Allegrow works in the awkward stretch after the handshake, when two companies have to become one without losing the people, customers, and value that made the deal attractive.
Taylor Rafferty has spent four decades arguing that investor relations is not a volume business. The useful work happens earlier: choosing a measurable goal, finding the investors who might care, and teaching executives to answer the question they wish had not been asked.
Its website says almost nothing. Its clients are announcing AI marketplaces, brain-computer interfaces and nine-figure funding rounds. Signal has built a communications business by making everyone else the story.

She began as an investor-relations analyst and stayed for the long argument. Two decades later, Suzanne Shepherd's remit spans marketing and sustainability - proof that the people who explain a business can end up helping shape it.