The founder of Leeds-based Garnet PR on how she went from losing clients and ending up in hospital following a severe accident, to turning the business around.
Former PR and celebrity manager Rhiannon Bates has worked with famous figures from David Attenborough to Dermot O’Leary, and launched Garnet PR in 2019.
Early on in 2020, she was carving out a niche in the PR industry with her passion for rural lifestyle and tourism and was beginning to grow her team.
“Then Coronavirus landed and it all went a bit pear-shaped from there,” she told Prolific North.
In the run up to the government imposed lockdown, within days she lost all but one of her clients.
“Clients said ‘I can’t pay you’, ‘I can’t do this anymore’, ‘we have to stop doing PR’,” she explained.
Understanding the strain on some of her smaller clients, some struggling to pay their mortgages, she let them out of their contracts.
“How am I going to rebuild this business from the ground up, what am I going to do when the industry is on its knees?,” were the thoughts playing out in her mind, she said.
She watched the agency crumble and within weeks buckle as it brought in just £300 a month.
By dipping into her own savings, despite struggles to pay her own bills, she kept her team on throughout the pandemic.
“I was panicking. I was trying to think how are we going to get through this, how am I going to salvage this business when there is no end in sight and my whole niche is basically closed right now,” she said.
“I was sat [at] my laptop for hours, long days, just trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do.”
“Make or break”
With the collective fear that there was “no end in sight” alongside no Government support for the business, she experienced severe burnout.
With a myriad of pressures on her mind, she wasn’t eating or sleeping properly and “it all kind of came crashing down”.
On a Saturday morning, while in her kitchen she passed out, dropping a just boiled kettle of water over herself.
She was rushed to A&E and initially spent 10 days in hospital during the peak of the pandemic after suffering third degree burns across her legs.
Isolated in a hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses, she persisted with a plan to rebuild her business and continued working on rebuilding her website.
“In the back of my mind the whole time there’s ‘how am I going to keep my business afloat’, ‘what am I going to do’,” she explained.
Unable to walk and ending up in a wheelchair in the months following the accident, her house sale fell through and her partner was made redundant.
“It was a real make or break time for us,” she explained.
