The crisis begins, as crises often do, with a sentence nobody wants to finish. “A reporter is asking about…” Or perhaps, “The board has learned…” Somewhere in the room a lawyer begins removing adjectives. Someone from operations asks for another hour. An executive, feeling the magnetic pull of the microphone, proposes saying something “off the record.” This is the moment LaBreche sells: the interval between an organization realizing it has a problem and deciding what it can truthfully, usefully say.
LaBreche is a Minnesota communications consultancy led by Beth LaBreche, a former newspaper reporter, agency founder, corporate executive and professional translator of institutional anxiety. The company handles crisis and change communications, executive media training, public relations, content strategy, media monitoring and temporary communications leadership. Its clients are executives, boards, communications teams, nonprofits and entrepreneurs. They tend to arrive with either very good news that could be mishandled or very bad news that already has been.
The distinction matters. Plenty of agencies are built to attract attention. LaBreche is built for the more difficult task of managing attention once it has become unavoidable.
A company with three lives
To understand the current LaBreche, it helps to notice that the name has described three rather different businesses. Beth founded the first in 1990. For 13 years it was LaBreche Murray, a growing Minneapolis public relations shop. Then the partners discovered a familiar incompatibility: they wanted different speeds.
Beth wanted growth. She also admitted to a feeling that business profiles rarely include: boredom. “I wanted to grow it and was getting a little bored with the business,” she told Upsize in 2007. A valuation firm helped establish what each owner contributed, and Beth bought out minority partner Jerry Murray. The partnership formally ended in 2006. Nothing spectacular had collapsed. The operating agreement had simply stopped matching the owners’ ambitions - the first system to fail was alignment.
The second life reached its conclusion in 2012. LaBreche joined Gage, bringing a public relations capability to a larger agency known for digital, loyalty and promotional work. Beth became vice president of strategic development. It was a neat strategic fit: Gage had scale and channels; LaBreche had media judgment and content.
The third life began in 2017. After senior roles at Gage and the Fortune 200 agricultural cooperative CHS, Beth returned to the family name. This time, the proposition was deliberately compact. There would be fractional assignments, projects and on-call work. The founder herself would be the product.
No bill for waiting
The most revealing feature of LaBreche is not a service but a price structure. Many crisis advisers charge a monthly retainer to remain available. LaBreche says it does not. A company can prepare the relationship, put Beth on the crisis team and call when an issue erupts. The meter starts when the work does. The hourly rate is not published.
This is not philanthropy. It is positioning. The model lowers the psychological cost of asking for help early, especially for a mid-sized business that cannot justify another permanent senior hire. It also says something about the customer: this works best for an organization that already has capable operators and needs concentrated judgment, not an army of account executives.
“We won’t recommend PR unless the story has potential to make news.”LaBreche on earned media
That sentence is a small rebellion against the agency habit of confusing motion with progress. Media lists can be assembled. Releases can be distributed. Reporters can be pestered. None of those actions creates news. LaBreche’s claim is that judgment comes first: Is there a story? Who is affected? What can be said? What must be said? Which channel will make the answer clearer rather than merely louder?
Interim leadership and hands-on communications for reorganizations, new executives, transactions, layoffs and market shifts.
Scenarios, roles, starter statements, key messages, media handling, internal communications and after-action work.
One-to-one coaching, mock interviews, presentation critique and live support when the questions turn sharp.
Real-time alerts, sentiment, share of voice, topic momentum, influencers and international conversation maps.
News judgment, story pitches, releases, targeted outreach, interview coordination and coverage amplification.
Content strategy, editorial calendars, channel design and coordination of writers, video teams and designers.
The product is a decision sequence
A crisis plan can look like a document. In practice, it is choreography. LaBreche’s public materials list the unglamorous pieces: identify the team, map scenarios, write policies, prepare question-and-answer sheets, draft starter statements, schedule training, monitor issues and determine how internal communications move. The value is not literary. It is that nobody has to invent governance while the story is moving.
From signal to response
The sequence also explains how LaBreche differs from a general marketing agency. A generalist can bring creative production, paid media and large delivery teams. LaBreche brings senior counsel, confidentiality and speed. Through relationships cultivated in the PROI Worldwide network, Beth can also call regional specialists when geography, language or local media culture matters. It is a hub-and-expert model rather than a payroll-and-office model.
The fit is not universal. A global brand seeking hundreds of simultaneous deliverables may need a large integrated agency. A tiny business with no internal owner may find hourly senior counsel expensive if every basic task must be outsourced. And no communications plan can compensate for leaders who withhold facts, refuse rehearsal or mistake message discipline for evasion. LaBreche’s model depends on access, trust and a client willing to make decisions.
The reader’s five-page playbook
The most transferable lesson here costs nothing: decide the architecture before you need the words. Most companies begin with a statement because a statement is visible. The better starting point is authority. Who owns the response? Who verifies facts? Who calls legal? Who speaks to employees before employees learn from a news alert? Who watches the conversation after the CEO leaves the podium?
- Name a small crisis team and one final decision-maker.
- List five plausible scenarios and the audiences each one affects.
- Draft a truthful starter statement for each scenario - short enough to approve quickly.
- Run one hostile mock interview and record it.
- Choose a monitoring method and a threshold for escalation.
That is the quiet logic beneath LaBreche’s business. Reputation is discussed as if it were mist - atmospheric, vague, impossible to hold. But the work is remarkably physical. A phone tree. A prepared executive. A list of stakeholders. A dashboard. A paragraph that does not speculate. A decision made at noon instead of 4:45.
Beth LaBreche has spent 36 years moving among the roles that make those decisions difficult: reporter, agency owner, acquired executive, corporate communications leader, board adviser, consultant. The company that bears her name has become smaller than the one she sold. Its wager is that, in the decisive hour, the room does not need more people. It needs someone who has seen the hour before.