On twenty-two years of independence
EPR: You founded Steinreich Communications in 2003 after senior roles at Burson, Fleishman, and Edelman. What made you go independent — and what's kept you independent?
Steinreich: The holding-company model wasn't built for the kind of counsel senior clients actually need. Layers between the CEO and the person doing the work. Utilization targets that push decisions in the wrong direction. I wanted to build something where a client hires you and gets you — where the person on the phone at 11 p.m. during a crisis is the person whose name is on the door. Twenty-two years in, that's still the answer. Every acquisition offer we've had, we've turned down for the same reason.
EPR: Three acquisitions on your side — Omniado, McNeill, Kenwerks. What's your filter?
Steinreich: Sector expertise, a client roster we can steward, and a cultural fit that survives day 91. We're not building a spreadsheet. We're absorbing teams whose institutional knowledge we couldn't replicate by hiring.
On home furnishings
EPR: High Point is unusual — most independents don't put a permanent office in a single-industry town. Why did you?
Steinreich: Because the industry is there. High Point Market moves $6 billion of business twice a year. If you serve furniture clients seriously, you have to be in High Point — not fly in for the show, but be there year-round with people who know the buyers, the trade press, the retailers, the licensing landscape. We built the office because our clients demanded it, and it's now a defining part of the firm.
EPR: Home furnishings has been through a rough cycle — post-COVID demand collapse, tariff exposure, a wave of consolidations and closures. How is the category holding up?
Steinreich: The strong operators are getting stronger. The weak ones are consolidating or exiting. What buyers want from PR right now is trade-press dominance, retailer-facing storytelling, and executive visibility that holds up when a licensing partner or a private-equity buyer runs a background check. That last part is where AI comes in — because that background check is increasingly a ChatGPT query.
EPR: You run permanent offices in Tel Aviv and Dubai — one of very few U.S.-founded independents to do so. How do the two operations differ?
Steinreich: Tel Aviv is a technology, defense, financial services, and nonprofit market with clients who need serious U.S. visibility and clients on the U.S. side who need to be understood correctly inside Israel. Dubai is a regional hub — Gulf sovereigns, family offices, hospitality groups, and multinationals routing regional communications through the UAE. They're separate practices with separate client rosters. What links them is that both offices sit at the intersection of business, policy, and reputation in ways New York and Washington cannot cover from a distance.
EPR: Post-October 7, running an Israel-focused practice inside a U.S. firm is politically loaded in ways it wasn't before. How do you think about that?
Steinreich: We do the work. Our Israel clients need honest counsel, our U.S. clients need to understand what's actually happening on the ground, and our job is to give both a version of reality that isn't filtered through the noise. That's what corporate communications is supposed to do. It's harder than it was five years ago, and the counsel matters more than it did five years ago.
Parallel view from inside the Israel market: EPR's Q&A with Roni Rimon of Rimon Cohen & Co., Israel's crisis and political media strategist.
On corporate and crisis
EPR: What do CEOs most often get wrong in the first 24 hours of a crisis?
Steinreich: They talk too much or they talk too late. There's almost never a case where the right answer is a full press-release apology inside the first two hours, and there's almost never a case where the right answer is 72 hours of silence. The middle path — a holding statement that acknowledges the situation, commits to facts, and buys the room enough time to actually know what happened — is what protects the company. Most CEOs default to one of the extremes because their legal counsel and their comms counsel are pulling in opposite directions and nobody has synthesized the two.
EPR: How has the role of comms counsel to a CEO changed over the last five years?
Steinreich: The audience is different. Five years ago you were managing a Wall Street Journal story, a couple of trade titles, and social media. Now you're managing what an AI engine tells an institutional investor when they run the CEO's name through ChatGPT before an earnings call. Same job — protect the CEO's reputation, keep the company narrative intact — but the surface area is different and the retrieval mechanics matter.
Adjacent crisis-operator Q&As on EPR: Evan Nierman, Red Banyan · Hugh Braithwaite, Braithwaite Communications · Michelle Lyng, Novitas Communications.
On AI Communications
EPR: You've been vocal about AI reshaping the corporate comms landscape. What is the shift you're actually seeing?
Steinreich: Board members, regulators, journalists, and investors are all doing preliminary research inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews before they pick up a phone. What those engines say about your company frames the conversation before it starts. If the AI answer is thin, wrong, or hostile, the counterparty walks in with a bias you cannot fully repair in a meeting. That's a structural change in how reputation works, and it's happening now.
EPR: What does that mean operationally for a firm like Steinreich?
Steinreich: It means the trade-press placement we've always done matters more, not less, because those are the sources the engines cite. It means executive positioning has to be built with the retrieval layer in mind — schema, entity clarity, structured bios, primary sources that the engines can find. It means every crisis response has to be evaluated not just against tomorrow's news cycle but against what an AI engine will say about that response six months from now.
EPR: Is that a new discipline, or the same discipline with new tools?
Steinreich: The core discipline is the same — get the right story in the right place with the right sources. The distribution layer has changed. So has the measurement layer. What the trade calls AI Communications is a real category. The firms that treat it as a rebrand of media relations will get flattened by the firms that treat it as a rebuild of the retrieval graph.
On family and firm
EPR: Multiple Steinreichs sit on the senior team — Ariella, Joshua. What's the discipline that makes a family-in-firm structure work?
Steinreich: Everyone earned their seat. Ariella and Josh both worked outside the firm before they came in. Clients hire us for the work — the last name has to be a footnote, not a headline. Internally, the rule is that the family conversation happens at dinner and the business conversation happens at the office. When those get confused, family businesses break.
On the next twenty years
EPR: What is Steinreich in 2030?
Steinreich: A larger firm, in more markets, with a deeper AI Communications practice fused into every client engagement. Independence intact. Same core discipline — senior counsel, sector expertise, cross-market execution — layered onto a distribution and retrieval reality that didn't exist when we started. The firms that adapt to that reality will define the next chapter of the industry. We intend to be one of them.
About Steinreich Communications
Steinreich Communications is a New York-headquartered independent PR firm founded in 2003. Nine offices — NYC, Hackensack/Fort Lee NJ, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., High Point NC, London, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Dubai. Revenue: $13M (2025). Three acquisitions to date — Omniado, McNeill Communications, Kenwerks. Full firm profile at the Steinreich Agency Profile.
