By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
The oldest leadership product in the world was a story told about a ruler after the battle ended. Judgement leaves no artefact, so reputation has always been the packaging your work arrives in. You sell decisions that will only be visible months later, inside rooms you will never enter. One bleak finding frames this guide. Trust in the very people you develop has fallen off a cliff in three short years. Your agency choice is therefore a credibility decision before it is a marketing one, because nobody buys judgement from a firm the market does not trust.
29 percent trust in immediate managers in 2024, down from 46 percent in 2022 (DDI, 2025) 40 percent of stressed leaders have considered leaving leadership roles altogether (DDI, 2025) 38 percent of journalists want help securing interviews with genuine industry experts (Cision, 2025)
I Discrimen
Judgement cannot be demonstrated, so it must be evidenced differently
A software founder can record a demo. You can only point to decisions that aged well.
That constraint shapes every honest choice you will make about representation. Your buyers cannot trial good judgement in an afternoon, cannot photograph it for a brochure and cannot return it when a quarter goes badly. What they can examine is a trail: the quality of your thinking in public, the calibre of clients willing to be associated with you and the consistency of your faculty over time.
An agency that understands this constraint will build that trail patiently. An agency that does not will reach for spectacle, pushing retreat photography, inspirational slogans and founder heroics that make serious buyers quietly step back. The distinction sounds subtle in a pitch meeting and decisive in a board corridor.
Ask any candidate firm how it would promote a programme whose results will not be visible for eighteen months. The answer tells you whether the team grasps your product at all. Vague talk of buzz means you are about to pay for noise around the one asset you cannot replace.
Reputation is the only sample of your product a buyer ever gets to inspect in advance.
II Machina
Boards buy leadership help the way they buy auditors, on referral and record
Nobody shortlists a leadership firm from an advertisement.
Trace the real route into a client and you will find a chain of borrowed confidence. A board member mentions a name heard at another board. A chief executive asks a trusted peer who steadied their top team. A chief human resources officer checks whether your partners have published anything worth arguing with. Your name either survives those quiet checks or it never reaches a formal process.
Public relations earns its fee inside that chain, not outside it. A sharp article in a serious title gives the referrer something respectable to forward. A well placed argument about succession or derailment gives the chief executive a reason to raise your name without sounding sold to. The coverage is a permission slip for a conversation between people who already trust each other.
That is the mechanism your agency must design for, deliberately and in writing. Who needs to be able to recommend you, what will they forward, and does the piece make the forwarder look discerning? Programmes built around those three questions compound. Programmes built around impressions evaporate by the next board cycle.
Your next client will hear about you from someone they trust, holding something your agency helped create.
III Exemplum
The trust collapse is your market context, not your headline
DDI surveyed 10,796 leaders and 2,185 human resources professionals across more than 50 countries for its Global Leadership Forecast 2025, and found that 71 percent of leaders reported significantly increased stress (DDI, 2025). Sit with the commercial meaning of that response pattern before you brief anyone. The population you serve is tired, scrutinised and in many cases quietly reconsidering whether leading is worth the personal cost.
The same study recorded that four in ten stressed leaders had considered stepping away from leadership to protect their wellbeing (DDI, 2025). A pipeline with that level of ambivalence inside it is a strategic risk a board can price. Your commentary should treat it that way, as succession exposure and organisational fragility, rather than as a wellness talking point for a panel.
Notice how this example disciplines your tone. Firms that sell rescue fantasies to exhausted leaders sound opportunistic against data this stark. Firms that speak plainly about load, purpose and support sound like adults in a room full of slogans. Journalists covering the leadership beat can hear the difference in a single quote, and so can the chief executives reading over breakfast.
When your market is this tired, calm authority outsells excitement every single time.
IV Damnum
A failed leadership appointment costs more than the search fee
The invoice you can see is the smallest part of a bad succession.
SHRM reported that the average tenure of departing chief executives fell to 8.5 years in 2025, the lowest figure since 2019, and that nearly 40 percent of United States chief executives left within their first five years (SHRM, 2025). Shorter tenures compress everything around your work. Development cycles get judged earlier, successors get promoted ready or not, and boards grow less patient with programmes that cannot show behavioural movement.
