Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher has 26 partners, and its founder estimates that half to three-quarters of them are homegrown.
“Many of our partners came to us right out of college and have come all the way up,” Joele Frank said.
A Stable Partnership
Only one founder has retired since the firm opened in early 2000, and that retirement came in 2011. Total headcount has passed 200, and the firm has moved from its first offices on 55th Street to 22 Vanderbilt, with a second office in San Francisco. Its partners have recently advised Bio-Techne on its $11.3 billion sale to Merck KGaA and Pine Gate Renewables on its Chapter 11 filing, work that spans both deals and restructuring.
Frank ties the arrangement to ownership. She started the firm after her contract at Abernathy MacGregor ended, having held basically none of the equity there.
“We are independent owners with one P&L and that means everyone is equal in that environment,” Frank said. “Culture is very important to me.”
Staying Independent
Joele Frank has also stayed out of the holding-company model. Frank has pointed out that a conglomerate can one day divide up a business it owns, a risk independent partners avoid.
Growth inside the firm tracked growth in what it sells. Joele Frank started strictly in M&A and learned a lesson in its first year. “At the end of a deal, guess what happens if you’re only in M&A? You lose the client,” Frank said. The partners moved into investor relations, public relations and activism defense, and graphic and digital work, including investor-day slide decks, came later.
A Founder Who Deflects Credit
Frank’s own path to partnership ran through several employers. She trained as a biochemist, worked as a financial analyst at Allied Chemical and spent years at AT&T in finance and investor relations before an introduction to Jonathan Rinehart brought her to Adams & Rinehart. She later joined Abernathy MacGregor, where her contract ran until early 2000.
She is reluctant to take credit for what followed. At the start of a recent interview about the firm, she said no one had written a story like this about her before, even though O’Dwyer’s editor-in-chief Kevin McCauley calls her the first lady of financial PR.
“It’s really a team sport,” she said. “We just keep our noses to the grindstone.”
“One of the things I’ve always stressed is that we need strong competition for the PR industry to exist,” Frank said. Joele Frank meets FGS Global, FTI Consulting and Kekst CNC regularly on deals.