Dean Trevelino and the distance a reputation travels

Dean Trevelino’s answer to a question about his toughest challenge runs to 33 hours. That is how long he spent running in the hills of No Business, Tennessee. It is an unusually literal entry in a business leader’s biography: no metaphor about an uphill battle is required. The hills have already done the work.

There is another long undertaking in his life. In 2003, Trevelino and his longtime colleague Genna Keller founded a communications agency in Atlanta. They had worked inside global firms. Now they would put their own names on the business and take responsibility for what happened next. More than two decades later, those names remain together.

Today, Trevelino is the agency’s co-CEO and co-founder, with a career that reaches from consumer campaigns to the emerging business of AI visibility. His life outside work includes ultrarunning and modern architecture. Across those interests, there is plenty to occupy an English graduate who once divided his college time between writing and the wrestling mat.

Two names, one wager

His route into communications began with language. Trevelino earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Pennsylvania State University and a master’s in organizational communications at the University of Alabama. At Penn State he also wrestled. His public college profile lists Shakespeare and writing alongside Division I wrestling. That is a fairly broad extracurricular brief.

That career took him through executive positions at Ogilvy, Golin and Shandwick. His work involved corporate initiatives, product introductions, sponsorships, rebranding and executive preparation. Clients and assignments demanded both a broad view of the business and attention to the moment when someone actually had to explain it to another person.

Keller was already a colleague before she became the other half of the agency’s name. The pair worked together at Shandwick and later reunited at Ogilvy. Starting a firm in 2003 meant carrying that professional relationship into a different arrangement. Their reputations would help open doors; their own decisions would determine what happened once they were inside.

The early boutique proposition was practical. Senior people would remain close to daily client work, and decisions could move without the machinery of a larger organization. Trevelino described the value in terms of getting from one point to another more quickly. It was a promise about access and execution, the kind a client can test before the next invoice arrives.

In 2006, the agency launched the Start-Up Council. Its quarterly roundtables gave entrepreneurs a place to bring business ideas and receive advice across marketing, funding, legal matters, accounting and other disciplines, without a financial or contractual commitment. The initiative put the founders in contact with businesses while their questions were still open and their plans still changeable.

A cow, a burrito, a car

Some of Trevelino’s career is easier to recognize through the brands than through the job titles. His credits include the public relations launch of Chick-fil-A’s cow campaign, work on the scale and sale of Moe’s Southwest Grill, and the launch of Carvana. The list crosses restaurants and cars, familiar purchases and unfamiliar ways of making them.

Each presents a different communications problem. A campaign needs an idea people can remember. A growing restaurant business needs a story that holds together as it expands. A new way of buying a car requires an explanation that makes the unfamiliar comprehensible. The differences matter. A memorable line cannot do every job in a company’s life.

His earlier experience also included preparing executives and management at businesses such as Coca-Cola, MindSpring and EarthLink. Executive preparation brings communications down to human scale: a person, an audience, a subject that may be complicated or sensitive. The finished announcement can look simple precisely because someone has spent time deciding what needs to be understood.

By 2007, Trevelino was also discussing blogs as a setting for dialogue and anticipating a larger role for social media in agency work. The language of that period included virtual worlds and user-generated content. Some of the packaging now feels dated. The underlying question has aged more comfortably: where will an audience gather, and what gives a company a useful voice there?

The people who carry the work

Trevelino’s explanation of staff retention is grounded in the thing an agency sells. Practitioners develop its thinking, learn its methods and execute its work. Their knowledge grows through experience. Losing a colleague can therefore mean losing some of the business’s accumulated expertise, along with the person who knows how to apply it.

“When you lose staff, you lose a piece of that capital.”

Dean Trevelino

He has paired that argument with a preference for fewer rules and room for different working styles. In his account, the management task is to agree on priorities and get the work done. Retention matters because experienced people carry knowledge forward; it does not require everyone to perform the same version of office life.

The agency also promotes Wild Blue Yonder, a curated travel incentive for talent. Travel is a more tangible invitation than many corporate statements about culture. It suggests that a professional life might include something beyond the next deadline. The idea fits a founder whose interests extend well outside the business, without requiring anyone else to adopt his taste in distance running.

Room for another discipline

Trevelino has questioned the assumption that an agency founded in PR should lead every assignment with PR. His firm invested in digital marketing, demand generation and creative services. That decision creates a useful test of leadership: can the founder give another discipline enough attention to let it influence the work?

In July 2024, the answer took the form of an acquisition. Trevelino/Keller bought Marsden Marketing, adding experience in digital advertising, demand generation and account-based marketing. The two firms already knew one another through client collaboration. Keller described the integration as a natural fit across people, clients and technology.

Anne Marsden and Suzanne Moore joined as full-time senior consultants; Jeffrey Willis joined the management team as vice president of growth marketing. Those details make the deal concrete. Capabilities arrive through people who have spent time developing them. An acquisition announcement is only the beginning of figuring out how those people will work together.

The combination supported the agency’s approach to inbound, outbound and reputation marketing. A company needs ways to attract interest, reach prospective buyers and establish credibility. Putting those functions together raises questions about which activity comes first and what each is meant to accomplish. It also widens the range of answers available to the agency.

A new audience at the other end

By 2026, Trevelino was turning his attention to how executives and companies appear in answers produced by AI systems. In May, the agency introduced Exec-AI, a service that scores an executive’s observable public presence and examines its relationship to company visibility across platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.

The announced framework uses a zero-to-100 score across eight weighted dimensions. Its premise is that a leader’s public record can contribute to the visibility of the business they represent. That is the agency’s proposition, rather than a guarantee that every executive appearance will produce a particular result. The service includes baseline assessment, competitive comparison and ongoing measurement.

On September 23, the firm launched Visibly-One as a fourth practice alongside public relations, growth marketing and creative services. The work combines audits, monitoring, content and technical guidance for brands seeking visibility in AI-generated answers. For a communications executive, it introduces another place where the public account of a business can be assembled.

Trevelino’s description is direct: “Now they need to learn how to be found in answers.” Search visibility remains part of the background, but the proposed work extends to how a brand is described when the response arrives as a composed answer. What appears, what is missing and what is accurately represented become questions to examine.

There is a recognizable connection to his earlier executive preparation and blog work. In each case, the agency is concerned with where information travels and how it reaches an audience. The medium changes the assignment. Experience offers context, while the new service still has to demonstrate its usefulness in the work clients pay for.

A life with room to roam

Outside the agency, Trevelino has another sustained interest: modern architecture. He described moving from an ultra-modern home he built in 2003 to a mid-century modern home completed in 2015. His own description of a hidden talent is “closet modern architect.” It is a nicely modest phrase for an interest that has involved rather more than browsing photographs.

His bucket list includes a trek across Costa Rica. It is a personal ambition with an actual destination, a welcome change from the vague language that can attach itself to business biographies. The running and architecture details give his life texture. They do not need to prove anything about quarterly results to earn their place.

The professional story continues with Keller, the colleagues who carry the agency’s expertise and the new questions its clients bring. Trevelino began his own firm with a bet on proximity and quicker decisions. He now helps lead a business addressing audiences who may encounter a brand through an AI answer. Between those points lie restaurant campaigns, startup roundtables, executive preparation and an acquisition. It is a considerable distance. He has chosen to keep going.