Reputation Managers 2020

‘Of course, it’s rare to fi nd the Andrew Honnors of reputation,’ a senior trusted adviser recently told Spear’s when asked to name the top managers he would recommend to others. Often, private client advisers are benchmarked against the Greenbrook managing partner, who is recognised for his decades of experience in fi nancial, corporate and political communications. His career started when he worked on political campaigns in both Britain and the US, and he was a special adviser to the UK government in the Nineties. After Brunswick and Tulchan, he had a stint advising News UK before launching Greenbrook as a specialist consultancy for the investment industry. In fact, Greenbrook, which counts Goldman Sachs and RBS among past clients, is one of the fi rst PR agencies to establish a dedicated hedge fund practice. Honnor has previously noted that clients ‘don’t deal with traditional fi rms any more’, explaining: ‘We’re very fast, very professional and responsive in a way that some of the big bureaucratic fi rms have struggled to be. We are a new, disruptive infl uence on the market, so they can get a fantastic level of service by a smaller, nimbler and more independent fi rm.’ It’s no easy task to work with the ‘very exacting standards’ of HNWs and global fi rms, Honnor admits. ‘But that makes it much more fun and challenging.’

It’s no secret that Jonathan Hawker is a crisis comms heavyweight who has worked with contentious cases of every nature, from ‘intricate’ white-collar crime (including what he considers to be the largest fraud in continental Europe) to those involving HNWs who ‘fall victim to a crime in a way that you cannot fathom’. Whatever the challenge, Hawker often has innovative solutions to problems, and has confi ded once to Spear’s that he could ‘mitigate pretty much anything’. It is for this, and repeat peer recommendations, that he has been named a top ten adviser in this Index since 2015. Despite the accolades, the enigmatic Hawker still remains the same one-man band since his departure from FTI Consulting in 2014. He says that large PR fi rms who expand on the basis of a ‘top-line growth’ forecast are no longer sustainable, citing the model as one of the factors that led to the demise of Bell Pottinger. The pressure to bring in more work to match the trajectory makes it ‘very easy to take on the wrong client’. Hawker identifi es a few strategies he’s applied to many of his cases. The fi rst is to accept blame ‘quickly’; the second is to ‘broaden it out’; the third is to criticise or blame someone else – ‘if it’s true, of course, you can’t do it’; and the fourth is to delay – ‘buy time while you get all the information’.