We find your true narrative, segment your audience, and build messaging built to last. The foundation everything else can stand on.
Strategic Communications Advisory
Not for lack of effort. Not for lack of talent. The foundation underneath isn't there yet. And everything built on top — the campaigns, the pitches, the messaging — keeps producing the same result. Close. But not quite. And definitely not built to last.
Groundline takes a foundation-first approach to communications — building the narrative architecture organizations need before campaigns, content, or announcements begin.
A company goes public. A funding round closes. A new CEO walks in. The business has evolved — the audience has shifted, the stakes are higher, the room is more sophisticated — and what used to work no longer resonates. Not with investors. Not with customers. Not with the people you most need to reach.
Or you've been building for years and something has always been slightly off. The messaging doesn't travel. Different stakeholders — investors, customers, press, new hires — need to hear the same truth in completely different ways. Until you've mapped who you're speaking to and why, the story can't hold. And it definitely can't last.
The instinct is to generate more. More content, more guidelines, more versions that sound almost right. But more output on an unstable foundation is just more noise. Groundline cuts through. We find the one true thing, build it to resonate across every audience that matters, and make sure it holds — not just for the launch, but for what comes after.
Most companies don't have a messaging problem.
They have a foundation problem.
Everything built on top of an unclear narrative has to work too hard — every pitch, every hire, every press moment. Groundline fixes what's underneath.
Three situations that are more common than they should be. And what's different on the other side of the work.
The founder gives a different answer every time someone asks what they do. The pitch is twelve minutes long. The website says everything and means nothing.
There is one true sentence. The whole leadership team says the same thing. Investors lean in instead of asking questions that signal confusion.
A raise, a rebrand, a public launch. The communications feel like they were written by committee at 11pm the night before.
The message is tight and confident. The founder sounds like themselves. The moment lands the way it was supposed to.
Fifteen versions of the messaging. None right. The brand sounds like everyone else. Speaking to the wrong audience — wrong tone, wrong voice, wrong funnel.
One clear story built around the right audience. Tone, voice, strategy aligned. The right people self-select in. The wrong ones stop taking up your time.
Groundline works across founders, corporate and growth-stage companies, and agencies. The work looks different depending on who's in the room. The approach never changes.
A focused 3–4 week engagement to find and name the story behind what you're building. Your POV. Your narrative. Your positioning.
Delivered as a document you can use in every room that matters. Built from conversation, not a template.
One-time · 3–4 weeksStrategy and execution together. Monthly advisory plus thought leadership, founder LinkedIn, messaging updates as the company evolves.
The Sprint builds the foundation. The retainer delivers on it. Most clients stay 6–12 months.
Monthly · OngoingA raise. A rebrand. A media moment. Built from first principles every time. No templates, no agency markup.
Available to retainer clients first, then by availability.
Project-basedSenior counsel for C-suite and leadership teams. Annual planning, executive narrative, message maps, issues prep. Built with the discipline regulated environments demand.
Directly informed by IPO communications at Definity Financial and senior leadership at FreshBooks.
Retainer or projectEnd-to-end strategy connecting internal and external audiences. Change management, transformation narratives, stakeholder alignment.
KPIs defined upfront. Impact tracked. Results in language that connects communications to business outcomes.
Project or retainerEditorial planning, executive LinkedIn, long-form content. Every piece tied to a point of view that means something. Not volume for its own sake.
Monthly retainerSenior-level writing and strategy when you need extra hands. Messaging frameworks, narrative documents, executive content. Clean, on brief, on time.
Project-based · By availabilityFor clients who need genuine sector depth. IPO experience, regulated environment fluency, C-suite advisory brought in at a critical moment.
Project · By availabilitySenior strategic counsel delivered under your agency brand. Deep thinking without adding headcount. Full discretion, clean handoff.
Retainer or projectIn movement, the groundline is the invisible axis everything organizes around. The foundation point. Get it right and everything above it holds. Without it, even the hardest work stays unsteady.
For fifteen years, the handstand didn't come. Not for lack of trying. Real practice, real commitment — and still: legs in the air, no control, nothing holding.
The breakthrough didn't come from trying harder. It came from a different question entirely. Not how do I get the handstand. What does a handstand actually require.
Hollow body position. Active shoulders. Wrist preparation. Progressive drills that looked nothing like a handstand and everything like what one requires — so foundational, so unglamorous, they confused people watching.
