Meredith O’Sullivan and the value of being trusted

Jennifer Garner paused on the red carpet and adjusted Meredith O’Sullivan’s tuxedo jacket. She straightened the publicist’s shirt, too, borrowing the small, practical gestures usually performed in the other direction. Outside NeueHouse Hollywood in November 2022, the client had briefly taken charge of presentation. O’Sullivan was the person being celebrated. Someone had to look after her lapels.

The reversal made a good photograph because it made sense. Garner had come to honor her longtime publicist and friend at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles’ Big Night Out. Usually, the actress would be the reason for the cameras. Here was an evening when the person beside her had a reason to stay in the frame.

Garner also supplied a useful account of their relationship: “She has mentored me since she was about 22, and I was 27,” she joked. The arithmetic was part of the joke; the affection was plain. Her description put mentorship alongside representation, making room for a kind of influence that does not appear on a movie poster.

O’Sullivan’s professional title is co-founder and co-CEO of The Lede Company. A title can tell you who shares responsibility for a business. That exchange with Garner gets closer to what her work requires: another person willing to place consequential parts of a public life in her hands.

Eleven years before the leap

O’Sullivan joined 42West from BWR in 2007. By the time she left in June 2018, she was a managing director. Her departure came with those of Amanda Silverman and Sarah Levinson Rothman, colleagues who would become her business partners. Eleven years separated her arrival at the established agency from the decision to help start another.

The announcement from their former employers was affectionate. The departing executives had contributed to the agency’s growth, and their bosses acknowledged the appeal of entrepreneurship. There is a particular awkwardness to leaving a business built on relationships: an organization has employed you, while people have come to depend on you personally. Those two facts travel together until departure day.

Lede began in 2018, with Christine Su becoming its fourth co-founder. Silverman and O’Sullivan brought talent publicity experience, Rothman corporate communications, and Su brand expertise. The founders shared the chief executive role. Their business would have to accommodate the places where these practices met, as well as the clients who arrived through each woman’s work.

By December, the agency appeared second on the annual PR Power List, with 32 employees listed. That was an editorial ranking, rather than a measure of revenue. Even with that qualification, the speed matters. A new company had acquired an institutional outline within months. The work behind the founders’ reputations had, of course, taken much longer.

The early roster crossed several kinds of business: entertainment, animation, consumer products and streetwear. Illumination, Live Nation Productions and Stadium Goods were among the names attached to the young firm. The founders were building an employer and an organization around professional relationships that already existed. A fresh company name did not make those relationships young.

A star has more than one audience

By 2022, Lede’s work made an argument about the changing shape of celebrity. The firm represented performers and businesses associated with performers, including Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine and Will Smith’s Westbrook. It also worked with fashion labels. A person might arrive with a film to promote, a company to discuss and a fashion audience paying attention.

Those interests do not produce identical publicity assignments. A film has a release date. A business needs an identity that can outlast a release. A designer entering television acquires viewers who may know little about the clothes. Putting these conversations inside one agency creates opportunities to coordinate them, while leaving plenty of decisions about which connection is useful.

Lede’s first European office opened in London in 2022. At that point, its 130-person operation spanned five divisions. The expansion followed the geography of a business already working across entertainment and brands. O’Sullivan’s talent practice belonged to an agency whose clients and prospective audiences could be in different countries and different industries at once.

Her own account of choosing clients starts with mutual understanding. She asks whether representative and client connect and respect one another. She has also argued for bringing capable leaders into the company and giving them room to work. Both ideas depend on recognizing that judgment belongs to people, even when the organization grows.

When invited to illustrate her work with a particular client story, she offered a compact professional boundary: “I never give specifics about clients.” For a publicist answering questions about herself, it is a wonderfully inconvenient sentence. The storyteller is available; some of the stories remain with their owners.

The work behind the award

The Sherry Lansing Award she received in 2022 recognized her commitment to mentorship. Before the gala, O’Sullivan had served as a mentor in the organization’s Women in Entertainment Mentorship program. Garner’s introduction therefore had a second meaning: she was celebrating someone whose interest in advising people extended beyond the usual client relationship.

