Embedded Files
Communications counsel
Practice
Hearings & Committees
A parliamentary committee,
a public hearing, a regulator’s consultation, a board asked to explain: each has its own logic. That logic is rarely written down.
Who is in the room.
What the body can actually decide. What it has already decided.
Which question is a trap and which is an invitation.
Is there a play. What is it.
CS Advisory prepares the substance of what gets said in those rooms. The position, in a form the body can adopt. The three points that carry it and the ten that do not. Where the exposure lies, and what to say when someone finds it. The work is done with the person who will speak, not for them.
Training for camera and delivery is not part of the practice. Execution partners can be recommended.
Position & Narrative
A position can be correct and still lose. It loses when it is written for the author rather than the reader, when it proves too much, when the other side has set the terms of the debate and the text quietly accepts them.
CS Advisory writes and rewrites positions for people with the power to reject them:
consultation responses, statements, position papers, speeches, the note that goes to the board the night before.
The work is the argument itself – what is claimed, what is conceded, what is left unsaid – and the evidence chosen to carry it. Not a file of facts. The few that matter, in the order they matter.
Nothing carries the firm’s name. The text should read as if it had always been the client’s own.
Standing Counsel
Some questions do not arrive as projects. A journalist’s call at four. A sentence in a draft that will be read differently than it was meant. A decision that is sound on the numbers and will not survive THE meeting.
The useful moment is before, and before has no brief.
CS Advisory keeps a small number of standing arrangements: a second voice available to a chief executive, a chairman or a board when something is forming and has not yet become a matter. Reading, listening, saying what the other advisers are paid not to say.
A retainer buys access to judgment. Not a block of hours.
Note: conflicts of interest are checked before anything is accepted. What is said in confidence stays there.
Approach
The practice takes few mandates at a time. Where a matter needs more hands and broader reach, a team is assembled for it and dissolved after.
Larger regulatory and public-affairs matters – monitoring, intelligence, work across more than one capital – are conducted within Secgen, where the founder is a partner. CS Advisory is for what sits outside that frame: communications questions that need judgment more than process.
Confidentiality, political or price-sensitive, is taken as read.
Nothing learned on one mandate is material for another.
Public relations, social media and events are not part of the practice. Where they are needed, execution partners can be recommended.
Work is conducted in Polish and English, from Warsaw.
Engagement notes
Do we run social, PR or events? No. We design strategy, frames and decision sequences. We can recommend execution partners.
Conflicts? Every engagement is screened against existing mandates. Separate repositories, strict need-to-know, written disclosures.
What does success look like? Adoption of proposals by decision-makers, movement of key stakeholders along an agreed posture scale, and tangible policy/process milestones. We measure shifts in stakeholder posture and policy milestones.
Retainer vs. hours? Retainer buys access to senior judgment, not a block of time. We show up when it matters, ship outcomes, and refuse the big-consulting timesheet grind.
Tomasz Boguszewicz
founder
Twenty years in media and communications before CS Advisory. Journalist at Gazeta Wyborcza, then at Rzeczpospolita and Parkiet, the business and capital-markets dailies. Consultant at Hill+Knowlton Strategies and Monday Group. In-house at Bird & Bird and Netsprint Group. Co-founder and partner of Secgen.
Most of what I know about public positions I learned in rooms where they get tested: parliamentary committees, public hearings, consultations, newsrooms on deadline. I have sat on both sides of the table.
I take few mandates and do the work myself. I say when a question is outside my competence; the alternative costs the client more than it costs me.
contact
hello [at] csadvisory.net
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