Katie G. Harvey and the value of a second pair of hands

The wicker furniture had been left behind. Katie G. Harvey gave it a coat of spray paint and made it the waiting room. In 1994, a new public relations agency in San Antonio needed somewhere for clients to sit. The previous tenants had inadvertently made a contribution to the launch.

Harvey was 24. She had $2,000 and a first client secured through a conversation with her boss: could she keep doing the work, but through a business of her own? Her boss agreed. Before there was an agency with offices in two Texas cities, there was someone willing to say yes to a young woman’s proposal.

Today, Harvey leads K Harvey Brand Partners, the business long known as KGBTexas Communications. The furniture story survives because it makes the beginning legible. So does another decision, made much later: in 2022, she brought five executive colleagues into ownership. The first chapter depended on somebody backing her. The later one involved giving other people a stake.

A desk before a blueprint

Both of Harvey’s parents were entrepreneurs. Her father worked in the Arabian horse industry, while her mother ran a small business that allowed her to raise Harvey and her brother at home. Business ownership belonged to family life before it became a career choice. Their confidence in her helped make the risk feel possible.

She graduated from Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State, in 1991. The university lists her degree as a BS in Journalism. She moved to San Antonio in 1992 and founded the agency two years later. The dates give the journey an orderly appearance. Her recollection of planning is considerably less ceremonial.

“Honestly, I didn’t have a plan.”

Katie G. Harvey, on her original five-year plan

The early business had room for improvisation beyond the decor. Harvey remembers forwarding the phones with her first employee, Elizabeth, and going to the pool when there was nothing to work on. It is an appealing admission from someone in communications. Even a founder’s calendar occasionally contains an afternoon that refuses to become a milestone.

The work expanded through clients’ questions. A public relations assignment would lead to another problem they wanted solved. Advertising, paid media, social media and digital work joined the offering. Her agency’s development followed the requests coming across the desk. The original description of the business gradually needed more words.

The horse that came back into the story

There is another timeline running alongside the office one. Harvey was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and moved to Texas at two when her father set up an Egyptian Arabian horse farm. She grew up in China Spring, outside Waco, riding, caring for horses and helping around the farm.

At about 14, she lost interest. At 30, her father gave her an Arabian horse as a wedding present, and the interest returned. Some wedding gifts spend the marriage in a cupboard. This one brought back a pursuit that would take her into competition.

By January 2019, Harvey had won 15 U.S. and Canadian national championship titles. That is a record from a particular moment, rather than a running total. It is enough to establish that the horses in her biography occupy more than a decorative corner. She had also been named Working Western Amateur of the Year by the Arabian Professional and Amateur Horseman’s Association.

Her official biography still singles out competitive riding. The interest deserves its own space, without requiring every hour in a saddle to explain an hour at a desk. It has roots in childhood, a memorable return and results earned in another arena. A business biography becomes more interesting when it leaves room for the rest of a life.

A birthday present for somebody else

In 2014, at the agency’s twentieth anniversary, Harvey helped launch the Catalyst Award with law firm Jackson Walker. A startup owned by a woman could win a year of communications strategy services, including planning and ongoing mentor meetings. The offer addressed a problem a new business can recognize immediately: having something to offer and needing help explaining it.

Her stated aim was to share experience gained while building her own company. The agency’s skills became the anniversary gift. It was a practical choice for a communications firm, and a more useful object for a founder than a commemorative plaque.

Five years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary produced a related initiative. Again working with Jackson Walker, the agency announced a Community Impact Award offering $25,000 in marketing services. Two nonprofits, one in Houston and one in San Antonio, would each receive $12,500 in work, with public relations, public affairs, advertising and creative services among the options.

Both programs put a defined offer behind Harvey’s interest in helping other organizations. They also show how her idea of an anniversary developed: take stock of what the agency had learned, then make some of that knowledge available to someone else. The years in business supplied the occasion. The services supplied the substance.

Who gets a stake in the next chapter?

By 2022, sharing took another form. Five members of Harvey’s executive leadership team became partners in the agency. She described trusting the group and valuing their investment in the work. Ownership made that relationship explicit, giving people who had helped build the business a stake in its continuation.

The current leadership list includes partners Elizabeth Marshall Black, Jonathan Gurwitz, Jessica Serna, Edith Ramirez and Ron Landreth. Their names sit alongside Harvey’s on the agency’s website. A business that began with a founder and one client now introduces itself through a group of people responsible for what happens next.

That change gives the December 2024 rebrand some context. At its thirty-year milestone, KGBTexas Communications became K Harvey Brand Partners. The surname kept the connection to the beginning. The partnership structure was already in place. The new name made an established business introduce itself again.

There are plenty of ways to measure an agency’s growth: services, assignments, markets. Ownership adds a different question. Who gets to participate in the value those years have created? Harvey answered it by bringing colleagues inside. The answer belongs in her biography as much as the original incorporation.

Professional recognition has accompanied that longer career. In 2022, PRSA San Antonio’s Del Oro Awards recognized her with the Tex Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award, including her work mentoring communications professionals. In 2024, she was among the San Antonio Business Journal’s C-Suite honorees. The milestones acknowledge a career whose daily work is mostly less visible than an awards stage.

The city outside the office

Harvey’s professional world reaches well beyond consumer campaigns. The agency’s work has included the San Antonio River Authority, Harris County Flood Control District, VIA Metropolitan Transit, the city’s 2012 and 2017 bond programs and Pre-K 4 SA. These are assignments connected to the everyday systems and decisions of a place.

That civic dimension became more public when she served as the Greater San Antonio Chamber’s board chair in 2023. The role brought a wider brief than running her own firm. Her priorities that year included a CEO search, the legislative session and strengthening the relationship between San Antonio and Austin as a region.

In July 2026, the Chamber announced that she would chair the second cohort of Executive Connections: San Antonio. The program is designed for senior executives who have recently moved to the region or taken on a new role. Participants meet local leaders and get an introduction to the issues shaping the community.

Infrastructure, transportation, utilities, education and workforce development are among its subjects. The cohort is limited to 20 participants. It gives an organized form to something a newcomer often has to assemble slowly: an understanding of how a city works and the people who can explain it.

For Harvey, the assignment extends a long relationship with San Antonio. She arrived after college, started a business there and became involved in its civic institutions. Now she helps other executives establish their bearings. A title may arrive on the first day of a job; a working knowledge of the place usually takes longer.

Leaving room for a conversation

Harvey has also used her public platform to write about Christian faith and leadership. She has explained that speaking openly about her beliefs might make other people more comfortable discussing theirs in a business setting. The writing puts a personal commitment alongside the professional role, rather than leaving readers to guess what matters to her.

Her public conversation extends to the agency’s thePoint series. Its episode list brings together people working in business and civic life across Texas, including Roy Spence, David Robinson and Henry Cisneros. Extended interviews appear under More to thePoint. An episode with Phil Green includes Harvey herself.

In a 2020 essay, she wrote about entrepreneurial thinking as a way to help solve problems and called for thoughtful conversations about difficult public questions. That is a useful thread to carry back through her story: the proposal to a boss, the client asking for help, the colleague becoming an owner, the newcomer getting an introduction.

None of those exchanges could have been furnished by the wicker chairs alone. Still, the chairs were a start. Harvey found something usable in the room she had rented, gave it some attention and opened the door. Thirty years later, the business has more people with a stake in keeping that door open.