The PR Firm That Took a Sledgehammer to Its Own Status Symbols

Four years before Tunheim won a small-employer award, someone swung a sledgehammer through the office. Around the windows sat a ring of private rooms - the sort of corporate geography that quietly explains who matters. The firm knocked them down. The stated aim was not fashionable furniture. It was to make accidental conversation possible. In a communications company, the walls had begun communicating the wrong thing.

The demolition makes a good anecdote because it is satisfyingly literal. But it was only the visible part of a more difficult confession. By Tunheim's own account, clients disliked the hourly pricing model. Employees inhabited a system that rewarded titles and office space. Annual reviews looked backward and searched for faults. The market saw a traditional PR shop hired to execute; Tunheim wanted to be valued for high-level judgment. A firm built to diagnose misunderstanding had diagnosed itself.

“Clients hated the pricing model our industry was clinging to.”Tunheim, reflecting on its overhaul

The outsiders

The origin story begins in 1990, when Kathy Tunheim and four colleagues left Honeywell together. They had concluded that they could be more useful as outside advisers than as insiders perpetually asked to do more with less. They knew corporate communications and public life; they were less familiar with benefits administration and the small daily anxieties of running a firm. Their first assignment was not a publicity stunt. It was redesigning the communications function of a Fortune 100 company.

That beginning still explains the company better than the label “PR agency.” Tunheim works at the point where a decision meets the people who can accept it, resist it or reinterpret it. Its buyers include corporations, public agencies, nonprofits, coalitions and civic initiatives. A health-system consolidation, a product launch, a policy fight and a stadium bid look unrelated until you notice the shared problem: each requires a group of people to understand why something is happening and what they should do next.

The thing that failed first

Over time, the consultancy became a national consumer and business-to-business PR agency, then built a substantial public-affairs practice. The capabilities were useful; the category became a trap. During and after the Great Recession, disruption accelerated while the firm's position narrowed. If clients regarded Tunheim as an execution team, they compared its hours. If they regarded it as counsel, they compared its decisions. The first failure was therefore not a campaign. It was the frame around the business.

Tunheim moved back toward consulting and away from the billable-hour identity it said clients hated. It replaced supervisors and annual performance reviews with coaches and a continuing conversation about improvement. It organized people around assignments instead of trapping them in account or industry silos. Its “collective best” model added independent specialists when a problem required expertise the core staff did not own. Through IPREX, which Tunheim joined in 2007, that bench extended into other markets and countries. The cost showed up in surrendered habits: private offices, familiar authority, predictable reviews and the comfort of billing every unit of effort the old way.

This structure has a condition attached. Flexible talent is useful only when the firm can diagnose the problem well enough to choose the right talent. A loose network without senior judgment is merely a crowded address book. Tunheim's version leans on experienced counselors, many of whom have sat on the client side, and on a regional network built through Minnesota business and civic life. Global reach comes through IPREX; local credibility still has to be earned locally.

Fifteen minutes for Minnesota

Consider the bid for Super Bowl LII. Minnesota had a new stadium, nearly 50 possible venues, more than 180 hotels, transport infrastructure and a Mall of America expansion. Facts were plentiful. Attention was not. Tunheim worked with the bid committee, steering committee and communications task force to turn all of that inventory into a story that culminated in a 15-minute presentation to NFL owners. Minnesota won the 2018 game.

The useful detail is the compression. The agency's job was not to invent Minnesota or paste a slogan over it. It was to decide what mattered, remove the “you betcha” caricature and give multiple powerful groups one coherent case. That pattern appears in less glamorous work too. For Fresenius Renal Therapies, Tunheim examined competitors, channels, tone and industry sentiment, then argued that regulatory uncertainty did not require digital silence. For Schneider Electric, it built thought-leadership programs around experts in technical business units. For Renewable Energy Group's Manchester United partnership, it coordinated American outreach with IPREX agencies in Germany and the Netherlands.

Communication works best before a decision hardens - while leaders can still change the choice, not merely polish the explanation.

The campaign from the kitchen table

The pandemic supplied a harsher test. Tunheim already had remote-work systems, so the office closing was less disruptive than the changing public environment. The firm onboarded the Minnesota Homeownership Center without an in-person meeting and ran a two-part campaign directing homeowners toward foreclosure-prevention help. It supported the State of Minnesota's #StayHomeMN effort, centered on influencer outreach, which reported nearly 200 million Twitter hashtag impressions and more than 12,000 organic Instagram mentions.

With FOX 9, it helped create Shine On Minnesota, a two-hour virtual broadcast featuring Minnesota artists. The event raised $140,000 for local nonprofits. The production process was not mystical: daily calls, clear deliverables, named owners and a timing plan. That is worth remembering when the headline metric starts sparkling. Reach can expose a message; it cannot repair a vague objective. The campaigns worked under unusual conditions because the desired actions were unusually concrete - stay home, seek help, donate.

What another firm can borrow

Tunheim's reinvention is most useful when reduced to practices, not décor. Start with the client complaint nobody wants to repeat. Separate the expertise customers value from the activity that is easiest to invoice. Replace annual judgment with frequent coaching. Build the team after defining the problem. And put communications into the operating plan early enough that stakeholder reaction can improve the decision.

The approach fits complex, high-stakes choices with several audiences and room for leaders to listen. It is less useful when the underlying conduct is indefensible, the decision is already irreversible or executives want decoration rather than counsel. No channel plan can manufacture consent. No clever message can substitute for operational truth. Tunheim's own story is persuasive precisely because the firm changed the system behind the words.

A firm between categories

Today, Tunheim sells public relations, public affairs, crisis and change counsel, management consulting, government services, digital marketing, content, podcasts and AI-era discoverability work. It is a private, woman-owned firm with a GSA contract, a Bloomington headquarters and a staff count that public listings place in the 11-to-50 range. Its alternatives include large network agencies, local independents, specialist public-affairs shops and the client's own communications department.

The differentiator is not that Tunheim can write, pitch, post or measure; competitors can do those things. It is the attempt to connect them to the decision that created the communications problem. Kathy Tunheim once worked in a world where a few broadcasters and newspapers supplied a common picture of reality. That world fragmented. The company's answer has been to become broader without becoming enormous: a senior core, assembled expertise and a durable premise that being understood is an organizational responsibility.

There is a pleasant symmetry here. The agency began when five insiders decided they could be more valuable from the outside. Decades later, it renewed itself by looking at its own firm as outsiders might - at the invoices, the reviews, the office map and the assumptions. Then someone picked up the sledgehammer.