A quarter century inside PR agencies taught her one rule she now teaches everyone else: great communication is not about saying more. It is about saying what actually matters.
Sarah Kissko Hersh - Founder, Type A Consultancy
Sarah Kissko Hersh spends her days in a role that did not exist for most of her career: the outside voice a communications team calls when it needs to get unstuck. From a practice she runs just outside New York City, she coaches executives on how to be visible without being loud, trains PR teams to write like humans, and advises brands on the difference between noise and a story worth telling. The practice has a name that doubles as a description of the person behind it - Type A Consultancy.
She launched Type A after more than 25 years inside agencies, brands, and leadership rooms where words carried real weight. The work now is narrower and, by her own account, more useful. She helps people communicate directly without losing kindness, and lead with clarity in the moments that actually matter. It is a deceptively simple mission for someone who spent decades in an industry that often rewards the opposite - more press releases, more jargon, more motion mistaken for progress.
Her core belief cuts against that grain. "Great communication isn't about saying more," she says. "It's about saying what actually matters." That line is the through-thread of everything she does now: the one-on-one coaching, the team trainings, the speaking, and the steady stream of practical advice she publishes to a LinkedIn audience that has grown into the tens of thousands and earned her a spot among the platform's top creators.
Great communication isn't about saying more. It's about saying what actually matters.- Sarah Kissko Hersh
The path did not start in a glass tower. Hersh grew up in Indiana, where she learned to drive a tractor before she ever learned to drive a car. It is the kind of detail she offers with a shrug, but it says something about her sensibility: practical first, unimpressed by polish, wired to figure out how a thing actually works. Her grandfather built an ice cream business during the Great Depression that ran for roughly 75 years - a family lesson in the idea that steady, useful work outlasts the flashy kind.
She built her career in Chicago and then New York, moving across architecture, design, travel, luxury, and the global-agency world. At Weber Shandwick, one of the largest PR firms on the planet, she rose to Vice President and was promoted five times, running PR strategy for a roster of travel and consumer brands. Later, as an Executive Vice President at Percepture, she led the Travel & Lifestyle Division, building market share and shaping narratives for leading brands. Along the way she worked with names people recognize, from Canada Goose to industry organizations like Kellen and Travel Leader Network.
Those years were not all clean wins, and she does not pretend otherwise. Pressed on what shaped her most, she gives an answer most consultants would edit out: the bad managers taught her as much as the good ones. Every hard room, every poorly run project, every leader who got it wrong became a note on how she would do it differently. When she finally built her own practice, that accumulated field research became the curriculum.
Ask Hersh what public relations really is and she will spend as much time on the myth as the definition. It is not spin. It is not a firehose of press releases nobody reads. In her telling, PR is a simple, true story told to the right people at the right time - and most of the craft is resisting the urge to complicate it. On a recent podcast conversation she made the case that simple stories still win, and that constraints, far from being obstacles, are often what unlock the better idea.
That translates into a service list built around clarity: one-on-one coaching for leaders who need to sound like themselves, team training that turns junior talent into confident communicators, executive-visibility work, brand elevation, and a specialty in helping people actually use LinkedIn instead of just having a profile there. She works as a fractional communications advisor, the kind of senior outside counsel a growing organization can borrow rather than hire full time.
Direct, senior counsel for executives who want to be visible and clear without losing their own voice.
Practical programs that turn junior PR talent into writers and thinkers who can hold a room.
Helping leaders show up with presence - and make LinkedIn a tool instead of an afterthought.
Borrowed senior communications leadership for brands that need strategy, not headcount.
If I'm typing a message to you, it's because it matters.- Sarah Kissko Hersh, on communicating with intent
Today Hersh lives in a New Jersey town about 20 miles from Manhattan, close enough to the city that made her career but far enough to keep a life outside it. When she is not working she is often planning her next trip, debating wallpaper patterns, or cheering from the sideline at her kids' games. She is an unapologetic reader who folds book recommendations into her feed as naturally as PR advice.
The travel is not idle. She is chasing a specific number - all 50 U.S. states before she turns 50, and she is already at 42. It is a very Type A goal: measurable, a little stubborn, and pursued with the same steadiness her grandfather brought to selling ice cream through a depression. She runs her career the way she plans a road trip. Know the destination, enjoy the stops, and do not overpack.
A public relations and communications leader with more than 25 years of experience and the founder of Type A Consultancy, a PR coaching and leadership practice based outside New York City.
Her practice, offering one-on-one PR coaching, team training, executive-visibility advising, brand strategy, and LinkedIn optimization.
She held senior roles at global agencies including Weber Shandwick, where she was promoted five times to Vice President, and Percepture, where she led the Travel & Lifestyle Division.
She is a Top 2% creator recognized for practical, direct advice on PR, personal branding, and communications, with a following in the tens of thousands.
New Jersey, about 20 miles from New York City, after growing up in Indiana and building her career in Chicago and New York.