An Influential Firm
Qorvis specializes in corporate communications on national and international levels. Our clients have included Fortune 500 companies, as well as major international companies headquartered in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. We help companies build and maintain strong reputations, manage difficult crisis issues, enhance shareholder value, and protect their interests in Washington, D.C.

Find out how Qorvis conducts a communications audit for enterprises. Click here.

Qorvis has performed every level of a communications campaign – from international awareness and education to national public affairs. We can do this because we are the best of big and small. We have the reach and resources of a large agency, with the quality and attention of a boutique firm.

Our ability to effectively identify and isolate our clients’ issues on every level comes from our experience and full-service capabilities. And our team includes individuals who have served at the highest levels of management in corporations and associations; in government, from Capitol Hill to the White House; and in the news media, from television to print. We pride ourselves on our legendary client service that achieves breakthrough results.

The Qorvis Differentiators
What they are … Why we have them … What they can mean to you

Qorvis was founded on a totally different premise. We thought from the start that our clients would want to acquire our brains and experience and ability to execute communications campaign. We thought clients couldn’t care less about how busy we were (or were not) as long as we helped them achieve their goals.

So we asked a simple question: If clients care about results and not how much time it takes to achieve those results, why establish fees on the basis of time? Instead of being in the business of selling a commodity (time), we would sell what clients really want: something of value, namely our strategic and tactical ideas and our ability to execute on them. By starting with that basic premise, we would end up changing the business model for communications firms, primarily by taking a first step that was as revolutionary as it was obvious: throw out the time sheet. Not simplify it. Kill it. Time would not be relevant to our business at all. That means that our clients would never have to look around the conference room and try to calculate what extending the meeting by another hour would cost them. And, it would also mean that our professionals would not take a nanosecond of their precious time to do non-productive administrivia such as filling out a sheet to itemize how they spent the last ten minutes.

We learned another lesson: a new business model has to do with much more than finances; its biggest impact is cultural in nature. Our approach resonated with the highest quality professionals who wanted to work in an environment that freed them from the restrictions forced on them by a time-focused business model. They wanted to be driven by a fundamental question: Are we succeeding for our client, and how can we succeed even bigger and better? They wanted to be able to go to a colleague’s office and chat about a client issue without the colleague’s first knee jerk reaction being to ask: “How do I bill my time for this conversation?” And as that philosophy became more inculcated into our working environment, something else happened. Silos came down between disciplines. We started to think of our capabilities not in terms of “practice groups,” but in terms of our ability to assemble a team of experts in whatever area of communications expertise that made sense for the particular client.

That core philosophical shift in the way we approach business worked – and a phenomenon started to happen. Our clients loved the way we approached our relationship. Our professionals loved the working environment. And that simple combination resulted in growth. We began to attract more professionals who knocked on our door with statements like: “I see what you guys are doing and I think I’d like to join.” So we added more very high quality professionals, encouraged even greater collegiality, expanded the range of our expertise beyond our core traditional “public relations” capabilities, and saw our reputation grow (in lock-step with the growing pride of our people for being involved with great work). Step-by-step we grew from about a dozen people to more than 100 people in the space of about eight years. We won a load of awards in the process. But we gained something even more significant:

It became clear that our business model was the right approach for the communications revolution. It dawned on us that our industry has been defined and structured for years on a silly premise: the distribution channel. “Ad agencies” are ad agencies because their area of expertise and the center of gravity for their business is using space or time in a medium for which they had to pay to get a message to a target. And “PR firms” work to earn space and time from a distribution channel. Interactive firms use digital distribution channels, and sports marketing firms use a NASCAR race or some other event as the channel to get their messages to their targets. But that type of thinking results in the communications campaign strategy being shaped by the distribution channel. That’s nuts. Instead, the communications strategy should be driven by the goal: to communicate a message that will resonate to a targeted audience, delivered in a compelling presentation, through any and all distribution channels that make sense in terms of cost and impact.

In other words, our clients do not launch an “ad campaign” or a “publicity blitz” or a web site. Instead, they undertake a “communications campaign.” And here is what that means to our clients:

• Our focus isn’t on the means (distribution channel) but on the goals (what our client actually wants to achieve).

• Our clients do not pay a fee that is variable depending on the hours we may devote to their effort in any particular month; instead, it is based on a fixed retainer based on a scope of work and fee to which we and our client mutually agree. The client can put our fee in their budget spreadsheet for any month and simply “fill right.” No surprises.

• Our vested interests align with our client’s vested interests. It is not our goal to spend as much time as possible doing enough actual work to warrant the client to ask us to devote more hours next month. Rather, our goal is very simple: hit a homerun for the client so that they value our relationship, keep us as an intimate and valued part of their team, and give us a great recommendation when prospective clients call them for references.

• This environment means our client sees nominal if any turnover in their professional team. Most of our competitors have 30% annual staff turnover; we know that 40% turnover isn’t all that unusual. Over the years, we have stayed under 10% turnover. That means our clients do not have to educate new team members as they leave and enter the team. Over time, our team actually becomes smarter for and about our client and builds a more intimate relationship, translating into more powerful results more quickly for our client as our relationship builds.

• Because we have brought to Qorvis just about every area of communications expertise, our client can retain our single team to strategize, execute the overall strategize while controlling the integrity of their messages through any distribution channel. That means Qorvis clients don’t need to juggle numerous agencies each having their own slants on the core messages, submitting separate invoices and expenses, conducting separate meetings. As a result, the messages are controlled. All relevant distribution channels are used. The campaign succeeds faster and more cost-efficiently than the outdated time-based business model still employed by virtually all our competitors.

• And all that together allows us to offer The Qorvis Guarantee: We promise only what we can deliver, and we deliver all that we promise. We believe we shouldn’t be paid for trying, but only for delivering what we promise. This core philosophy gives us an exceptional incentive for clearly identifying the exact expectations that we and our clients share, with defined benchmarks and timetables.

Does this make sense to you? Want to find out more about working with us as a client or professional? If so, we’re open to candid discussions. Start by contacting co-founder and partner Doug Poretz (dporetz@qorvis.com or 202-683-3210) or Rick Silipigni, who leads our new business development efforts (rsilipigni@qorvis.com or 202-683-3223).

back to Home page