Christopher G. Sheeron Put Two Careers Under One Roof

In a photograph from a garden in Georgetown, Christopher G. Sheeron stands on a brick path with one hand raised. Around him, guests hold drinks beside tables dressed in navy cloth. The occasion is Grayson & Co.’s third anniversary, celebrated at Dumbarton House in May 2022. A company that began by combining two professional worlds has acquired something considerably easier to photograph: a gathering of people.

There are clients, colleagues, friends, and local business figures. Some have come from New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. More than 60 guests attend. The picture is appealing partly because it makes the business look so ordinary. Advising people about reputation, leadership, and public affairs eventually involves standing in front of them and finding something worth saying.

Three years earlier, Sheeron had left executive search to establish a Washington firm offering communications alongside leadership consulting and recruiting. He brought a particular history to that decision: experience helping organizations explain themselves, followed by years helping them choose the people in charge. Grayson would put those experiences together.

The recruiter had already worked in communications

The career preceding Grayson helps explain its design. Sheeron worked at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and at a global public relations firm representing the American oil and natural gas industry’s largest trade association. Later came public affairs work involving strategic communications, crises, and litigation. Energy, chemicals, and environmental questions were recurring subjects.

His assignments extended beyond the United States. He advised commodity producers in Central and Southeast Asia, alongside work for an American multinational oil and natural gas company. Such industries bring together physical operations, government decisions, commercial interests, and public argument. A company may sell a commodity; its explanation of its activities has to travel through a much more crowded market.

Then came RSR Partners. Over more than seven years there, Sheeron worked in the office of founder and chairman Russell S. Reynolds Jr., moved into board recruiting, and became a principal in the energy and environmental practice. His recruiting work covered oil and gas, chemicals, mining, commodities, agriculture, and environmental businesses.

The sequence matters. He entered executive search with communications experience already behind him. Within the search firm, he also took on marketing and communications responsibilities. The two careers overlapped well before he made their combination the premise of his own company.

A Tokyo office, and a name beneath the announcement

A useful glimpse comes from January 2016, when RSR Partners completed its expansion into Japan. The announcement described a Tokyo office, a Japanese-language website, and plans to advise companies on boards and senior leadership. Sheeron was the communications contact. International expansion was a business decision that also needed a public explanation.

Jim Whittle headed the operation. He had previously worked in Japan, and his experience there helped bring clients interested in that market to RSR. Sheeron explained the reasoning behind having Whittle work and live in Tokyo. The episode placed him in a familiar position: translating an organizational decision into an account that people outside the organization could understand.

By October 2016, an RSR announcement identified him as senior director of marketing and communications. The same title appeared on a March 2017 appointment announcement. These were practical responsibilities inside a firm whose work concerned leadership itself. Before becoming the founder whose business required explaining, he had been helping explain somebody else’s.

“After more than seven years with RSR Partners, I am leaving to start my own firm.”

Christopher Sheeron, 2019

Four services, one founding decision

Grayson & Co. announced its formation on June 4, 2019. Its original offering had four parts: strategic communications, public affairs, leadership consulting, and board advisory. The arrangement followed the contours of Sheeron’s working life. Experience that had occupied different jobs could now sit within one business.

He described the pressures he wanted to help clients address as “political uncertainty, corporate complexity, and technological innovation.” That is a broad brief, but the four services gave it a recognizable shape. Public affairs concerned the environment in which an organization operated. Communications concerned how it was understood. Leadership and board advice concerned the people making its decisions.

Consider the difference between finding an executive and preparing one to speak publicly. Each requires attention to judgment, experience, and an organization’s circumstances. They produce different pieces of work, yet the questions can overlap. Grayson’s founding proposition was that a client might benefit from having those capabilities within the same advisory business.

The work beyond the announcement

Today, Grayson’s service list includes media training, executive positioning, regulatory analysis, economic research, litigation support, and coalition building. Leadership advisory remains there too. Read together, the offerings give a sense of the range Sheeron chose to assemble. They run from helping someone deliver a message to understanding the rules and relationships surrounding it.

Some tasks are public by definition. Others happen before an organization attracts attention. Media training prepares a speaker; message development asks what the speaker should say. Coalition building requires finding allies; regulatory analysis requires understanding the formal setting. The variety supplies context for the founder’s decision to combine advisory disciplines rather than build exclusively around executive recruitment.

His work also connects him with ndp | analytics, where he serves as a communications advisor. The firm combines economic and communications research. That relationship adds another professional setting to a career already moving between organizations, audiences, and decision-makers. Research needs to be understood as well as conducted; communicating it is a distinct responsibility.

Asia returns to the conversation

In February 2025, Grayson appointed Jimmy Rhee senior advisor for Asia. Rhee’s background included serving as Maryland’s cabinet secretary for business affairs and Virginia’s assistant secretary of commerce and trade. He had also led technology and software businesses. His brief at Grayson included Korean, Indian, and American economic and political relations, business development, strategy, and market entry.

The appointment gave the firm a specific person and a specific remit for its Asian advisory work. For Sheeron, whose earlier career included counsel involving companies in Central and Southeast Asia, it also kept an international dimension in view. Grayson is headquartered in Washington and offers its services to corporations, associations, governments, and individuals worldwide.

Rhee’s responsibilities illustrate the kinds of questions the firm wants to handle: entering a market, understanding political conditions, and making connections across borders. The appointment is a concrete development in the business Sheeron founded. Its geography is broader than the city on the letterhead.

June 2025 brought another advisory appointment for Sheeron, as senior advisor at Capitol Asset Strategies. The policy and regulatory consultancy works where financial services and technology meet, offering government relations, regulatory guidance, and political risk analysis. The appointment carried his experience in communications and leadership consulting into another advisory setting. It also returned to two concerns present at Grayson’s launch: political uncertainty and technological change. Six years after founding his own firm, he was still working across the professional boundaries that had shaped its original offering.

A different kind of board seat

In Washington, Sheeron serves on the board of the John S. Mulholland Family Foundation. The organization supports food assistance for working families in the District’s poorest neighborhoods. Its directors serve without compensation, and the foundation describes itself as entirely volunteer-run. Here, a board position carries a plainly local purpose.

Sheeron and Grayson were recognized as platinum sponsors of the foundation’s tenth-anniversary celebration in November 2023, A Capital Evening XI in November 2024, and A Capital Evening XII in November 2025. All three events were held at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington. The successive acknowledgments show support extending across several years.

In March 2025, he joined fellow directors for a roundtable interview with board chairman Brian Mulholland. The discussion concerned the foundation’s mission and the initiatives its board would undertake that year. It offers another view of the founder: taking part in a shared local undertaking alongside his business responsibilities.

France, the kitchen, and a backgammon board

Outside work, Sheeron enjoys rowing, golf, racquet sports, and backgammon. Travel takes him to Latin America and Europe. He traces his affection for time in the kitchen and garden to his father’s native France. These are pleasingly concrete interests for someone whose working vocabulary necessarily includes such things as strategic advisory services.

Originally from New York, he lives in Washington with his wife, Katherine A. H. Ballou. He earned his bachelor’s degree in international affairs at George Washington University. His interests in cultural institutions include patronage of Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, while his community affiliations include Catholic Charities’ 83.33 Society.

The garden photograph brings several parts of this life into the frame without requiring an elaborate explanation. There is Washington, an organization he founded, people connected with its work, and a speech outdoors. The anniversary supplies the occasion. The longer story is how communications and leadership became, for Sheeron, parts of the same working life. At Dumbarton House, they even shared a garden.