There is an old theory of public relations that says the important work happens in the room. The right reporter is in one room, the chief executive in another, the investors in a third. The agency earns its fee by knowing which door to open and what ought to be said once everyone sits down. Steve Hirsch and Evan Leatherwood chose a strange moment to test that theory. They launched Hirsch Leatherwood in 2021, when rooms had been reduced to rectangles on a screen and the casual machinery of New York business had stopped humming.
The timing sounds reckless until you consider the product. Companies were changing faster than their stories could keep up. Employees were remote. Markets were skittish. A chief executive could create a crisis before breakfast, on a platform whose rules had changed by lunch. Hirsch and Leatherwood were not selling press releases. They were selling coherence.
Today the firm describes itself as a strategic communications company and content studio, serving Fortune 500 businesses and emerging challengers. In ordinary agency language, that means brand positioning, media relations, investor communications, crisis counsel, executive thought leadership, research, events and content. The more interesting description is the firm's own: Smart Visibility. A company should not simply be seen more. It should be seen by the people who matter, with an argument sturdy enough to survive contact with them.
The first thing to fail was the hallway
The remote launch worked. Clients arrived. The team grew to roughly twenty people. But in a 2025 PRWeek interview, Hirsch admitted he would have opened a physical office sooner. This is a small confession with a large implication. Video calls are good at preserving the meeting. They are poor at producing what happens five minutes after the meeting, when somebody follows a colleague down a hallway and says, “Wait, what if the real story is this?”
For an editorially minded firm, that missing moment matters. Hirsch Leatherwood says its team includes authors, journalists, speechwriters and versatile communicators. Those are people whose work gets better through collision. The lesson was not that remote work had failed. Remote work had made the company possible. It simply could not reproduce all the friction from which language, judgment and jokes are made.
“A powerful brand knows what to say, and when to say it.”Hirsch Leatherwood
Start with the transaction, not the headline
The easiest way to understand Hirsch Leatherwood is through Backstage, the century-old entertainment-industry publication that had become a digital career marketplace for creators. Backstage had a strategic problem disguised as a storytelling problem. It wanted a substantial exit, yet the old print identity could obscure the platform it had become.
The agency reframed Backstage as part of the creator economy, arranged targeted interviews in publications including The New York Times, Business Insider, Digiday and The Information, and developed executive bylines for industry outlets. In January 2023, Cast & Crew acquired Backstage. It would be silly to claim that publicity caused the deal. The useful point is narrower: the communications program had the same destination as the business. The story made the asset easier to understand in the vocabulary of its likely future owner.
Lido Advisors offers the complementary case. The wealth manager was large but comparatively quiet. Hirsch Leatherwood rebuilt the corporate narrative, sharpened senior executives' thought-leadership strategy and found moments when their expertise matched the news. The result included recurring appearances by Lido president Ken Stern on CNBC's Power Lunch, along with trade coverage, awards and published opinion pieces. Backstage needed a story that could help complete a transaction. Lido needed a story that made existing scale visible.
The agency became a publisher
Traditional PR was built around rented land: a newspaper column, a television segment, a trade story. Those places still matter, and Leatherwood has argued in Fortune that legacy media will retain a particular kind of authority even as its mass audience shrinks. But the modern attention map has too many roads for earned media to do all the driving.
So the firm added the other pieces. Its content studio makes newsletters, white papers, customer stories, podcasts, speeches and digital assets. Its research practice publishes cultural studies, including a Celebrity Influence Index. Hirsch Leatherwood Studios, introduced in 2025, packages short-form video, role-specific daily newsletters, the Out of Scope podcast and quarterly gatherings for people in business, media, communications and marketing.
This expansion is partly defensive. If the media gatekeepers are weaker, an agency that depends only on them is weaker too. It is also a live demonstration. A communications firm that advises clients to publish, convene and build direct audiences becomes more credible when it does those things itself.
A boutique is not a miniature network
Hirsch Leatherwood competes with the giant agency networks, specialist crisis firms, investor-relations advisers, content studios and the client's own internal team. Its answer is not to imitate all of them at smaller scale. It puts senior counsel, editorial production and distribution under one roof. Fewer handoffs are the product.
That matters when an assignment runs across categories. A funding announcement may require investor language, executive preparation, media outreach, employee communication and a library of owned content. A reputation problem may begin on social media, migrate to search, reach a reporter and land in a board meeting. Hiring five disconnected specialists creates five interpretations of the same company. Hirsch Leatherwood's model bets that the connective tissue is worth paying for.
The part worth copying
Do not copy the podcast. Do not copy the dinner series. Do not copy the phrase Smart Visibility. Copy the order of operations.
First, name the decision you want another person to make. An investor should take the meeting. A customer should understand the category. A reporter should see why this executive belongs in the story. A buyer should recognize the future company hiding inside the old brand. Second, assemble proof rather than adjectives. Research, customer evidence and a precise point of view travel farther than “innovative” ever will. Third, choose the mix of channels after the argument is clear. A CNBC segment and a white paper are not rival tactics if they are doing different jobs for the same idea.
Finally, leave room for the hallway. Hirsch Leatherwood's origin suggests that the unplanned exchange is not office nostalgia. It is part of the production system. The firm opened when nobody could be in the room and succeeded anyway. Then it changed its mind about how much the room mattered. In a business devoted to controlling the message, that may be the most persuasive message of all.