I hold no office at any agency. No chairmanship, no board seat, no executive role.
That matters most when you are selling. What you tell me about your numbers, your people and what the business is really worth to you cannot be something I carry into a boardroom I sit in. I act for one side of any given deal and for nobody else in it.
What I offer that a firm cannot is skin in the game. My reputation is on every piece of advice I give.
PR agency owners exploring a sale. Founders, CEOs and holding-company MDs at the inflection point of sale, acquisition, merger or succession. Off-market introduction, patience counsel through processes where banker incentives run the other way, and a cultural read on the senior team, the layer that decides whether the deal works after the cheque clears.
Acquirers seeking the right firm to buy. Strategic acquirers, financial buyers backing roll-up platforms, and adjacent-industry buyers looking to identify, be introduced to, and make acquisitions in the PR and communications sector.
Boards facing reputational crisis. General counsel, chief executives, chief communications officers, board chairs and private-equity deal leads at listed multinationals, family offices and large law firms. Pre-litigation crisis preparation, regulatory inflection points, deal-side reputational diligence and contained-incident war rooms.
PR agency M&A. Counsel and introductions for founders weighing a sale and for acquirers looking for the right firm, on one side of any given deal. The work starts before you are approached: a clear read on what a buyer will actually pay and where your value sits.
Crisis and reputation. Standing counsel for boards that want senior judgment available on a Sunday night, and discreet mandates of two to six weeks for the moment something might break, is about to break, or has already broken. You are paying for someone in the room who has seen this before.
For Data, The End of the Age of Innocence, PRovoke Media, 23 November 2020. Written before the current argument about AI and evidence had started, and about the same problem underneath it: an industry that had stopped asking where its numbers came from.
Crisis and reputation counsel · PR agency M&A advisory · Insights · Speak in confidence