Strategic Communications

Be known before you need them.

We make organizations known to the people who decide about them. Every executive who matters, speaking to every audience that decides something, run as one function, so you are never introducing yourself at the moment you can least afford to.

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Trusted by executives in healthcare, energy, financial services, government, media, and ministry

Watch First

Why you keep starting from zero.

Evelio Silvera on what it costs to be unknown to the people who decide about you, and why three separate vendors will never fix it.

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Is This You

The worst time to introduce yourself is the moment you need something.

Somebody is going to decide something about your organization this year. A buyer choosing a vendor. A partner choosing a channel. A commission voting on a permit. An agency reading an application. A reporter writing the first paragraph anyone will read about you. The only question is whether they know who you are before they decide.

  • ✓You are entering a new market or a new geography, and every conversation there starts from scratch.
  • ✓You are going to ask a county or a city for a decision, and the people voting on it could not describe what you do.
  • ✓You need a license or a permit, and the first time that agency hears your name will be on the application.
  • ✓Your CEO is the only person who ever speaks for the organization, and usually only when something has gone wrong.
  • ✓A competitor with half your track record is the one getting quoted, invited, and called first.
  • ✓Your buyers, your partners, and your board look you up and find a website and very little else.
  • ✓Your members or donors hear from you at renewal, which is the one moment it is too late to build anything.
  • ✓You are growing into places where trust gets built one relationship at a time, and you cannot do it one at a time fast enough.

Every one of those is the same problem. The people who decide about you are meeting you for the first time at the exact moment you need something from them.

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The Problem

They decide about you either way. Make sure they know who you are first.

Every organization has a set of people outside it who decide things. Whether you get the contract, the permit, the partnership, the renewal, the benefit of the doubt. You do not employ them. You will never meet most of them. And they are making those decisions on whatever they happen to know about you.

For most organizations that is not much. A website. A company page that posts when someone gets hired. A CEO who speaks publicly when something has already gone wrong. So every one of those decisions starts from zero, and starting from zero has a price.

You pay it in sales cycles that run months longer than they should. In markets you have to enter twice because the first attempt never got traction. In permits and applications that sit while somebody works out who you are. In the deal that went to a competitor who is not better than you, just better known.

This is not vanity metrics and it is not press releases. It is pipeline that moves faster, markets that open sooner, and decisions that go your way because the people making them already knew who you were.

That is the whole job. By the time anyone has to decide about you, they already know who you are, what you do, and why you are worth believing. Be known before you need them.

Strategic Communications

Your CEO cannot be the only person your market hears from.

Your investors want to hear from your CFO. Your regulators want the person who actually knows the science. Your members want the leader who sits closest to them. Your employees need it from you before they read it somewhere else. One voice on a content calendar cannot do that job, and most firms are only selling you one.

01

Every leader who matters sounds like themselves.

We model each executive's actual voice, then run them on the same chassis: interview, write, human edit, your approval, publish, measure. Your CFO, your clinical or technical lead, your policy lead, your division heads. Nothing goes out without a person on your side signing off on it.

02

Every audience that decides something hears the version meant for them.

Employees, investors, regulators, members, donors, the community, and the press are not one audience and they do not respond to one message. We build the map, write to each one, put it in front of them where they already are, and measure whether it moved.

03

Someone decides what you say before you have to say it.

A named senior strategist sets the position, the sequence, and the timing, and is reachable the day something breaks. This is the part no tool touches and no freelancer carries. It is judgment, and it is the difference between publishing and being ready.

Around all three: a newsroom on your own domain, a newsletter to the stakeholder list you own, and reporting in outcomes rather than activity. This is the function Evelio ran in-house for a national healthcare enterprise, rebuilt as something a mid-market organization can actually hire. We scope to the voices and the audiences your outcome requires, and we price the engagement, never the seat.

The Approach

You are hiring judgment, not output.

Not a lobbyist who makes an introduction and leaves. Not a PR firm chasing clips. Not a ghostwriting shop filling a content calendar. Every one of those sells you activity and leaves you to work out what it was for.

The organizations that win the outside do not buy pieces of it. They decide, early and on purpose, who needs to know them and what those people need to believe. Then they are consistent about it for long enough that it compounds.

Press clips, ad buys, and activity reports are yesterday's playbook. What decides outcomes now is knowing what is coming before it moves, owning your distribution instead of renting attention, and measuring in results rather than activity. That is the firm we built.

You always know the goal, the plan, and where it stands, and the senior person you meet is the senior person who does the work.

What It Pays For

Being known is not the goal. These are.

1

New markets open at half the effort

You walk into a new state, category, or buyer set where the people who matter already know your name, so your team spends its first two quarters selling instead of explaining. That is a shorter cycle and a higher win rate, and it shows up in the pipeline, not in a clip book.

2

Your category has a reference point, and it is you

When somebody in your space needs an example, an opinion, or a name to call, it is your people they think of. That is what puts you on a shortlist without a bidding war.

3

When something needs deciding, you are not a stranger

The commission voting on your permit, the agency reading your application, the reporter writing the story. They already know what you do and why it matters, before anyone had to form a view under pressure.

The Edge

Stop paying to be seen by people who cannot help you.

Most firms buy their way into the conversation. We aim ours. Buying attention is easy and almost everyone does it: you pay for a general audience and hope the people who matter are somewhere inside it.

We work the other way. We operate media properties, distribution channels, and audience data, so we can build the exact audience your outcome depends on, put your message in front of it, and measure whether it moved. The buyers on a shortlist you are not on yet. The members deciding whether to renew. The constituents in one commissioner's district.

Precision cuts both ways, and that is the point: we reach the audiences that move your outcome without cross-pressuring the ones that do not.

