The Public Relations Firm That Put Leadership in the Same Room

In 1970, Chuck Schnake was presented with the kind of career choice that sounds administrative until it changes a life. His employer wanted him in Philadelphia. Schnake wanted to remain in Tulsa. So he declined the move, hung out a shingle downtown and became a one-man public relations firm. The company that grew from that refusal now has two Oklahoma offices, a national client reach and a service list that wanders far beyond press releases.

It advises on crises and media, certainly. It also coaches executives, searches for their successors, measures organizational culture, runs leadership retreats, helps nonprofits test capital campaigns and convenes a free monthly People & Culture Consortium. At first glance, this looks like a consultant's cupboard: every jar from messaging to management. Look again and one idea holds the shelves together. An organization's reputation is the public reading of how that organization is led.

“Do the right thing, then we can talk about it.”Steve Turnbo, founder

The sentence before the statement

The most revealing thing about crisis communications is when the communicator enters the story. Too late, and the job is cosmetic: turn a muddle into a sentence, put someone under flattering light and hope the questions are polite. Schnake Turnbo Frank's proposition is to enter earlier. It offers crisis planning and mock drills, organizational assessments, internal communications and executive coaching alongside the familiar work of media relations and message development.

That sequence matters. A mock crisis drill can expose who has authority before an incident exposes that nobody does. A culture survey can reveal the internal contradiction before an employee gives it a microphone. An executive search can treat the next CEO as a reputation decision rather than a vacancy. The useful product is not a perfectly polished response. It is the pause in which a client discovers what it actually believes and whether its behavior agrees.

A breakfast, an oil bust and the relieved bookkeeper

Schnake's first consequential partnership began over breakfast in 1982. Steve Turnbo had left advertising and opened his own shop. Chuck Schnake, 13 years older and already established, asked him to merge. Turnbo later said there was only one person with whom he would have done it. The only casualty, he joked, was his wife Norma's bookkeeping job. Norma was delighted. The family business had made life one-dimensional, and being fired from the ledger gave her part of it back.

A few years later the Oklahoma oil bust arrived. The founders' recollection was strikingly untheatrical: they did not sit around worrying; the phone kept ringing. One reason may have been the firm's dense civic roots. In a 2008 interview, Turnbo said every representative was expected to serve on one or two community boards. This was service, but it was also distribution. Help run the institutions of a place and you meet the people who will eventually need counsel.

That system has conditions. It works when community service is actually useful, the counselor has access to decision-makers, and leaders are willing to hear something more difficult than a slogan. It works poorly as a shortcut. A board seat occupied as a sales prospect is detectable at conversational distance. A client seeking a cheap publicity burst will find the organizational diagnosis excessive. And a regional relationship network, however deep, is not the same thing as a worldwide delivery footprint.

The firm learns to look inward

Becky Frank joined as a partner in 2000 after work in nonprofit and corporate communications. Russ Florence, a former newspaper editor and corporate communicator at BOK Financial, arrived the following year. By 2009, when Frank and Florence bought the firm from Turnbo, income had more than doubled since 2000 and the employee base had tripled to 25. The firm had also opened in Oklahoma City after years of driving there for clients. Its leaders spoke with businesspeople, studied the market and concluded that Oklahoma's two largest cities could be collaborators instead of rivals.

Then came the move that clarified the modern company. In 2010, Aaron Fulkerson joined to build a management consulting practice around individual development and organizational strategy. Public relations had acquired an inside voice. Today that branch includes executive coaching and search, leadership training, team building, strategic planning, surveys and workforce-transition communications.

Public relations for people who dislike public relations

The firm serves a distinctly Oklahoma cross-section: energy and transportation companies, tribes, manufacturers, banks, healthcare organizations, schools, governments, arts groups, faith communities and nonprofits. Historical work has included Tulsa Community College, Explorer Pipeline, Oklahoma State University, River Spirit Casino, the Oklahoma Pork Council and the Benedictine Sisters of St. Joseph Monastery.

The monastery assignment produced the firm's most charming artifact. Divine Days, a 2008 calendar, showed Benedictine sisters in ordinary and whimsical moments: playing Frisbee golf, watching fireworks, standing in the snow. It won a national PRSA Bronze Anvil. The work did not invent a personality for the sisters. It made visible a personality outsiders had not been shown. That is a clean description of good public relations and a useful rebuke to the industry's appetite for manufacture.

“You can never have too much goodwill. You're going to need it sometime.”Russ Florence, partner, president and CEO

Schnake applies the same logic to nonprofits. Before a capital campaign, its team develops the case for support, assesses the organization, interviews stakeholders and tests a proposed goal. Only then comes the public campaign, volunteer recruitment, collateral and donor recognition. The cost of a failed campaign is not merely missed money. It is exhausted volunteers, embarrassed trustees and donors trained to doubt the next ask. Testing first is the less glamorous product and probably the more valuable one.

A classroom disguised as a network

The clearest expression of the firm's community model may be the People & Culture Consortium. It began with a full-day summit in 2017. By 2026, Schnake said it had more than 2,000 members across hundreds of organizations, nearly 70 meetings and four summits. Sponsors underwrite the free monthly Zoom sessions; advisors help select topics and speakers. Recent subjects range from workplace mental health and generational differences to immigration response plans, neurodiversity and conflict competency.

There is also an eight-part, in-person Leadership & Reputation Academy for new and emerging leaders. The curriculum joins conflict, relationship building, strategic thinking and executive presence. More than 600 leaders had taken part according to Florence's public biography. These programs do more than teach. They create a network around the firm's thesis, let potential clients experience its thinking and make the border between community service and business development productively blurry.

Schnake Turnbo Frank is not a software company wearing a consultancy's jacket. Its business remains labor, experience and trust sold through projects and ongoing counsel. That makes it difficult to scale neatly and difficult to compare by rate card. It also explains the durability. For 56 years, the firm has occupied a place technology has not automated: the chair beside a leader when the obvious sentence is the wrong one.