There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a meeting when everybody realizes the person who understood the assignment has left the room. The senior partner made the pitch. The client nodded. Then the work descended through the org chart until it reached someone bright, diligent and newly acquainted with commercial mortgage-backed securities. This is an old agency joke, except that the client pays the invoice.
Akrete was built around refusing that handoff. Margy Sweeney started the firm in 2011 after working as a journalist, a corporate marketer and an agency executive. She chose an unfashionable premise: complicated subjects deserve experienced people who remain close to the verbs - interviewing, writing, pitching, editing and advising. The company's territory became commercial real estate, financial services and professional services, fields dense with intelligent people who often explain their work in a dialect no customer or reporter is obliged to understand.
The name is a clue. “Akrete” comes from accretion, an accounting word for growth by gradual accumulation. This is not the language of rockets. It is the language of layers: one useful report, one well-aimed interview, one client relationship that survives another budget cycle.
The product behind the press release
Akrete sells public relations, content development and marketing communications. That catalog includes media strategy, crisis planning, executive visibility, research reports, white papers, brand messaging, social campaigns, websites and books. It is bespoke professional work, generally shaped as projects or ongoing programs. The visible object might be a feature in a trade publication. The underlying product is a chain of translations.
The KeyBank relationship makes the abstraction concrete. Since 2011, Akrete says it has developed more than 75 white papers and articles for groups across KeyBank and KeyBanc Capital Markets. Subjects have included affordable housing, fraud, healthcare real estate, payments, mergers and tax policy. In 2020, it also took over writing a recurring survey of middle-market business owners. The significant thing is not that Akrete can write a white paper. Thousands of firms can. It is that a bank kept returning with another technical subject.
For Franklin Partners, the job was different. Akrete used the acquisition and reopening of a former OfficeMax headquarters as two distinct news moments, supported them with releases and direct outreach, then fed the building narrative into web and promotional copy. Coverage appeared in Chicago business and real estate outlets. The work supported leasing awareness. One asset, two chapters, several audiences.
Remote work, before it became an argument
Sweeney's other founding choice was to let people work where and when it made sense. In 2011, that sounded less like the future of work than an eccentric accommodation. Akrete made it structural. A senior professional with fewer hours available could join fewer accounts rather than leave the field or accept a smaller intellectual role. The office became useful space, not proof of commitment.
There is a business reason hiding inside the humane one. Narrow specialization shrinks the talent pool. Flexibility widens it again. Working parents, independent creatives and experienced operators who do not want the standard agency week can still sell their best judgment. Clients, in turn, get people who already know the difference between a real estate fund and the building it owns.
“Working where and when it makes the most sense isn't an employee benefit or a luxury - it's an achievement-focused approach.”Margy Sweeney, founder and CEO
This arrangement does not run on vibes. Flexible systems require unusually clear staffing, deadlines and accountability. Akrete's public award materials describe how the business became more formal from 2023: new personnel and financial policies, a writer-capacity dashboard, visual KPI trackers, HubSpot, revised billing and guidelines for artificial intelligence. The founding idea stayed. The operating system grew up around it.
The first crack, then the instrumentation
For fourteen years, Akrete says revenue rose every year but one. The exception was 2020. The pandemic was also the year clients urgently needed language for hybrid work, workplace change and new ESG commitments. A communications firm could be busy and still feel the economy move beneath it.
The later numbers show what management chose to measure. Revenue increased 8 percent from 2023 to 2024. Quarterly net operating income improved from 9.75 percent in late 2024 to 18 percent in early 2025. Labor cost improved by 16 percent across 2024. Those figures came from Akrete's own 2025 award submission, so they are a company's account of its progress, not audited public-company filings. But the selection of the metrics is telling: utilization, margin and visibility had joined prose and placements on the dashboard.
In 2024, Nicole Stenclik became the firm's first president, taking responsibility for client service, operations and growth alongside Sweeney. In 2025 came the 100th client, a Gold Stevie for U.S. and Canada PR Agency of the Year, a place on PRNEWS' Agency Elite list and recognition from PRWeek for the workplace. In 2026, management practice itself won a Bronze Stevie. Awards are imperfect instruments, but the sequence is coherent: specialization created a reputation; flexibility attracted experience; formal management made the combination less fragile.
A niche that is wider than it looks
Akrete competes with specialist agencies such as The Bliss Group and Stanton, larger firms with deep financial practices, and the in-house teams that might simply hire another communicator. Its answer is not scale. It is reduced translation time. The people doing the work have already encountered bankers, developers, architects, investment managers and consultants. Former journalists know why a pitch dies. Corporate veterans know why an executive is reluctant to approve the sentence that might actually be interesting.
That edge matters most under three conditions: the subject is genuinely complex, reputation influences a high-value decision and the client will let outsiders interrogate the idea. It matters less for commodity publicity, pure consumer buzz or an organization that wants volume without access to its experts. Senior judgment cannot rescue an empty premise. Specialization also carries concentration risk: when real estate transactions slow or financial institutions cut discretionary work, expertise does not repeal the cycle.
The AI question sharpens the position. Generic business prose is now abundant. Akrete's bet is that original thought leadership begins before the draft - in the interview, the skepticism, the industry context and the decision about what is actually new. Software can accelerate parts of production. It cannot make a cautious executive possess an opinion.
The copyable parts
The obvious lesson is “pick a niche,” but that is too easy. A niche is useful only when prior knowledge changes the product. Akrete chose fields where terminology, regulation, market cycles and a small universe of trade reporters reward memory. A bakery does not need a croissant specialist in its public relations firm. A real estate investment manager discussing fund compliance might.
The second lesson is to keep expertise in production. If the senior person is merely a layer of supervision, the model recreates the handoff it claims to avoid. The third is to treat flexibility as capacity design. Part-time work can be a way to preserve rare talent, but only if assignments, availability and ownership are visible. Finally, instrument the dull parts early. Capacity boards and billing processes do not make a good headline. They make it possible for good writers to keep writing.
Akrete's story is not that every company should become an agency without an office mandate. It is that an operating model becomes strategic when it solves the same problem for employees and customers. Experienced communicators wanted serious work without surrendering control of their time. Technical clients wanted experienced communicators without paying for a skyscraper full of hierarchy. The fit is almost suspiciously tidy.
And so the company accumulates. A report becomes a relationship. A flexible role keeps a specialist in the profession. A newsroom contact remembers the pitch that was aimed properly. Accretion is not theatrical. That may be precisely why it works.
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