To my surprise—and no little chagrin, I now can count my years in corporate marketing communications and public relations consulting at more than a score. For by far the majority of them, I’ve worked with professional services firms, including in engineering, law, accounting and consulting, private equity, hedge investing, and financial services.

 It’s been quite a ride! I founded Clovis in 2002, after four years in what people like to say are “positions of increasing responsibility” at good old Arthur Andersen LLP. That exciting interlude ended with the firm’s spectacular crash-and-burn after an indictment by the DOJ for—okay—shredding documents. (The official line was obstruction of justice. The conviction was later overthrown by the Supreme Court.)

 Truthfully, running my own shop is more invigorating than working in marketing for a global Big 4 firm, although working for Andersen was an education in itself.

And I’m thrilled that Clovis’s clients have nevertheless included such firms, including Ernst & Young and, earlier on, Deloitte. Others have included intellectual property law firm Brinks Gilson & Lione, former Fortune 500 IT consultant BearingPoint, a range of alternative asset investment managers including private equity firms Prairie Capital and Glencoe Capital, and hedging solutions provider Aurora Investment Management, as well as specialized engineering firms OnQuest (hydrocarbon processing) and GaiaTech (environmental). And quite a few others. You can learn more on the web site.

Invigorating—as in adding spice to life. I tend to be drawn to complexity, and to thrive in engagements where we’re trying to market intricate products or articulate complex value propositions. We’ve marketed everything from LNG process plants to patent law, from environmental due diligence to institutional funds, from broker-dealer services to financial information databases. (Oh, and ask me about chickens some day.)

Professional services marketing? Wow, yes, there’s a conversation for this blog. Differentiation can be challenging—though it’s by no means impossible. Branding can be challenging—not least because creativity is only a piece of the puzzle.

But to finish this little waxwork, I began my professional communications career as a copywriter at Brown Marketing Communications in Chicago, in the early 1990s, then I consulted on communications to KPMG Consulting. That led to Andersen and the rest is, well, in the paragraphs upstairs. I earned my doctorate at Northwestern and taught there, then taught English at Loyola University of Chicago for a bit more than a decade. (It overlapped the work at Andersen—and https://www.viagrapascherfr.com/viagra-pour-homme-quebec/ beyond. I’m not THAT old!) And I directed theater in Chicago and worked for Lyric Opera.

But that’s a ‘hole ‘nuther story, as a friend likes to say. About me, enough already. Back to the blog!