The first draft did not go well. Paul Orzulak was writing for Senator Tom Harkin, and the ritual of review began with two words: “Dammit, Orzulak.” It happened often enough to become a nickname. This is a useful origin story for a company whose product is sometimes mistaken for verbal decoration. Good speechwriting is not the discovery of a sparkling adjective. It is the slow, occasionally bruising business of finding the argument a particular person can carry into a particular room.
Orzulak eventually wrote for President Bill Clinton. In 2001, as the administration ended, he, Jeff Shesol, and Tom Rosshirt organized West Wing Writers in Washington. The proposition was simple, if slightly audacious: the habits formed around presidential speeches could travel. A chief executive introducing a product, a philanthropist asking others to act, and a mayor explaining a policy all faced versions of the same problem. They had information. They needed meaning.
A speech is the receipt, not the purchase
West Wing Writers still writes speeches, but “speechwriting firm” now describes it the way “bookseller” describes Amazon: true, recognizable, and radically incomplete. The company develops thought-leadership platforms, audits messages and public conversations, positions executives, writes op-eds and manuscripts, designs event content, coaches speakers, runs workshops, builds public-affairs campaigns, and publishes nonfiction through Disruption Books.
The visible output might be twelve minutes at a lectern. The service is everything that makes those minutes coherent. Who else is speaking? What has this leader already said? Where do the organization’s claims contradict one another? Which idea belongs credibly to this person, rather than to any competent person with a microphone? West Wing Writers calls one early exercise a conversation audit. It studies who is saying what, to whom, and with what effect. Another exercise, the message audit, compares the story an organization believes it tells with the one its speeches, interviews, op-eds, and web copy actually reveal.
That sequence explains the firm’s place in the market. A PR agency may begin with attention. A ghostwriter may begin with a book. A leadership coach may begin with delivery. An in-house communications team may begin with this week’s calendar. West Wing Writers begins with the argument and then follows it outward. Its political ancestry matters here. On a campaign or in the White House, a sentence is rarely alone. It must fit policy, biography, news, coalition, venue, and the sentences that came before.
Our clients don’t need to hear themselves talk; they want to lead a conversation.
The clients you are not supposed to notice
The company says it works with recognizable CEOs, major foundations, entrepreneurs, public officials, entertainers, and athletes. Then it declines to name most of them. This is not an unfortunate gap in the marketing. It is the marketing. A famous person hiring help to sound like themselves does not generally want the helper jumping into the frame. Confidentiality is one of the deliverables.
A few edges of the portfolio are public. Vinca LaFleur, now the CEO, helped write President Clinton’s speeches on foreign affairs and later collaborated with Kamala Harris on The Truths We Hold. Co-founder Shesol worked on State of the Union addresses and Clinton’s farewell. Staff members have written in campaign war rooms, for governors and cabinet officials, and around the United Nations. The team also includes authors, teachers, improv performers, and humor writers. One senior director hosts SpeakEasy, a live New York show where speechwriting and comedy share a small stage and, presumably, an even smaller margin for a weak line.
The business model is custom professional services: projects and ongoing relationships spanning strategy, writing, coaching, events, campaigns, and publishing. There is no public rate card. That makes sense because “write a keynote” can mean anything from editing an existing draft to interviewing a leadership team, researching a market, shaping a platform, rehearsing the speaker, and planning the afterlife of the idea. A supplied business dataset estimates annual revenue at roughly $6.9 million, but the private company does not publicly confirm that figure.
Then the supporting cast bought the theater
In 2023, West Wing Writers made the most interesting strategic statement in its history without drafting a speech. It created an Employee Stock Ownership Plan and transferred the company to its employees. Every full-time worker became a shareholder. The legal entity changed from an LLC to a corporation. The firm said it had grown from three people to nearly 50 over two decades.
The ownership matched the byline
The work had always been collaborative and usually anonymous. The ESOP made the economic structure reflect that reality: the people researching, drafting, editing, coaching, and producing now shared in the value they created.
The change also answered a succession question common to founder-led creative firms. A consultancy’s assets walk out the door each evening. Sell it to an outside buyer and the culture can become a line item. Keep ownership among a shrinking set of founders and the next generation remains permanently next. Employee ownership offered another path: preserve independence, reward tenure, and make “our firm” more than office grammar.
It is tempting to make this tidy. It is not. An ESOP does not make deadlines shorter, clients less demanding, or difficult edits charming. Nor does a White House résumé guarantee the right voice for a founder, actor, scientist, or athlete. Political rhetoric can sound inflated in a product meeting. Humor can collapse when the speaker does not own the joke. A polished line will not rescue a vague strategy, and a private writing partner cannot manufacture courage for a leader who will not say what the moment requires.
What to steal from the people who borrow voices
The useful lesson is not “hire a former presidential speechwriter.” It is to separate thinking from typing. West Wing Writers’ method begins before the blank page and continues after the applause. Anyone preparing an important message can copy the bones of it.
A five-step podium test
- Audit the room before entering it. List what the audience already believes, fears, and has heard too often.
- Choose one change you want in the listener: a thought, a feeling, or an action.
- Build several angles on one story instead of several unrelated stories.
- Write for the speaker’s mouth. If they would never say it in conversation, elegance will not save it.
- Make the central phrase easy to remember, repeat, translate, and quote without its surrounding paragraph.
This method works when the leader has a real idea, grants the writer access, accepts honest edits, and practices aloud. It works poorly when the assignment is camouflage: a slogan in search of a strategy, a personality imposed on an unwilling speaker, or “authenticity” ordered by committee. The first thing to fail is usually not the wording. It is the premise.
The firm’s first 25 years trace a curious arc. Presidential speechwriters left the most famous office in America and built a company devoted to staying out of sight. The company expanded from speeches into the machinery around them. Then the founders made the invisible contributors visible on the cap table. For a business that insists the story is the strategy, the ownership story may be its cleanest piece of writing.