At the bottom of a public announcement there is usually a small, ignorable block of text. Lawyers may have occupied most of the page. Bankers may have spent months on the numbers. The chief executive gets the quotation. Then comes the contact line. In the paperwork for the 2020 listing of JDE Peet's, the coffee company that arrived on the Amsterdam exchange with an implied market value of €15.6 billion, that line named Zach Siegel of The One Nine Three Group.
This is an oddly good place to begin. The One Nine Three Group, usually shortened to 193, is not famous in the manner of its clients. It is designed to appear at the edge of their important moments: an IPO, an acquisition, an earnings announcement, a leadership change, a proxy fight, a crisis. Its work becomes most visible precisely when the firm itself is trying not to become the story.
Founded in 2019 by Siegel and Matthew Freud, 193 is a founder-owned corporate and financial communications advisory firm. Its public headcount is 18. Its address is on Madison Avenue. Its reach stretches through a permanent London team and affiliate partners elsewhere. Its clients are boards, C-suite executives, owners and communications leaders. The product is not publicity in the ordinary sense. It is judgment under deadline.
Reputation, with a job to do
The usual language of reputation is soft: warmth, sentiment, awareness. 193's language is harder. It says it works to enhance reputation and shareholder value. Its recruiting material calls reputation “a tangible asset that can be actively managed to support business objectives.” That last clause matters. A good message is not good because it sounds polished. It is good because employees understand the change, investors grasp the economics, reporters see the logic and leadership can defend the same sentence when the questions become less friendly.
That is why the firm's two practices sit beside each other. Corporate affairs includes narrative development, executive visibility, employee communications, crisis preparation and media training. Financial communications includes earnings, investor days, shareholder activism defense, IPOs, SPACs, mergers, restructurings and public-company readiness. One side concerns belief. The other concerns money. In real life they are rarely separable.
“Leaders today need more than a service provider. They need a trusted partner.”The One Nine Three Group
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One defensible narrative
Consider a chief executive announcing a restructuring. Investors want proof that the savings are real. Employees want to know whether their jobs exist next month. Customers want continuity. Reporters want the reason the plan was not made earlier. A statement that pleases one group and alarms the other three is not a communications win. The difficult work is creating a narrative that survives contact with every audience without becoming vague.
The boutique hiding in large transactions
193's client roster is not published as a glossy wall of logos, but its public-document trail tells the story. It was named in communications around the JDE Peet's flotation. It handled media and investor contacts around Genius Sports' announced combination with dMY Technology Group II, a transaction that valued Genius at $1.4 billion. It appeared in Krispy Kreme's 2021 IPO announcements. Other public materials connect it to JAB, BeautyHealth and Hydrafacial, Mayfair Equity Partners, i-media and Rezolve Ai.
These references do not reveal the advice given behind closed doors. They do reveal where the firm is hired: where capital markets, ownership and public attention meet. The customer is not someone shopping for a catchy campaign. It is the executive who needs the earnings story to match the operating plan, or the owner who needs a transaction explained without creating a second problem.
Siegel came to this model after nearly a decade at Teneo in New York and London, most recently as a managing director, and earlier work on Edelman's corporate and financial communications leadership team. Freud brought a different kind of leverage: Freuds Group, the strategy, creative and content network he founded in 1985. The observable choice was structural. Keep 193 small and founder-owned, place senior people close to the work, then connect it to adjacent creative capabilities through the wider group.
What a boutique actually costs
193 does not publish client fees. The business model is familiar professional services: ongoing advisory relationships and specific project mandates, priced around access to senior judgment and execution. A recent New York director listing offered a base salary of $175,000 to $225,000 and made the economics unusually plain. The director would own client relationships, team performance, revenue retention, scope growth and commercial outcomes. Seniority is not ornamental here; it is part of what the client buys.
The alternative is a large global consultancy with deeper benches, an investment bank's communications apparatus, or an internal corporate-affairs team. Firms such as FGS Global, Brunswick, Teneo, Joele Frank, Prosek, FTI Consulting and Kekst CNC all occupy parts of this territory. 193's distinction is the combination of boutique scale, founders still in ownership, teams on both sides of the Atlantic and a direct line into Freuds Group. Small is useful only if the senior people remain in the room.
The part worth stealing
- Name the business outcome before anyone drafts the announcement.
- Map every audience that will read the same words for a different reason.
- Find the contradiction each audience will notice first.
- Rehearse the hostile question, then make the underlying decision stronger.
- Use one defensible narrative across the press release, employee note and investor call.
This is the copyable lesson in 193's model. Communication starts before writing. It begins with the decision, the evidence and the stakeholder map. A company can borrow that sequence without hiring anyone. What it cannot easily copy is an adviser's pattern recognition after many IPOs, crises and activist approaches, or the license an outsider has to tell a chief executive that the proposed answer will not survive the first follow-up question.
The model loses its advantage when leaders want language to disguise weak facts, when the adviser is brought in after every consequential decision has been locked, or when senior counsel is sold in the pitch and replaced by a distant delivery team. Reputation can support an operating choice. It cannot substitute for one.
A deliberately serious firm, plus Marvin
The staff biographies read like a map of the work: Teneo, Edelman, Joele Frank, Brunswick, FTI, PwC, law, journalism, risk and international relations. The firm says its counsel is intellectually honest, evidence-based and commercially grounded. Its current expansion language emphasizes hands-on delivery even for senior hires. This is a culture arranged around credibility, or at least the disciplined projection of it.
Then the official team directory reaches Marvin Siegel, Office Dog, New York. Marvin joined in October 2020. He sleeps on the CEO's couch, barks at visitors “a bit unprofessionally,” and chases squirrels on good days. This is more than a charming footnote. A communications firm reveals itself through what it chooses to include. After pages of transactions and titles, Marvin is a small permission slip to be human.
The most recent signals point to growth rather than reinvention. The New York team has been hiring for broader sector reach and deeper market penetration. Public filings still place 193 beside active corporate moments. Its central bet remains wonderfully unfashionable: when information moves instantly, judgment becomes more valuable, not less. The sentence at the bottom of the announcement may be small. The business behind it is not.