The telephone rang on a Sunday afternoon while Roshann Parris was walking through driving rain, carrying her new baby grandson. There had been an accident at Schlitterbahn, the Kansas water park, and the ordinary weekend was over. This is the detail that explains Parris Communications better than a list of services does. Crisis work does not arrive politely. It arrives wet, loud and already late.
Parris had started the company under almost opposite circumstances. In 1988, after six years working in the United States Senate, presidential campaign travel and a job at a Kansas City public relations firm, she wanted more flexibility as her family grew. On June 15, she opened the business in the converted carport of a Johnson County ranch house. It was necessity wearing the clothes of entrepreneurship.
“We didn't turn into Apple, but it was something akin to that anyway.”Roshann Parris, on the converted-carport beginning
Nearly four decades later, the company remains privately held and deliberately compact. LinkedIn places it in the 11-to-50-employee band. Its menu is broad - crisis communications, media relations, strategic counsel, public affairs, community and stakeholder engagement, media training, executive coaching and events - but the connective tissue is narrow. Parris is hired when an organization needs to decide who must hear what, from whom and in what order.
The clock was the first thing to change
Parris did not set out to manufacture a crisis specialty. The market pulled the firm there. Accidents, lawsuits, financial trouble and workplace emergencies had always produced calls, but older media rhythms offered a peculiar luxury: time. A client could explain the situation, schedule a meeting and assemble a plan. Social platforms erased that interval. The first public account of an event may now appear before the people responsible for it have found a conference room.
“Today, it's a five minutes ago kind of thing. We are in drop everything mode every day.”Roshann Parris, speaking in 2020
That shrinking window changed the product. The work is not merely drafting a clean statement. It is triage: establish what is known, identify the people affected, decide which leader has standing to speak, prepare that person for questions, then keep internal and external messages from contradicting one another. During the opening months of the pandemic and the racial-justice protests of 2020, Parris said the team spent 14 weeks in round-the-clock crisis mode. Speed was not a slogan. It was a staffing condition.
The audience map is the most portable part. Shareholders may need continuity. Employees need instructions and candor. Neighbors need practical consequences. Reporters need verifiable facts. Public officials need accountability. Treating those groups as one giant “public” creates the bland, evasive language that makes a tense situation worse. The method works because it begins with differences.
There is also a useful boundary. Communication cannot substitute for operational authority or trustworthy facts. If leaders cannot establish either, faster messaging simply distributes confusion faster. The discipline only works when the communications team is close enough to decision-makers to know what is true and empowered enough to say it plainly.
Six years for one opening day
The cleanest demonstration was not a sudden emergency but a long civic argument: Kansas City's new airport terminal. Developer Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate hired Parris Communications for reputation and brand management, crisis counsel and media relations across the project's six-year life cycle - from City Council approval through construction to the February 2023 opening.
The reported cost of the new Kansas City International Airport terminal. Parris handled communications around the project for six years, a reminder that a ribbon-cutting is the end of a story, not the beginning.
A billion-dollar public project accumulates audiences the way an airport accumulates gates: elected officials, contractors, airlines, unions, travelers, nearby communities and skeptical taxpayers. The task was not to make all of them agree. It was to keep a comprehensible narrative moving while the physical project moved. The work received Silver PRISM recognition in 2023, alongside Parris campaigns for Giving Machines KC and Cosentino's Food Stores.
Small on purpose, wider by partnership
Parris competes in an awkward middle market. Local agencies know Kansas City; national firms can flood a problem with people. Parris' answer is to keep senior counsel near the assignment while borrowing scale. In 2022, the firm joined the Worldcom Public Relations Group after a partner-review process. The network gives an independent shop collaborators across six continents without turning it into a branch of a holding company.
That combination clarifies the customer base. Public records and industry recognition point to work for Fortune 500 businesses, hospitals and health technology companies, banks, universities, law firms, life-sciences companies, public agencies, civic organizations, retailers and professional sports franchises. The firm says it has handled challenges in more than 60 countries. Its local civic work is equally conspicuous: Roshann Parris helped lead the “Raise the Woof” campaign behind Kansas City's first purpose-built animal shelter, and the agency managed the Boys & Girls Clubs' Kids Night Out for more than a decade.
Culture matters here because crisis firms sell access to human judgment, not software seats. The Kansas City Business Journal had counted eight Best Places to Work honors by 2018 and recognized the firm again among its 2024 honorees. In 2025, Parris promoted 17-year veteran Kelly Cooper to managing director and hired former FOX4 anchor Kevin Barry to lead media relations. One appointment protects institutional memory; the other imports the instincts of the person who used to ask the questions.
A converted carport becomes Parris Communications.
The Midwest Transmission Project wins PRISM Best in Show.
The firm joins the Worldcom global partnership.
Kansas City's new airport terminal opens after a six-year communications assignment.
Kelly Cooper becomes managing director; Kevin Barry joins to lead media relations.
The product is the conversation before the conversation
Media coverage is visible, which makes it easy to mistake visibility for the service. The more interesting work happens earlier: the uncomfortable briefing, the stakeholder list with too many names, the rehearsal in which an executive discovers that the obvious answer sounds terrible aloud. Parris' political-advance DNA shows up there. Advance work is contingency made professional - check the room, anticipate the obstruction, know who moves next.
That is what another organization can copy without hiring an agency. Build the contact tree before the emergency. Put employees near the front of the audience order. Rehearse the difficult question rather than the opening line. Assign one person to reconcile updates across channels. And remember that the statement is not the decision; it is evidence that a decision has been made.
The converted carport makes a neat origin story, but the better symbol may be the ringing phone in the rain. One is about making room for a company. The other is about what fills that room: a client, a fast-moving event and five minutes that have already disappeared.