It is the difference between hoping the right people hear you and knowing they already have.

Who We Serve

Whatever is coming for you, someone here has already faced it.

You are not paying us to learn your world on your time. In each of these, we have already sat in the rooms, know who actually decides, and know which arguments move them. What changes from one to the next is who those people are.

Regulated Industries

Industries where one decision can reset the market. We have worked all four, and the list is where we have gone deepest, not where we stop.

Margin · Market Access · Reputation

Healthcare

Margin, market access, and the right to operate all sit with people outside your building: state agencies, legislative committees, payers, and the public. We protect what you already have, open the markets you want next, and keep the story straight while it happens.

Rules · Position · Reach

Technology & AI

You built the product, then found out that fifty different governments have an opinion about it. We get ahead of the rules while they are still being written, position you as the company that shapes them rather than reacts to them, and reach the people forming that judgment.

Exposure · Access · Narrative

Financial Services & Fintech

Every state, every regulator, and every headline is a gate you have to clear. We manage the exposure across all of them, build the relationships before you need them, and make sure the market hears your version of the story first.

Rates · Siting · Community

Energy & Utilities

Rates, siting, and reliability get decided by commissions, committees, and the communities they answer to. We work those rooms early, build the coalition around your position, and carry it to the people whose opinion actually moves the outcome.

Membership and Mission
Growth · Retention · Advocacy

Associations & Membership Organizations

Your members choose you again every year, and your advocacy only carries weight if they move when you ask. We build the narrative that keeps them, the distribution that reaches them where they already are, and the coalition strength that makes your position count in the rooms that decide.

Reach · Partnership · Trust

Faith-Based & Mission-Driven Organizations

Growth runs through trust, and trust runs through people who have to be persuaded one at a time: pastors, boards, donors, partners, denominational leadership. Barry Sneed grew a fledgling church network into a national alliance of thousands of church partners, and was instrumental in building out the church resource network at LifeWay. We know this ecosystem from the inside, and we know it does not respond to a marketing campaign.

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How We Measure

Results, not impressions.

Most firms report activity: meetings taken, mentions earned, impressions served, hours billed. We report in the currencies your board recognizes: pipeline opened, markets entered, decisions won, members kept, dollars secured and protected. If it does not show up in your operations or your P&L, we do not count it.

Healthcare
Kept in the market
A healthcare company was about to be forced out of a state by a Department of Insurance action. We saw it coming, got ahead of it, and kept them operating and in business there.
Technology
Opened the market
Built the relationships and partnerships that let Lyft operate in Florida, over incumbent opposition that had been blocking it.
State Appropriations
$100M+ secured
For two Florida counties, a 5X increase over prior cycles.
Media & Public Affairs
$24M+ in earned media
More than a billion impressions a year, shaping and elevating how the public and policymakers viewed a national organization.
Ministry & Membership
Thousands of church partners
Built a fledgling church network into a thriving pastors alliance, and converted it into measurable membership growth for one of the largest healthcare sharing ministries in the country.
Who We Are

You get senior operators who have already held the chair you are hiring for.

Between them they have run government affairs from inside the legislature, led communications for a national healthcare enterprise, and built the publishing and partner networks that reach thousands of congregations. The relationships that came with all of it now sit in state agencies, the Florida Legislature, federal agencies, the U.S. Congress, and the largest ministry and membership networks in the country. Named principals doing the work, not a pitch team you never see again.

Evelio Silvera
Co-Founder

Evelio has sat on both sides of these decisions, inside government and inside the companies affected by it. He was Legislative Director to the chairman of the Florida House Energy & Utilities Committee, ran statewide ballot and candidate campaigns, and led communications and strategy for a national healthcare enterprise. He is still operating today, as a senior executive at a green hydrogen company and a strategic advisor to two healthcare ventures, which means he is working the same rooms our clients are, on the same week they are. He also builds and operates media, which is why this firm owns its distribution instead of renting it. When an organization needs someone to decide what it says and when, Evelio takes that chair.

Jon Yapo
Co-Founder

Jon has spent 20 years opening doors in the rooms where decisions get made. He was a public affairs advisor at an Am Law 100 firm, counseling clients across healthcare, energy, technology, and financial services. He builds coalitions, moves legislation from the statehouse to the federal level, and shows up for his community just as hard, through church and ministry networks and volunteer work with Special Olympics and the Coalition for the Homeless. When an organization needs a seat at the table, Jon is the one who secures it.

Barry Sneed
Co-Founder

Barry has spent his career building the distribution that puts a message in front of the people who act on it. He was Executive Vice President of NavPress, the publishing arm of The Navigators, where he ran editorial, marketing, and sales through the shift to digital. At LifeWay he was instrumental in building out their church resource network. He then grew a fledgling church network into a thriving national alliance of thousands of church partners. That alliance became membership growth for one of the largest healthcare sharing ministries in the country. When an organization needs its message to reach an audience and change what they do, Barry builds the channel.

Featured In

See how much of your growth gets decided by strangers.

The Growth Map Scorecard takes three minutes. Name the audiences that decide your growth, and you will see how many of them know you, how many voices you have covering them, and what that adds up to in your own numbers. No call required, and the result is yours whether or not we ever speak.

The scorecard shows you the shape of it. The Growth Map puts real names to it.

See Your Growth Map →

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Get in Touch

Let's talk.

Tell us what you are up against. No intake forms. No junior associates. A real conversation with a senior operator who has been on the other side of the decision you are facing. If we can help, we will tell you how. If we cannot, we will tell you that too.

Email hello@chiefstrategist.com
Evelio → Jon → Barry →

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