Grace Keith Rodriguez has an advantage that an agency cannot put in a pitch deck quite as neatly as a list of media placements: she remembers hiring one. Before joining Caliber Corporate Advisers, she worked inside financial businesses, dealing with PR agencies from the client's chair. Today, as Caliber's CEO, she carries that memory into decisions about what an agency should deliver. It gives her a practical question to ask of any proposed improvement: would this have helped when she was on the receiving end?
There is something pleasingly inconvenient about that perspective. A communications firm can become very fluent in explaining its own activity. The client still has a business to run. Rodriguez's career moves between those two viewpoints, with financial knowledge providing a common language. Her work has included public relations at OTC Markets Group and the Financial & Risk business at Thomson Reuters, followed by a decade of increasing responsibility at Caliber. She became CEO in February 2024.
The promotion put her in charge of the firm's strategic direction, service development and growth. It also gave a familiar concern a larger stage: the relationship between the experience employees have at work and the experience clients have with the company. Rodriguez had already spent years attending to recruitment and learning. Taking the top job meant carrying those responsibilities into the decisions that set the agency's direction.
An economist finds her audience
Rodriguez studied economics at Rhodes College, then earned an MBA at NYU's Stern School of Business, with studies spanning finance, international business and marketing. PR became an interest through her first job. She learned the craft while working, rather than arriving through a communications degree. That route matters in an industry where understanding what a client does can require considerably more effort than finding a pleasant way to describe it.
In her early career, she spent time trying to resemble the professional she thought she ought to be. Her parents' advice to be herself became more useful with age. Curiosity, and the knowledge she already possessed, offered a better footing. An economic report or a spreadsheet could become material she knew how to explain to journalists. The detour had supplied a skill.
By 2012, she was working in public relations for Thomson Reuters' Financial & Risk business. In 2014 she joined Caliber, the communications firm Harvey Hudes had founded in 2010. Her progression included director of public relations and content, managing director and president before CEO. This was a move from an established corporate setting into a business she could help build. In recalling that choice, she described leaving corporate familiarity as a leap of faith.
Her comfort with numbers has survived the move. Discussing her career at Fintech Meetup in 2026, she described spreadsheets as familiar territory, a preference she said amused her colleagues. That detail makes a useful companion to her public role as a storyteller. Financial communications needs people who can ask what a number means before deciding how prominently to display it. A spreadsheet has very little patience for an adjective.
“Spreadsheets are my comfort zone”Grace Keith Rodriguez · FintechTalks, 2026
Growth with names attached
Caliber's expansion brought work that was less visible than a CEO announcement but important to the business underneath it. In 2017, the firm acquired Austin-based Leverage PR. Rodriguez helped coordinate accounts and teams across Austin and New York, supporting the transition. An acquisition can be summarized in a sentence; making colleagues and client relationships fit together is a longer assignment.
She subsequently became Caliber's first president. The firm's history places the announcement in 2019, while her professional record dates the role from December 2018. The broad sequence is clear: she spent more than five years as president before succeeding Hudes. When Caliber announced the CEO change on February 29, 2024, Hudes moved into a newly created chief innovation officer role. The founder stayed involved, with responsibility for technology, services and the agency experience.
The announcement described an agency with more than 40 employees across 20 states and Europe. Those figures belong to that moment in 2024, rather than serving as a permanent headcount. They show the management problem accompanying the promotion: colleagues were spread over a wide geography. Familiarity would have to be maintained deliberately. A remote company cannot count on a corridor to do its introductions.
A college without a campus
One of Rodriguez's answers was Caliber College of Public Relations. She launched the internal learning program during her presidency. Employees teach colleagues, passing on practical knowledge that might otherwise stay with the person who learned it. The curriculum has included building media lists and organizing time. New hires have attended one or two sessions a week over several months. The classroom is also a way to meet the people who know things.
The program became particularly useful after Caliber shifted to remote work in 2020. Rodriguez's account of getting it started emphasizes recruiting the first willing teachers. Once people saw the opportunity, participation grew. Teaching gave colleagues another way to contribute and develop. The person with a useful method could become the person explaining it, with authority earned through experience.
