The questions executives ask us
before they hire us.

Most marketing teams report on activity — impressions, clicks, follower counts. None of those tell you whether marketing is contributing to revenue. The test is simple: can you draw a direct line from a marketing activity to a sales conversation, a closed deal, or a retained customer?

The metrics that matter at the executive level are pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, and marketing-influenced revenue versus marketing-generated revenue. If your team can’t report those three things clearly, you have visibility into whether marketing is busy — not whether it’s working.

It depends on your stage and industry. Early-stage companies (pre-Series B) typically spend 15–25% of revenue on marketing. Growth-stage companies (Series B through C) typically run at 10–20%. Mature companies in stable markets often operate at 5–12%.

In regulated industries like industrial manufacturing and advanced technology, the number is often lower on paid media but higher on PR and communications — because earned credibility is more valuable than bought attention in those categories. The more important question isn’t the percentage, it’s whether each dollar has a clear return path.

A strategy answers “why” and “who” — why are we in this market, who is the specific customer we’re trying to reach, what position do we want to own, and what does winning look like. A plan answers “what” and “when” — the campaigns, channels, and activities that execute against the strategy.

Most companies have plans but no strategy. They have a content calendar and a paid media budget — but no clear answer to why a specific buyer should choose them. Strategy is the foundation that makes all plan-level decisions faster, cheaper, and more consistent.

Agencies are better for execution at scale; in-house teams are better for deep business context. Most companies make this decision backwards — they hire an agency first because it feels lower-commitment, then discover the agency can’t make good strategic decisions without someone inside who understands the business.

The model that works best for growth-stage companies is a hybrid: senior strategic leadership close to the business (in-house or fractional), paired with specialist execution for specific channels. Build in-house when you need deep institutional knowledge. Use a fractional or agency model when you need senior strategic thinking without the full-time cost.

Boards care about revenue impact, risk, and competitive position. The questions your board is actually asking: Is marketing contributing to our pipeline? Are we getting efficient customer acquisition? Is our brand positioned to win our market?

A board-ready marketing update is typically one page with five numbers: marketing-sourced pipeline, marketing-influenced pipeline, customer acquisition cost versus prior period, marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, and one leading brand health indicator. Then two or three sentences on what’s working, what isn’t, and what you’re adjusting.

Competitive analysis is the systematic practice of understanding how competitors position themselves, what messages they lead with, where they’re investing, and where they’re vulnerable. Done well, it’s a map of the white space you can own that they can’t or won’t.

For most growth-stage companies, a full competitive landscape audit is worth doing once a year, with a lighter quarterly update tracking positioning changes, new messaging, new launches, and earned media. In fast-moving categories like advanced technology manufacturing and science & technology, quarterly is often not frequent enough.

Marketing creates the conditions that make selling easier — awareness, credibility, qualified interest. Sales converts that interest into revenue. When they’re misaligned, marketing generates leads that sales can’t close, or sales closes deals that marketing didn’t support.

The specific things that go wrong: marketing defines a target customer that doesn’t match who sales is talking to; sales dismisses marketing leads without shared criteria for what a good lead looks like; marketing doesn’t know what objections come up in conversations, so content doesn’t address real buyer concerns. The fix is a shared customer definition, shared pipeline metrics, and a regular joint review — at minimum monthly.

PR builds credibility that paid media can’t buy. When a journalist writes about your company, when a podcast host invites you to speak, when an analyst cites you — those are third-party validations that your buyers trust more than anything you say about yourself. In regulated industries especially, earned credibility is often the difference between a warm conversation and a closed door.

What you can measure: share of voice versus competitors, inbound inquiry volume and quality, sales cycle length, and AI citation rate — whether your brand shows up when buyers search your category in AI tools.

PR is a subset of communications. PR specifically refers to earned media — relationships with journalists, analysts, and influencers that result in coverage you didn’t pay for. Communications strategy is the broader framework for how your company speaks to every stakeholder: customers, employees, investors, regulators, media, and the public.

Companies that treat PR as their entire communications function end up reactive: good at responding to journalists but without a proactive narrative that builds the position they want to own.

This is the wrong framing — and it’s the reason most PR efforts fail. Journalists don’t cover companies; they cover stories, trends, and ideas that are interesting to their readers. The question isn’t “what big announcement do we have?” It’s “what is our audience curious about, and how can we be the most credible voice on that topic?”

The most durable media relationships are built on thought leadership, not press releases. Build a genuine point of view, share it consistently, make yourself available to journalists working on stories in your category.

