The Firm That Took Its Name Off the Door

Professional-services firms are unusually fond of surnames. A surname says there is a person here, a reputation, someone whose dinner may be interrupted when the client calls. So it is worth noticing when a firm removes not one surname but three. Solomon McCown & Cence became Issues Management Group in 2022, and the change explained the business more clearly than a slogan could. The firm no longer wanted to look like a collection of notable advisers. It wanted to look like a system.

The occasion was an acquisition. Dan Cence, who had bought Solomon McCown from founders Helene Solomon and Ashley McCown in 2020, acquired Murphy Donoghue Partners, a respected Boston lobbying practice. The transaction brought five government-relations veterans into a communications firm of roughly 50 people. It also returned Cence to the people who had taught him lobbying in 2009. The student had bought his mentors' shop.

Then came the curious part. Cence revived “Issues Management Group,” a name Murphy's firm had used years earlier and put away. He told The Boston Globe the appeal was scalability: removing people's names made the firm more team-focused. Beneath the corporate housekeeping was a practical idea. Public controversies rarely arrive sorted into departments. A zoning fight is political, local, emotional and digital at once. A hospital issue can become a news story, a regulatory problem and a crisis before lunch. The client does not care which internal discipline gets credit. The client wants the room to stop spinning.

“Removing people's names from it makes it more team-focused. That's who we are. Our success is derived from the collective.”Dan Cence, on the 2022 rebrand

The four desks around one problem

IMG's offer is easy to list and harder to coordinate. Strategic communications handles counsel, messaging, media relations and training. Public affairs works on lobbying, ballot questions, permits, coalitions and community relations. Digital builds content and targeted campaigns. Crisis specialists make plans, run tabletop exercises, monitor coverage, prepare statements and work beside legal counsel. The differentiator is not that any one of those services is exotic. It is that all four can be pointed at the same outcome.

That puts IMG in a crowded but useful middle. It competes with Boston public-affairs firms such as Liberty Square Group, O'Neill and Associates, Tremont Strategies Group and Dewey Square Group; with public-relations agencies; and, on larger assignments, with national firms such as SKDK and Global Strategy Group. A client hires IMG when the work crosses the boundaries those categories imply. The firm makes money in the ordinary consulting way - retainers, campaigns and discrete high-stakes assignments - and does not publish a rate card.

A foster-care campaign chooses hope over guilt

The firm's work for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families is the cleanest demonstration of what “integrated” can mean when it is more than agency decoration. At the end of 2019, DCF needed more foster-parent applicants, and a more diverse pool of them. The obvious emotional lever was need: children in danger, homes urgently required. IMG's research pointed elsewhere.

Negative emotion can prompt a one-off, low-risk act such as a donation. Becoming a foster parent is not that kind of act. It is a major decision, full of practical questions and sustained responsibility. The team chose positive emotion, showing the ordinary warmth and mutual benefit of foster family life. Diverse parents appeared in the creative, not as a demographic footnote but as a way to loosen the stereotype of who a foster parent is.

Video ran across Facebook, YouTube, programmatic inventory and connected television. Display, social and print extended the idea. Geographic, behavioral and interest targeting concentrated attention in markets with the greatest need. Visitors who reached the landing page but stopped were shown remarketing ads; paid search caught people closer to applying. The first instinct - dramatize the crisis - gave way to a better understanding of the decision.

By the end of 2020, the campaign had generated 33,130 website visits, 1.37 million completed video views, more than 700 applications and 270 phone calls. Those are the firm's reported results, not an independent attribution study, but the sequence is useful: begin with the psychology of the decision, build creative around it, distribute across channels, and repair the point where attention becomes action.

The crisis product is mostly preparation

Crisis communications is sold with storm metaphors because storms photograph well. The actual work is closer to plumbing. IMG says it has managed more than 300 complex issues: leadership transitions, layoffs, investigations, construction accidents, data breaches, labor disputes, public-health emergencies and workplace violence. Its service list is strikingly operational - message templates, media procedures, tabletop exercises, monitoring systems, off-site crisis centers and post-crisis reviews.

Beacon Capital Partners shows why continuity matters. IMG says it has spent 14 years as part of the real-estate owner's emergency planning and response team. The firm created internal and external statement templates, trained property managers on media procedures and helped incidents move cleanly from a building to Beacon's leadership and crisis team. During COVID-19 and public protests, it monitored traditional and social media around properties in several American cities. The assignment was not to produce one perfect quote. It was to make dozens of people less likely to improvise badly.

This model has limits. Integration does not rescue a client without a defined objective, decision authority or truthful facts. A local network is less valuable outside the jurisdictions where it is deep. Earned media cannot guarantee a legislative vote, and campaign metrics cannot prove every application was caused by an ad. Nor is a full-service firm automatically the sensible choice for a narrow design job or a simple press release. The machine earns its keep when the issue genuinely crosses systems.

A firm assembled in three acts

Today the company describes more than 45 professionals serving healthcare, real estate, corporate and professional services, education, energy, public service, cannabis and mission-focused organizations. Named clients range from Atrius Health and Beacon Capital Partners to the Northeast Clean Energy Council and the Massachusetts Brewers Guild. The range is broad. The common product is public permission: permission to build, to change policy, to be trusted, to recover, to act.

The charming irony is that the firm's strongest story is a branding story. By removing the people from the name, IMG made the people easier to combine. The lesson is not that every consultancy should adopt three generic nouns. It is that structure becomes a message. Issues Management Group tells a prospective client exactly what it expects to find: not a tidy communications brief, but an issue - political, digital, legal, local and already moving.