There is a special category of business story in which the founder remembers the date because history promptly made it ridiculous. Slice Communications began in February 2008. Cassandra Bailey and a partner worked from their homes, convinced that public relations and the new world of social media should be treated as one conversation. Seven months later, Lehman Brothers failed. By autumn, every optimistic spreadsheet in America looked like a practical joke.
Bailey did not arrive with the tidy biography of a lifelong agency builder. She studied international politics, economics and philosophy. She worked in PR, litigation support and economic development, where she encountered mergers, venture capital and the unruly mechanics of growing companies. She has called herself an accidental entrepreneur. Her recurring advice to students is equally unceremonious: when a door opens, walk through it.
“Whenever a door opens, just walk through it.”Cassandra Bailey, founder and CEO
The first surprise was not a bad campaign. It was the economy. Yet the founding observation held up: companies were beginning to talk with people in public, at speed, and the old division between “earned media” and “social” made less sense every month. Growth arrived in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The company that had opened at an exquisitely inconvenient moment had found a conveniently durable problem.
Attention is not the finish line
Plenty of agencies sell attention as if it were a unit: one mention, one view, one impression, one fleeting twitch of the thumb. Slice's more interesting move is to treat attention as a sequence. First a person becomes aware. Then connected. Then engaged. Then converted. Finally, if the work keeps its promise, that person becomes an advocate.
It sounds obvious only after someone diagrams it. In practice, it changes the opening question from “Which channel should we use?” to “Who are the best people for this outcome, and what must they do next?” Slice calls them a client's “best people.” The phrase is slightly odd, which helps. It refuses the lazy comfort of “general audience.” A university may mean prospective students, alumni and major donors. A utility project may mean residents, regulators and skeptical neighbors. The channel comes later.
The agency has turned that logic into a division of labor. A strategy team defines audiences, messages, goals and measures. Execution specialists work across PR, public affairs, social media, web, advertising, design, crisis and internal communications. Client-success and project teams police the handoffs. Strategy and execution are kept separate enough to challenge each other, then joined in a feedback loop. Every quarter, Slice looks back over 13 weeks of data and adjusts.
That rhythm is one of the easiest things to copy. Pick the audience before the platform. Decide what behavioral step follows awareness. Give execution a strategy it can argue with. Then force a quarterly reckoning with the evidence. The model costs less to imitate than a rebrand and asks more useful questions than a content calendar.
Proof, with dirt under its nailsA flower show, an outdoor gamble and a storm
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's 2021 Philadelphia Flower Show is where the abstraction becomes pleasantly messy. The show had spent almost two centuries indoors. COVID pushed it outside for the first time. That meant explaining a new venue to a loyal audience, selling tickets through uncertainty and preparing for the fact that outdoors contains weather.
Slice built organic and paid social campaigns around exhibitors and the novelty of the setting. It recruited creators who could reach parents, plant people and local communities. More importantly, it prepared standard operating procedures for online customer service before the gates opened. When a storm forced an early closure, the response did not begin with a panicked search for the password. The plan went live.
The social-driven ticket goal was met before opening day. Thirty-six influencers produced more than nine million potential impressions and 485,000 video views. PHS retained Slice, and the relationship continued when the show returned indoors. This is the agency at its best: the attractive content gets people through the door; the unglamorous operating procedure earns its fee when the sky turns black.
Small numbers can tell the better story
Consider a different client. The Franklin Institute's “So Curious!” podcast suffered an 84 percent fall in downloads between seasons. The ordinary response would be more promotion. Slice narrowed the field instead. It pitched 88 approved creators in mental health, science and Philadelphia niches, signed eight paid partnerships and produced 25 pieces of content. The download decline shrank by 10 percentage points, and the next season opened with the podcast's largest audience to date.
The number that interests me is eight. It suggests the agency was buying fit, not a bucket of influence. That approach is sensible only when a client knows enough about its audience to reject 80 plausible messengers. Precision is slower at the beginning. It is often cheaper at the end.
The Delaware Wellness Challenge application lift
Other public work makes the same argument at different scales. A DonorPerfect campaign increased social traffic and conversions by 60 percent each over a year, while organic engagement rose 99 percent. An Axalta announcement generated more than 40 media placements and 118 million media impressions. For Delaware's Lieutenant Governor, Wellness Challenge applications doubled, doubled again, then grew another 20 percent in year three as the team refined the message and application process.
How the firm makes moneyThere is no attention vending machine
Slice is a professional-services business, not software in agency clothing. Clients buy projects and continuing relationships built from strategy, creative work, execution and reporting. The public inquiry form offers a revealing bit of commercial honesty: it asks prospective clients to choose a monthly marketing budget band. The bands begin below $3,000 and climb past $15,000. That is not a rate card. It is a signal that scope follows goals, channels and the amount of sustained labor required.
What does an engagement cost?
Slice qualifies monthly marketing budgets in four public bands. The useful takeaway for buyers is to arrive with a goal and a spending boundary, not a request to “do some social.”
Its customers occupy the difficult middle of institutional life: universities, nonprofits, government programs, manufacturers, financial and healthcare organizations, utilities and companies in transition. They are large enough to have several audiences and reputational risk, but often not equipped with every specialist in-house. Competitors include local independents, specialist public-affairs shops, giant network agencies and, most commonly, the client's own overloaded communications team.
Slice's claim to difference is therefore structural rather than magical: national reach without the layers of a global network; multiple specialist disciplines without requiring the client to referee several vendors; and a strategy team that is not swallowed by production. That combination is useful when the problem crosses departments. It is less compelling for a buyer who needs only low-cost volume, a single isolated deliverable or instant virality. It also depends on access to decision-makers, a measurable outcome and the patience to run the feedback loop. Remove those conditions and the five steps become five labels on a slide.
The second actFrom getting noticed to winning permission
The agency's expansion tells its own market story. Slice acquired the assets of Delaware firm GillespieHall in 2022, adding depth in public relations and crisis work. In 2025 it acquired Henry & Germann Public Affairs, a woman-owned firm whose work spans community relations, issues management, public acceptance and risk communications for Fortune 500 and government clients. H&G continues under its own name as a Slice company.
This moves Slice into a harder form of attention. Marketing asks people to notice and choose. Public affairs may ask them to understand a mine, a utility project, a regulatory change or an unpopular construction plan. The audience cannot always swipe away, and applause is not the measure. Trust, reduced resistance and permission to proceed are.
The company now describes seven broad solutions: brand and corporate communications; product and service marketing; advocacy and engagement; employer brand; transition communications; crisis communications; and executive communications. Underneath sit media relations, social, listening, email, content, design, video, web, advertising, training and public affairs. It is a broad shelf for a firm of roughly 30 people. The discipline has to come from choosing the business problem before opening the shelf.
Bailey's earliest idea was that companies should not advertise at people when they could communicate with them. Eighteen years later, that thought looks less like a social-media insight than a management one. Attention is easy to rent, hard to keep and useless if nobody knows what should happen next. Slice survived its unlucky opening because it built around the next part.
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