For most growth-stage companies, yes — with preparation. The CEO is the most credible face of a company’s vision, and founder-led communications have an authenticity that polished corporate messaging lacks. In 2026, buyers and journalists are more interested in the human behind the brand than the brand itself.

That said, media interviews carry real risk without preparation. The investment in media training — staying on message under pressure, bridging from difficult questions, speaking in quotable language — pays for itself the first time a journalist asks something unexpected.

Employer branding is the reputation your company has as a place to work — distinct from your product or market brand. Strong employer brands attract better candidates at lower recruiting cost and retain them longer. Weak employer brands create a recruiting tax: you pay more, wait longer, and still lose candidates to competitors.

Candidates research companies extensively before applying. They read Glassdoor, check LinkedIn, look at how leadership communicates. An employer brand isn’t built with a careers page — it’s built through consistent internal culture and authentic external communication about what it’s actually like to work there.

Directly and increasingly so. Employees are now among the most powerful amplifiers — or critics — of a company’s public narrative. Screenshots travel. Glassdoor reviews appear within days of major internal events. LinkedIn posts by unhappy employees reach thousands of people in your industry instantly.

When there’s a gap between internal reality and external messaging, employees notice it first — and they talk. Internal communications is not a support function. It’s a reputational risk management function, and one of the most underinvested areas in most organizations.

A communications crisis is any situation where your company’s reputation, operations, or relationships are threatened by events requiring an immediate, coordinated response across multiple stakeholder audiences. A negative article, a lawsuit that becomes public, a product recall, a regulatory investigation, a data breach, an executive departure under difficult circumstances — all qualify.

The test: are people forming opinions about your company based on information you don’t control, and is the narrative moving faster than you can respond?

Hour 1: Assemble your core response team. Agree on the facts as you currently understand them. Do not speculate. Do not go public until you have a clear, accurate, legally reviewed statement.

Hours 1–4: Draft holding statements for each primary stakeholder audience. A holding statement is a short, factual acknowledgment that you’re aware of the situation, taking it seriously, and will provide more information as it becomes available. This buys time without leaving a vacuum for others to fill.

Hours 4–24: Communicate proactively with high-priority stakeholders before they hear from media. Employees should hear from leadership directly. Investors should hear from the CEO. Proactive stakeholder communication is consistently the most effective thing a company can do to control a crisis narrative.

Almost never. “No comment” is interpreted as an admission that you have something to hide. It leaves the story entirely in others’ hands and signals you’re not in control. There is almost always something you can say that is both legally safe and publicly constructive.

The alternative is a holding statement: “We’re aware of [the situation] and are taking it seriously. We’re committed to [relevant value], and we’ll have more to share as we learn more.” This is factual, non-committal on specifics, and signals engagement.

Four things every leadership team should have in place: a crisis playbook defining your response team, decision-making authority, and communication protocols; pre-approved statement templates for your most likely scenarios that have already been through legal review; media training for your CEO and likely spokespeople; and a communications partner on retainer who already knows your business and your industry. The worst time to find a crisis firm is when you’re in a crisis.

Duration depends almost entirely on how the crisis was handled. Companies that responded quickly, communicated honestly, took accountability where appropriate, and demonstrated concrete corrective action tend to recover within three to six months. Companies that went silent or were caught in contradictions can carry reputational damage for years.

Recovery is an active process, not a waiting game. It requires publishing proof of what changed, re-establishing presence through thought leadership, re-engaging key stakeholders, and earning third-party validation. The worst strategy is hoping people forget. The best is giving them something new and credible to believe.

Significantly. AI-generated content can now produce realistic audio, video, or text that appears to be from your CEO — spreading misinformation at a speed and scale that was impossible five years ago. A deepfake can circulate across social media in minutes, generating real reputational impact before your team has identified it as fake.

The defensive posture: establish canonical, verified digital presence on key platforms; implement monitoring that flags unusual mentions and synthetic media around your brand; and have a rapid-response protocol specifically for synthetic media incidents. This is new enough that most crisis playbooks don’t address it. It should be on every executive team’s agenda in 2026.

For the past 20 years, discovery worked like this: a buyer searched Google, found your website, and formed an opinion. That chain is breaking. Increasingly, buyers ask AI tools questions about their category, and the AI synthesizes an answer that may or may not include your brand. In many cases, the AI answer is the first impression — formed before a buyer ever visits your website.

The brands that show up well in AI-generated answers are the ones that have built a reputation footprint — credible third-party mentions in publications AI systems trust, structured content that’s easy to cite, and clear positioning that makes it easy for an AI to describe you accurately.

