Joele Frank has a short answer for what her firm sells. “We sell credibility. If we aren’t credible, the clients aren’t going to hire us. And if we don’t help the clients be credible, it doesn’t work,” she said in a September profile.
Her firm works on mergers that regularly run into the billions of dollars. Frank breaks the trust behind that work into three parts: trust in her clients, trust among the people who deal with those clients, and trust for the clients themselves. Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher has operated on that premise since it opened in early 2000.
Ownership Comes First
Frank set up the firm after her contract at Abernathy MacGregor ended, moving her team a few blocks uptown. She wanted a partnership where equity was shared and everyone answered to the same results. “We were all for one and one for all,” she said.
Her reasoning was practical. A company that sits inside a conglomerate can be broken up by its parent one day. Joele Frank the firm answers to its own partners.
“We are independent owners with one P&L and that means everyone is equal in that environment,” Frank said.
A Wider Set of Services
The firm opened doing M&A work only, and the limits of that model showed up within a year.
“You know what we learned in our first year? At the end of a deal, guess what happens if you’re only in M&A? You lose the client,” Frank said.
The partners responded by adding investor relations, public relations and activism defense. Graphic and digital services, including slide decks for investor days, came later because many companies lack the staff to produce them. Each of those lines gives Joele Frank clients a reason to call after the deal is done.
Headcount now tops 200, with 26 partners, and Frank estimates that half to three-quarters of the partners grew up inside the firm.
The Founder Steps Back
Frank came to the business from corporate finance. She started as a biochemist, earned an M.B.A., worked at Allied Chemical and AT&T, and learned financial PR at Adams & Rinehart before joining Abernathy.
She resists the spotlight. At the outset of the interview she said no one had written a story like this about her before. “It’s really a team sport,” she said of the firm’s success. O’Dwyer’s editor-in-chief Kevin McCauley has called her the first lady of financial PR.
Rivals including FGS Global, FTI Consulting and Kekst CNC chase the same boardroom calls, and Frank has said the PR industry needs that competition to exist at all. Joele Frank now meets them from 22 Vanderbilt, still owned by its partners.