Joele Frank came to investor relations by way of the finance department at AT&T and the group that divided the Bell system. She was trained for neither.
Frank began as a biochemist and went years in the lab without making money. She switched to business, earned an M.B.A. and took a job as a financial analyst at Allied Chemical before joining AT&T.
The Question After 1984
With the Baby Bells created by 1984, her managers had to find Frank a new role, and she tells the story with a laugh. They told her, “you have a big mouth, why don’t you go into investor relations at the new AT&T?”
She loved the job. It gave her years on the corporate side of shareholder communication before she ever worked at an agency, and Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher later built an investor relations practice of its own.
Leaving AT&T
The corporate move came in 1987, when AT&T headed for the New Jersey suburbs. Joele Frank stayed behind.
“I was a small town girl who loved being in New York City,” she said.
At that point she saw that what she had been doing inside AT&T, outside firms were selling as a service. An introduction to Jonathan Rinehart took her to Adams & Rinehart, where she learned financial PR, and she later worked at Abernathy MacGregor until starting her own firm in early 2000.
“When we started the firm, we wanted to have a place where we could do good work, have a lot of fun and operate under one bottom line,” she said.
Investor Relations Today
The new firm began in M&A only. “You know what we learned in our first year? At the end of a deal, guess what happens if you’re only in M&A? You lose the client,” Frank said. Investor relations was added in response, alongside public relations and activism defense.
Graphic and digital work followed, since many companies lack the staff to produce it themselves. “When there are investor days involving major presentations, we do a lot of the slide deck work,” Frank said.
Joele Frank now has more than 200 employees and 26 partners, about half to three-quarters of them homegrown, and works from 22 Vanderbilt and an office in San Francisco. Its recent work includes advising Aligned Data Centers on its $40 billion acquisition by a consortium backed by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, MGX, Microsoft and NVIDIA. The discipline Frank picked up at AT&T is a regular part of what Joele Frank offers clients today.
