The first thing to understand about a crisis is that everybody wants a verb. Kill the story. Crush the rumor. Stop the leak. The verbs are muscular because the people saying them feel helpless. A reporter has called. A regulator is asking questions. A private failure has acquired a public deadline. Somewhere in a conference room, twelve intelligent adults are discovering that panic is a group activity.
HELLER enters in that cramped interval between the question and the answer. Founded in New York in 2011 by former political spokeswoman Risa Heller, the firm is a communications and public affairs consultancy for companies, institutions, developers, executives and public figures. Its six advertised practices cover crisis and reputation, real estate and civic life, litigation and regulation, corporate communications, issue advocacy and media and entertainment. The list sounds broad until you notice the common thread: every assignment involves a constituency that can say no.
The useful mistake
Heller learned the business in politics, where mistakes become headlines before lunch and yesterday’s adversary may be tomorrow’s necessary phone call. While handling media for Senator Chuck Schumer in the mid-2000s, she berated a reporter over a story she considered unfair. Schumer made her call back and apologize. His lesson was brutally practical: “You need him more than he needs you.”
What failed first was not the argument. It was the assumption that winning one exchange mattered more than preserving credibility. The apology changed the unit of account. A press relationship is not a single transaction; it is a repeated game. HELLER’s later method follows from that correction. Fight over facts. Supply context. Anticipate where the reporting goes next. But do not lie to the press, and do not pretend that volume can substitute for evidence.
A business measured in negative space
The peculiar thing about this product is that its best result may never be seen. A reckless quote is removed. A defensive executive waits until the facts are checked. A journalist receives a document that changes the frame. No campaign report can display the headline that never ran. This is one reason crisis work resists the cheerful arithmetic of impressions and clicks.
There are public clues about the economics. In June 2025, Hudson River Park Trust authorized a five-year strategic communications contract with HELLER worth up to $700,000. The brief included helping the park explain major initiatives and reinforce its role in Manhattan’s far west side. A separate public authority report listed $132,000 in 2025 spending for public relations and strategic communications. Those are examples, not a rate card. Private retainers remain private, as one would expect from a firm whose clients often prefer the work to the spotlight.
Long-horizon counsel, press and media relations, and help making complex civic projects understandable to the people who fund, regulate, use and write about them.
Politics was the prototype
Before founding the firm, Heller was communications director for Schumer and then served in a similar role for New York Governor David Paterson. Government provided a useful laboratory: facts arrive incomplete, opponents are articulate, stakeholders are numerous and the principal still has a job to do after the press conference. HELLER now applies those reflexes to corporate transitions, lawsuits, development approvals, policy campaigns and reputational emergencies.
One firm, six doors into the same room
The bars are not revenue shares. They illustrate overlap. A development dispute can be simultaneously a regulatory matter, a neighborhood argument, a lawsuit and a corporate reputation problem. HELLER’s advantage is less a secret technique than a team designed for collision: former reporters, political press secretaries, campaign hands, government officials and corporate communicators working on the same account.
The coast-to-coast bet
In 2024, the firm opened a Los Angeles office and recruited Erika Masonhall to lead it. Her résumé runs through Netflix, Facebook, NBC News and Senator Joe Lieberman’s office. The hire was a compressed statement of strategy. Entertainment crises are corporate crises with recognizable faces; technology controversies become policy fights; executive departures turn into culture stories. Los Angeles was not simply a new pin on the map. It put a senior operator closer to studios, creators and media executives already living inside that convergence.
HELLER’s customer base follows the same logic. The firm works for startups and large companies, nonprofits and civic institutions, developers and investors, high-profile individuals and families. Public reporting has connected it to work involving Airbnb, DoorDash and Match Group, as well as media executives and other prominent figures. The point is not celebrity for its own sake. Fame merely increases the number of audiences and shortens the response time.
Build the chronology before the statement. Name every audience that can affect the outcome. Separate a false claim from an embarrassing true one. Draft answers to the next three questions, not only the first. And give the adviser the fact you are most tempted to hide.
Where counsel stops
Good communications can make reality legible. It cannot manufacture a better reality indefinitely. If leadership withholds material facts, refuses operational change or treats every critic as an enemy, the method collapses. The same is true when a client expects an adviser to “kill” accurate reporting. Heller has said the killed story is nearly a unicorn. A factual error can sometimes be corrected; an inconvenient fact remains inconvenient.
The firm’s most distinctive idea is therefore not control. It is disciplined influence. Learn enough to see the whole board. Move quickly enough to matter. Preserve enough trust that a reporter will read the next email. In an industry caricatured as spin, that is an almost austere proposition: the sentence before the story works only if somebody still believes the person delivering it.