There is a peculiar interval in the life of a company when the facts have happened but the meaning has not. The board has voted. The papers are signed. The factory is closing, the shares are listing, the founder is leaving, the lawyers are nervous. Somewhere, a journalist is composing the first sentence. Barabino & Partners has spent four decades making a business out of that interval.
It began in Genoa in 1985, first in the basement of Luca Barabino’s home and then in a small city-centre shop. Barabino had studied architecture - a useful education for someone preoccupied with how things look from the outside - and toured Anglo-Saxon communications firms. His wager was contrarian for Italy at the time: avoid the crowded consumer-advertising market and position public relations as management consulting for corporate, financial and reputational problems.
The wager was not that companies needed prettier language. It was that their most delicate moments needed an interpreter.
A specialty hiding in plain sight
Corporate communication is easy to mistake for publicity. Barabino & Partners’ specialty is closer to air-traffic control. On an IPO, bankers want demand, lawyers want precision, employees want reassurance, executives want stature and reporters want a clean explanation. All are looking at the same aircraft from different windows.
The firm got its early proof in the transformation of corporate Italy. In 1995, then 40 people across Genoa and Milan, it won the mandate to communicate the privatization of STET Telecom. It went on to handle the first listing of an Italian municipal utility, the Olivetti-Telecom operation and the ENEL privatization, which attracted more than three million shareholders. In 2015 it advised on the Poste Italiane listing, that year’s largest IPO in Europe. The company now says it has worked on more than 100 stock-market listings.
The product is not a press release. It is agreement under pressure about what happened, whom it affects and what must be said next.
This explains the customer list. Banks, investment funds, private-equity firms, public companies, law practices and family-owned exporters do not arrive merely to be famous. They arrive because a transaction, dispute or expansion has created a surplus of attention. In Britain, the firm publicly lists work with Roberto Cavalli, Venchi, UniCredit, Unipol, Reply and SIX Group. In New York, Marco Lastrico’s team supports Italian businesses entering the United States and became the National Italian American Foundation’s official communications adviser in 2024.
What the firm actually does all day
The offer has widened without losing that original center. Corporate and financial communication remain the spine. Around them sit investor relations, crisis management, legal-sector positioning, internal communication, public affairs, training and Made in Italy market entry. B&P Design handles identities and visual systems. bDigital, launched in 2018, covers social strategy, listening, content, influencers and web development. Officina22 is a physical Milan venue for events and press conferences.
Its crisis method is unusually explicit. First construct a factual storyline. Then map every stakeholder touched by the event. Then choose the channels and materials each group requires. Preparation matters because the first thing to fail in a crisis is usually not a platform; it is internal alignment. Executives improvise, facts fork into competing versions and a reply designed for one audience escapes into another.
The method travels only when judgment travels with it. That is why the firm’s international expansion was made through offices rather than a vague network of affiliates: Brussels in 2002, London in 2007, Berlin in 2009, New York in 2011, then Paris and Munich through the 2022 acquisition of B2P Communications, and Madrid in 2024. Local teams translate more than words. They translate which newspaper matters, which claim sounds boastful and which silence sounds guilty.
It is a useful advantage for Made in Italy brands. A cheese, fashion house or engineering company may carry enormous meaning at home and almost none abroad. The consultant’s job is to preserve the origin story without assuming the foreign audience already cares.
The evening the symphony became football
The firm can be theatrical when the brief allows. Its most famous consumer-facing work helped lure roughly 1,000 Italian football fans to a classical concert during a Champions League match. Their partners and bosses had conspired; onstage, the orchestra gave way to a giant screen showing the game. The 2010 Heineken “Auditorium” project spread far beyond the room, collecting nearly 45 million views. Barabino & Partners reported media value equal to ten times the initial investment, and the campaign won two Cannes Lions.
The stunt worked because the deception was affectionate, the reveal was immediate and the audience’s obsession was widely understood. Copy the structure in the wrong setting - a health scare, a redundancy announcement, any situation where consent matters - and the same surprise becomes manipulation. Communication techniques are not interchangeable tools. Context is the handle.
The attention portfolio
When the adviser becomes the deal
By 2024, Barabino & Partners had reached an awkwardly successful middle age: about €22 million in revenue, more than 140 people and international credibility, but a global market consolidating around larger corporate-affairs platforms. The company joined Excellera Advisory Group that May. The price was not disclosed. Management and brand autonomy were promised; the stated ambition was a European communications group with deeper public-affairs, international and data capabilities.
What changed the logic was scale. In the firm’s own 2024 impact report, Luca Barabino described the appeal as building an Italian champion able to compete globally. This was not a rescue narrative. Mergermarket’s 2024 table credited Barabino & Partners with 120 transactions worth $26.85 billion, first in Italy, third in Europe and tenth worldwide by deal count. In 2025, MergerLinks counted 104 EMEA deals worth £10.44 billion. The independent boutique had proved its model. The next question was whether a platform could multiply it.
Then came the part no founder-led consultancy can avoid. In December 2025, ICG replaced Xenon Private Equity as Excellera’s financial partner. Federico Steiner became CEO of Barabino & Partners, Massimiliano Parboni became chair and Luca Barabino left his executive role after forty years. The announcement emphasized continuity. Of course it did. But continuity after a founder is not a sentence in a release. It is a thousand small decisions made when the founder is no longer in the room.
The conditions are now clear. The larger group can add data science, technology, public affairs and geographic reach. It can also introduce layers between the client and the senior judgment the client believed it hired. The model works when local partners keep authority, the factual discipline survives commercial pressure and specialists collaborate without turning the client into an internal routing problem. It works less well when a company needs mass consumer advertising, self-serve software or a cheap burst of publicity. This is bespoke advice for moments expensive enough to justify bespoke advice.
The small lesson inside the large firm
Barabino & Partners’ durable idea is not Italian charm, a clever stunt or even a league-table position. It is sequence. First understand the business event. Then identify who can alter its outcome. Then decide what each person needs to know, in what order, from whom. Channels come last.
That sounds obvious. Most useful professional ideas do, after someone has named them. The surprise is how often companies reverse the order: open an account, write a post, book an interview and only then argue about the story. Four decades ago, in a Genoa basement, an architecture graduate decided communication should be treated as management. Every difficult headline since has made the wager look less eccentric.