Many founders look forward to the day their companies are acquired for a substantial amount of money, often by a much larger business. CEO Lisa Hannum, who founded the Beehive communication firm two decades ago, chose to take a different path.

On July 1, three senior women from the firm will join Hannum as shareholders, and they’ll become one-third equal owners within the next few years as a management buyout is finalized.

It’s an exit strategy that Hannum started crafting in 2016, which was 30 years after she entered the public relations business in Minnesota following her graduation from St. Cloud State University.

In a Twin Cities Business interview, Hannum talked about her career path, the business she’s launching, how the communication ecosystem has radically changed, and when she believes corporate CEOs should engage on compelling public issues.

A first-generation college student from Jamestown, North Dakota, Hannum didn’t have a well-formed career plan when she registered late as a freshman and landed in an upper-division English class. Her professor, Dr. Ruth Thompson, concluded she could tell a story, and literally walked her over to the office of Mike Vadnie, a journalism professor, who became Hannum’s mentor.

“I have had the luckiest career,” Hannum said. It began with professors Thompson and Vadnie taking an interest in her, continued with early career lessons from PR bosses such as Ted Murphy, and endured with longtime business and nonprofit clients who supported her boutique agency.

“I have a high tolerance for risk. I’m very entrepreneurial,” Hannum said. But she added she lives by the adage “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” which is often attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca.

Her embrace of taking risks, preparing to seize the next opportunity, and charting her own path are evident in key decisions that Hannum made over her career.

In 1998, she quit her agency job and became a solopreneur. That work formed the foundation for her agency, which later was named Beehive. In 2016, Hannum began writing her firm’s succession plan and in 2017 invited three women to participate in a stock plan culminating in a purchase of Beehive. In 2018, Hannum’s firm became a Certified B Corp., meaning it would meet social and environmental standards and have a purpose that extends beyond making profits. In 2026, when many business leaders were being silent about Operation Metro Surge, Hannum was outspoken on how Minnesotans needed to respond to support immigrants.

Building a woman-owned firm

Working from home became a mainstay of professional workers when the pandemic hit in 2020, but it was a big step that Hannum took in 1998. She created a work area in her basement in the Como Park home in St. Paul that she shared with her husband and young daughter.

“I was a partner at an agency,” Hannum recalled. “I had just had my first child, and I couldn’t negotiate a return-to-work schedule that I felt was going to work for me personally and professionally. I quit at a time when my husband was also freelancing.”

The stakes were high. To have a constant reminder that she must succeed, Hannum tacked up a photo of her infant on a bulletin board. Next to it was a photo of her mortgage.

“I had a non-compete, so I couldn’t work for my former clients,” she said. “But what I could do is work for people I had worked for or worked with before who were now in other places.”

In 1998, Hannum had an email account, a good Rolodex of contacts, and she reached out to people to say she was working independently and could provide key public relations services. “My first really meaningful client was United Properties, and I worked for them for 12 years,” she said. She attracted a number of other clients.

“Within probably six months, I had all the work I could handle and I never looked back,” Hannum said. “That’s a testament to building relationships with people as you go, remaining connected, earning that trust, and the value that goes in both directions when you have a good experience.”

Hannum gave birth to two more children, and she was attracting bigger clients for her PR services.

“I started to have this network of freelancers in 2004,” she said. “I started building a real team.”

Exiting one business, starting another

2005 was a transformative year for Hannum. “I was able to lure the three people who are now buying the [Beehive] business from other agencies in town,” she said. “They came to my basement because they wanted to work in a different way.”

Ayme Zemke joined Hannum from Padilla, while Nicki Gibbs and Rebecca Martin came from Weber Shandwick. “Within a year, we moved out of the basement, and we rebranded as Beehive PR,” Hannum said.

“At that point, we were all either raising very small children or planning to have families,” she said. “We all had been serving large national clients. We traveled a lot.”

The women wanted a cadence that would serve their clients, their needs, and the needs of their families. “We had cell phones, email, and laptops,” Hannum said. “So we had all the tools that allowed us to be a lot more flexible and serve clients in a way that we felt like we could be faster.”

When the women emerged from Hannum’s basement—often called the “garden level”—they opened an office as Beehive in Bandana Square in St. Paul’s Midway.

