We build your reputational capital.
Your reputation is being shaped right now, whether by you, by others or by chance. Akela helps you take control.
Leaders instinctively understand that reputation forms as a result of what you do and how you interact with the world.
It’s the micro moments - from the employee with the branded backpack offering their seat on the tube to how the CFO sells your vision in a meeting with investors - alongside the long-term story you tell about your business that are the greatest shapers of reputation. What you communicate when you have something to say is only one small part.
Yet, for most, reputation remains accidental: uncultivated, inauthentic, and under-leveraged. It is understood as a concept but not managed in a way that reflects how it’s actually formed.
Akela Advisory works with you to turn your reputation into an asset: reputational capital.
Because when your reputation is an asset that works for you - when you are actively shaping how your stakeholders think and feel about you - it can be your biggest growth engine and what ensures your organisation is resilient through a crisis.
What we do
Akela Advisory helps clients build reputational capital.
Reputational capital can be designed, it can be shaped, it can be measured, and it can be drawn upon in good times and in bad. When you get that right, every stakeholder relationship can become stronger and work in support of your business objectives.
How we work with you
We take a whole-system approach to reputation. One designed to create sustainable, long-term value that keeps working long after we’ve left the room.
We help our clients understand how their reputations are really formed, develop a strategy to reshape their reputation into an asset that works for their business, and then we support them in implementation, including strategy, governance, organisational design and training.
We also advise our clients on strategic communications programmes (including media relations, stakeholder engagement, social & digital communications) that begin to reshape the narrative immediately.
Reputational infrastructure
We build capability in your business, rather than simply adding capacity to your team.
We can help diagnose how your reputation is being formed and shaped, design the frameworks and training your team can use to manage it more effectively, and develop new ways of working to proactively shape your reputation and protect it.
Reputational infrastructure work can include:
> Resilience reviews and crisis communications playbooks: identifying your reputational risks as a business, and working with you to improve how you would respond in a crisis
> Organisational design: we analyse your reputation and communications function, including in-house resource and agency support, and identify ways to make it work more impactfully and sustainably
> Tools and technology: reviewing and developing your reputation, communications and marketing platforms, including building generative AI tools to support your reputation management
Embedded advisory
We serve as an extension of your team, operating as your communications and reputation strategist.
For a fixed-term period (usually three, six or 12 months), we act as your fractional corporate affairs director: developing your communications function and leading your day-to-day stakeholder engagement.
This can be particularly valuable to organisations navigating:
> Growth: where you need a communications operating model built to sustain what comes next
> Change: where your communications function needs to serve the business as it is today and will be tomorrow, not as it was ten or twenty years ago
> Pressure: where you need an embedded crisis leader to see reputational risks before they emerge and lead stakeholder engagement through situations that threaten your licence-to-operate
For organisations that need a lighter-touch approach, we can also act as retained strategists alongside your in-house team and agency partners.
About Akela Advisory
Akela is a strategy and reputation advisory firm, founded in 2026. We work with boards, executive teams and communications principals in financial services, professional services, real estate and private equity-backed businesses to turn their reputations into an asset they can manage: reputational capital.
We take a whole-system approach to reputation, looking beyond corporate communications to where reputation is really won and lost, helping you to understand and plan for what will make a long-term difference.
Akela was founded by Ben Monteith, a reputation strategist with experience across financial services, professional services, real estate, and the public and third sectors – from founder-led businesses to global asset managers, government departments and the NHS.
Let’s talk.
If you would like to understand how your reputation is forming around you - and what you can do to make it work for you - get in touch.
ben@akelaadvisory.co.uk
+44 (0) 7341 131 536