The award recognizes professional achievement alongside investment in the next generation. O’Sullivan shared the evening’s program with honorees from music, fashion and other parts of entertainment. The setting suited someone whose working life involves making introductions across those worlds. The purpose of the gathering, though, was specific: supporting mentoring relationships for young people in Los Angeles.

Her connection continues beyond that evening. Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles lists Meredith O’Sullivan Wasson, affiliated with The Lede Company, on its board. The organization describes the board’s responsibility as setting strategic direction and providing financial oversight. Service carries duties after the applause has ended and the photographs have been selected.

The organization works with nearly 1,500 children across Los Angeles County each year. That is its reach, rather than a number attributable to one director. O’Sullivan’s place within that effort gives the career a local dimension. Her company works internationally; the mentoring organization’s relationships are built one young person and one adult at a time.

“I never give specifics about clients.”

Meredith O’Sullivan, on professional discretion

Building room for other people

By its fifth anniversary in 2023, Lede had expanded from three divisions to five and added a Paris presence through the acquisition of Olivier Bourgis Communication and Marketing. The progression gave the founders more than a larger roster. It required them to lead an organization containing other leaders, teams and professional histories.

The agency’s stated approach to hiring gives some detail about how it wants that organization to work. In 2024, it described working with historically Black colleges and universities, recruiters focused on inclusion and a range of vendors to bring different perspectives into its teams. These were company commitments made under four female founders, including O’Sullivan.

Its next additions kept widening the range of assignments. A Nashville office opened in November 2024 for its music business. An events practice built on existing work with fashion houses. Each expansion added people responsible for a particular craft, and another reason for colleagues from different practices to speak to one another.

In June 2025, Lede acquired Element Brand Group. Founder Heather Leeds Greenfield joined as partner and head of brand partnerships, bringing her team with her. Element’s work had included Airbnb, Audible, Coca-Cola and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee. The transaction added experience in arranging commercial relationships and integrated marketing to the founders’ original communications business.

That is a revealing development for a company associated with publicists. A partnership has obligations, participants and practical deliverables alongside its announcement. Adding that capability brings more of the work surrounding a public association inside the organization. O’Sullivan and her fellow founders were extending the business into another part of their clients’ working lives.

London calls again

On October 22, 2026, Lede announced its acquisition of London agency Aisle 8. Founder Lauren Winslade would become president of brand for Lede’s UK operation, with Aisle 8’s 21-person team joining the business. Winslade would report to Su, while Matthew Avento continued overseeing talent and strategic communications in London.

The allocation of roles gives a concrete picture of shared leadership. O’Sullivan remained one of the co-founders and co-CEOs announcing the transaction; specialist responsibilities sat with named executives. The agency she helped establish had become a place where another founder could bring a team and continue leading a defined part of the business.

Aisle 8 brought British media relationships and clients including Merit and Bicester Village. Alongside the earlier Paris and Element acquisitions, it extended Lede’s existing mix of talent and brand work. Eight years after launch, the latest development was another business combination, with the everyday integration of people and practices still to follow.

Lede’s own company account now lists more than 240 employees, over 150 corporate and brand clients, and more than 250 talent clients. Those figures describe the whole firm. They also give a sense of the managerial distance between founding a company with colleagues and helping run an organization in which many relationships happen without a founder in the room.

A rather specific taste of Los Angeles

Ask O’Sullivan about Los Angeles itself, and the answer becomes pleasantly concrete. She singles out The Serving Spoon, praising its shrimp and grits and its history as a family business. She is also enthusiastic about the city’s Mexican restaurants. “I eat chips and salsa daily,” she said. Here, at least, is a habit that requires no elaborate interpretation.

The detail is welcome beside the executive titles and company announcements. Publicists spend so much of their working lives helping other people become legible that a plain personal preference can feel like a small opening. There is a person here with a regular appetite, a city she knows through its restaurants, and a recommendation more useful at lunchtime than a client list.

The career has involved a similar movement between the personal and the organizational: a relationship with an actor, a partnership with colleagues, a mentoring commitment, a company with offices abroad. Trust has to survive each change in scale. Garner’s gesture on that carpet offers a particularly economical image of it. For once, someone else was checking that Meredith O’Sullivan was ready for the photograph.