The odd thing about a company called The Results Company is how often its work begins without a result in sight. It begins with a room. In the room are business executives who possess influence, money, frustration and only a partial view of what everyone else knows. Chuck Fuller’s job is to arrange the conversation until the partial views become a plan.
That sounds softer than “public affairs,” the industry label attached to his Raleigh firm. But consider what has come out of those rooms: a statewide economic-branding effort, a nonprofit for commercializing university research, a fisheries-data tool and a daily briefing for executives. The Results Company, or TRC, is less a conventional PR shop than a builder of civic machinery. It advises the people, assembles the constituency and, when necessary, helps construct the organization that can keep the idea alive.
The reputational hangover
The cleanest illustration arrived after North Carolina’s 2016 HB2 controversy. State leaders had enacted policies meant to improve the business climate, yet the national story about North Carolina was dominated by the bathroom bill and the boycotts around it. The policy product and the public perception had separated. A tax reform cannot recruit a factory if the executive choosing the site never hears about the reform.
TRC says it repeatedly convened senior business leaders between 2016 and 2018. By the spring of 2018, the group had settled on an answer: North Carolina needed a coordinated national campaign with enough precision and money to compete with states such as Georgia, Texas and Florida. That organizing work eventually fed into All in North Carolina, the state’s business-and-talent recruitment campaign.
Here the credits matter. TRC describes itself as the convener and strategist whose work helped yield the initiative. The Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina credits Charlotte agency Mythic with creating the advertising campaign. In other words, TRC helped organize the reason and the mandate; Mythic made the public-facing work. This is a useful distinction in a business that often collapses strategy, politics and creative production into one foggy word: “campaign.”
The first thing that failed was not North Carolina’s policy. It was the translation of policy into reputation.The All in NC problem, in one line
What changed minds was not another press release. According to TRC’s account, it was the 2018 gathering itself - executives compared what the state had changed with what outsiders still believed, and concluded that isolated promotion would not close the gap. The campaign needed a single statewide frame. Public records later show the advertising grew from a $2 million 2021 launch into a program backed by an initial $30 million allocation.
The claimed return by 2025
EDPNC compared the initial allocation with estimated economic impact. The estimate is an attribution, not proof that advertising alone caused every dollar.
Sometimes the client does not exist yet
A normal consultancy waits for an organization to call. TRC sometimes helps create the organization. In the mid-2010s, it organized business leaders around a question: why was promising research at public universities outside the Triangle failing to become companies, licenses and jobs? The group raised private money for research. Research became a plan. The plan became a nonprofit corporation, NCInnovation, incorporated in 2020.
In 2023, the state created a $500 million endowment reserve for NCInnovation. The design is unusual: preserve the public principal, use investment income for university grants and related support, and pay core operating costs with private contributions. It is a large bet and a disputed one. NCInnovation first sought far more public money, and reporting has documented skepticism about handing such a sum to a young private nonprofit. That argument is part of the result, not an inconvenient footnote to it.
The Results Company’s role, by its own account, was upstream: organize the leaders, support the inquiry, help turn years of analysis into an institution. This is the firm’s competitive distinction. A lobbying shop sells access. A PR agency sells attention. A management consultancy sells analysis. TRC combines pieces of all three, then adds something less glamorous and often more valuable - the ability to operate the nonprofit, coalition or project after the launch photographs are taken.
Too much news, too little knowledge
The most charming TRC origin story concerns a newsletter. At a 2018 summit, business leaders were telling legislators which issues deserved attention. Partway through, they learned that lawmakers were already considering many of those issues. The work simply had not matured enough to attract news coverage. Everyone was drowning in headlines while missing the information that could change a decision.
TRC Nexus was conceived that day. It now delivers weekday state and national briefings, Tuesday and Thursday opinion selections, and an original Saturday column. It is free, intentionally aimed at North Carolina executives and proudly uninterested in mass clicks. The company says it carefully maintains the recipient list. Scarcity here is not a bug. It is part of the service: a small audience whose members have reasons to act on what they read.
A second translation product is more literal. TRC provides operational support to the North Carolina Marine & Estuary Foundation, which launched FINDEX in 2022. Fisheries assessments speak in fishing mortality and spawning-stock biomass. FINDEX combines the gaps between current and target measures into a percentage, then labels a stock depleted, rebuilding, stable, robust or world-class. The tool acknowledges an important weakness: government stock assessments may lag reality by five years, sometimes more than ten. Clarity cannot make old data young.
“It’s operational expertise, not mission statements, that determine a nonprofit’s success.”The Results Company
The invoice is mostly invisible
TRC publishes no fee card, revenue figure or complete client list. Its business appears to be conventional professional services - advisory and project fees for executive counsel, public affairs, coalition work and nonprofit operations. The company says it works at local, state and federal levels, but nearly every vivid public example is anchored in North Carolina. That concentration is the point. Political intelligence is perishable and local. Relationships do not travel as neatly as a slide deck.
The firm’s customers are executives and organizations that face a public problem with too many interested parties: companies entering a policy debate, industry groups needing a coalition, civic leaders testing a new institution, nonprofits that require an operating spine. They are not buying media coverage by the pound. They are buying judgment about who must be involved, which facts will move them and what structure can survive disagreement.
The useful constraint: this method needs a real constituency, patient leaders and a problem that can be converted into collective action. It is poorly suited to a founder hunting for instant national buzz, a client unwilling to share control, or an issue with no credible common ground. It also travels less well outside the geography where the firm’s network and political memory are deepest.
What to steal from the quiet part
The copyable lesson is not “hire better lobbyists.” It is to separate the visible output from the system required to produce it. Start by convening people who hold different pieces of the problem. Ask what they believe that the public, market or government does not. Decide whether the missing vehicle is a campaign, a recurring briefing, a nonprofit or simply disciplined project management. Only then commission the logo.
And measure the thing that the vehicle exists to change. TRC Nexus tracks whether executives open and circulate its briefings. FINDEX turns inaccessible assessments into a common score. All in North Carolina reports impressions and leads, while also attaching claimed investments to the campaign. None of these measures is perfect. Each is at least closer to behavior than applause at a launch party.
The Results Company is a reminder that communications can be an act of organization. Fuller’s firm is most distinctive when it makes the room useful, gives the room a vehicle and stays around to run the vehicle. The headline arrives later.