The outside voice every agency relationship needs.
Finally. An honest look at what's working and what's not. Somebody has to say it.
What nobody says out loud — but everyone knows.
Everyone wants to do good work.
Agencies want to deliver it. Clients want to receive it. The breakdown is never about intent — it's about infrastructure. When the foundation is missing, even the best people can't build what everyone in the room is hoping for.
Dysfunction hides in plain sight.
Missed expectations. The blame game. Campaigns that produce activity but not impact. A nagging sense that a lot of money isn't moving anything. You're not imagining it — and you're not alone.
A struggling relationship isn't a failed one.
Most of the time, what looks like an agency problem is actually a relationship and infrastructure problem — and those are issues that can be fixed. Re-Rooted gives you the outside perspective to see what's actually happening, and a clear path to make it work the way everyone intended.
Think about the last time
you read advice about
managing your agency
relationships. Who wrote it?
Probably another agency.
Which means it wasn't really advice. It was a pitch.
An independent voice is the missing piece.
No agency P&L to protect. No new-business agenda hiding behind the insights. Just 20+ years of experience on both sides of the table, and no reason to tell you anything but the truth.
Re-Rooted is that voice.
Finally.Proagency.Proclient.Prorelationship.Antidysfunction.
Services
I grew up in the agency world.
I've spent 20+ years inside PR agencies — the big ones, the good ones, the messy ones. Long enough to have seen just about everything.
I've sat on the other side too — as an interim communications director managing agencies — watching the same dysfunction play out from the client chair.
Here's what I know to be true after all of it: everybody in these relationships wants to do good work. Agencies want to do it. Clients want to receive it. But most of these relationships are broken in ways neither side can see clearly from inside them — and that's not a people problem. It's an infrastructure problem.
That's what Re-Rooted fixes.
I'm not your next agency. I'm not here to pitch stories, manage your social, or write your press releases. I'm the outside set of eyes that knows exactly how agencies think, where relationships go sideways, and what it actually takes to get them working the way everyone in the room wanted them to from day one.
I built Re-Rooted because I really, truly, deep-down-in-my-bones love agencies and the brilliant work they create. Re-Rooted exists because great agencies and great clients deserve better than broken infrastructure and a tired playbook that sets them up to fail.
Where I learned what I know
Here's what to tell your boss's boss about me.
Susan MacLaughlin is the Founder of Re-Rooted, an independent advisory firm pioneering a new approach to evaluating and strengthening communications agency relationships through objective diagnostics, strategic insight, and operational transparency.
Over the course of a 20-year career in public relations—including leadership roles at Burson, Edelman, Golin, Ketchum, and MSL, as well as her own independent advisory practice—Susan has worked from nearly every seat at the communications table. She's been an account lead, solo consultant, strategist, crisis counselor, agency executive, and trusted advisor to senior leadership teams. She's also experienced agency life from the ground up, giving her a rare perspective on how decisions made in the boardroom ultimately affect the people delivering the work every day.
Susan understands the agency business inside and out. She's written scopes of work, led new business pitches, built staffing plans, managed budgets, navigated procurement and finance, coached high-performing teams, and delivered strategic communications programs for organizations including BT, Chevron, Citi, CIT, Dow, Direct Energy, Entrust, FedEx, PetSmart, Philips, Regus, SonicWall, Symantec, Verizon, and many others.
Again and again, she saw the same pattern: when agency relationships struggled, organizations lacked an objective way to diagnose what was actually preventing everyone from doing their best work together. Decisions were too often driven by assumptions, frustration, or incomplete information rather than facts.
That insight became the foundation for Re-Rooted.
Today, Susan helps organizations evaluate, manage, and optimize their agency relationships through independent diagnostics that cut through the fluff and uncover hidden risks, operational breakdowns, strategic misalignment, and untapped opportunities for improvement. Her work gives communications leaders, procurement teams, legal departments, and executive stakeholders a clear, fact-based understanding of what's working, what's not, and what to do next.
Known for asking the questions others avoid and identifying the root causes beneath surface-level symptoms, Susan brings equal parts strategic rigor, operational insight, and practical experience to every engagement. She believes the strongest agency partnerships are built on trust, transparency, and accountability—and that when organizations get those fundamentals right, better business outcomes follow.
Susan is based in North Texas and serves on the UT Southwestern Simmons Cancer Center Patient & Family Advisory Council, where she collaborates with patients, families, and healthcare providers to improve the patient and family experience. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and a postgraduate certificate in Artificial Intelligence for Leaders from The University of Texas at Austin, reflecting her commitment to combining deep communications expertise with emerging technologies that are reshaping the profession.
The first conversation is just that — a conversation.
If your agency relationship feels like it's producing a lot of activity and not enough impact — or if you're an agency that wants to get ahead of the problem before it becomes a crisis — reach out.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call