Now add the preparation gap on the client side. Only 44 percent of extra large organisations reported a formal succession plan, and the share dropped to 16 percent among small organisations (SHRM, 2025). Many of your prospects are therefore buying development and succession support at the same time, usually after a scare. Your public positioning needs to speak to that urgency without exploiting it.
Here is the cost logic your agency should be able to articulate to a finance minded director. One derailed executive appointment burns search fees, severance, stalled strategy and team attrition in a single chain of events. Against that chain, the price of credible development looks modest, provided the firm providing it can discuss assessment and follow through with a straight face.
Boards forgive an expensive programme. They do not forgive feeling unprepared twice.
V Genus
Your real competitors are not other consultancies, they are substitutes
A business school logo and a famous coach both sit on your shortlist.
Understand the full shelf your buyer is looking at before you judge agency options, because your communications must win against alternatives that barely communicate at all. The table below compares the routes a board typically weighs.
| Route the buyer considers | What it signals | Where it falls short | Implication for your PR |
|---|---|---|---|
| University executive education | Academic prestige and a safe name in the board pack | Cohorts are generic and the relationship ends at the certificate | Publish thinking a prospectus cannot carry |
| Independent executive coach | Personal attention and confidentiality for one leader | No organisational view and no succession depth | Show team and system level outcomes in your stories |
| Global leadership consultancy | Scale, assessment infrastructure and research budgets | Partners rotate and mid market clients feel processed | Make named partner continuity a public promise |
| Boutique development firm like yours | Senior attention and contextual design | Thin public proof compared with famous substitutes | Borrowed credibility must be earned title by title |
| Internal academy build | Control and apparent cost saving | Slow to launch and hard to staff with credible faculty | Position your faculty as the faculty they cannot hire |
Your agency choice follows from whichever substitute worries you most. Beating the business school requires intellectual visibility. Beating the celebrity coach requires evidence that your work changes teams, not just individuals. Ask each candidate firm which substitute it has actually campaigned against, and listen for specifics rather than confidence.
You do not lose deals to firms like yours. You lose them to safer looking answers to a different question.
VI Probatio
Assessment claims are where leadership reputations go to be audited
Every validity question you dodge in public will be asked in private.
Serious buyers have learned to interrogate the instruments behind the insight. They ask what an assessment predicts, on what population it was validated and how your coaches handle a profile that flatters a powerful client. Harvard Business Review reported a study of 3,761 executives in which 24 percent significantly overestimated their own coaching skills compared with colleague ratings (Ibarra and Scoular, Harvard Business Review, 2019). That single mismatch explains why self description convinces nobody at board level.
Your agency should welcome this scrutiny and build content that survives it. Publish your assessment philosophy in plain language, including what your tools cannot tell a client. Explain how feedback is delivered, how derailers are handled and what happens after the debrief, because the follow through is where most development quietly dies.
McKinsey Quarterly identified a familiar pattern in why leadership development programmes fail, pointing to overlooked context, reflection detached from real work, underestimated mindsets and results that nobody measures (McKinsey Quarterly, 2014). An agency fluent in that critique will stop you publishing claims your own delivery model contradicts. That protective friction is worth money, and it rarely appears on a rate card.
Candour about limits is the loudest credibility signal available to a firm selling judgement.
VII Segmentum
The founder guru model builds reach and concentrates risk
Your biggest media asset and your largest exposure may be the same person.
Many leadership firms are, in the public mind, one charismatic founder with a book, a keynote and a waiting list. That concentration wins attention quickly, and the Center for Creative Leadership research tradition reminds you why the attention is fragile. In the CCL study of the top leadership challenges facing senior leaders, credibility gaps ranked first among the concerns recorded after the pandemic period (Center for Creative Leadership, 2024). A practice built on one persona carries a credibility gap waiting for a trigger.
The triggers are ordinary rather than dramatic. Illness, a careless remark in an interview, a public disagreement with a former client or simple overexposure can each turn the asset into the story. Succession inside your own firm then becomes a press problem as well as a partnership problem, which is an uncomfortable mirror for a business that advises others on exactly that transition.
