Joele Frank opened a September interview by noting that no one had written a story like it about her before. For the head of a firm that works on mergers worth billions of dollars, it was an unusual admission.
“It’s really a team sport,” Frank said of the firm’s success. “We just keep our noses to the grindstone.”
Others Supply the Titles
O’Dwyer’s editor-in-chief Kevin McCauley calls her the first lady of financial PR. Her firm, Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher, has grown to more than 200 employees and 26 partners since 2000, and it offers M&A, investor relations, public relations, activism defense and digital work from New York and San Francisco.
Frank seldom leads with her own record. Before founding Joele Frank, she began as a biochemist, earned an M.B.A. and worked as a financial analyst at Allied Chemical. At AT&T, where she worked in finance on the Bell system breakup, her bosses steered her into a new job. They told her, “you have a big mouth, why don’t you go into investor relations at the new AT&T?” She took the job and loved it, and when AT&T moved to New Jersey in 1987, she stayed in New York.
She learned the agency business at Adams & Rinehart and left Abernathy MacGregor in early 2000 with her team. She has also discussed the firm’s shared-equity partnership on The Deal’s podcast.
The Team She Credits
“Many of our partners came to us right out of college and have come all the way up,” she said.
Frank estimates that half to three-quarters of the partners are homegrown, and only one founder has retired, in 2011. Of the firm’s founding, she said, “We were all for one and one for all.”
The firm started as an M&A shop, and within a year the partners found that deal-only advisers lose the client once a transaction closes. Investor relations, public relations and activism defense followed, and graphic and digital work came later.
Shared Ownership
Partners at Joele Frank are independent owners who share one P&L, and Frank has said that makes everyone equal inside the firm. Their recent assignments include the media contact role for DigitalBridge on its leadership appointments and advising Confluent on its $11 billion acquisition by IBM.
“Culture is very important to me,” she said.
Frank welcomes the rivalry with FGS Global, FTI Consulting and Kekst CNC. “One of the things I’ve always stressed is that we need strong competition for the PR industry to exist,” she said. Joele Frank meets those firms on large deals from its offices at 22 Vanderbilt.
