Jane Barwis and the Business of Staying

Before Katy Frame joined BRG Communications, she told Jane Barwis what she wanted from a job: somewhere to put down roots and learn her craft. It was a modest request with a considerable lifespan. In 2025, marking ten years at the agency, Frame recalled that conversation and the work that followed. Among her memories was putting on a hairnet for a CNN feature about Red Gold, the family-owned tomato company. Public relations, it turns out, has a dress code more varied than business casual.

That small recollection offers a useful entrance into Barwis’s career. A founder can announce a culture in a sentence. An employee needs years to discover whether the sentence holds up. Frame stayed, kept finding reasons to enjoy the work, and eventually became a vice president. Her story gives a human scale to a company usually described through growth figures and award categories.

Barwis founded BRG in 2001 and remains its president and CEO. The interesting question is how a business built around personal relationships changes without exhausting the relationships that helped build it. Her choices over the years offer several answers: let employees direct a birthday donation, fund students before they become employees, hire a former colleague to run operations, and give an established team new skills.

A founder with an apprenticeship

BRG began after more than fifteen years of Barwis working at communications firms. Her professional history includes Hager Sharp and Ketchum, where she held a senior vice president role directing the brand practice. She had worked across consumer branding, reputation, issues, crises and organizational change. The businesses in that earlier client experience included Delta Air Lines, JCPenney, MCI and Lowe’s. These were organizations with customers, employees and reputations large enough to make every choice of words consequential.

The variety matters. A consumer brand wants attention; an organization facing a difficult transition needs understanding. Both depend on knowing what people care about before deciding what to tell them. Barwis carried that audience-first experience into her own agency. She has also appeared alongside corporate and nonprofit executives to discuss local engagement, including how organizations can make use of trusted voices and assets already present in a community.

In that setting, the audience has a geography. People live and work somewhere; a national campaign still has to reach them there. Barwis’s participation in a local-engagement webinar with representatives of Walmart and Fisher House Foundation places her alongside people dealing with that practical problem. It also helps explain the connection between her professional interests and her leadership: relationships need attention at the level where people actually experience them.

The birthday present went elsewhere

For BRG’s fifteenth anniversary in 2016, employees took part in an internal competition that included volunteerism. The prize was a $15,000 donation to a local nonprofit they selected. The campaign was called Cause for a Celebration. There are easier ways to celebrate a company birthday. A cake requires considerably less administration and rarely asks anyone to volunteer.

The choice gave staff a role beyond attending a party. They could help decide where the anniversary money went. For an agency accustomed to developing messages for other organizations, it was a chance to make its own milestone useful outside the office. The celebration also became part of BRG’s record of recognized work, receiving a Silver Stevie honor.

That same year, Barwis was named a finalist in the Stevie Awards’ Female Entrepreneur of the Year business-services category. In her remarks, she linked the business’s long-term vision to keeping the energy of a startup. The tension is familiar to anyone who has built a company: early enthusiasm is precious, but enthusiasm alone makes an unreliable operating system. Barwis wanted staff to care about both the assignments and the place where they did them.

A relationship that survives the leaving

In 2021, Barwis received PRNEWS recognition in the mentoring category of its Top Women in PR awards. The account of that recognition emphasized her willingness to advise employees and agency alumni, and to identify opportunities suited to their individual talents. It described professional development as something that continued beyond the employment relationship.

This is a revealing definition of loyalty. People can leave an agency and remain part of its professional circle. Their development does not cease to matter because another company now signs the paycheck. For Barwis, the mentoring recognition acknowledged years of helping people grow, including former staff who moved into senior positions elsewhere.

An agency sells judgment through its people. Helping those people become better at their work is therefore a business decision with a personal consequence. The mentoring award gives that otherwise quiet activity a date and a name. It also complicates the usual picture of retention. A durable professional relationship may continue after a desk has been cleared; staying connected can matter as much as staying employed.

“Mike and I were a strong team”

Jane Barwis, on appointing former colleague Michael Sloan as COO, 2022

Twenty years, and a place for someone new

When BRG reached its twentieth anniversary in 2021, the company established the Better Living Scholarship Fund for George Mason University undergraduates studying communications who needed financial support. Its initial commitment was $20,000. Five years after inviting employees to help direct an anniversary donation, Barwis’s agency used another milestone to invest in people who had yet to enter the profession.

A scholarship is a particularly concrete way for an established communicator to think about the next generation. Before someone can build a client relationship, pitch an editor or run a team, they need access to training and an opportunity to begin. The fund attached a dollar amount to that beginning. It connected BRG’s anniversary to a university in the same region rather than leaving the celebration entirely inside the company.

