The Agency That Learned to Hand Over the Keys

In September 1974, Charlie Ryan left television and opened a public-relations shop in the basement of a law firm in Charleston, West Virginia. The inventory was concise: one employee, one client, one desk, one telephone. It sounds romantic now, because the risk has been edited out by fifty-two years of hindsight. At the time, it was simply a man making calls from below ground.

The firm above that desk became Charles Ryan Associates, or CRA, an independent communications agency with offices in Charleston and Richmond and staff and clients around the country. It now makes brand identities, websites, films, search campaigns and media plans. It conducts audience research, trains spokespeople, prepares executives for crises and watches the campaign data after launch. Publicly named clients range from Anthem and Encova to Dominion Energy, ExxonMobil, Virginia is for Lovers and the DC Lottery.

But the revealing CRA product is not on a rate card. It is continuity. Creative firms usually claim to be restless, young and forever reinventing themselves. CRA has reinvented itself while keeping people around long enough to remember the previous reinvention.

The quiet trickA succession with no stranger at the door

In 2015, four longtime CRA colleagues - Susan Lavenski, Matt Isner, Matt Fidler and Alisha Maddox - bought the agency they had helped build. Lavenski became majority owner and chief executive. She had joined in 1998, worked on transportation and energy accounts, and managed assignments that included statewide campaigns, utility expansion projects, contested elections and health-care approvals.

The ownership group had an unusual qualification: history with one another. By CRA's fiftieth anniversary, Lavenski and Fidler had each been at the firm for roughly twenty-seven years, Isner for twenty-five and Maddox for twenty-three. Lavenski described them as people who had “grown up together” at the agency. That phrase can sound sentimental. In a service business, it is also operational. They knew where the awkward decisions were buried.

Lavenski began thinking about her own next chapter in 2024. A retirement strategy took shape in 2025. In July 2026, after twenty-eight years at CRA and eleven as CEO, she retired. Isner, Fidler and Maddox became the sole owners. Together, they arrived at the moment with nearly eighty years of experience inside the company.

This is worth studying because succession is usually treated as a legal event. At CRA it looks more like a long apprenticeship. Each new owner had already carried clients, managed work and shaped a discipline. The signature changed after the habits had transferred.

“If we can’t tell your story as confidently as you can, we haven’t done our job.”CRA on its research standard

One table, fewer seamsWhat the company actually sells

The tidy answer is “smart brand communications.” The useful answer begins with the client problem. An organization has an audience it does not fully understand, a message that will not travel on its own, and a collection of vendors that each sees one slice. CRA's response is to keep the slices close.

There is also CRA Forum, a training and research practice led by former journalists and communications specialists. Sessions can run for half a day, a full day or several days. Executives rehearse recorded mock interviews. Teams prepare for public meetings and hard questions. The group also conducts focus groups, surveys, interviews and facilitated meetings. The agency can help create the message, make the film, place the campaign and coach the human being who must explain it on camera.

That range is the distinction. The alternatives are familiar: a specialist studio for video, a performance shop for search, a public-relations firm for press, a media buyer for placement, or an internal marketing department coordinating all four. Specialists can be the right choice when a problem is narrow or when a company already has strong orchestration in-house. CRA fits the messier assignment, where the message, medium and public response keep changing one another.

What changedTraditional and new stopped being useful boxes

The first model to wear out was the clean separation between “traditional” communication and “new” media. CRA says that distinction no longer makes sense. A tourism campaign may need a printed guide, a short film, paid search and social clips. A transportation issue may need audience research, public meetings and retargeted ads. A crisis plan becomes real only when the designated spokesperson can deliver it under pressure.

So the company added a major digital focus while retaining the older muscles: message discipline, media relations and knowledge of how institutions behave in public. It formed an in-house film unit. It built a media and insights team that monitors placement after launch. It separated communications training into a recognizable practice. None of these moves discarded the original business. Each made the old promise - help a client communicate - harder to fragment.

The work is broad, but its center of gravity is specific. CRA has decades of experience in sectors where audiences are varied, regulation matters and public trust can move a project: energy, transportation, tourism, insurance, health care, education, government and nonprofits. A local point of view becomes an advantage when it supplies context, and a constraint when it becomes provincial. CRA's reported work in more than thirty states suggests it has pushed beyond the latter without hiding the former.

This approach has conditions. It works when a client values continuity, has several connected communications problems and will let the agency learn the business in detail. It is less compelling for a commodity brief awarded entirely on price, a single isolated deliverable, or a team that wants five vendors competing rather than collaborating. Integration is useful only when someone has the authority to integrate.

The market positionA regional firm that kept widening the map

At its height under Charlie Ryan, the firm grew to seventy employees and a reported $30 million integrated communications business, according to West Virginia University's profile of the founder. The modern CRA is smaller - LinkedIn lists it in the 11-to-50-employee range - and privately held. That puts it between the solo specialist and the network agency: large enough to assemble a multi-disciplinary team, small enough for the owners to remain near the work.

Clients describe the benefit in intimate language. Anthem executive Michael Fillhardt said the agency knew the organization “as much as we know us.” Leadership West Virginia credited CRA's work with increased audience engagement, event participation, fundraising and interest. The Virginia Transportation Construction Alliance said a social audience built with CRA had grown into the thousands and helped move people to act.

Those testimonials are marketing, of course. They are also clues. The buyer is not purchasing cleverness by the pound. The buyer is paying for accumulated context: who cares, what they misunderstand, where they spend attention, which message can survive a meeting and which spokesperson needs another rehearsal.

A desk and a telephone were once enough to begin. They were never enough to endure. Endurance required new tools, new owners and the discipline to pass along what the last campaign taught. Charles Ryan Associates has spent fifty-two years making that handoff look uneventful. That may be the most persuasive campaign it has produced.