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of building content and reputation infrastructure that causes AI tools to include your brand in their answers. SEO rewards technical optimization and link authority. GEO rewards clarity, structured content, credible third-party mentions, and accurate public information.

Yes, you should be paying attention. The brands investing in GEO now are building a visibility advantage that will compound over the next two to three years. The good news is GEO and traditional PR are highly complementary — earned media, speaking appearances, well-structured content, and clear positioning all contribute to both simultaneously.

Yes, strategically — but with a clear understanding of where AI adds value and where it doesn’t. AI is excellent at production tasks: drafting variations, reformatting for different channels, generating outlines, summarizing research. It can help a small team produce content at a scale that would otherwise require significantly more headcount.

What AI can’t produce is the specific, earned, credible story that makes a regulated-industry company trustworthy. The strategic narrative, the brand voice, the founder’s genuine point of view — these require human judgment. Use AI to execute at scale; set the direction with human expertise.

Brand storytelling is communicating your company’s identity, values, and purpose through narrative rather than claims. Instead of “we’re the leading provider of X,” you tell the story of why you built the company, what problem you saw that others weren’t solving, and what you believe that your competitors don’t.

It matters more than ever because AI has made it trivially easy to produce generic, competent-sounding content at scale. Every category is now flooded with content that sounds professional and means nothing. The brands that cut through are the ones with a specific, authentic story that can only come from them. In a world of infinite generic content, specificity is the scarcest and most valuable resource a brand can have.

Four practical steps: maintain a canonical About page with a precise, two-paragraph definition of what you do; keep your pricing, contact information, and key claims consistent across every platform; earn third-party mentions in credible publications (AI systems weight external sources heavily); and monitor regularly by running the queries your buyers would run across major AI tools monthly.

When you find inaccuracies, the fix is publishing more accurate, structured, credible content — not contacting the AI company directly.

Our work is concentrated in specialized industries where communications require real expertise: Industrial & Manufacturing, Advanced Technology Manufacturing, Science and Technology, Scientific Communications Nonprofits, Transportation & Logistics, Food & Beverage, and Lab Equipment. Our clients are typically growth-stage companies and established mid-market organizations navigating a significant transition — a funding round, acquisition, leadership change, regulatory challenge, or market expansion.

The common thread is complexity. Our clients operate in environments where the wrong communication can have real regulatory, financial, or reputational consequences, and where generic advice is at best useless and at worst harmful.

Debbie and Jamie do. When you engage TCG, you’re not hiring a firm that assigns a junior account team and checks in monthly. You work directly with the co-founders — senior practitioners who have led communications and marketing at scale, built and led teams, navigated crises, and presented to boards. Jamie has sat in the CMO seat and spent 25+ years in PR, media, and marketing; Debbie brings two decades as an HR and talent leader, now driving our social media, content, and operations.

For specific execution work — design, specialist writing, media relations — we bring in trusted partners from our network when an engagement calls for it. Those partners are vetted, briefed, and supervised by TCG leadership. The accountability for your outcomes sits with us.

We charge flat fees — either by project or as a set monthly retainer. No hourly billing, no surprise invoices, no charges for calls or emails. You know exactly what you’re paying before we start.

Typical ranges: Crisis Preparedness Retainer from $3,500/month. Fractional CMO engagements $4,000–$8,000/month. Project-based work scoped individually. All third-party costs are disclosed upfront and require your approval.

For ongoing engagements, we typically have an initial call within a week of inquiry and can be operational within two to three weeks — after a short onboarding period where we get up to speed on your business, stakeholders, and existing communications infrastructure.

For active crisis response, we move as fast as the situation requires. If you have an emergency, call us at 510–575-9555. We don’t have a queue for crisis situations.

It’s a complimentary 45-minute conversation with your leadership team. We give you a high-level review of your communications infrastructure across four dimensions: media and public profile, regulatory and compliance communications, employee communications and sentiment, and digital brand health including AI visibility.

At the end we identify your top vulnerability areas and show you where a deeper audit would focus. It’s a general assessment — our detailed crisis audit, with a full written action plan and step-by-step recommendations, is a separate paid engagement worth well over $20,000.

Three things. First, you work directly with the founders — not an account team. The people who pitch you are the people who do the work. Second, we operate as strategic partners embedded in your business, attending leadership meetings, reporting to your board, and owning outcomes the way an internal executive would. Third, we bring deep industry context in the sectors we serve.

Traditional agencies have large teams, account management layers, and pricing tied to headcount and hours. That model works for some companies. It tends not to work for growth-stage companies in regulated industries that need senior judgment, fast adaptation, and a partner accountable for business outcomes rather than deliverable output.