Zero Outside Investors. Three Agencies Bought Anyway.

Heather Whaling started Geben Communication at her dining room table in Columbus, Ohio, in 2009, according to the company’s own site, after leaving a steady job at another PR firm. Seventeen years later, the way she describes what she built is specific about one thing above all: no outside money. Whaling’s own speaker bio says she grew Geben into “a multi-million-dollar company” with “consistent year-over-year growth” through two recessions and a pandemic, and “zero outside investors.” Not a funding round, not a private equity check — the business paid for its own growth.

That includes growth by acquisition, which is the less common way small agency founders expand. Geben’s first deal came in May 2021, when it acquired Women Online, a content-marketing and influencer-relations firm built around social-impact and nonprofit clients. “This acquisition expands our expertise, elevates our services, and creates new ways for us to support our clients’ goals,” Whaling said in the announcement. Women Online’s founder, Morra Aarons-Mele, joined Geben as an executive vice president to build out the combined firm’s social-impact practice rather than exit the business she’d built.

The pace picked up five years later. In January 2026, Geben acquired TorchLight Marketing, a Reston, Virginia digital-advertising shop offering programmatic, paid search and paid social services — expanding Geben’s capabilities beyond earned media and into performance marketing, per O’Dwyer PR’s trade coverage. Six months after that, on July 10, 2026, Geben closed its third deal, acquiring New York agency LBR/PR, an 11-year-old firm serving professional-services, luxury and health-and-wellness clients. “LBR/PR is known for its deep media relationships, high-touch client service and a consistent track record of securing meaningful national media placements,” Whaling said. LBR/PR founder Lauren Banyar Reich, who’d previously led accounts at Peppercomm, framed the deal from her side as an expansion rather than a sale: her clients would now get “access to an incredible, integrated team with deeper social, content, advertising, AI-enabled research and paid media capabilities, alongside the earned media expertise and relationships we’ve built.”

None of the three deals disclosed terms, which is typical for agency M&A at this size — these are not venture-scale transactions. What’s notable is the shape of the strategy itself: three competitors folded into one firm, financed without a single outside check, by a founder who still owns the company she started at her kitchen table. It’s the mirror image of Elizabeth Stein’s exit from Purely Elizabeth, where a strategic acquirer wrote the check and the founder’s stake converted to a payout — here, Whaling is the one writing the checks, and nothing converts. It also lands closer to how Jacq Tatelman kept growing STATE Bags without an equity investor: a line of credit, not a term sheet, and the founder’s ownership stays exactly where it was.

Geben now operates out of Columbus with the added Reston and New York teams from TorchLight and LBR/PR under one roof, run by a founder whose own bio still describes the business the same way it always has: multi-million-dollar, growing, and unfunded by anyone but its own clients.