A thoughtful agency will spread the voice before a crisis forces the issue. Faculty members with distinct topics, a research habit that survives any one calendar and client advocates who can speak without you in the room all reduce the concentration. Gallup found that global employee engagement fell from 23 percent to 21 percent, with manager engagement sliding from 30 percent to 27 percent, which gives your wider faculty a live topic to own together (Gallup, 2025).
A firm that can only be interviewed through one mouth has a succession problem it sells solutions for.
VIII Occasio
Succession stories are the media diet your buyers already consume
Chief executive exits are covered like sport, and the analysis afterwards is your opening.
Read how a departure gets reported and you will see the gap your expertise fills. The first wave covers the announcement and the share reaction. The second wave asks why the successor was or was not ready, and that wave is written by journalists hunting for informed explanation. SHRM noted that 49 percent of organisations called succession planning a top priority in 2024, yet priority and readiness remain two very different states (SHRM, 2025).
Your agency should maintain a standing readiness file for these moments. Short, quotable analysis of what boards typically get wrong, prepared lines on interim leadership and a partner cleared to comment within hours all belong in that file. Cision found that 38 percent of journalists want public relations professionals to connect them with industry experts, and 35 percent said an ideal pitch offers direct access to one (Cision, 2025).
Speed alone will not win the quote, because accuracy is the currency in a story about a named company. Muck Rack reported that one in three journalists now publish independently, and that creator journalists respond well to relevant expertise while rejecting most pitches as irrelevant (Muck Rack, 2025). The resources collection for this sector shows how the same readiness approach is framed for neighbouring people businesses.
When a chief executive falls, the second day story belongs to whoever can explain readiness without selling anything.
IX Consilium
Choose the agency that protects your credibility while it builds it
Growth and guard duty are the same job in your category.
Score candidates with the table below during final meetings, and require examples drawn from professional services clients rather than consumer brands. The criteria reflect the standards set out in the public relations services overview for this programme and the parallel tests in the companion piece on selecting a PR agency for corporate training companies.
| Criterion | Question to ask | Strong answer sounds like | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boardroom literacy | How would you brief a partner for a succession story within two hours | A readiness file, cleared lines and named risks | A promise to wing it with media training |
| Voice distribution | How will you reduce our dependence on one founder | Faculty topics, research ownership and client advocates | A plan built entirely on the founder diary |
| Assessment candour | What will you advise us never to claim about our instruments | Clear limits, validation language and follow through detail | Psychometric claims with no evidence behind them |
| Expert placement record | Where have your experts been quoted as analysts, not vendors | Named titles and the questions they answered | Coverage that only announces your own events |
| Crisis judgement | Talk us through a client credibility problem you handled | Facts first, short statements and documented restraint | Stories that celebrate aggressive spin |
| Substitute awareness | Which alternative do our buyers pick when they reject us | Business schools, coaches and internal builds discussed plainly | A competitor list containing only similar firms |
| Referral design | What will a board member forward about us, and why | A short serious piece that flatters the forwarder judgement | Social content built for applause metrics |
Give boardroom literacy and crisis judgement the heaviest weight in your scoring. Edelman reported that 68 percent of people believe business leaders purposely mislead them, so any agency casual with the truth is a liability wearing a lanyard (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2025).
In your market the agency is part of the product, because its conduct becomes evidence about yours.
Questions partners ask before appointing representation
How is choosing representation different for a leadership firm than for a training provider? Your product cannot be sampled, so the agency itself becomes part of the evidence buyers weigh. Expect partners to probe judgement, discretion and boardroom fluency far harder than campaign mechanics. The interview is a proxy for how the firm will behave beside your clients.
What should you do if your firm depends heavily on one founder? Start distributing the public voice while the founder is still the strongest asset you own. Give faculty members owned topics, publish research under more than one name and cultivate client advocates. Waiting until a problem forces the change turns a manageable transition into a public question.
