Larry Rosenfeld and the Call That Gets Returned

When Larry Rosenfeld retired from running Sage Communications in 2021, an editor offered an unusual compliment. Nick Wakeman remembered a public relations executive who understood his publication, asked useful questions and respected the editor’s right to decide what belonged in it. In a business devoted to getting attention, Rosenfeld had made an impression by knowing where to stop.

There was a particularly good test of that restraint. Wakeman had worked for Rosenfeld’s wife, Jennifer, who oversaw sales and operations at the publication and its siblings. Rosenfeld could have treated the connection as a convenient shortcut. Wakeman recalled that he never used it to secure favorable treatment for a client. The relationship remained a relationship. The news judgment remained the editor’s.

Wakeman also remembered a “wicked sense of humor.” That detail helps. A long career in government technology involves an extraordinary quantity of terminology that appears to have been assembled by committee and then sent back for more committee. A little wit is useful equipment.

The returned call is a modest measure of success. It is also a revealing one. Someone has to believe that answering will be worth the interruption. Rosenfeld’s career offers a way to think about how that belief gets earned, over years, among people whose business depends on telling the difference between a useful conversation and another pitch.

“Wicked sense of humor.”

Nick Wakeman, on Rosenfeld

A former boss becomes a partner

Before Sage, there was Stackig Advertising and Public Relations. Rosenfeld spent roughly three decades there. David Gorodetski joined the agency earlier in his own career, and Rosenfeld was his boss. Their eventual partnership grew out of working together long before they put their names on the same founding story.

After Stackig was sold, Gorodetski went on to lead interactive creative services at Ogilvy Public Relations. He later described reconsidering what he wanted from work after September 11, 2001. The decision to start Sage brought the two colleagues back together. Accounts of the agency’s beginnings place its early work in Gorodetski’s home basement.

By 2004, the partnership that would define Sage was under way: Rosenfeld as chief executive, Gorodetski as chief operating officer and executive creative director. One was an experienced agency leader; the other brought a career in visual communication. They had already seen each other at work. The new business gave that familiarity a different structure.

A former boss becoming a co-founder is an interesting change in the seating plan. Authority has to make room for shared ownership. Years later, Gorodetski described their working relationship in terms of mutual respect, candor and the understanding that they were in it together. His account makes the partnership sound less like a ceremonial handshake than a durable working arrangement.

What happens after the deal closes

Rosenfeld’s own writing gives the story some practical texture. In 2008, he published advice about communicating through a merger or acquisition. His attention went beyond the transaction announcement to the people who would have to live with the combined business: customers, employees, partners and the teams speaking to them every day.

He recommended clear, consistent messages tailored to each audience, an outreach program and visits by the chief executive to important offices. Employees working with federal customers needed facts and guidance, too. An executive could announce a deal in a moment; explaining its consequences would require many more conversations.

The useful detail is the emphasis on employees close to the customer. A merger reaches the outside world through their ordinary interactions. If they cannot explain what has changed, the carefully polished announcement has a short working life. Rosenfeld’s advice treated communication as something an organization had to equip people to do.

He returned to the connection between branding and internal behavior in 2009, discussing HP’s renaming of EDS. “Changing the brand forces a one-company, one-culture approach,” he said. A name change, in that reading, places demands on the organization underneath it. New stationery is comparatively easy.

Growth with a particular purpose

The agency Rosenfeld led expanded through both new business and acquisitions. Sage reported 25 percent growth for fiscal 2011, alongside a 43 percent staffing increase between January 2011 and January 2012. Those are separate measures, covering different periods; together they describe a company taking on more work and adding people to deliver it.

Its new clients ranged from technology businesses to the National Cherry Blossom Festival and S&R Foundation. The mix matters because Sage’s work extended beyond the federal contracting world that had shaped so much of Rosenfeld’s experience. Events, cultural organizations and commercial businesses brought their own audiences and their own reasons for needing help.

In November 2011, Sage acquired Brotman-Winter-Fried Communications, adding event planning capabilities and a broader consumer portfolio. It also moved its headquarters to Old Meadow Road in McLean to accommodate the expansion. Growth had the unglamorous physical consequence of needing somewhere to put everyone.

