Originally published August 3, 2015. Updated October 12, 2026. This page was rewritten as a founder-brand analysis. The events described below date from 2009 and August 2015, and are reported as of those dates.
Raptor Strategies was a Washington DC public relations and consultancy firm founded by David Bass in 2009, in the wake of the 2008 presidential election. Its tagline: "New times demand new strategies."
The firm's founder became the story twice. The first time was in 2009, following an in-flight incident on return from a business trip to Honduras (charges were later dismissed; Bass attributed his behavior to sleep deprivation and an adverse reaction to allergy medication). The second was in August 2015, when The Washington Post and other outlets reported him as a suspect in a Georgetown restaurant burglary involving two bottles of alcohol from Café Milano, with the incident captured on CCTV.
Whatever the underlying facts, the pattern is the recurring risk in small principal-led PR firms: the founder is the brand, and the brand carries every headline the founder generates.
The founder-brand risk
Boutique agencies with the founder's name, or the founder's public identity, attached to the firm face compounding exposure any time the founder is in the news for anything other than client work. In holding-company shops, the personal life of a mid-level partner is contained. In a ten-person boutique built around a single principal, it isn't.
Three operating principles reduce the exposure:
- Separate the firm from the founder in public identity. A firm named after a concept (Raptor Strategies) rather than the founder buys some distance. Not enough distance to survive a genuine legal issue, but enough to survive a bad news cycle.
- Build a second visible principal. If the founder is unavailable, on leave, or in the news, a second senior operator with client relationships and press profile keeps the firm functioning.
- Publish enough substantive work that the founder's name is associated with more than the founder. If the top Google results for the founder are all firm-related coverage (client wins, published bylines, industry appearances), a personal news cycle carries less weight in the composite reputation.
Why it still matters
The founder-brand risk applies to every AI Communications boutique launching in 2026. Single-principal shops built on one operator's personal profile are optimized for early-stage growth and vulnerable to any personal-reputation event. The mitigation isn't to hide the founder. It's to build enough surface area around the founder that no single story can occupy all of it.
Crisis Communications · Reputation Management · PR Firms & Communications Agencies
Related: The Founder-as-Brand: How Top PR Agency Leaders Built Their Own Personas
