Overall, I think you’ve addressed a lot of the questions that perspective clients should ask (or, really, that firms should proactively address when meeting with someone).

I will take issue a bit, however, with #5. Geography does not (and should not) in any way limit a firm’s ability to have significant contacts and reach nationally or even globally. Our agency is independent and based in Atlanta, but we have always had clients on a national and even international scale – and solid media contacts based all over the country. What’s more important than “who you know” is “what’s the story” – any good PR person can get stories placed, with any media, if they know how to tell the story in a way that makes a reporter listen. That’s sometimes difficult to convey to a prospective client when they come in thinking that lack of a national presence means lack of national reach – and results.

I’m interested in your “pay for performance” model. What is the definition of performance? This is a totally loaded question, since I’ve had this debate many times, and seen it defined many ways, but I’d be interested in your thought.

I also think that it is incumbent upon an agency, no matter how hungry, to ask a few questions of the prospective client. Why do you think you need a PR agency? What do you expect from it? How will you know when the agency succeeds? How much time can you allocate to working with the agency? Do you or will you have any news to advance the business or is this a defensive/crisis situation? And finally, as a recitation of your earlier question: who’s going to be our account manager and does he/she know anything about PR? Those are just a handful of questions that come to mind.

The phenomenon I have observed is that agencies are often hired for reasons other than public relations. In the minds of hiring authorities, they are there to pave over huge potholes in strategy, products and logic; or they are there to blow air into leaking corporate life rafts; or there to send the hounds and horses to the left when the last thing a company wants is to have a stampede to the right. That is not meant to diminish the majority of clients that hire agencies to promote themselves, their products, and deliver news as effectively as possible, but you get my point: agencies should be responsible for due diligence as well as should clients.

Anyway, good post.