The appeal is easy to understand without treating an internal course as a grand institutional invention. An agency's expertise is distributed among its staff. Training gives that expertise a route to someone else's desk. It also places experienced employees in contact with newcomers whose questions may expose assumptions. For a firm selling judgment, the ability to share judgment is a practical investment.
The CEO makes the rounds
In her first year as CEO, Rodriguez conducted what she called “Listening Tour 2024.” She met individually with every member of the team to ask what was working, what was not and what could improve. In March 2025, she identified those conversations as a personal highlight and said the tour would return that year. The approach made listening an appointment, with each employee having a turn.
Her anniversary reflection also acknowledged the executive team, clients navigating acquisitions or exits, and a three-day company offsite. She made a point of celebrating progress together and taking time to consider what had gone well. A leadership reflection can easily become an inventory of the leader's accomplishments. Hers repeatedly brought other people into the frame.
Trust and relationships were also central to her July 2024 appearance on the PR 360 podcast. The conversation covered the move from president to CEO, remote culture and the value of connecting employees across the company. These subjects make a coherent management agenda. The agency's product depends on people working with one another well enough to give clients useful advice, particularly when the answer is complicated.
One conversation at a time.
Individual meetings to hear what was working, what needed attention and what could improve.
The competition might be Excel
Rodriguez's February 2026 conversation with Jared S. Taylor on Slice of Finance offered a dryly recognizable account of fintech competition. A company's rival may be the spreadsheet and manual process a prospective customer already uses. Familiar habits are formidable. A new product must persuade someone to change a working routine, even when the routine has obvious limitations.
That shifts the communications assignment toward explaining the reason for change. Rodriguez also drew attention to subjects such as digital identity and financial crime prevention, where consequential work happens between large funding announcements. A valuation supplies a headline-ready number. Infrastructure requires someone to explain why a less conspicuous development deserves attention. Her financial background fits that work: describing a system's consequences requires understanding the system.
Her December 2025 writing on thought leadership asks executives to supply an informed point of view. Reporters already know the news; useful commentary explains its implications. She also argues for restraint when a topic falls outside a company's expertise or threatens its broader relationships. The advice requires a little courage and a little editing. Having an opinion is straightforward. Knowing which opinion one has earned the right to offer takes longer.
In March 2026, she wrote about the importance of varied perspectives in fintech storytelling. Her argument connected the people shaping a message to its ability to address the audience's actual experience. Different backgrounds can reveal assumptions that a narrower group misses. It is a relevant concern for financial products, whose usefulness depends on the circumstances of the people expected to use them.
Learning to stop mid-sentence
Her August 2026 writing returned to another deceptively simple leadership skill: reading the room. She described the value of noticing when an explanation is failing and pausing to repair it. Silence after an announcement can mean people are still processing. Leaders should ask questions instead of assuming everyone has arrived with the same context.
That is a telling place for a PR executive to put the emphasis. Professional polish has its uses, but a prepared message still has to reach someone. Rodriguez's recent public work pays attention to that recipient, whether an employee hearing company news, a journalist considering an interpretation or a prospective customer evaluating unfamiliar technology. The audience keeps reappearing as a participant with its own knowledge and questions.
The teaching has continued, too. In 2026 Caliber announced agency-wide Digital Metrics Certification, covering SEO, analytics and AI-driven search strategy. The firm also received Inc. Best Workplaces recognition again after its 2023 appearance. Rodriguez connected that recognition to investment in staff. These are company achievements, shared across the team; they also show how the development work associated with her presidency has continued during her tenure as CEO.
A little Baltimore in New York
Away from the agency, Rodriguez has described raising her family in a New York suburb while retaining an attachment to Baltimore, where she grew up. In 2024 she reported being Caliber's only Ravens fan. Her family enjoys outdoor trips and the cultural possibilities nearby. Her answer to the question of an ingredient she could eat indefinitely was garlic. At least the position is clear.
Her stated ambitions for Caliber include developing services thoughtfully, staying close to client needs and extending the firm's work across its financial and technology sectors. Those plans bring the story back to the chair she occupied before joining the agency. Rodriguez knows a client has reasons for asking a question. Her career has given her the financial vocabulary to understand it, and her leadership has made room to hear the answer.