Jesse Comart Wants Every Corporate Message to Earn Its Keep

The corporate communicator is usually introduced after the nouns have hardened. The product exists. The financing has closed. The executive has decided. A message is requested, preferably by lunch. Jesse Comart has spent his career moving the work earlier, nearer to the decisions and closer to the people who will live with them. His preferred raw material is not a polished adjective. It is a measurable goal.

That instinct now has an expansive title attached to it. At GoodLeap, the financial-technology company that helps homeowners finance solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and other home improvements, Comart is Chief Marketing & Communications Officer. His portfolio includes brand and product marketing, social media, content, creative services, the website and search, media relations, internal communications and government relations. It is enough territory to exhaust an org chart.

The sprawl is also the thesis. He does not regard communications as a decorative paragraph applied to a business after the machinery has been assembled. He sees a connected system: customers, homeowners, contractors, employees, investors and policymakers hear different parts of the same company story, then compare notes. A contradiction can travel faster than a campaign. So can clarity.

First, learn how institutions speak

Comart's route began in Washington, not in a brand studio. He worked in the U.S. Senate as a policy and communications aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid. By 2009, he was assistant to the staff director of the Democratic Policy Committee. The distinction matters. Policy work is communication under consequence: language must survive rival interpretations, political pressure and the unforgiving memory of the public record.

He then crossed into advisory work, holding senior roles at the Glover Park Group and Brunswick Group. There he counseled public and private companies in financial services, media, hardware technology, education and energy. Consulting offered a different education in institutional temperament. A Senate office, a global company and a growth-stage startup may all want to be understood. None of them possesses the same metabolism.

At Brunswick, he also wrote. He interviewed Mashable founder Pete Cashmore about the way social networks widened people's interests beyond the subjects they deliberately sought out. He later co-authored a piece on education with Chris Blundell, examining the gap between lofty intentions and measurable results. The subjects look distant from home-energy lending. The habit underneath them does not: ask whether the system is producing what it promised.

The first five minutes belong to everyone

In 2015, Comart left Brunswick to become MediaMath's first head of communications. The advertising-technology company had roughly 600 employees at the time, spread across regions whose working days and office cultures did not line up neatly. The communications challenge was not merely to broadcast from New York. It was to let a global company feel global without making its offices feel interchangeable.

His team spent two months rebuilding the all-hands meeting. Employees gathered in their local offices. The chief executive opened with five minutes on an important topic. The president followed with a ten-minute financial update. Then the cameras went dark and each office held its own regional session. The format offered a central heartbeat and local circulation. Corporate unity did not require regional personality to surrender at the door.

“I'm a big believer that internal and external communications need to be connected.”Jesse Comart, on building internal communications

This is one of Comart's most consistent positions. Employees should not learn company news from the press. External announcements should usually have an internal counterpart. When the two functions are linked, employees understand the public story and can become credible advocates for it. When they are not, a company asks its own people to applaud a performance whose rehearsal they were not allowed to attend.

After MediaMath came Two Sigma, the quantitative investment manager, where Comart served as senior vice president of communications. The vocabulary changed again. Programmatic advertising had involved algorithms, auctions and consumer data. Quantitative finance added models, markets and the reserve of a large private firm. His career was becoming a tour of businesses that are technically intricate, publicly consequential and very easy to describe badly.

Six months of work before one click

Comart joined GoodLeap in 2021 as senior vice president and head of communications. A year later, while discussing how to launch an internal function from scratch, he offered advice that runs against the twitchy tempo of corporate software: “You want to do 6 months of work before you press send.”

The months are not a sabbatical. They are for deciding what the channel must accomplish, connecting its goals to company values, enlisting the C-suite and HR, finding enthusiastic users and setting norms. An intranet without a purpose is merely an expensive place to forget a password. A newsletter without trust is furniture for the inbox.

His phrase for leadership cadence is equally practical: increase the frequency to lower the pressure. When executives communicate only twice a year, each meeting arrives burdened like a royal wedding. More regular exposure permits a human scale. Yet Comart adds the necessary brake. Too much communication produces saturation and disengagement. The work is editorial in the oldest sense: selection, timing and judgment.

At GoodLeap, the message meets the monthly bill

GoodLeap sits at a crowded intersection. Its software and lending products are used around consequential purchases - rooftop solar, battery storage, energy-efficient heating and cooling, windows and other home systems. The company has to speak to homeowners who want transparent terms, contractors who need quick tools, capital markets that assess risk and policymakers who care about consumer protection and energy infrastructure.

Comart's 2024 promotion joined marketing and communications more formally. He argued that communications tied closely to business and revenue goals becomes marketing in the broadest sense. The tactics remain distinct, but their destination is shared: a person may buy the product, invest in the company, work there or grant it the institutional permission to operate.

That logic appeared in his account of GoodLeap's first customer summit in Austin. The event packed 24 speakers into five hours, along with product launches, live demonstrations, customer conversations, a magician and a robot. His conclusion was less circus than show-and-tell. If a company wants people to think differently about it, the company must provide something visible. Positioning becomes persuasive when the product can walk onto the stage.

“How can marketing and comms pros adopt new tech while maintaining quality and uniqueness?”The question Comart says he asks regularly

The professor returns to the practical school

The circle closes at George Washington University. Comart earned a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in legislative affairs and political communications there. He now sits on the board of the Graduate School of Political Management and serves as an adjunct professor. It is a fitting return for an alumnus whose career has tested political communication in places that do not look, at first glance, like politics.

But companies contain constituencies. Executives form coalitions. Employees read silences. Regulators interpret commitments. Customers vote with money and attention. A chief communications officer operating across these groups practices a domestic diplomacy with quarterly targets.

Teaching also exposes a useful tension in Comart's current preoccupation: artificial intelligence. He is watching how it changes marketing and communications, but his stated question includes the words “quality” and “uniqueness.” Those are not efficiency metrics. They are editorial standards. The tool can accelerate production; it cannot decide whether the result sounds like this institution, deserves this audience's time or makes a promise the business can keep.

Across Comart's career, the glamour is routinely assigned to the wrong moment. The press release, keynote and campaign launch draw the light, while the decisive work is the quiet wiring beforehand: measurable goals, authentic leadership, informed employees, compatible channels and enough repetition to make trust feel ordinary. A message earns its keep when it moves through that system without becoming less true at every stop.

This is patient work in industries addicted to speed. It is also why Comart's long title makes sense. Marketing and communications are not identical, and he does not pretend they use identical budgets, metrics or tactics. He simply refuses to let their borders become excuses. The homeowner, colleague and policymaker all meet the same company eventually. Better that the company has met itself first.