Strategic communications advisory
An organization tells one story. It lands in a dozen different rooms — employees, customers, investors, regulators — and each room tests it against what it experiences every day. We measure that gap in every room, and catch the moment the rooms begin to disagree.
Drift — the interval in which a correction is still a correction
01 — The premise
It is the most valuable asset most organizations hold, and the least deliberately managed. It is treated as an outcome — something that follows from good work, good products, good intentions — rather than as a condition that can be watched.
So the work around it runs in episodes, one audience at a time: an audit, a message refresh, a crisis firm on retainer that activates only after something has already broken.
But trust does not move in episodes. It moves continuously, and it moves differently in every room.
02 — One story, many rooms
The danger is not any single gap. It is the moment those gaps stop agreeing with each other — and that is visible long before it reaches coverage, churn, or attrition.
03 — Our approach
Reputation work is built to activate after something breaks. Ours is built to run before it does, because trust drifts between audits — and drift is only inexpensive to correct while it is still drift.
Investor relations watches the analysts. HR watches engagement. Communications watches coverage. Nobody watches whether those readings agree — and that disagreement is the earliest signal available.
We put a defensible, consistent instrument against a question most organizations answer by instinct — built from evidence against your own stated commitments, so every reading comes with its reasons. That changes what a leadership team can decide, and what a board can track.
And one structural choice underneath all three: we advise and govern; we never execute what we measure.
04 — Scope of practice
Scope is a feature, not a limitation.
Corporate communications, marketing, and brand. Not enterprise strategy, not finance, not operations — the disciplines that shape what people believe about an organization, and whether that belief holds.
The story an organization tells, and whether it holds in more than one room.
What is said, to whom, in what order, and through which channels.
Earned and owned posture, spokesperson alignment, and response discipline.
Prepared paths for the moments that do not allow time to invent one.
Executive voice, positioning, and the counsel that precedes a decision going public.
A consistent read on where trust stands, and with whom, over time.
We design the strategy and govern its use; your team, or your agencies, execute — so the measurement is never grading our own work.
05 — Guiding perspective
“Every organization I have worked with says trust is a priority. Almost none of them can tell me where it stands this quarter, or with whom.”
Mac Worsham, Founder and Managing Principal
That is not negligence. Reputation work is built to be episodic, and built to watch one audience at a time. This is the practice built the other way round — close enough to the decision to change it, and early enough that changing it is still cheap.
For more than 25 years, Mac Worsham has served as a steady strategic anchor for the world’s largest professional services firms. He has guided the voice of organizations with over 150,000 professionals through a global pandemic, technological disruption, geopolitical shifts, and economic upheaval. His professional path has been anything but linear, and certainly not conventional: he learned how public narratives take shape as a legislative aide in the United States Senate, and then in municipal finance and government relations — learning early how public affairs, economics, and high-stakes messaging move together, or drift apart. He carried that rare blend of policy insight and financial fluency to the professional services arena.
He reads reputation the way a policy strategist reads risk — treating communications not as storytelling but as the discipline of keeping an institution’s actions, culture, and public promise in alignment. His career stands as proof that financial fluency and policy insight need not come at the expense of empathy and ethics: an organization’s strongest asset is its people, and its most powerful tool an authentic, clear, and purposeful voice.
The firm is one principal. Start to finish, it is Mac who does the work.
07 — Begin a conversation
A first conversation covers the pressures you are managing now and the constituencies you are least confident about. Thirty minutes, no obligation, and you will be speaking with the person who would do the work.
Tampa Bay Area, Florida
Monday–Friday
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Eastern