Jennifer Connelly and the business of being believed

Jennifer Connelly began with a BlackBerry, an old PC and a 90-day plan. There is something appealingly modest about that inventory. The equipment makes an unceremonious founding inventory. A device for answering people, a machine for doing the work and a deadline close enough to concentrate the mind. In March 2003, at 26, she started the business that would become JConnelly.

She had encouragement from Lee Schultheis, the CEO and co-founder of AIP Funds, whom she has described as a longtime mentor. His contribution was confidence: the assurance that her work and relationships could support a company of her own. For someone whose eventual profession would involve advising other people about their reputations, the initial act was unusually personal. She had to believe in hers.

The short planning horizon makes a useful opening to a career that has now stretched across more than two decades. Connelly built her agency around financial communications, expanded its capabilities and eventually shared its top job. Along the way, she kept returning to a deceptively awkward question: what does a client actually need to hear? The answer, in her telling, can make the room uncomfortable.

The lawyer who took an internship

Long before the agency carried her surname, Connelly expected to become a lawyer. Then, during her sophomore year of college, she took an internship at a public relations agency and found work she wanted to keep doing. Her bachelor's degree came from Saint Peter's University. The internship supplied the career turn. An intended life in law yielded to a profession where language, judgment and relationships would still matter rather a lot.

There is another detail from her early career that complicates the usual portrait of a publicist. Asked in 2010 what might surprise people about her, Connelly described herself as sensitive. The profession's reputation for thick skin did not quite fit her own account. That admission belongs beside her reputation for directness. Someone can notice the emotional temperature of a conversation and still say the difficult thing.

Her early ambition also included protecting the firm's culture while it expanded. This was already on her mind in 2010, years before the anniversary announcements and later executive appointments. Growth would create a practical problem: how to bring in more people without losing the reasons the existing people wanted to stay. For a business built on relationships, that is hardly a decorative concern.

Finding room inside the rules

Financial services gave Connelly a particular place to start. She saw an opening among companies struggling to communicate within industry restrictions. Her premise was that regulated businesses could still communicate with imagination. The constraints made the assignment interesting. They also rewarded familiarity: understanding the client's business mattered as much as finding a sentence that might catch a journalist's attention.

By 2011, JCPR, as the agency was then known, employed 34 people. It served financial companies and other businesses in regulated industries. That year it also launched Jennifer Connelly Interactive Productions, a sister company devoted to visual communications and social media. The old PC had acquired quite a few colleagues. The company was building ways to make and distribute material beyond the conventional press pitch.

Connelly later explained the financial communications challenge in terms of overlapping rules and changing channels. A message has to survive both. An agency needs to understand what a client wants to accomplish, which audiences matter and how the message can travel appropriately. A clever campaign that ignores the operating environment creates more work for everyone. In this field, the small print is part of the assignment.

That grounding helped the business move into other sectors, including technology, entertainment, food and beverage, and professional services. The connective tissue was the work of explaining organizations and protecting reputations. The industries changed; the requirement to understand a client's interests remained. Connelly's career developed around learning enough about a business to offer advice its leaders could use.

The difficult privilege of saying so

The interesting part of Connelly's job begins where agreeable conversation ends. She has repeatedly described trust as the basis of the client relationship. In practice, that means offering advice even when the client would prefer another answer. A communications adviser hired merely to applaud would have a straightforward working day. Connelly describes a more demanding arrangement.

“Our job is not to be ‘yes’ people.”

Jennifer Connelly

It is a compact description of an uncomfortable privilege. Access to senior executives brings proximity to decisions, but proximity only becomes useful if the adviser can exercise judgment. Being in the room creates an obligation to contribute something more substantial than enthusiasm.

In a 2016 conversation on Women Worldwide, she discussed building relationships with CEOs through listening, direct advice and mutual respect. She emphasized making time for personal interaction and approaching relationships with a willingness to give. The combination is telling. Candor depends on groundwork. People are more likely to hear an unwelcome observation from someone who has taken the trouble to understand them.

Her advice in an earlier business profile was equally practical: unfairness is part of working life, and sometimes a person bears frustration that began elsewhere. Knowing how to lower the temperature matters. Taken together, these ideas describe a working temperament rather than a publicity trick. Listen carefully. Stay useful. Resist the pleasure of making a tense conversation even tenser.

There is a quiet distinction here between attracting attention and earning permission to advise. Connelly works in corporate positioning, reputation management and crisis communications, fields in which a poorly timed phrase can carry consequences. Her emphasis on relationships makes sense in that setting. The conversation before a difficult moment helps determine whether the conversation during it can accomplish anything.

When the initials became too small

In March 2016, the agency marked its thirteenth anniversary by changing its name from JCPR to JConnelly. By then it had more than 70 employees across three offices. Its offering included video, digital and social media, content, advertising, design and crisis communications. A name associated narrowly with public relations was struggling to describe the work already happening inside the business.

The rebrand was led by the internal marketing team and marketing vice president Ian Keldoulis. Connelly explained the change as a response to an agency and an industry that had both evolved. The name needed to catch up. That is a pleasing complication for a communications firm: eventually, the people who help other businesses explain themselves must sit down and do the exercise at home.

Her own writing shows the same interest in the gap between a business's intentions and an audience's understanding. She has written about co-branding partnerships and examined the launch messaging of Jay Z's streaming service Tidal. These are consumer-facing subjects, some distance from the regulated financial world where she began. They share a concern with what people actually hear when companies speak.

The expansion continued through acquisition. In January 2021, JConnelly announced that it had acquired Las Vegas-based AdvisorPR. Founder Alana Kohl and her team would operate as a division of the agency's financial practice. The move added a firm with a focused wealth management offering, bringing a specialist business into the broader organization Connelly had helped build.

Making room at the top

Twenty years after the launch, Connelly was sharing the chief executive role. In December 2023, JConnelly announced Carol Graumann's return as co-CEO and the promotion of James, known as Jaime, Doyle to president. Doyle had spent 14 years with the agency. The anniversary came with a redistribution of responsibility among people who knew the business.

The following October, Jami Schlicher became chief strategy officer after 15 years at the firm. Her remit included strategic initiatives, mentoring client teams and the agency's digital development, alongside continuing client work. The announcement also reported that nearly 30 percent of staff had been with JConnelly for more than a decade. Those are dated figures, but they give shape to Connelly's early concern with retaining people while expanding.

Her public ambitions have also included helping women define success for themselves. Writing in 2016, she recalled a former boss discouraging her belief that she could combine a career with other priorities. She treated the warning as a reason to seek a different arrangement. Her argument connected specialization and innovation with the freedom to make choices about one's own working life.

Giving occupies a place in that outlook too. Connelly has served Invest in Others, the organization recognizing charitable work in the financial advice community; its current roster places her on its Leadership Council, which advises the board. It is a connection to the same industry that supplied her original commercial opening, this time through the work its members do beyond their businesses.

More recent appearances keep bringing her back to communication under pressure. At the eighth annual Steward Partners Symposium in May 2025, she joined Alyson Tucci for a fireside conversation about strategy, execution and leading through change. The 2026 MMI Women's Leadership Forum agenda listed her for a session on strategic communication amid uncertainty. The topics sound familiar because the underlying task has endured.

The BlackBerry belongs to an earlier chapter. The need to answer people remains. Across the internships, the agency's changing name and its expanded leadership, Connelly's story keeps circling the same human problem: how to make yourself useful enough that someone will listen when the advice becomes inconvenient. A 90-day plan got her started. The relationships required a much longer view.