The origin story contains a spare bedroom and an admission. In 1993, after jobs at Sahara Resorts and R&R Partners, Solveig Raftery started The Firm Public Relations & Marketing from home. She had one employee and a conviction that she should be running the place. “I like to be in charge of things,” she later told the Vegas Chamber. “I’m a bad employee.” It is the sort of line a publicist might normally edit out. Raftery left it in.
Within a year, the company moved into an office and added two people. Later came a 5,000-square-foot building and, eventually, 17 employees. Then came the recession. The first documented thing to break was not a campaign or a client promise. It was the assumption that headcount only traveled in one direction. The Firm downsized.
A small graph about getting smaller
Reported employeesThe recession forced the contraction. What remained was a model built around senior attention rather than layers of staffing.
The useful failureThe lean years became the operating system
By 2023, The Firm had 13 people. The Las Vegas Review-Journal counted 14 in July 2026 and ranked it ninth among local PR shops by staff size. This is neither boutique theater nor a miniature global agency. It is a senior-led independent firm whose leaders are plainly present in the work. Raftery remains president and CEO. Jasen Woehrle, who joined in 2006 and has nearly three decades in communications, is senior vice president. Public client reviews describe teams of two to five.
That shape matters because the agency sells decisions made under pressure. A hospital executive facing cameras, a nonprofit staging a volunteer event during Super Bowl weekend, or a developer trying to turn awareness into visits cannot send judgment down an assembly line. The Firm's pitch is that a seasoned strategist stays involved while a collaborative team handles the many unglamorous details.
What the 14 people sellSix services, one underlying product
The menu has six headings: strategic planning; corporate communications and public affairs; media and influencer relations; media and public-speaking training; social and digital marketing; and event management. Underneath all six sits the same product - turning a complicated institution into a clear sequence of messages, people and moments.
“A press release is not the Holy Grail of a communications plan.”Solveig Raftery
That sentence is more revealing than a list of services. The commodity version of PR produces documents. The useful version diagnoses the situation first. Sometimes the answer is a release. Sometimes it is training the person who must answer questions, arranging the right coalition, or finding one human detail that makes a large civic project legible.
Stories with moving partsFrom 200 volunteers to 100 apartments
Consider Super Bowl LVIII. Rebuilding Together Southern Nevada wanted attention for its 29th Kickoff to Rebuild, a home-repair event for low-income veterans, seniors and people with disabilities. The obstacle was nearly comic: every other organization in Las Vegas also wanted attention that weekend. The Firm coordinated the local earned-media strategy around nearly 200 volunteers, NFL running back Chase Brown, Lowe's and the NFL. It prepared spokespeople, political and executive talking points, local outreach and day-of logistics. The client was not buying “buzz.” It was buying a route through congestion.
The repeatable move: turn scale into a sentence
The same method appears in very different assignments. For more than a decade, the team has coordinated publicity for Three Square Food Bank's Restaurant Week, aligning hundreds of restaurants, spokespeople and cooking segments around a simple exchange: dine out and help fight hunger. For Nevada Health & Bioscience Corporation, it sustained the story of a 135,000-square-foot medical-education building from announcement in 2020 to opening in 2022. For Blind Center of Nevada, a groundbreaking for 100 affordable apartments generated enough momentum that a single event assignment expanded into ongoing PR, marketing and social work.
The clearest example may be Kay's Power Play. The Firm helped Comprehensive Cancer Centers build the breast-cancer initiative from its name and message onward, connecting the memory of Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Shea Theodore's grandmother with screenings for uninsured and underinsured women. Six years in, the program had committed hundreds of thousands of dollars to screenings and patient support. Good publicity got attention; the durable program gave the attention somewhere to go.
The price of experienced judgmentA floor, not a vending machine
Those figures put The Firm above the casual press-release shop and below the opacity of a giant holding company engagement. The business model mixes ongoing relationships with defined projects. A scope may include media strategy, releases, social content, crisis preparation, events, influencer introductions, award nominations and monthly placement reports. The real cost depends on how many of those problems arrive in the same box.
The economics work best when communications is attached to something substantive: a service people need, an event with operational muscle, a credible expert or a community program that can survive after the cameras leave. It is a weaker fit for a company seeking instant national fame without a defensible story, or for a buyer who wants a large volume of content but no strategic disagreement. The Firm says it is particular about client fit and will tell a client when an idea is unlikely to land. That selectivity is part of what the fee buys.
Copy the operating systemThe address book is local. The habits travel.
A reader in another city cannot copy three decades of Las Vegas relationships. The more useful pieces are mundane enough to try on Monday.
- Choose for fit. Work on causes and businesses the team can understand and defend.
- Put senior judgment close to delivery. Do not make experience a cameo at the pitch meeting.
- Meet around every client. The Firm says its team reviews each account weekly, making cross-pollination routine.
- Build a story before choosing a format. A release, an event, an interview and a social post are tools, not strategies.
- Track the behavior after attention. Calls to a sales center, attendance, donors and screenings say more than clip volume alone.
The Firm has also adapted without treating every new tool as a personality transplant. Raftery called social media's immediacy the biggest industry change of her career. Woehrle's recent digital-marketing training added analytics, search and email credentials. On AI, his rule is similarly plain: use it for first drafts, lists, analysis and reporting, then keep human judgment responsible for the final move.
Where the agency fitsDeeply local, deliberately networked
The Las Vegas field includes much larger integrated agencies, specialist boutiques and in-house teams. The Firm occupies the middle: independent, women-owned, senior-led, and broad enough to move from a crisis plan to a construction-site event without pretending those are the same job. Its strongest verticals - healthcare, nonprofits, real estate, construction, hospitality, gaming, education and arts - all reward knowledge of local institutions and stakeholders.
For work outside Nevada, the agency points to PR Consultants Group, a nationwide network of independent senior practitioners that it says it co-founded. That arrangement offers reach without a branch-office map. It is also consistent with everything else here: use a small group of experienced people, borrow scale when the assignment needs it, and keep the person with judgment in the room.
There is one last odd detail. The Firm calls its blog “Firm Shui” because it has worked with a feng shui master to arrange its office for decades. The joke is playful; the metaphor is accurate. Public relations is often the invisible arrangement of facts, people and timing so that a story moves cleanly through a room. The client sees the headline. The agency sees the furniture.