Some companies are called when a thing breaks. Keadjian is often called earlier, at the more interesting moment when nothing is technically broken and yet almost nothing is moving. A utility has a safety program. A developer has a plan. An agency has a policy. The engineers understand it, the lawyers have read it, and the public is unconvinced. Somewhere between a spreadsheet and a town-hall microphone, certainty has leaked out of the room.
This is the gap Keadjian Associates has made into a business. Founded by Jason Keadjian in 2005, the privately held Walnut Creek firm combines strategic communications with management consulting. The label matters. A conventional publicity agency asks how to make the announcement land. Keadjian's public method asks whether the organization has listened closely enough to know what it should announce.
“First we listen. Then we act.”Keadjian's statement of approach
Four ordinary verbs, in an expensive order
The company's process is almost suspiciously plain: listen, identify, solve, mobilize. There is no proprietary acronym to license. But the order contains the idea. First, learn who has standing in the argument and what each person actually fears. Then separate a missing fact from a conflicting interest. Only after that does the firm develop messages, revise the project's position and build a campaign across audiences and geographies.
What fails first in a contentious project is often the shared map. Experts describe a system; residents describe an experience. One side talks in probabilities, the other in consequences. Keadjian's work is to put those descriptions in the same frame. That can mean executive counsel and message development. It can also mean the unglamorous machinery of outreach: fact sheets, meeting facilitation, community surveys, production trackers, websites, social campaigns and people physically present in a neighborhood.
A firm built for arguments with consequences
Keadjian organizes its expertise around six arenas: energy, land use, infrastructure, environment, health care and education. These are not impulse-purchase categories. They are systems where an institution's decision can change a skyline, a hospital routine, a campus or the risk profile of an electrical grid. They are also systems in which regulatory approval and public acceptance are related but not interchangeable.
Where the communication load gathers
Public records make the positioning concrete. PG&E documents identify Keadjian as a communications and engagement partner on wildfire-safety work. A 2024 wildfire mitigation guidebook credits the firm with strategic communications and engagement support. In Concord, reporting on the former naval weapons station redevelopment said Brookfield brought Keadjian in for community outreach that would include neighborhood meetings, market pop-ups, newsletters and surveys. This is communication as fieldwork, not merely coverage.
Those two numbers explain each other. During the pandemic, complex public programs did not become less necessary; the rooms in which people understood them disappeared. The San Francisco Business Times reported that Keadjian grew more than 50 percent over two years while maintaining a staff that was 70 percent women. By 2024, the publication ranked it second among Bay Area advertising and PR agencies by local headcount, with 70 employees in the five-county region and 90 companywide. Current company data puts the team near 100.
The product is alignment; the deliverables are everything else
The service menu is broad: corporate communications, public affairs, crisis preparation, community relations, media and marketing, coaching, creative services and management consulting. Broad menus can be vague. Here, the combination reveals the commercial model. Keadjian sells professional time and coordinated execution, scoped to an engagement. It can advise a senior executive in the morning, revise a stakeholder plan after lunch and produce the public-facing materials that evening.
That is also its distinction from a media-relations boutique or a lobbying shop. Keadjian works across the boundary between the decision and its explanation. The firm says stakeholder feedback can uncover new opportunities and alter project positioning before the larger campaign begins. In other words, the conversation is allowed to change the plan. Listening that cannot change anything is simply a nicer form of broadcasting.
The price of invisible workKeadjian does not publish a rate card, hourly fee or project minimum. Third-party agency listings also leave those figures undisclosed, so any precise price would be fiction. The honest answer is that this appears to be custom-scoped consulting: cost expands with the number of audiences, jurisdictions, meetings, creative assets and months a project requires. The less visible cost is organizational. A client must give the firm access to decision-makers and permit uncomfortable feedback to travel upward.
A campaign cannot reconcile a promise the operating team is unwilling to keep.
This approach has limits. It is a poor fit when the decision is already immutable but the engagement is presented as open, when leaders want attention without scrutiny, or when there is no credible action behind the message. Consensus is not guaranteed, either. Some conflicts are contests over values or scarce resources, not puzzles waiting for a clearer fact sheet. The method works best when there is time to listen, room to revise and a client willing to treat people as participants rather than targets.
The useful thing to steal
Most organizations cannot hire an outside team for every hard conversation. They can still copy the sequence. The transferable advantage is not Keadjian's contact list; it is the decision to postpone mobilization until the disagreement has been described accurately.
A field brief for the next difficult project
- List every group that can slow, reshape or legitimize the work.
- Write each concern in that group's language, not your own.
- Mark which concerns require information and which require a changed action.
- Give one person authority to reconcile the message with the operating plan.
- Choose channels only after the first four steps are complete.
There is something pleasantly unfashionable about all this. The communications world is full of dashboards that measure what happened after publication. Keadjian's wager is that the most consequential metric may be found earlier: how much the organization learned before it spoke. For a land-use plan, a wildfire program or a hospital initiative, that is not a poetic distinction. It is often the difference between an audience that has received a message and a community that believes it was heard.