Will journalists quote our partners on chief executive succession stories? Yes, if your partners can explain readiness, interim arrangements and board mistakes without commenting recklessly on the named company. Prepare a readiness file in advance and clear the partner for fast response. The second day analysis story is where expert firms earn their place.
How should we talk about our assessment tools in public? Describe what each instrument measures, where it was validated and what it cannot tell a client. Buyers at board level respect stated limits far more than sweeping predictive claims. Keep the detailed validity material ready to send, because a good journalist or a good chief human resources officer will ask for it.
Can a small leadership firm realistically compete with business school brands? Yes, by winning the questions a prospectus cannot answer, such as what changes inside a specific top team over twelve months. Prestige wins the first glance, while contextual proof wins the reference calls that follow. Your communications should be engineered for those reference calls.
What is the biggest red flag in an agency pitch to a leadership firm? Watch for a plan that treats your founder as a celebrity in waiting. Celebrity tactics inflate exactly the concentration risk your category can least afford, and they attract enquiries you would never accept as clients. Serious firms are built on distributed authority.
How long should you commit to a first engagement? A twelve month horizon is the honest unit for work that depends on referral chains and board cycles. Shorter trials reward noise, because the conversations that matter to your pipeline move at governance speed. Judge the year on expert placement quality and referral material created, not on clip volume.
How this guide was built
The argument above rests on published work from DDI, the Center for Creative Leadership, McKinsey Quarterly, Gallup, SHRM, Edelman, Cision, Muck Rack and Harvard Business Review, with each figure checked against the publisher material or publisher summary listed under Sources. Two limits deserve stating plainly. Survey findings about leaders describe large mixed populations, so your segment may behave better or worse than the average shown. Commentary on succession and derailment also reflects what journalists choose to cover, which overweights dramatic exits against quiet successes. Claims that could not be anchored to a verifiable published source were expressed qualitatively or omitted entirely.
A final word on starting well
If your partners already do the quiet work of preparing successors and steadying top teams, your public record should say so with the same care. Frontier Industries represents leadership and people businesses whose authority is real but under documented, building the articles, expert placement and referral material that let a board find you before a crisis does. You can read more about the people doing this work on the about the industries team page, or begin with the industry campaign enquiry form. If a conversation suits you better, call 401-219-4207.
Sources
1. DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025 announcement, 2025. https://www.ddi.com/about/media/global-leadership-forecast-2025 2. Center for Creative Leadership, The Top 20 Leadership Challenges, 2024. https://reportds.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/The%20Top%2020%20Leadership%20Challenges%20from%20Center%20for%20Creative%20Leadership.pdf 3. McKinsey Quarterly, Why Leadership Development Programs Fail, discussed by DX Learning, 2014. https://www.dx-learning.com/blog/why-leadership-development-programs-fail-and-how-dx-learning-makes-a-difference 4. Gallup State of the Global Workplace findings summarised by FlexOS, 2025. https://www.flexos.work/future-work/gallup-upgrade-managers-to-coaches-reclaim-trillions 5. SHRM, CEO Succession, How CHROs Can Prepare Their Teams to Lead, 2025. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/ceo-succession-how-chros-can-prepare-their-teams-to-lead 6. SHRM, CHRO Turnover and the Decline of Internal Succession, 2025. https://www.shrm.org/in/executive-network/insights/chro-turnover-decline-of-internal-succession 7. Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 findings reported by CEOWORLD Magazine, 2025. https://ceoworld.biz/2025/01/20/edelman-trust-barometer-2025-reveals-growing-distrust-in-leaders-and-institutions/ 8. Cision, Want Media Coverage, Industry Experts Are Your Secret Weapon, 2025. https://www.cision.ca/resources/articles/media-coverage-industry-experts/ 9. Muck Rack, State of Creator Journalism Report announcement via GlobeNewswire, 2025. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/10/28/3175468/0/en/New-Muck-Rack-Report-Finds-One-in-Three-Journalists-Now-Publish-Independently.html 10. Ibarra and Scoular, The Leader as Coach, Harvard Business Review, reproduced 2019. https://en.git.ir/article/hbr-the-leader-as-coach/