The origin of DH fits neatly on a cocktail napkin. Jim and Cher Desautel sketched their ideal communications firm over drinks at a resort on Priest Lake: adaptable, equitable and powered by people who cared. The charming part is the napkin. The consequential part is what came next. They started the company in their Spokane basement, hired Michelle Hege as employee No. 1 in 1998, and gave her room to grow into the institution rather than merely work for it.
Hege became a partner two years later. In 2013, after a transition discussed and shaped over years, she succeeded Cher Desautel as president and CEO. Today she is DH's CEO and majority owner, leading a communications agency with offices in Spokane and Seattle. Her name supplies the H in the sign outside. Her more revealing imprint is inside: an appetite for unfamiliar problems, a bias toward research and an insistence that the people receiving a message should help shape it.
This is a pleasantly odd posture for someone in the business of persuasion. Agencies are hired to arrive with answers. Hege's career suggests that the useful answer tends to arrive later, after someone has asked what people actually experience and then stayed quiet long enough to hear it.
An apprenticeship in how work really works
Hege was born in San Diego and raised in Spokane. She studied English literature and politics at Whitman College, a combination that looks almost suspiciously well tailored to a future in public communication: language on one side, power on the other. At Eastern Washington University, she earned a master's degree in organizational communications and met professor Jeff Stafford. He involved students in consulting projects, introducing Hege to private-sector work and to people who would become collaborators, clients and business partners.
The encounter gave her a vocation. It did not give her a glamorous first job, and she now treats that as a feature. Before DH, she worked in both a nonprofit and an insurance company. The nonprofit job came with the deluxe small-organization package: marketing, selling event tickets, coordinating the events and keeping the books. The insurance role taught her how a large institution moves, or sometimes declines to. One job showed her the whole shop floor. The other showed her the hallways.
Years later, speaking to students at her graduate alma mater in 2025, she did not sand those beginnings into a heroic montage. She told them that all work experience could be useful work experience. Her daily question in those early jobs was, “How can I make this organization successful today?” It is practical career advice because it returns attention to the work at hand. It is also a small operating system for a future chief executive.
- Joins the young Desautel agency as its first employee.
- Becomes a partner, two years into the job.
- Takes the president and CEO role after a deliberately planned succession.
- Leads DH's acquisition of Seattle-based Nyhus Communications.
The quiet machinery of succession
Business stories enjoy a coronation. DH's leadership change was more like careful carpentry. The founders built a partner group over time and remained available as counselors and shareholders after stepping away from daily operations. Hege had worked with Cher even before joining the agency; several partners had spent most of their careers together. The transition to CEO therefore carried history, chemistry and an unusual amount of rehearsal.
Hege once described management at the firm as “a team sport.” That phrase earns its keep. It rejects the fantasy of a lone genius at the top and makes room for the less photogenic work of shared judgment. It also explains how a founder-led shop can change hands without acting as if its memory has been erased.
The people-first culture was not merely a sentence in a values brochure. Hege described it through the ordinary emergencies of life: a family need, an unexpected departure from the office, colleagues picking up what must still get done. A value is most credible when nobody thinks to turn it into copy.
Patience did not mean standing still. In 2022, DH acquired Nyhus Communications, a Seattle public-affairs firm with nine employees. The deal expanded DH into a second city and broadened what the combined team could offer. Hege's public explanation focused on a prior working relationship and aligned values between the firms. That, too, sounds like succession thinking: growth is less perilous when trust arrives before the paperwork.
Listening is not the soft part
Hege's professional vocabulary keeps returning to voices, questions and realities. DH describes its work as research-fueled. Before deciding what an audience ought to hear, the team asks what motivates people, what stands in their way and what their days actually look like. The aim is not to gather decorative quotations for a presentation. It is to let the response alter the work.
This requires a mild surrender of agency vanity. The sharpest line in the room may be irrelevant. The expensive idea may be answering a question nobody asked. Listening introduces the possibility that a communications problem is partly an experience problem, a process problem or an institutional habit wearing a clever little messaging hat.
Begin with how the audience experiences the issue, not with the sentence the organization hopes to deliver.
During uncertainty, communicate early and honestly. Explain the next action, not merely the present intention.
Trust lives in the interval between the promise and the visible follow-through. Close that gap.
The same logic governs her view of crisis communication. Silence can feel cautious to the institution and alarming to everybody outside it. Her advice is blunt: communicate quickly, tell the truth, describe what happens next and then do it. An apology without repair is a performance. Repair without communication leaves people guessing. The job requires both.
She applies listening inward, too. DH calls itself a self-empowered team, with people trusted to make decisions and organize the work. For the leader, empowerment does not mean installing a process and admiring it from a safe distance. It means hearing when the process fails, convening the conversation and revising the tool. Autonomy still needs maintenance.
A Spokane career with a wider radius
Hege's civic work follows the same collaborative instinct. She served on the board of the Association of Washington Business, co-chaired its Rebound & Recovery Task Force, and led Greater Spokane Incorporated's board in 2020. She was elected to the United Heritage Financial Group board in 2021. The Spokane Journal of Business named her among its 23 People of Influence in 2023.
Regional business has its own choreography of rivals, partners and former rivals who become Tuesday's partners. Hege has called it “collabetition,” an inelegant word for an elegant reality. Agencies can compete for one proposal and assemble around the next. Cities do something similar. Spokane competes for attention and investment, then grows through coalitions among business, government and education.
That makes Hege's story distinctly local without making it small. Her firm began in a basement, grew up in downtown Spokane, and now works from both sides of Washington. She has remained interested in what institutions can do for communities, not simply how polished those institutions can sound while doing it.
Her career also offers a modest rebuttal to the idea that ambitious work requires a dramatic exit every few years. Hege changed jobs inside the same company because the company kept changing around her. Employee, partner, president, owner: each role widened the question she was responsible for answering. Staying became its own form of motion, helped by founders willing to share authority early and colleagues who had learned one another's rhythms over decades.
The student returns as the speaker
When Hege spoke at Eastern Washington University in 2025, Jeff Stafford was in the audience. The professor who helped her discover consulting watched his former student explain the career that followed. Her own child was then an EWU student as well. Careers rarely offer symmetry this tidy; when they do, one should resist ruining it with a leadership acronym.
She told students facing an uncertain economy to keep learning from every role. She also argued that institutions should take the long view. Political climates change. Administrations turn over. Public trust notices whether an organization abandons its commitments at the first discomfort. A durable point of view is not stubbornness for its own sake. It is a promise that survives contact with the calendar.
Nearly three decades after becoming DH's first employee, Hege still talks about being stretched and still describes herself as growing. That may be the least theatrical explanation for her longevity. She did not arrive to preserve one perfect answer. She arrived curious, became responsible for the place, and kept the question open.