted in insight, informed by data and aligned with our clients’ wider objectives. Then we need to be prepared to challenge it as we go, learning from what works and, just as importantly, what doesn’t.
There comes a point when persistence becomes counterproductive. If the evidence tells us something isn’t working, we need the judgement to change direction rather than keep investing time and resources in a failing approach. Or, as another of my favourite expressions puts it, if you’re dead, lie down. The trick is knowing when to persevere, when to adapt and when to stop altogether.
That balance is particularly important in the work we do at Barley. Whether we’re trying to influence policy, change behaviour or build understanding of complex social and environmental issues, meaningful progress rarely happens overnight. We’re often dealing with deeply entrenched attitudes, competing priorities and barriers that can’t be overcome by a single campaign or a clever piece of creative. Making a difference requires patience, determination and a willingness to keep learning.
It’s hard work, but the satisfaction of knowing we’re helping clients achieve something that really matters makes it worthwhile. And because we care about the issues we’re working on, we’re prepared to go that extra mile to get the results they deserve.
Looking back, I don’t think we’ve really changed our values at all. We’ve simply found a better way to describe something that’s been part of Barley’s character from the start. Curiosity drives us to ask better questions. Integrity ensures we stay true to our principles. And tenacity gives us the determination to turn good ideas into meaningful results.
Ultimately, why do we win? Not because we refuse to take no for an answer, but because we care enough about the outcome to keep finding better ways to get there. That’s what tenacity means to me, and it’s what I want it to mean for Barley over the next ten years.