Rosenfeld’s explanation of the results centered on clients’ business objectives and limited budgets. He argued for choosing a combination of planning and marketing services that helped those clients achieve their goals. That is an accountable proposition: the campaign has to be useful to the business paying for it. The agency’s activity alone cannot settle the question.

A satellite business needs satellite knowledge

Another acquisition made the value of specialist knowledge explicit. In November 2013, Sage acquired Longbottom Communications, a marketing and public relations firm serving the satellite and space industry. The companies planned to appear together at that year’s Satellite Communications Conference & Expo.

Longbottom’s team stayed intact, with Penelope Longbottom and Patrick Boyle continuing to lead the division. That detail says something about what was being bought. An agency serving a technical industry carries knowledge in its people: the vocabulary, the customers, the history and the sense of which developments deserve attention.

Rosenfeld framed the combination around adding capabilities for commercial satellite and space, defense and energy customers. It was a specific expansion into fields where understanding the subject is a substantial part of the assignment. Knowing how to write a sentence is helpful. Knowing whether the sentence makes sense to the people buying satellite services is helpful sooner.

In 2016, Penelope Longbottom was selected for induction into the Satellite Hall of Fame. Rosenfeld publicly celebrated the recognition, pointing back to the reputation her firm had established before the acquisition. The distinction belonged to her. His comments acknowledged that the expertise Sage had brought inside already had a history of its own.

There is work. There is also play.

For a less corporate glimpse of Rosenfeld, consider the advice he offered his children in 2012. He began with work, repeated for emphasis, then immediately made room for play. The published item carried an instruction to be spontaneous. It is a pleasing contribution from someone whose professional life included strategic planning.

The distinction is ordinary enough to be believable. A person can care about preparation without wanting every hour of life to resemble a project schedule. Rosenfeld’s advice leaves room for effort and enjoyment in the same day. It also sits comfortably alongside the sense of humor his longtime editorial acquaintance remembered.

Sage’s anniversary archive supplies a visual companion: colleagues gathered in party clothes, holding props and appearing thoroughly willing to look ridiculous. An agency earns its living attending to appearances. It can apparently survive a paper mustache. The photograph offers a welcome interruption to the succession of titles and transactions.

There was also a professional habit of making room for other people’s knowledge. Rosenfeld sponsored a 2015 roundtable where reporters Frank Konkel and Aaron Gregg spoke with marketing leaders about what makes a story useful. The discussion emphasized concrete technology applications, financial information and an understanding of how journalists find leads.

A year earlier, Sage had sponsored a discussion about when organizations should handle marketing internally and when they should hire outside help. Rosenfeld welcomed hearing directly from the practitioners. For someone selling agency services, that was a sensible conversation to host: the client’s problem deserves a hearing before the proposed solution takes the floor.

Leaving the chair, keeping the connections

The leadership handover came in August 2021. Gorodetski became chief executive, and longtime Sage partner Julie Murphy became president. Rosenfeld’s retirement arrangement included a year as a consultant. The people taking over had worked inside the business; the transition carried their accumulated experience into the next chapter.

Gorodetski’s farewell described Rosenfeld as a friend, mentor and “occasional co-conspirator.” He credited his partner’s business instincts and ability to understand complicated technologies and client missions. The affectionate language belonged to someone who had known him as both boss and business partner. That is a considerable stretch of shared working life.

Retirement from the CEO’s chair did not conclude Rosenfeld’s appearance in business circles. A January 2024 CONNECTpreneur program listed him as co-founder of Tysons Angels Group. The organization’s June 2025 Summerfest program listed him as an investor with McLean Partners. These later affiliations add an investing chapter to the agency career.

There is a fitting continuity in that shift. Agency work and early-stage investing both bring people into conversations about what a business does and why anyone should care. The event listings establish the affiliation; the resemblance is a useful way to consider a career that has repeatedly put him close to people building companies.

Sage’s own twentieth-anniversary reflection thanked the employees, clients and partners who had carried the business forward. Rosenfeld had already handed over its leadership. The company was still telling its story, with other people deciding what came next. For a founder, there is something satisfying about reaching the point where the conversation continues without your having to make every call.