Robert Falls bought an advertising agency and acquired a problem familiar to anyone who has ever inherited a household: what to do with all the stuff. There were vintage advertisements, antique furniture and rock-and-roll photographs. Wyse Advertising had accumulated a collection over decades. Its new owner had a growing company and an office to remodel. In January 2021, more than 300 pieces were headed for auction.
The episode has a pleasing complication. Falls is himself a collector. Buying Wyse in 2019 brought together his professional appetite for additional capabilities and an actual archive of the profession. The future arrived carrying the past. Even an agency moving deeper into digital work can discover that its next decision concerns furniture.
By then, changing the business was familiar territory. The Cleveland operation Falls had helped establish in 1989 had passed through ownership changes, new names and new services. Public relations expanded into digital work and advertising. The enterprise eventually became Falls & Co. The ampersand does some honest work there: a founder’s name, followed by the colleagues who make the company possible.
A Cleveland office, four people, two cities
Falls’s Cleveland chapter began with a divided working life. He was a senior vice president in Detroit and president of a new Cleveland public relations operation. The arrangement paired Detroit’s Anthony M. Franco Inc. with Cleveland’s Griswold Inc. advertising agency. The Cleveland office had four people. For a while, Falls had responsibilities in both cities.
He eventually moved to Cleveland full time and bought control of the business. That sequence matters. He first had to run an operation someone else owned; ownership came afterward. The move gave him both a new city and a business whose direction he could eventually determine himself. It also left him with the ordinary obligations behind an entrepreneurial story: people to employ, relationships to maintain and work to deliver.
His early professional life had involved journalism and congressional work. Those are occupations in which words travel beyond their author. A newspaper reader, a voter or a client may understand a message differently from the person who wrote it. That is a useful lens through which to read his later agency career, with its recurring attention to audiences, clarity and relationships.
The business keeps getting another room
The early firm became Robert Falls & Co. Public Relations. Its history records client relationships with Moen, Sherwin-Williams and Lincoln Electric. In 2009, the name became Falls Communications. Naming a company after its founder is easy enough. Keeping its name useful as the work changes takes more thought.
Falls Digital began in 2012, adding work around websites, inbound marketing and technology. In 2019, the communications and digital businesses merged. The same year brought the acquisition of Wyse Advertising. By the time Falls & Co. became the combined identity in 2021, several formerly separate capabilities were gathered under it.
There is a practical attraction to that arrangement. A client’s problem can run across an advertisement, a website and a conversation with employees. Having the relevant people within the same firm gives the client one place to begin. The internal challenge remains: separate specialties have to agree on what the problem is before they can help solve it.
Company histories tend to make these transitions look tidy. Dates stand in a row. Names change. A new discipline appears. The less tidy part is the work between those dates, when established colleagues and newly arrived colleagues have to learn how to use one another’s experience. An acquisition announcement cannot do that work for them.
A deal has to work after the handshake
Wyse offered Falls something he wanted: advertising expertise that would take time to build from scratch. Michael Marino, who was ready to step away from the agency, wanted a buyer. The fit between those intentions helped the transaction move forward. A useful deal starts with the people on either side understanding what the other side hopes to achieve.
Falls also paid attention to the relationships the deal would inherit. The agency’s clients and colleagues would be living with the consequences long after the signatures. That makes the buyer’s task larger than choosing a price. The work has to continue, and the people doing it need reasons to remain confident in the arrangement.
“Clarity and transparency are crucial.”
Robert Falls, discussing the Wyse acquisition in 2019
The sentence is short enough to sound obvious. It becomes more demanding when a company is changing hands. Different people need different kinds of clarity: a client wants to know who will handle the account; a colleague wants to understand where the organization is going. Transparency has to reach those individual questions to mean very much.
Falls’s acquisition experience also makes a useful distinction visible. Adding an agency adds capabilities immediately. Making those capabilities work together remains a continuing responsibility. The opening announcement belongs to the deal; the following years belong to management. His company’s later leadership changes show how that second task continued.
