Arvo Advisory

I (Stephen) was leading Corporate Strategy for MoneyGram and working with the leadership team to craft a turnaround strategy anchored by a digital transformation as the company faced rapidly changing industry dynamics and investor concerns. One day, my boss forwarded me the draft of the upcoming earnings call transcript to get my thoughts. The document was very well-written, but it wasn’t written in the context of the competitive landscape, the company strategy, and how the strategy was driving results. I rewrote it, and from there on out the CEO gave me ‘the pen’ to own the transcript and the accompanying slides. Shortly thereafter, the leadership team took a pioneering approach to combine Strategy and Communication under one function that I was honored to lead.  

To ensure I was the best possible steward of the responsibilities MoneyGram had given me, I knew I needed a mentor, and I read an article from my business school by an executive communications leader and strategic communication professor, Steve Soltis. He graciously responded to a cold email and that’s what spurred our relationship and now our partnership!

In the new role, I needed to hire a PR firm, and I quickly learned that PR firms had incredibly talented professionals, but they largely didn’t understand competitive dynamics and the importance of EBITDA. I became frustrated with the lack of relevant ideas and the amount of rewriting that occurred. That’s when this initial idea came to be: what if we created a firm that combined the poets (traditional PR professionals) with the quants (strategy consultants): combining those two skillsets can create the magic needed to create real value.  

In his work advising CEOs, CFOs, and CCOs, Steve noticed this need as well: traditional approaches to communication no longer met the needs of today’s leaders. Executives increasingly needed talent with hard and soft skills, yet this was incredibly hard to find – firms like this didn’t exist.

When MoneyGram’s stock price quadrupled despite flat financials due in part to the work we’d led to craft the strategy and then uniquely communicate it across diverse stakeholders, I decided to take the brave move to start Arvo (meaning value / valuation in Finnish) to help other companies craft and communicate their strategy to drive value though a business strategy-driven approach to executive communication and public relations.  

After a year of launching Arvo and collaborating on various projects, Stephen and Steve decided to merge to best leverage each other’s strengths with our vision of changing the world by bridging the gap between strategy and communication.