The moment the foundation became the work, everything changed. Vertebra by vertebra, until the impossible became the natural result of what had been built underneath. Most communications skips straight to the handstand. Groundline starts at the ground.
Every recommendation filtered through a person with taste and judgment. Curation isn't a feature. It's the whole point.
The most durable communications isn't the loudest. It's the most rooted. We build from the spine out.
One true thing, made to travel. More output is almost never the answer. The right thing said clearly is.
Everything we build is in service of being believed. Not liked. Believed. Higher bar. More durable.
Carefully, in sequence, until the whole thing holds without us. No shortcuts. No templates.
Every engagement is different. The process is always the same — deliberate, sequential, and designed to leave you with something that holds.
We start with a call. No agenda, no pitch. You tell us what you're building, what's not landing, and what moment you're in. We tell you honestly whether Groundline is the right fit.
30–45 min · No obligationBefore we write anything, we listen. Conversations with founders, leadership teams, sometimes key customers. We're looking for what's true about this company at the level of meaning.
1–2 weeks · Interviews and researchWe find the one true thing and build the narrative structure around it. Positioning. Audience definition. Messaging hierarchy. Tested against real scenarios before it leaves the room.
2–3 weeks · Iterative, collaborativeA narrative document built for real use — not a presentation deck. Clear enough that anyone on your team can pick it up and know exactly how to talk about what you do.
Narrative doc · Activation planSome clients take the foundation and run. Others bring us in as a standing advisor — for retainer work, high-stakes moments, or as the strategic voice in the room when it matters.
Retainer · Project · AdvisoryChloe. Natural light, real space. Not a studio.
Chloe didn't start Groundline because she read about a gap in the market. She started it because she spent a decade sitting inside the rooms where the gap shows up — and watching what happens when a company's story isn't ready for the moment it's standing in.
Her career moved through every environment that matters to the founders and leaders Groundline works with. Early years at EY and APEX — learning the discipline of regulated environments and the craft of media. Then Definity Financial, where she was part of the team that navigated Canada's largest IPO of 2021: a $1.4 billion raise, a national rebrand, and the specific pressure of guiding a leadership team through the transition to public markets with disclosure discipline and no margin for error. Then FreshBooks, as Senior Manager of Communications through a period of significant North American growth — building executive voice, leading PR, and helping a scaling SaaS company tell a story that could resonate with customers, investors, and talent all at once.
What she saw consistently, across every organization, was the same thing. Talented people. Real ambition. And a story that hadn't been properly found yet. Not for lack of effort — for lack of foundation. The narrative underneath all the output had never been named clearly enough to hold.
That's what Groundline is built to fix. Not from the outside looking in, with a framework and a template. From the inside out — with the fluency that only comes from having been the person in the room when it actually mattered.
Chloe is a 200-hour certified yoga teacher. The handstand took fifteen years. The foundation is why it finally held.
"I built Groundline for the moment after the wake-up — when a founder or leadership team knows something has to change and needs someone who's been inside enough rooms to help them find what that change actually requires."
These aren't marketing downloads. They're working tools — built to help leadership teams evaluate the foundation behind their communications before they build anything on top of it.
A 3-minute diagnostic to evaluate whether the narrative behind your organization is strong enough to support your communications. Most leadership teams are surprised by their score.
Calculate Your Score →Identify gaps in how narrative translates into messaging across leadership communications, product launches, and company announcements. Built for teams who create messaging reactively.
View the Audit →Five honest questions that reveal whether your communications foundation is strong enough to support growth and visibility. If several answers are No, the issue is rarely the output.
Run the Stress Test →A simple four-step framework for articulating the narrative behind what you're building. Many founders can explain what they built. Far fewer can explain why it matters.
Build Your Narrative →Evaluate whether your leadership team's voice is actively building credibility and influence — or leaving it on the table. Strong companies build ideas, not just products.
Run the Scorecard →The three-layer framework every founder needs before they can communicate clearly. Work through it alone or with your leadership team. Free download.
Download Free →All tools are free. Each one ends with an option to receive the underlying framework by email.
The foundation everything else can stand on.
Schedule a complimentary call to talk about what you're building, what's not landing, or what moment you're navigating. We'll listen first. Then we'll tell you honestly whether Groundline is the right fit — and if not, we'll point you toward what is.
No pitch. No obligation. Just a straightforward conversation about whether there's something worth building together.