Sallie Boyce

Sallie Boyce is founder of the Startup PR Academy.

At just 14, Sallie decided PR was the career (and, as her father pointed out in his speech at her wedding with an anecdote about how she could lie before she could talk, there were earlier signs - not that we encourage lying).

She wrote her first winning award entry at 18 for a local Pub of the Year competition, for a pub with sticky floors and broken windows in the men's bathroom.

During her career, Sallie has worked for sports companies, energy companies, technology companies, finance companies. She's worked for global institutions (HSBC, Cisco, Visa), right down to pre-launch startups, and everything in between.

But working with entrepreneurs is really where her heart is. Seeing a client land a feature in The Guardian and see a 30x spike in web traffic is just so much more satisfying that seeing a global name in print, again.

Sallie is on a mission to get entrepreneurs gaining visibility + credibility for their business through the power of PR. And she believes the best person to tell the story of the startup, is the startup.

As a PR freelancer, Sallie was regularly having great conversations with passionate entrepreneurs, with these exciting businesses, who lived her PR ideas.

But so often, the conversation would end the same way. With them asking her to come back in X months, when they had some budget. And with all the encouragement in the world, and all the promises of fame and glory, for bootstrapping businesses, this just wasn't an expense they could stretch to.

So, instead of paying hundreds, or more likely thousands, each month to an agency, SPRA teaches entrepreneurs how to build a consistent, targeted media presence for just a fraction of the price.