In the spring of 2020, L.C. Williams & Associates had a perfectly sensible story to tell. Its client, Monte Nido & Affiliates, was opening two eating-disorder treatment facilities in the Chicago area. New place, new service, local relevance. The agency secured coverage in the Chicago Sun-Times, Crain's Chicago Business and elsewhere. Then the world acquired a different story, and it was the only story anybody wanted.
COVID-19 consumed the healthcare press. A ribbon-cutting pitch, even one involving needed care, suddenly felt as if it had arrived from a previous century. This is the point at which a communications agency earns its fee. The first idea had not become badly written; it had become irrelevant.
The launch that disappeared
LCWA went looking for a new question. Its research found that disrupted school, lost routines and isolation were creating particular trouble for adolescents with eating disorders. So when Monte Nido opened its Naperville program for girls ages 11 to 17, the agency stopped leading with real estate. It connected the facility to the pressure families were already living through.
That shift produced 12 stories and almost 16 million impressions. The original goal had been five or six placements. What changed the team's mind was not a brainstorm in the abstract. The surrounding facts changed, the team researched the consequence, and the consequence supplied the new story.
The first idea had not become badly written. It had become irrelevant.
There is a useful miniature of LCWA in that episode. The firm, founded in Chicago by the late Louis C. Williams Jr. in 1985, does public relations, digital marketing, crisis counsel, events, research and media training. Those labels are accurate and unilluminating. The more distinctive product is translation: making an expert's knowledge legible without sanding off the expertise.
“Since high school, I wanted to work in a public relations firm.”Kim Blazek Dahlborn, president and CEO
One deck board, two truths
Consider Trex Refuge, a fire-resistant cellular PVC deck board. To builders in fire-prone Wildland-Urban Interface communities, the pertinent facts include ASTM E84 Class A Flame Spread compliance and ignition-resistance standards. To a homeowner watching another wildfire season approach, the pertinent fact is quieter: this material might make home feel less exposed.
LCWA split the 2026 introduction into two phases. Trade publications got code readiness, performance, colorways and warranty information in January. Consumers got contractor and homeowner voices in March, with outreach concentrated in California, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado. Same object, different anxiety. The campaign recorded more than 130.2 million impressions and $1.95 million in reported ad-equivalency value.
The same move powered work for NexTrex, a program that helps nonprofits, schools, municipalities and other community groups collect plastic film for recycling. Prospects did not need one more sustainability statistic. Interviews revealed that they wanted evidence that an organization like theirs could make the program work. LCWA built stories around a resale center, a recycling nonprofit and a county. In 2025, 38 new partners joined, participation rose 18 percent year over year, and collected plastic increased from 2.4 million pounds to more than 4 million.
Attention, measured in reported impressions
Campaign totals reported by LCWA. Bars use a compressed visual scale so the smaller campaigns remain readable.
The niche is not a limitation
The agency's client history is an odd shelf: Trex and Latham beside the American Academy of Sleep Medicine; Monte Nido beside Bosch, Hershey, Ace Hardware, Comcast and Wilsonart. LCWA organizes its expertise around consumer brands, corporate and B2B work, home and housewares, healthcare, associations and professional services, and food and beverage. It is a portfolio built for people who enjoy learning how the hinge works.
That appetite matters in trade media, where a generic claim is easy to ignore and technical specificity is the admission price. For Sightline Commercial Solutions, LCWA began with a short project profile about a pedestrian bridge in Gulfport, Mississippi. A construction publication asked for more. Working with the project manager, the agency expanded the engineering challenges, community purpose and design choices into a seven-page feature. The technical material was not baggage. It was the reason the article deserved seven pages.
Clients buy this as custom professional service, not as software and not from a public menu of prices. LCWA is independent and management-owned. Its pitch is the range of a large shop with a smaller firm's access to senior people. The leadership roster gives that claim some weight: CEO Kim Blazek Dahlborn joined when the company was four years old; executive vice president Shannon Quinn has been there since 2001. For work outside the United States, membership in the Public Relations Global Network supplies local agency partners across six continents.
A usable little machine
The transferable lesson is not “hire a publicist and hope for billions of impressions.” It is a sequence that a founder, marketer or communications team can use before writing the first press release.
Borrow the LCWA sequence
- Name the audience precisely. “Consumers” is not precise; California homeowners in wildfire-risk areas is.
- Ask what evidence that audience trusts. A code matters to a builder. A peer's success matters to a nonprofit director.
- Translate the feature into a consequence without discarding the feature.
- Give journalists usable material: expert access, real cases, images, data and enough technical depth to report.
- Change the premise when events make it stale. Protect the objective, not the original pitch.
This machine has limits. It depends on a product that works, experts who can speak, customers willing to provide proof and a claim sturdy enough for scrutiny. It is poorly suited to a company seeking attention before it has evidence, or to one that treats subject-matter access as an inconvenience. A human angle cannot rescue a hollow promise for long.
Nor should every result be collapsed into a giant impression number. LCWA's more persuasive outcomes are often behavioral or concrete: 38 organizations joining a recycling program; plastic collection rising 66.7 percent; nearly every invited trade publication covering Trex after tailored facility visits. Reach tells you that the door opened. Those details suggest somebody walked through it.
Forty years of borrowed spotlights
PR firms live in a curious position. If the work succeeds, the client is the one in the headline. LCWA's name sits behind stories about sleep, pools, decking, treatment, bridges and household goods. Even its awards tend to carry the client's idea: “Sleep Recharges You,” “Trex Makes It Easy,” “Office Life.” The craft is visible mostly in retrospect, when you notice how neatly an obscure specification became a reason to care.
That may explain the durability. LCWA was named to Forbes and Statista's inaugural 2021 list of America's Best PR Agencies and has collected Chicago industry awards, but it still describes its advantage in plain service language: flexibility, experience, priority and value. The less corporate translation is simpler. Learn somebody else's world. Find the detail with stakes. Hand the spotlight back.