Joele Frank’s Career Has Moved in Short Manhattan Blocks

When AT&T moved to the New Jersey suburbs in 1987, Joele Frank stayed in Manhattan.

“I was a small town girl who loved being in New York City,” she said.

A Career Rooted in New York

She had spent years at AT&T by then, first in finance on the team that broke up the Bell system, then in investor relations. The IR role came after the Baby Bells were in place by 1984 and her bosses needed a new job for her. They told her, “you have a big mouth, why don’t you go into investor relations at the new AT&T?”

Her career had started far from any trading floor. Frank trained as a biochemist, went years without making money, then earned an M.B.A. and joined Allied Chemical as a financial analyst.

From 51st Street to 55th

Staying in the city meant Joele Frank needed new work there. She saw that others were selling the kind of work she did at AT&T as a business, and an introduction to Jonathan Rinehart brought her to Adams & Rinehart, where she learned financial PR.

Her next stop was Abernathy MacGregor, at 51st Street and Madison Avenue. When her contract ended in early 2000, Joele Frank moved her team four blocks north to 55th Street and opened her own firm.

“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,” Frank said.

The Move to 22 Vanderbilt

That firm, Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher, has since moved again, to the redone 22 Vanderbilt. Its staff now tops 200, with 26 partners. Frank estimates half to three-quarters of the partners are homegrown, and only one founder has retired, in 2011.

“Many of our partners came to us right out of college and have come all the way up,” she said.

What began as an M&A shop broadened after its first year, when the partners saw that deal-only advisers lose clients at closing. It now also handles investor relations, public relations, activism defense and graphic and digital work, and it competes with FGS Global, FTI Consulting and Kekst CNC. The firm also keeps an office in San Francisco, and its recent New York work includes advising Bitcoin Depot on its Chapter 11 filing.

“We just keep our noses to the grindstone,” Frank said of the firm’s success. “Culture is very important to me.”

Nearly four decades after she declined to follow AT&T across the Hudson, Joele Frank still runs her firm in Manhattan.