In May 2020, the argument over a school-bus plant in Tulsa had been private for ten months. The mayor had rejected Navistar's request to extend a lease. The company had prepared for the possibility of leaving town. Then a small Chicago public affairs firm turned the dispute into a public campaign. By lunchtime on launch day, hundreds of emails had landed at City Hall. Within four hours, the mayor softened a position he had held for most of a year.
The campaign kept going. A dozen employees became "plant captains." Materials appeared in English, Spanish and Zomi, a language spoken by many workers. Suppliers spoke. Union leaders spoke. In all, 5,041 people sent 75,615 emails. Three weeks after launch, the city and company had an agreement, and 1,600 jobs stayed put.
That is the Culloton + Bauer Luce business in miniature. It is not quite public relations in the familiar sense. There is no perfume spritzed over a difficult fact. The firm takes a private disagreement, identifies the constituency hiding inside it, gives that constituency language and a job, and makes the argument visible to whoever has the power to decide.
The sentence that explains the firm
Dennis Culloton started the firm in 2010 after a career that seems engineered for unpleasant phone calls. He reported Chicago crime and politics while attending law school at night. He handled communications for the city's airports, served as press secretary to Illinois Governor George Ryan and worked in corporate public affairs. In 2019, Culloton Strategies became Culloton + Bauer Luce when Natalie Bauer Luce, another former journalist and public-sector strategist, joined him as an equity owner.
Culloton once offered a neat definition of the firm's niche: an issue campaign is a crisis project caught at the beginning. The line carries more information than a services menu. Crisis communications, reputation management, media relations, government affairs, grassroots organizing and digital analytics are tools. The actual product is a campaign built around a deadline and a decision.
“You can't just paper over problems with press releases. You have to actively work a problem.”Natalie Bauer Luce, president
The 13-person roster is heavy on people who have already occupied the other chairs in the room: reporters, political operatives, public officials and technologists. That changes the questions. A conventional agency may ask what to say. CBL asks who must believe it, which messenger has standing, what evidence the organization can create, and how quickly the audience can do something with the answer.
Message, messenger, movement
Consider a two-week assignment for the Illinois State Ambulance Association. A unanimously passed bill changed the route by which private ambulance providers received Medicaid reimbursement. The governor was signaling a veto. "Managed care organizations" versus "fee-for-service" is accurate language and terrible politics. CBL translated the choice into two consequences: longer patient response times and lower first-responder pay during a pandemic.
Next came messengers: ambulance providers from three regions, first responders and a legislative sponsor. Then came movement: an exclusive story, statehouse coverage, broadcast attention, letters to editors and direct appeals to the governor. The veto arrived anyway. That matters. The first thing failed exactly as threatened. But the campaign had changed the legislature's incentives, and lawmakers overrode the veto a week later. The firm reported favorable media attention in all ten Illinois markets during the 14-day engagement.
The pattern repeats, but the constituency changes. For the Chicago Cubs, the obstacle was years of deadlock over a privately financed $575 million renovation of Wrigley Field. The team showed season-ticket holders its outdated clubhouse and training spaces, kept fans updated, and gave them a direct line to City Hall. More than 30,000 supporters emailed officials. The revised plan won approval, and ground broke in October 2014.
For Lime, facing a skeptical new mayor and nine rival scooter operators, the route was safety demonstrations, free helmets, neighborhood events and allies in the city's equity zones. The campaign generated more than 80 media placements, while measured public support for scooters rose by seven points during Chicago's pilot. For NASCAR's first Chicago street race, the work included more than 150 community meetings, partnerships with tourism and labor groups, and a racing-centered curriculum that reached 17,000 Chicago Public Schools eighth graders.
The first failure is usually a vacuum
Crisis work exposes the method most clearly. Early in the pandemic, a skilled nursing network faced intense scrutiny after a cluster of deaths at one facility. Its slow, uneven answers created an information vacuum. Families, reporters and public officials filled it. This was not initially a wording problem. It was a response-system problem.
CBL brought infectious-disease and gerontology experts into a system-wide task force. It instituted twice-daily crisis calls, centralized facts, arranged a virtual media tour, increased family updates and documented the operational response. By midsummer, the facility reported no patients testing positive. Patient referrals later rose 44.9 percent, and two facilities appeared in Newsweek's 2021 nursing-home rankings.
This reveals the firm's most defensible difference from a generalist agency. It tries to splice communications into operations. If the client cannot show a new process, a qualified expert, a clearer owner or a repeatable update rhythm, there is little for even excellent messaging to stand on.
What to borrow before the phone rings
The firm's campaigns offer a practical checklist for executives who may never hire a public affairs adviser. It is useful precisely because none of the steps requires a clever slogan.
- Name the decision. “Improve reputation” is fog. “Win the zoning vote in 60 days” creates a campaign.
- Replace jargon with stakes. Reimbursement mechanics became response times and pay. A lease dispute became 1,600 jobs.
- Audit the messengers. Executives are rarely enough. Employees, experts, customers, neighbors and local partners possess different kinds of credibility.
- Build a response rhythm. Decide who owns facts, how often the team meets and when each audience receives an update.
- Give supporters one action. An informed constituency without a next step is an audience, not a coalition.
There is a catch. Mobilization amplifies whatever is underneath it. If the underlying conduct is indefensible, if a promised operational fix is cosmetic, or if supposed grassroots support is manufactured, speed merely helps the weakness travel. The play also loses force when decision-makers are insulated from public opinion or when the audience no longer trusts any available messenger. A campaign can clarify real value. It cannot manufacture durable permission for a proposition that collapses on contact.
Culloton + Bauer Luce sits in a specific part of the market: smaller and more senior-led than a global agency, broader than a lone crisis counselor, and more campaign-oriented than a conventional corporate communications shop. Its customers are institutions with something concrete at risk - a permit, a policy, a license to operate, a reputation, a plant full of jobs. The fees are private, as they usually are in bespoke advisory work. The public evidence is in the machinery of the cases.
Four hours is a seductive number. It makes public affairs sound like a switch that a clever operator can flip. The longer lesson from Tulsa is less magical. Ten months of private stalemate had hidden how many people cared. The firm found them, gave them the same facts in the languages they used, and made it easy to act. The reversal was fast because the preparation made the constituency legible.