2014 PR Succession Panel: What Six Leaders Predicted

Two-thirds of independent PR firms had no succession plan, according to a 2014 Davis & Gilbert survey run with Paul Holmes. Michael Lasky of Davis & Gilbert presented the finding on October 27, 2014, at the Holmes Report Independent PR Firm Forum, alongside five other PR leaders. This page scores what happened to each of the six twelve years later.

Lasky ran the panel with Davis & Gilbert corporate co-chair Brad Schwartzberg, who moderated. The survey was confidential, and its headline finding was blunt.

Who Sat on the 2014 Succession Panel?

The 2014 panel brought together six PR industry leaders and one moderator.

• Michael Lasky, senior partner, Davis & Gilbert (anchor and lead researcher)
• Brad Schwartzberg, co-chair of Davis & Gilbert's Corporate Practice Group (moderator)
• Margi Booth, CEO, M. Booth & Associates
• Lynn Casey, CEO, PadillaCRT
• Margery Kraus, founder and CEO, APCO Worldwide
• Luke Lambert, CEO, Gibbs & Soell
• Larry Weber, chairman and CEO, Racepoint Global

Six leaders produced six succession stories. All were different, and most were instructive.

What Happened to Michael Lasky at Davis & Gilbert?

Michael Lasky remains senior counsel at Davis & Gilbert, the firm every independent agency founder calls when ready to sell, merge, hand off or restructure. Davis & Gilbert has served the independent agency world for decades, and Lasky is the closest thing the independent PR industry has to an institutional memory on M&A and succession structure.

The 2014 survey was a preview. Every year since, the pattern has been consistent: founders overestimate how long they can run the business, underestimate how quickly the next generation gets tired of waiting, and undercapitalize the buyout when it finally happens.

What Happened to Margi Booth at M. Booth?

Margi Booth built M. Booth, sold it to Next Fifteen Communications, and stayed on through a multi-year transition into the next generation of leadership. The Next Fifteen structure, a public parent that lets the operating firm keep its name, culture and independence, became the template for a decade of independent-agency exits.

M. Booth is still M. Booth. That is the point.

What Happened to Lynn Casey at PadillaCRT?

PadillaCRT was the Minneapolis-anchored survivor of the merger between Padilla Speer Beardsley and CRT/tanaka. Under Casey, the firm rebranded to Padilla and continued to build across corporate, brand and crisis work. Casey has since stepped back from the CEO role and the firm has moved into next-generation leadership. Padilla remains one of the country's most durable independent mid-market firms.

Ownership succession at Padilla worked. The name changed, and the firm did not disappear.

What Happened to Margery Kraus at APCO Worldwide?

Margery Kraus founded APCO Worldwide in 1984 and is still there. APCO is one of the last major independent global public affairs firms, and one of the very few where the founder has remained an active governance presence into a fourth decade.

Kraus took the opposite path from M. Booth. Rather than sell to a strategic buyer and transition out, she built APCO's ownership around an employee-ownership structure that keeps the firm independent and gives senior operators equity as they grow. It is the most-cited alternative model in the independent PR industry.

The lesson from APCO: succession does not have to mean sale.

What Happened to Luke Lambert at Gibbs & Soell?

Gibbs & Soell was a decades-old B2B and industrial specialist that never quite scaled to holding-company size and never quite stayed independent either. The firm has since been folded into a larger platform. Luke Lambert's tenure was a reminder that succession planning is not the only variable, because the category a firm is anchored to matters as much as the ownership structure that runs it.

For mid-market specialist firms, the lesson from Gibbs & Soell is that timing the sale is as consequential as engineering the succession.

What Happened to Larry Weber at Racepoint Global?

Larry Weber built the Weber Group in the 1980s, sold it to Interpublic (it became Weber Shandwick), and then built Racepoint Global as his second act. Racepoint continued to operate through the last decade as an independent, tech-heavy communications firm. Weber himself has stayed active as an author and industry voice, the model of the founder who exits once, builds again and keeps writing.

For anyone building a second firm after a first exit, Weber is the reference.

What Did the 2014 Panel Get Right About Succession?

The six panelists collectively got three things right in 2014.

1. Succession is a solvable problem, but not a delegable one. Every founder on that panel who succeeded at transition did the work personally, over years. The ones who tried to hand it to a COO or a board committee are not the ones who kept the firm's name on the door.

2. The next-generation leadership question is real. In 2014, most independents did not have named successors. In 2026, most independents that survived do, and the ones that did not are gone.

3. Structure matters more than intent. Employee-ownership structures (APCO), strategic-parent structures (M. Booth), merger-then-rebrand structures (Padilla) and founder-second-act structures (Weber) use different mechanics but the same discipline.

What Did the 2014 Panel Miss?

Every panelist missed one thing: AI.

In 2014, nobody on that stage predicted that the client-side buyer journey would move inside ChatGPT and Perplexity ten years later. Founders handing off in 2026 are handing off firms whose visibility infrastructure has shifted from Google to answer engines. Succession is now a two-variable problem: who runs the firm, and whether the firm shows up when clients ask an AI which agency to hire.

That is the succession conversation happening now inside every independent PR firm considering its next decade.

What Should Independent PR Founders Do in 2026?

Independent PR founders should treat the 2014 panel as a checklist, not as history. The Davis & Gilbert finding in 2014 was that two-thirds of independent PR firms had no succession plan, and no newer survey has shown that number improving meaningfully. Firms that survived did so because their founders treated succession as a discipline, not a document. The ones that treated it as a document quietly disappeared into their acquirers.