Personal record audit
Everything indexed for the executive's name and its variants, ranked by damage and by fixability, delivered as a written report the board can read.
Practice area — executives
Executive and CEO reputation management
When the chief executive is the most searched entity associated with the company, their personal record is a corporate asset — and an unmanaged one is a corporate liability sitting outside every control you have.
The exposure
The company has a comms team. The CEO usually has nobody.
Corporate communications protects the brand. Almost nobody is accountable for what appears when a regulator, a journalist, an institutional investor or a prospective hire searches the chief executive by name — which is, in practice, the search that gets made first.
The gap widens at exactly the wrong moments: a listing, a raise, a succession, a restructuring, or the week an activist decides the CEO is the story.
Where the risk concentrates
- Personal name results nobody is monitoring or defending
- Historic quotes and interviews resurfacing without context
- Litigation, regulatory matters and prior directorships that still rank
- Activist and short-seller campaigns that target the individual, not the entity
- Employee review sites naming leadership directly
- AI assistants describing the CEO from stale or incorrect sources
- Family members and household details reachable through the executive's name
The mandate
What an executive programme covers
Owned estate
A personal property at the executive's own name, structured data, and a rewritten professional profile stating a position rather than a job history.
Earned authority
Bylined commentary and interviews that give the individual standing independent of the company — which is what makes the record durable through a transition.
Separation of risk
Deliberate management of where the executive's record and the company's record are linked, so that a corporate problem does not automatically become a personal one.
Household privacy
Address, family and travel exposure reduced, because the executive's personal footprint is usually the softest available target.
Standing protocol
Pre-approved statements, a named decision-maker and a line answered within the hour, agreed before anything happens.
Transitions
The two moments that expose a CEO
Arrival and departure. Both generate a burst of coverage that ranks for years, and both are almost always handled reactively.
Arrival
Appointment
The announcement will rank for the name for a long time. What sits alongside it is decided in the first quarter, or it is decided by whoever else is publishing.
Tenure
Steady state
Roughly one substantive publication a month holds page one. Left alone, the record decays over about eighteen months and the appointment release becomes the only thing there.
Pressure
Incident or activism
The protocol activates. Because the owned assets already exist, containment is a matter of hours rather than a matter of building assets under time pressure.
Exit
Departure
Departure coverage is written by other people and outranks everything unless there is a record underneath it. This is the point most executives wish they had started three years earlier.
Common questions
Straight answers
Is this different from the company's PR agency?
Different client and different objective. A corporate agency answers to the company and optimises for the brand; when the executive's interests and the company's diverge — which is precisely when this matters — the executive needs counsel that is theirs. We work alongside corporate comms rather than replacing them.
Who pays for it, the executive or the company?
Both arrangements are common and both are workable. Where the company pays, we are explicit at the outset about what happens to the engagement if the executive departs, because that is the awkward conversation nobody has in advance.
Our CEO does not want a public profile.
That is a legitimate position and we build for it. A low-profile executive still needs an accurate, controlled top of page one; they simply need a small authoritative footprint rather than a loud one. Deliberate quiet is a strategy. Absence is not.
We are pre-IPO. Does this matter?
It matters more. Listing exposes leadership to analysts, financial journalists and short-sellers who all search the individual first, and the record you have at that point is the record you have. This is difficult to build quickly under scrutiny.
Private enquiry
Start with the executive's record.
The audit is fixed fee and gives the board something concrete to decide from.