The Professors Who Play Hockey

There is a particular kind of compliment that no public-relations firm could safely write about itself. It arrived from Mike Deutsch, a lawyer and Group Gordon client, who said the team talked like professors and acted like hockey players. The line works because it contains a small surprise. Professors are rewarded for pausing. Hockey players are rewarded for moving. Most agencies would choose one costume. Group Gordon, a New York firm founded by Michael Gordon in 2005, made a business from wearing both.

The professors begin with the reason anybody is communicating in the first place. A company wants a market to understand it. A university wants faculty research to travel beyond campus. A nonprofit needs an issue to reach donors, legislators, or families. A law firm wants to be known for more than a list of partners. Group Gordon starts with that business or mission goal, then works backward toward the audience, the messenger, the story, and the channel.

The hockey players do the less romantic work. They draft the op-ed. They prepare the nervous expert. They call the reporter again. They monitor the news, revise the message, plan for the ugly question, and turn a big strategic noun into tomorrow morning's verb. The firm sells communications strategy, media relations, crisis and reputation work, thought leadership, content, video, internal communications, social campaigns, and media training. The product, however, is coordination. Thinking and doing are supposed to remain on the same line.

“They talk like professors and act like hockey players.”Mike Deutsch, partner at Singer Deutsch LLP

The generalist's trick

Group Gordon is a generalist in an industry that likes neat verticals. Its public roster and testimonials travel from Shake Shack, DonorsChoose, and New York Botanical Garden to legal recruiting, affordable housing, financial empowerment, universities, cancer advocacy, and biomanufacturing. The firm divides the work more usefully: corporate clients, nonprofit and social-impact organizations, and crises that ignore every industry boundary.

That range is not merely a sales brochure. It is the competitive position. A specialist may know one trade press list more deeply. A large network can place more people in more cities. Group Gordon's wager is that a small team can bring patterns from one field into another while keeping senior judgment close to the work. Around 20 employees appear on current public listings. Junior associates are expected to write, research, pitch, monitor, and face clients. Senior people remain tied to delivery.

A price tag escapes into daylight

Agency fees usually disappear behind private contracts. One Group Gordon engagement is unusually visible. In late 2024, Think Dutchess Alliance for Business issued a public request for a marketing firm. Eleven firms responded. Four were interviewed. The county economic-development organization chose Group Gordon for a three-year term, and its 2025 annual materials reported $90,100 paid to the agency that year.

What did that buy? The stated job was to raise awareness of Dutchess County as a place to start, move, or grow a business, reaching local, regional, and global audiences. In other words, not a bag of press clips but a positioning problem. The county had assets - infrastructure, incentives, employers, talent - that needed to become a coherent invitation.

The number is useful precisely because it is incomplete. Public relations does not come in standardized units. A crisis sprint, an executive-training day, and a multiyear agency-of-record relationship are different products wearing the same industry label. The copyable lesson is not to benchmark every proposal against $90,100. It is to define the job before arguing about the fee.

What fails before the pitch

The first failure in communications often occurs before anybody contacts a journalist. The organization has not agreed on the goal. It asks for visibility, as if visibility were an outcome rather than a condition. Or it chooses a messenger because of title rather than ability. Or it mistakes a company announcement for a public story.

Group Gordon's higher-education advice reveals how it gets stuck work moving. Faculty members may avoid interviews because they are busy, wary, or unconvinced that publicity deserves their time. Telling them to “be more visible” changes nobody's mind. Connecting a media opportunity to a grant, citations, a conference invitation, an industry partner, or a future book might. Then the communications team lowers the burden: handle scheduling, prepare concise background, outline the op-ed, rehearse the interview, and begin with a format the expert can manage.

This is a modest insight with wide application. People rarely resist communication in the abstract. They resist a cost whose benefit belongs to someone else. Show the benefit in their own terms and the conversation changes.

The group is part of the product

Michael Gordon came to communications by way of a law degree, an MBA, Skadden, and SS+K. He says he started the firm after seeing a gap between agencies that emphasized strategy and those that excelled at tactics. The resulting culture is designed to keep those activities from splitting apart.

The firm's published values put the group first, prize substance, insist on learning, and tie the company to the causes and clients it chooses. Its careers page describes a hybrid week, Summer Fridays, self-care afternoons, profit sharing, trivia, book club, and birthday leave. PRovoke has repeatedly recognized the workplace. There are also PR Olympics and a company-wide prize for client retention, two details that say more than a paragraph about “collaboration” ever could.

Culture matters here because service businesses cannot separate the employee experience from the customer experience for very long. An exhausted account team eventually becomes a slow account team. A territorial expert eventually withholds the information a colleague needs. Group Gordon's proposition is that people with responsibility, humor, and relatively little bureaucracy will do steadier work for clients. Its founder once compressed the theory into a haiku: focus on the group, put employees first, clients benefit.

Where the method loses traction

This approach depends on access and appetite. It cannot rescue a weak claim that has no evidence. It slows when leaders will not make decisions, experts remain unavailable, or a client wants attention without accepting scrutiny. It is also a poor fit for buyers who want a one-off publicity stunt detached from a longer goal. Persistence helps only after the story deserves to travel.

The same constraint sharpens the firm's place in the market. Group Gordon is not the cheapest possible press office, a global network, or a software platform promising automated coverage. It is a compact advisory and execution team for organizations that want communications woven into the work itself. The ideal client has something consequential to say, enough openness to refine it, and enough patience to build recognition rather than rent it for an afternoon.

Twenty years after the firm began, the professor-and-hockey-player description still holds because the underlying tension has not changed. Every organization wants the elegant strategy. Every organization eventually meets Tuesday morning. Group Gordon's business is the distance between the two.