Lauren Harris Is Accessibility A Strategy Or A Tactic

Hello again, I hope you are having an enjoyable weekend wherever you are watching, listening, or reading from.

On this episode of The Accessibility Advantage, I sat down with Lauren Harris, co-founder of Reliable PR & Marketing.

Lauren and I found a lot of common ground I didn’t expect going in not just between marketing and accessibility, but in how both fields are being reshaped by AI in ways most business owners haven’t caught up to yet.

And I found the thread of strategy over tactics applies to so much more of our lives than business or marketing.

On With The Show

Watch On Youtube

Listen On Your Favorite Player

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:12 — 51.4MB) | Embed

From Journalism to a Marketing Agency Built From a Class Project

Lauren didn’t set out to build a marketing agency. She studied English and journalism, but found herself constantly telling stories that the people involved didn’t want told a hard way to make friends. She pivoted into marketing because she wanted a way to actually help people, and the idea for Reliable PR & Marketing was born, almost by accident, as a fake business she had to build from scratch for a class project during her master’s program at Northeastern.

After graduating and staying home with her daughter for a few years, Lauren picked up a few freelance social media clients on the side to scratch the itch. It wasn’t enough. Her husband, watching her light up doing the work, quit his job as a social worker to go all-in on the business with her. Today Reliable PR has a team and a growing client roster built, as she put it, on remembering that most “marketing problems” are actually strategy problems wearing a marketing costume.

Strategy vs. Tactics

One of the clearest things Lauren laid out: tactics are the actions the post, the rebrand, the website update. Strategy is the intention behind stringing those tactics together the understanding of who you’re serving, what they need, and why you’re doing any of it in the first place.

You can execute every tactic on your checklist and still see zero growth if the strategy underneath it is missing or wrong.

Why AI Is Making Accessibility Matter More, Not Less

This is where the conversation really connected our two worlds. Lauren pointed out that before the internet, most of your customers already knew you, or knew someone who did. Now your website, your social posts, and your reviews all have to speak clearly to total strangers who may never get the chance to ask you a follow-up question. That’s not just a marketing challenge it’s an accessibility challenge, and the stakes for getting it right (or wrong) are higher than ever.

She also raised something I hadn’t fully connected before: social media content is Google-indexed right alongside your website, and AI platforms are increasingly the ones summarizing your business to potential customers before those customers ever reach you directly. If your content isn’t clear, accurate, and accessible, you’re not just losing human visitors you’re training the AI itself to represent you poorly.

The Risk of Letting AI Speak for Your Brand

Lauren didn’t pull punches on AI’s biggest blind spot: it tends to agree with you. If you’re getting positive feedback on something, AI will often validate it right back to you even when your actual audience is frustrated and you don’t know why.

She compared handing your brand voice over to AI to riding in a self-driving car: if something goes wrong, you’re still the one who answers for it, not the tool.

Her background in PR crisis communication made this point land hard for me. If you didn’t come up with the words yourself, you may not fully understand what you meant when someone misinterprets them and you lose the instinct that comes from writing something yourself, that little internal pause that catches a phrase before it goes out wrong.

ADHD as a “Debilitating Superpower”

Lauren wasn’t sure at first whether her ADHD, diagnosed at 19, even counted as a disability when she filled out my guest questionnaire. But she described it in a way I think a lot of listeners will recognize: it’s a superpower that drains your life force while you’re using it. It fuels a constant stream of genuinely good ideas, but it also makes the unglamorous work of finishing any one of them and waiting for the small wins to compound into big ones the hardest part.

She talked about working with founders who share that same wiring, and the strategies that help: building things fully in the background before ever launching them, so the decision to “go live” isn’t tied up with fear of failure, and surrounding yourself with people who share your passion but execute differently than you do so they can pick up where you tend to stall out.

About Lauren

Lauren Harris is the founder of Reliable PR & Marketing, a Bakersfield-based PR and marketing agency she and her husband built from scratch starting in 2021 with no funding, no loans, no investors.

Since then, the agency has worked with more than 50 founders across 12+ industries, earned 60+ five-star reviews, and maintained a 98% client retention rate.

Lauren grew up an Army brat, the daughter of Captain Kevin Silvis a Purple Heart recipient, Airborne Infantry Commander, and 20-year veteran whose service included responding at the Pentagon on 9/11 and a deployment to Afghanistan. While he was deployed, Lauren helped hold the family together, a role she carried into adulthood as the foundation for the discipline and work ethic behind her business today.

She studied English literature and journalism at CSU Bakersfield, working on the campus newspaper, before earning a master’s degree in marketing from Northeastern University where the concept for Reliable PR & Marketing was actually born as a class project. After graduating and staying home with her daughter in her early years, Lauren picked up freelance social media clients on the side, which eventually grew into the full-time agency Reliable PR is today.

Lauren also lives with ADHD, which she describes as both a challenge and a driving force behind her work it makes following a straight line from idea to execution difficult, but it’s also the source of the constant stream of ideas that fuels her business.

Connect with Lauren

Trust Your Why

Lauren’s closing thought was simple but one worth holding onto: when a project isn’t going where you hoped, go back to why you started it in the first place. That’s usually where you find your footing again and usually where you find the sign you may have started building something that no longer needs your original why to guide it.

Keep the Conversation Going

If this conversation resonated with you, here’s what I’d ask:

Watch or listen to the full episode and hear Lauren’s insights in her own words.
Visit Reliable PR & Marketing and see how Lauren and her team approach strategy before tactics.
Follow Lauren on social media and share this post with a founder or business owner who’s leaning too hard on AI to do their thinking for them.
Tell us what you learned. Drop a comment, reach out to Lauren directly, or email me at maxwell@theaccessibilityadvantage.com.

And if you’re a business owner wondering where accessibility fits into your marketing and your AI strategy, that’s exactly what I help with at The Accessibility Advantage. Reach out and let’s figure it out together.

What’s your excuse?