A new entrant
You have no track record yet, and nothing anyone can go and check.
Strategic Communications
The Problem
Trust runs on a track record. Change wipes the track record out.
You have no track record yet, and nothing anyone can go and check.
You are no longer the thing people trusted, even though the name on it is the same.
You are asking the market to unlearn what it already knows about you.
You are selling something with no analyst covering it, no budget line to buy it with, and no peer who has already done it.
All of them leave you asking people to believe something you cannot prove yet.
You already know when a story is not landing. You know what is at stake if it does not.
The usual way to solve that is to claim more. Claim bigger, claim first, claim loudest.
It does not work. Once a claim is disproven, the trust you built goes with it. Trust is difficult to earn back. It is slow and very expensive.
What has changed
Anyone can produce a page of polished, confident copy in seconds now, and nothing in the writing tells you whether any of it is true. Good claims have gotten cheap. Checking them is as slow and expensive as it ever was. Buyers know that. So do analysts, reporters and regulators. They have gotten harder to convince rather than easier.
So the claim starts with you. It cannot end with you.
Approach
Most narratives are built to be delivered by the company. They work while a founder or a salesperson is there to deliver them, and they stop working the moment that person leaves.
The claims that move a market get repeated by people who do not work for you, usually in one sentence, in a room you are not in.
So I write for those people. That sets three constraints.
It has to be sayable by someone with no stake in your success, which rules out anything that sounds like marketing.
It has to be specific enough that someone passing it along cannot easily get it wrong.
It has to arrive with its evidence, because whoever repeats it will be asked how they know.
I get the raw material by listening, and I do that by getting the people who will have to repeat it talking to each other.
The Proof
The second half of the work is inspiring someone else to say it.
Nobody repeats a story because they were asked to. They repeat it because it is true, because it is interesting enough to be worth their own credibility, and because something in it connects.
Evidence is what lets someone repeat you safely. Feeling is what makes them want to. Most communications work I have seen delivers one or the other.
Getting it said is also not one campaign, because each audience accepts a different kind of evidence.
So I work out which proof a given audience actually requires, and then I go and get that one.
That means analysts briefed properly rather than pitched, customers who are willing to be named, and reporters handed something they can verify. Then I build the program that keeps producing it, so the proof does not run out when I leave.
Why I do this
I have spent my career working on claims that people relied on.
A bank
Four million people kept their money there. A sentence that turned out to be wrong was not a brand problem. It was somebody's rent.
A global identity technology
The people on the other end have no documents at all. A system they cannot trust is not an inconvenience to them. It decides whether they can open an account or enroll a child in school.
That is why I care whether a claim holds up. Not because overstating is untidy, but because somebody on the far end of it is making a decision they cannot easily undo.
What I do
What your company is, who it is for, and why it matters, in language your key stakeholders recognize.
Go-to-market narrative · Category creation and repositioning · Messaging architecture · Stealth to launch
Getting third parties to say it. Analysts, reporters, customers, awards and speaking platforms, worked in sequence.
Media strategy · Analyst relations · Executive visibility · Customer stories · Agency selection and oversight
Communications where being wrong carries a real cost. Regulatory and policy narrative, supervised-entity messaging, pre-IPO discipline, issues and crisis.
Regulatory & policy narrative · Pre-IPO discipline · Issues and crisis · Quarterly and disclosure communications
Standing up or running the communications function itself, including global programs delivered through multiple agencies.
Team build · Fractional communications leadership · Agency and budget management · Plan execution
References
"Andrea ran communications through the bank's first years under federal supervision; oftentimes working directly with the CEO and board. What I valued most was that she knew exactly which sentences we could not say, and she still found a way to say something worth saying. Most PR professionals can do one or the other."
Halle Hutchinson, Chief Brand Officer, Varo Bank
"We were an enterprise search company in a market that had stopped growing, and we needed analysts and buyers to think of us in a category we had not been in. Andrea went and got the language from the people we were selling to, then made the case to the analysts rather than issuing press releases about it. The repositioning worked."
Chris Hutchinson, VP Marketing, Recommind
"When I started Civitas ID I asked Andrea to come with me. We were building something with no precedent, and we had to convince top global NGOs, multilaterals, national governments, banks and technologists, as well as the displaced and vulnerable people who will use the digital identity system itself. She built the story from nothing and got it into those rooms."
Colin Walsh, Founder and Board Chair, Civitas ID, and former CEO, Varo Bank
Experience
Earlier roles
Goldman Sachs · Genworth Asset Management · DocuSign · Intuit
Says Who
Says Who is a recurring series that takes apart how credibility is actually built and lost, using real examples as they happen. Three questions each time, and never a lecture aimed at the company involved.
It is the public version of the work on this page. If you want to know how I think before you hire me, read a few and decide.
Words matter when trust is on the line.
Credentials
Engagements usually take one of three shapes. A narrative and positioning project with a defined end. A launch or repositioning program run over several months. Or a fractional retainer where I run the function. I take on a small number at a time, and the first conversation costs nothing and usually tells us both whether this is a fit.