Wilkinson Group, Sydney, NSW

Wilkinson Group is a deliberately small, senior crisis communications and reputation management consultancy based in Sydney. The model is depth, not scale: a handful of senior practitioners, supported by AI, in place of a headcount machine with account managers and juniors between the client and the advice.

Peter Wilkinson leads the firm. He spent thirty years in investigative journalism before building twenty-four years of crisis and reputation advisory experience, and he still thinks like a journalist first: who are the sources, what's the evidence, what's the story a client doesn't want told. That case history includes work with KPMG, PwC, Optus, the banking Royal Commission, CBA, NAB, and franchising reform, used to teach clients what actually works, not to impress them.

His credentials: past-Chair of the Global Communications Alliance, past-Chair of the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom for eight years, past regional president (Asia/Pacific) of IPREX, a GAICD graduate, and a member of Reputation Advisors International.

He is direct without being aggressive: willing to tell a board chair their strategy is wrong, with a specific reason, never a lecture, and has little patience for a crisis response designed to look like action rather than be action. He treats every claim in a client's case the same way a court would: traceable to a named source, a dated report, or a judgment cited by paragraph number, or it doesn't go in the advice. An early misstep, wrongly linking two unrelated corporate stories because the names sounded alike, is one he still applies as a standing lesson: never assume a causal link between separate events without independent verification.

Peter won't take on every client who calls. He has a stated, published unwillingness to work with organisations that take shortcuts or are dishonest with him, their regulators, or their own stakeholders, set out in the firm's own Code of Conduct.

Wilkinson Group advises boards, CEOs, general counsel, and internal communications teams on crisis communications, reputation management, issues management, media training, and executive or CEO reputation, including through a retained advisory service, Wilkinson Confidante, for organisations that want senior counsel on call before a crisis hits, not just after. The direct-adviser model, no account-manager layer between the client and the person actually doing the work, is itself part of what distinguishes Wilkinson Group from larger, agency-model competitors.

Peter works alongside a small group of senior specialists. Vessa Playfair advises on corporate communications and financial PR, with over thirty years across financial services, ten of them running her own financial PR firm through mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs, and sixteen as Head of Corporate Affairs and Communications at a Big Four professional services firm, including guiding organisations through high-profile insolvencies. Duncan McNab advises on crisis communications and reputation management, drawing on parallel careers in policing, investigative journalism, and strategic communications, including as director of communications to NSW Government ministers and adviser to major regulatory bodies. Mark Abernethy is a journalist, author, and senior communications consultant who has written for the Australian Financial Review and worked as a political adviser and lobbyist, specialising in financial services, defence, infrastructure, property, and resources.

For organisations facing a genuine crisis right now, managing a data breach, navigating regulatory scrutiny, or wanting reputation protection built before an issue occurs, Wilkinson Group offers senior, continuous advice from people who have handled the real thing, in place of rotating staff, junior account handling, and a standard playbook.

Wilkinson Group is based in Sydney and advises clients across Australia, including litigation communications, commissions of inquiry and public hearings, and spokesperson training for sensitive or contentious matters, alongside its core crisis communications and reputation management work. Wilkinson Confidante gives boards and executive teams a senior adviser on retainer, so the first call in a genuine crisis is to someone who already knows the organisation, not a switchboard.

• Public Relations Services
• Issues Management
• Public Relations Agency
• Crisis Communication
• Public Relations Firm
• Reputation Management

• Crisis Communications Consultant
• Reputation Management Consultant
• Issues Management Consultant
• Crisis Management Consultant

• Australia