Everyone is communicating more. Less of it is landing.
Plumb started because so much of this work stays at the surface. Messaging that isn't targeted, or doesn't resonate deeply enough. Strategies that need tuning. Internal teams and channels carrying more than they were built to carry.
The work here is to build true alignment between a mission and its message: to bring clarity, deepen trust, protect equity, and inspire action.
Communications is bought as output when the need is judgment.
If you're here, you probably don't need more material. You need someone to help you work out what is actually true, what matters, and what to do about it — before anything gets written.
The pattern is consistent. A message written for everyone and therefore aimed at no one. A strategy that was right two years ago and hasn't been tuned since. A capable internal team without the planning or support to make good work hold. None of that is a writing problem, and more volume does not solve any of it.
What it costs is specific, and it lands on you. Trust leaves in small increments rather than all at once. Managers stop repeating what they can't confidently explain. The next announcement starts from a deficit nobody has named out loud, and the room can feel it before anyone says so.
What it looks like when this is working
Not a louder organization. A more legible one, where the message and the decision underneath it are the same shape.
Leaders know what is true before they decide what to say.
The read comes first: what is structurally true, who holds the decision, where it will break. Language follows a finding.
Announcements land because the decision underneath them holds.
A sound decision, explained plainly, survives being repeated by people who were not in the room.
Trust is a cadence the organization can rely on.
People stop reading the silences for signals, because they already know when and how they will hear from you.
The function runs without heroics.
Structure, rhythm and measures that report progress rather than activity — so the work no longer depends on one person's late nights.
Alignment is not agreement. It is everyone telling the same true story.
Which means the story has to be true first, and the people delivering it have to believe it before an audience is asked to.
Counsel from someone who has had to deliver it.
Plumb is led by an in-house operator rather than an outside observer. That is the whole distinction, and it shows up in how the work is sequenced.
I've had long nights at the desk trying to find the right words when the stakes are high, the strategy isn't clear, and I still need to deliver. I've sat with board members, counseled C-suite executives, managed complex cross-functional work, and built communications teams and platforms.
So the counsel is built to survive the room it is delivered in, the manager who has to repeat it on Monday, and the quarter that follows. It has to hold up when the person carrying it is tired and the questions are hostile, because that is usually when it gets used.
The honest part: this is often uncomfortable before it is useful. The first stage tends to surface a decision that has not actually been made, or one that was made and never explained. Naming that plainly is the job. It is also the part nobody enjoys hearing, and there is no version of this work that skips it.
In exchange, you get an honest read and one practitioner accountable for it. The person in the first conversation is the person doing the work.
Sounding
What is actually happening, from the people closest to the decision — and an honest read of how you are currently perceived, inside and out.
Structure
What is being decided, who it affects, in what order they hear it, and the few things that must be true in every telling.
Alignment
Leaders prepared, objections surfaced early, hard questions answered before anyone asks them in public.
Rhythm
Who communicates what, how often, through which forum — and the measures that show whether it is working after the announcement.
- Engagements
- Phased and scoped before each phase begins. You never commit to work that hasn't been defined.
- Client load
- Deliberately limited to what one senior practitioner can do well at once.
- Handover
- Built to be handed back. The structure should outlast the engagement.
- Confidentiality
- Every inquiry is handled with discretion. Formal confidentiality terms are confirmed before an engagement begins.
Michael Lassiter
Michael Lassiter founded Plumb after fifteen years in communications and reputation, split between global agencies and senior in-house leadership at director and vice-president level. Agency work teaches range and pace. In-house work teaches what it costs to be wrong.
In-house, he built communications functions rather than only running them: teams, operating models, and the platforms and forums a decision travels through. He has advised chief executives and their leadership teams, briefed and sat with board members, and led cross-functional programs where communications was the part holding everything else together.
He holds a master's degree in public relations and advertising and the Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential. The combination shows up in the work as strategy with a sequence, an owner, and a date.
- Experience
- 15 years, agency & in-house
- Seniority
- Director & VP level, in-house
- Credentials
- MA, PR & Advertising · PMP
- Based
- Dallas–Fort Worth · clients nationwide
Selected experience spans senior in-house leadership at Savills and EōS Fitness, agency work at Edelman and Ketchum, and institutional communications at Central State University.
Connect on LinkedIn →Bring the situation, not a brief.
If there is a decision to make or a moment approaching, that is enough to start. The first conversation is about what is actually happening, not about scope.