Our Services

M&A, Divestitures, Restructuring

When the stakes are high, the caliber and integrity of your advisers becomes mission-critical. This is particularly so when your company becomes involved in a transformational event such as a merger, acquisition, divestiture or restructuring.

When these transactions occur, you need to know how the news of your strategic moves will be interpreted by all of the audiences critical to your company’s success. And you need to reach out to each one of them in the right way, delivering the right messages, at the right time.

Pivoting off our extensive track record in this arena, we can help you create and implement winning media, investor relations and employee communications programs to reach each of your key constituencies, in the most logical, productive and effective fashion.

Our methodology in this area reflects the need to:

  • identify key messages and appropriate communications vehicles for those messages
  • pinpoint all key audiences
  • develop a communications timeline
  • rehearse key principals
  • implement the strategy
  • monitor and report on the results

In merger, acquisition and/or crisis situations, we bring more than 45 years of combined experience gained from deals that made the headlines, often across borders. We know the communications demands that these situations dictate — and we deliver on them.

Media & Crisis Training

Media training involves the specialized preparation of executives and officials to meet the media, and to enable them to effectively communicate key messages. These messages might be about a company’s or organization’s strategy and capabilities, a new product, or industry trends. They may involve specialized approaches for effective communications in a crisis.

Among the benefits that media training provides are:

  • more control of interviews through a positive, proactive approach to telling your company’s story
  • greater focus on key messages and positive information; less rambling
  • greater clarity in presenting complex information clearly and concisely
  • a better understanding of how journalists work and how executives can maximize their opportunities for positive press coverage
  • ultimately, more effective media interviews and better editorial coverage

In a high stakes do-or-die crisis situation, where the very future of your organization’s image and even existence may be at stake, our training will help you minimize the potential damages to both your image and equally to your bottom line.

A typical media training session consists of an initial segment including a brief, focused slide presentation, “Understanding The Media.” This segment also includes an important discussion of key media message points, which provide the “road map” for the interviews that follow.

The remainder – and the majority – of the session is spent practicing interviews, which are videotaped for immediate playback and an in-depth, constructive critique. The form of interviews in any particular training session is tailored to your company’s or organization’s needs, but generally include print interviews and one or two television interviews.

Our media training sessions are highly-tailored and personalized sessions. There is nothing generic about them. Extensive research and preparation are used to develop custom-made interviews that are detailed, realistic and challenging.

Thought Leadership:  Multi-Platform Writing

Thought leadership is a way of marketing by articulating your views on the issues that are important to your audiences. It presents an opportunity to show clients, prospects and the business community at large that you have the knowledge and insights to solve their most pressing problems. Your vehicle can take the form of a speech, a bylined article, analysis of a survey’s findings or numerous other modes of communication.

Thought leadership might encompass your proprietary view on a specific issue, cutting-edge thinking on tomorrow’s challenges, or more general insights into an industry’s problems or outlook, but your response must be grounded in your intellectual capital and speak specifically to your audience’s concerns.

Whether you are discussing critical economic issues, or your solution to a specific short-term problem, your response should cut right to the heart of the matter. You must have a point of view and be able to back it up with facts and figures.

Yes, you can have an agenda, but making a sale should not be central to it. The use of issues-based marketing is a subtle means to that end.