Eight Clients Walked Out the Door With Him

In 2014, Alan Fleischmann left Albright Stonebridge Group with a curious sort of balance sheet. He did not yet have the usual things that make a company look like a company: a staffed office, mature systems, a deep bench waiting for assignments. What he had were eight chief executives who said, in effect, wherever you are going, we are going too.

It is difficult to find a cleaner experiment in the value of trust. Remove the brand, the furniture and the institutional machinery. If the client still follows, the adviser was not merely renting credibility from the old letterhead. The relationship itself was an asset.

The chief executive with too many audiences

Laurel Strategies is a Washington, D.C. business advisory and strategic communications firm. That description is accurate in the way that calling a Swiss Army knife a pocket blade is accurate. Its public service list includes business strategy, leadership support, communications and positioning, crisis management, cybersecurity protocols and strategic philanthropy. Elsewhere it adds government affairs, investor relations, research, business intelligence, media relations and executive coaching.

The sprawl is the point. A modern CEO can make one decision and trigger six different arguments. Investors ask about return. Employees ask about values. Government officials ask about policy. Reporters ask who knew what, and when. Communities ask whether the company will stay. The legal answer may be precise and still be strategically disastrous.

“We will know you, and we will help you know yourself better.”Alan Fleischmann on Laurel's value proposition

Laurel calls this the age of the “CEO statesman.” The phrase can sound grand until a cyberattack, war, protest, acquisition or succession fight puts an executive in front of audiences that do not share a vocabulary. Then the job really does begin to resemble diplomacy. The firm maps those audiences, gathers intelligence, develops the position and helps carry it into the world.

The product is a sequence

A press release is a thing. Advice is harder to photograph. Laurel's work is best understood as a sequence: listen, map, decide, execute. Fleischmann has said the firm comes in asking questions rather than carrying a ready-made answer. This is not modesty for its own sake. In high-stakes counsel, a quick answer to the wrong question can be very expensive.

Consider a merger. It is simultaneously a capital-markets event, a workforce event, a regulatory matter, a media story and a test of the chief executive's promises. The order of communication matters. So does the identity of the messenger. A statement that arrives five minutes too soon can surprise employees; one that arrives five minutes too late can look evasive. Laurel's claim is that these are not separate workstreams to be handed to separate vendors after the strategy is finished. They are the strategy.

Tapiero, Laurel's co-founder, adds a revealing piece to the firm's range. At the World Bank Group she worked on privatization and founded the FIRST Initiative, a $66 million fund supporting financial-sector reform. At Laurel, her remit spans private equity, technology, family offices, financial communications, crisis, philanthropy and sustainable investment. The résumé crosses categories because the client problems cross categories.

What the invoice really buys

Laurel publishes no rate card. There is no basic tier, no enterprise dashboard and no free trial. It is a privately held, fee-for-service advisory whose public language repeatedly emphasizes bespoke work, senior access and execution. That makes the cost impossible to reduce to a software-style unit. A buyer is paying for experienced people to remain close to a consequential decision, sometimes around the clock.

This is also where the model is most vulnerable. The first thing missing at launch was infrastructure. Eight trusted relationships compensated for it. But relationships do not scale neatly. A founder can only sit in so many rooms, and a promise of 24/7 attention creates a permanent staffing problem. The firm answers with a network: policy hands, financiers, communicators, technologists and former public leaders attached to a relatively small core organization.

One publicly visible example of the execution side is GoldenTree Asset Management, which has named Laurel personnel as media contacts on corporate announcements. The firm's broader client list remains largely private, as one might expect from crisis and CEO counsel. Its stated market ranges from corporations and financial institutions to investors, founders, foundations and NGOs. The common denominator is not an industry. It is a leader whose decision has escaped the boundaries of a single department.

The part anyone can steal

The global network cannot be copied on a Tuesday afternoon. Neither can Fleischmann's career through Congress, Maryland government, Albright Stonebridge and an assortment of civic boards. But Laurel's operating logic is available to anyone.

First, resist the thrilling answer until the real question is clear. Second, draw the stakeholder map before drafting the message. Third, decide the sequence: who hears what, from whom, and in which room. Fourth, connect the declared value to an action. Finally, stay after the advice. A strategy that disappears at implementation is just an expensive opinion.

Fleischmann once imagined running for Congress. He changed his mind because he came to believe he could have more impact by helping other people lead. Laurel Strategies is the institutional version of that choice. It operates one step back from the spotlight, close enough to shape what the person in it sees. The eight clients who moved in 2014 understood the arrangement before the company had much else. They were not following an office. They were following a way of making decisions.