The agency also refreshed its brand and website for the anniversary, including an arrow element in its identity. One change addressed how BRG presented itself; the other helped future communicators get started. Together they show an organization thinking about its next chapter in more than visual terms. A new logo can be unveiled in an afternoon. Developing a future colleague asks for a longer calendar.

The old colleague with a new job

In September 2022, Barwis hired Michael Sloan as BRG’s first chief operating officer. The company was already more than two decades old. Sloan’s remit covered finance, human resources, office management and internal communications. These are the subjects that seldom get a campaign’s glamorous photograph, yet determine whether a growing agency can deliver the work it promises.

The appointment had a personal history. Sloan and Barwis had worked together at Ketchum and kept in touch. His subsequent experience included senior operations and finance positions at agencies such as Ogilvy and Edelman. Bringing him to BRG joined an existing working relationship to experience acquired elsewhere. Barwis described their approach to business as aligned and the timing as right for the agency’s growth plans.

Her short assessment was direct: “Mike and I were a strong team”. The new title formalized a division of responsibility that growth made increasingly useful. A founder who has built a company around relationships still needs someone attending to infrastructure. In this case, the relationship helped her choose the person who would do it. Familiarity supplied a starting point; a substantial operating brief supplied the job.

Learning gets a timetable

BRG launched Better University, or BetterU, in 2023. By the account accompanying its 2024 PRWeek award, the internal training program offered more than two dozen courses and had participation from the entire staff. That is a useful detail because mentoring can otherwise remain dependent on chance: the right conversation, the available manager, the quiet half-hour between deadlines.

A named program with courses makes development easier to see and organize. It puts some structure around the founder’s interest in helping people reach their potential. For an agency whose work changes with platforms, audiences and distribution channels, learning belongs in the working calendar. The next assignment can call for a capability the last one did not require.

BRG won PRWeek’s Outstanding Boutique Agency award in 2023 and again in 2024. The second announcement highlighted training alongside client and staff retention and revenue growth. The combination matters more than any one trophy. It describes an agency trying to increase its business while investing in the people doing it. Barwis’s leadership story becomes clearer when those choices are read together: advice, courses, responsibility and advancement are different ways of giving experience somewhere to go.

Changing the name is only one question

Barwis has also taken her thinking beyond BRG’s walls. In a 2019 rebranding webinar with Joanna Pineda, CEO of Matrix Group International, she addressed when organizations should consider changing their brands, how to plan a transition and when they should keep what they already have. The agenda included mergers, new leadership, changing audiences and the equity built into an existing identity.

That last question is a useful counterweight to the professional temptation to give everything a makeover. An established name contains other people’s memories of working with it. Changing the name, the look or the message means dealing with those memories, as well as with a designer’s brief. The webinar treated rebranding as a decision involving several groups of stakeholders.

In 2023, asked to define excellence in public relations, Barwis began with a compact proposition: “using communications to drive change”. She connected that goal to messages, current tools and audience action. Read beside the rebranding discussion, the thought has a practical edge. Choosing a channel or an identity should serve an outcome. The work has to travel beyond the presentation in which it first sounded persuasive.

Growth adds chairs to the table

In January 2025, BRG acquired Right Source Marketing. Mike Sweeney joined its leadership as executive vice president of digital; Yvonne Lyons became senior vice president of content strategy. The deal expanded content strategy, creation and optimization capabilities. In the same announcement, BRG highlighted Katy Frame’s promotion to vice president. An acquisition and an internal promotion arrived together.

The pairing captures two routes to expanding an agency’s judgment. Experienced people can bring skills and working habits from another organization. Long-serving employees can take on greater authority inside the one they helped build. Barwis described both moves as part of strengthening leadership and serving clients. Growth, in this instance, was expressed through identifiable people and responsibilities.

By 2026, the company had moved into PRWeek’s Outstanding Small Agency category and won. Its financial record also supplied a measure of the expansion: 2025 revenue was just under $6.5 million, rising 23 percent from the previous year. More than a quarter of its clients had been with the agency for over a decade. The Inc. 5000 listed BRG in 2024, 2025 and 2026, with 56 percent three-year growth on the latest entry.

Those numbers bring us back to Frame’s request for somewhere to grow roots. A company can add capabilities, leadership roles and revenue while preserving a place for someone’s longer professional life. Barwis has spent nearly twenty-five years making decisions about that balance. The hairnet in Frame’s recollection is a pleasing reminder of what those decisions ultimately support: people learning their craft, doing the assignment in front of them, and returning for the next one.