After taking home the gold in 2024 for Technology Agency of The Year, Wildfire PR’s CEO Debby Penton had her reservations about bringing back a 2025 PRmoment Award trophy.

“When we wrote the entry, we thought it’s not our year,” Penton reveals. She says that in 2024, together with joint MD Louise Palmer, the pair were standing at the back of the room — coats in hand, ready to make a swift exit.

“Our name was called out. We literally had to throw our coats and handbags on the floor and run on stage.” And in 2025, Penton says she had the same doubts, admitting that she didn’t think it would “happen twice”.

But the awards judges thought otherwise, describing the agency's growth and achievements as “phenomenal”, Wildfire has gone from strength to strength since first taking home a PRmoment Award, and now it boasts two consecutive wins for Technology Agency of the Year.

But, what makes Wildfire stand apart from the rest?

A key part of the win was its move to being 100% employee owned. This secured the B2B tech agency’s future by ensuring its independence and removing any of those dreaded shareholder exits.

“I don't want to be in a position where my fate is in someone else's hands,” says Penton.

“I really didn't want the jeopardy of a trade sale. It's distracting, everything is out of your control, and costs a huge amount of money. And [you could be] left at the end with someone who has completely changed the shape of your business. I didn't want that, and I knew the team didn’t want to have that situation enforced upon them just to help me liquidate my shares in the business. It didn’t feel good to me.”

Since becoming entirely employee-owned, Wildfire has been shortlisted for 21 awards across agency, culture and campaign categories, alongside achieving a eNPS of 89%. Additionally, its Great Place to Work Score increased to 98% which Penton has worked extremely hard to achieve.

“I’ve worked at places I've despised,” she says, adding that she wanted to take the “best” of her experiences and create the same for everyone that works at Wildfire. But, she insists that she hasn’t achieved this “shared vision” on her own.

And indeed, this culture shines through in the work Wildfire produces for its clients.

“I’m really proud of the fact that I know my team is trying to do more creative and bolder work for clients, and that's really important.

“I think the fact we have won creative awards for our clients means that we are more than just the agency that can tell a good story about itself, we are an agency that does good award winning work for clients too.”

When asked how Wildfire has achieved this creativity, when B2B tech has been tarnished with a reputation of being ‘boring’ when it comes to wild ideas, Penton says: “It’s just being really thorough, diligent and making sure clients are spending their money in the right places.

“If clients know that you’re on their side then you can build really good client relationships.”

She adds: “I think that for us it's not just one thing. Wildfire has been around for decades, and we look at every little thing that we can do. You can’t just have good client relationships, you can't just be creative, you can't just have solid financials.

“Through the longevity of the business we have been able to put in really good practices, processes and values. We've had time to prove that we can live, breathe and deliver on everything across the board.”

Penton is enormously proud of the team, but there’s no time for resting on your laurels at Wildfire — and as the name suggests, the agency is planning to create sparks into 2026.

“There’s a real ambition and appetite here. We are not complacent and don’t put ourselves in the shadows, we put ourselves forward for awards and we want to be seen in the industry.

“The next step is how we evolve the business, and make sure we are at the forefront of all the changes that are happening.

“It's really easy to be left behind… so we are investing across our team, structure, marketing, positioning and new business. We are looking at all of it and asking what needs to change now, so over the next few years we can keep up with everything that's happening.”

“I’m pretty confident that the old model of PR is [fading away] and people are going to struggle to grow and evolve. [We want to] make sure we are around for another decade or two and hopefully that will be the basis of our award entry next year.”