For years, the gap between small businesses and large corporations in communications has come down to one thing: resources. Big companies have communications departments. Small business owners have themselves.
That gap is starting to narrow, and Heather McElrath is paying close attention to how.
McElrath, founder of Sandbox Communications, a boutique marketing communications agency in Virginia, is a co-author of “Speak Your Way to Sales: Expert Strategies to Turn Speaking into Sales, Clients, and Growth” (Eaton Press, 2026), a Women’s History Month release from 10 women specialists addressing a persistent problem: women own nearly 14 million U.S. businesses but hold just a third of keynote speaking slots at major conferences, in part because 70% of speaking bookings still flow through established referral networks.
Her chapter, “Stop Chasing Gigs, Start Attracting Them: The PR Playbook for Speakers,” offers a practical roadmap for building the kind of credibility that makes speaking opportunities easier to attract. But the longer-term question she’s thinking about is how to make that kind of infrastructure available at a much larger scale.
According to McKinsey, small and medium-sized businesses that adopt AI tools report meaningful gains in productivity and marketing effectiveness, but adoption remains uneven, often because the tools aren’t designed with smaller operators in mind. McElrath sees that as an opportunity worth pursuing.
“AI is a great equalizer,” she says. “When it’s designed thoughtfully, it gives small businesses the ability to show up with the kind of consistency and credibility that used to require a full team.”
That idea is grounded in the same philosophy behind Sandbox Communications: that professional life should have room for experimentation, that good systems make better work possible, and that technology should support human storytelling rather than flatten it.
McElrath also teaches PR Essentials as an Adjunct Lecturer at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she works with students of all ages preparing to enter a field increasingly shaped by AI tools.
“I want them to be the people leading that shift,” she says, “not scrambling to catch up with it.”
The through line across her teaching, her writing, and her agency work is the same: help people build something that lasts, not just something that gets attention.
“Speak Your Way to Sales” is available now on Amazon in ebook and paperback. More at eatonpress.com/speak-your-way-to-sales.