The archive gets its own exit
Then there were the collectibles. Wyse’s collection had been assembled over more than five decades. When Falls partnered with Gray’s Auctioneers on the January 2021 sale, the inventory offered a tangible record of advertising’s past, alongside objects whose appeal reached beyond the agency business.
An archive changes the texture of an acquisition story. It gives history weight, dimensions and a storage problem. Vintage sales material was once produced to make somebody act; decades later, somebody else could buy it for the pleasure of looking. The business object becomes a collectible without changing its appearance.
The auction also accompanied an office renovation for the growing firm. That is a modest, revealing detail. Expansion needs room. The old agency’s possessions and the new agency’s requirements had to meet somewhere other than a press release. Sometimes the next chapter begins by deciding what can leave the building.
The company with a new president
In September 2022, Tom Bernot became president and chief operating officer. Falls became chairman and retained the CEO role. The agency had brought communications, digital and advertising businesses together; its leadership was being adjusted to the organization those changes had produced.
Bernot’s experience included brand management, digital marketing and other agency responsibilities. Falls described a business ready for someone with experience across its expanded work. A founder choosing a president is making a concrete judgment about the company: which responsibilities need another person’s attention, and which experience fits those responsibilities now?
Falls’s continuing role included senior counseling for clients, attracting new business and community involvement. That allocation gives the transition some substance beyond the title change. A founder can remain involved while giving another executive room to lead. The interesting question becomes how the work is distributed across the organization.
There was outside recognition along the way. Forbes placed Falls at No. 4 on its 2021 America’s Best PR Firms list. The ranking belongs to a particular year, rather than serving as a permanent verdict. Its place in this story is as a marker during the agency’s integration, when several businesses were becoming one.
Cleveland is another set of responsibilities
The city surrounding the agency has become a substantial part of Falls’s working life. He chairs the Downtown Cleveland Alliance board and is vice chair of Downtown Cleveland, Inc. Those are distinct roles. Both put him in the continuing conversation about how the center of the city works.
His civic connections also extend to the City Club of Cleveland. Its 2023 annual report listed Falls & Co. among contributors in the $100,000 to $249,999 band for its Guardians of Free Speech campaign. The company’s involvement helps give the broad phrase “community commitment” a concrete financial scale.
In May 2025, Falls was listed to give welcome remarks at the International Downtown Association’s Place Matters conference in Cleveland. A year earlier, the Cleveland Leadership Center announced his election as an incoming trustee. These are continuing obligations, rather than souvenirs of a completed business career.
There are visible intersections between the agency and its city, too. Falls Communications designed the logo for Cleveland’s 2016 Republican National Convention. The design combined the party’s elephant with a guitar, pointing to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A national political event needed a local visual accent; Cleveland supplied an instrument.
Two careers in the same photograph
The photograph of Rob and Kathryn Falls supplies another scale for the story. In 2020, Kathryn was profiled as Heinen’s Grocery Stores’ director of marketing, with thirteen years in the role. Their professional lives involved different businesses but a shared concern with reaching people.
That profile also described charitable giving and pro bono work by his firm. Rob spoke warmly about Kathryn’s consideration for others. The personal detail is welcome in a career otherwise recorded through organizations, acquisitions and board appointments. A business can explain where someone spends the day without explaining everyone who matters after it.
The couple’s picture has none of the geometry of an organizational chart. That is part of its charm. The founder stands, Kathryn sits, and two busy careers are briefly held still. Readers get a person with a relationship, rather than another title beneath a company name.
The conversation continues
Falls appeared with Kevin Donahue in the opening installment of the agency’s ctrl/shift video series in December 2023. The subject was geopolitical uncertainty and its effects on organizations, their people and their reputations. It put the agency founder back in an advisory conversation, addressing a problem that could reach across borders.
The format fits a career in which the business has repeatedly widened around the work. Public relations acquired digital capabilities; advertising joined the company; another executive became president. Cleveland remained the base. Each step created a fresh set of relationships to understand and responsibilities to assign.
The story keeps returning to that practical activity. Someone needs advice. Someone else brings a skill. A founder decides what the organization should be able to do next. After decades of names, offices and acquisitions, Falls & Co. still has room for the conjunction. There are people on the other side of it.