“We were a very traditional public relations agency at that time, so very strong in media relations, internal communications, and crisis communications,” she said.

As the firm’s work grew and changed, the four women formed a tight bond. “In 2016, I started writing the equity plan for these three leaders, which kicked in in 2017. This was not a sudden move,” Hannum said.

She approached the women nearly a decade ago to state candidly that she planned to step down as the firm’s leader in about 10 years, and she wanted to give the trio an opportunity to buy the firm.

The three women decided among themselves to purchase Beehive, and they also determined what roles they would hold after Hannum’s departure. Gibbs, chief strategy officer, will become president on July 1. Zemke will retain her role as chief client officer, and Martin will become chief people and impact officer. Hannum will serve as board chair during the leadership transition period.

“It is a dream come true,” Hannum said. “We are a Certified B Corp., woman founded, woman owned, women led, and that continues.”

Hannum will take a few months to relax after she relinquishes day-to-day leadership of Beehive, but she already plans to commercialize proprietary software through an LLC she’s formed called Clear Picture.

Her product is a professional services financial software platform, which allows people to use it for tracking time, billing, and other activities. Hannum said the differentiator is that “it allows you to forecast utilization of your team in real time.” She envisions attracting customers because of the “predictive planning piece.”

From PR to strategic communication

Hannum, who opened a post-pandemic Beehive office on St. Paul’s Vandalia Street in the Midway, said that 2016 was a pivotal year in the life of the firm.

“We made a super conscious shift,” she said. “The company name went from Beehive PR to Beehive Strategic Communication.”

Clients had noticed that Beehive was doing more than public relations. “That was everything from working on setting impact strategy, purpose, mission, and values, which I would argue is the corporate strategy,” Hannum said. The work also included change management communication and addressing company cultures.

“There were not a lot of firms calling themselves strategic communication firms 10 years ago,” Hannum said, but she and Beehive leaders wanted to get in front of a growing marketplace need for more than a public relations firm.

The shift in mindset and services was viewed as an opportunity for businesses. “We really saw it as opening up this possibility to have a full relationship with all the stakeholders that matter to you, all of your people, your employees, your business partners, the communities you serve, your prospects, your clients, your sales force,” Hannum said.

“Now you have an opportunity to start getting information from this ecosystem to help you frame your business strategy,” Hannum said. “Then, critically, how are you going to bring that strategy to market? How are you going to tell those stories? How are you going to differentiate your brand from your competitors? How are you going to be an employer of choice?”

Maneuvering in an exploding communication ecosystem

Hannum graduated from St. Cloud State University in 1986 when the media landscape was much more streamlined. Legacy media—daily newspapers, network television, and longstanding radio stations—were big players.

Public relations people in agencies valued getting their clients earned media.

The onset of digital news media and social media dramatically changed the rules of the corporate communications game.

“We worked with our clients to disabuse them of the notion that they were going to communicate internally from the top down, and you’re going to receive the information and believe it and understand it, that they could decide what was news and when it was news,” Hannum said.

“The loss of [business] control came with the rise of digital,” Hannum said. “In a world that became increasingly uncertain, economically fraught, politically challenging, socially challenging, and then you’ve got this whole new communication ecosystem that’s exploding around you.”

Ultimately, Hannum said, the current ecosystem makes it even more important for companies to communicate effectively with multiple stakeholders. “The understanding of communication as a powerful business tool really started to open up,” she said.

“We have to help organizations navigate information,” she said, and assist them with fact checking information that can surface from a variety of sources. She wants to ensure that a business “is taking responsibility and accountability for telling the truth around their brand.”

On Beehive’s website, one sentence—“We use strategic communication to solve your complex business challenges.”—dominates the home page. Beehive states it delivers its services “in your organization, in the marketplace, in a crisis.”

When should CEOs speak out on public issues?

When federal immigration agents were conducting sweeps in Minnesota over the past winter, Hannum was among the women business leaders who spoke publicly in support of immigrants.

She argued that major corporate leaders needed to have a more substantive and specific message during Operation Metro Surge.

She noted that many Minnesota women who belong to the Women Presidents Organization did make public statements.

“We were a community that was under attack,” Hannum said.

“It is reasonable to be worried about saying the wrong thing or stepping into something that is polarizing,” she said. But she was disappointed that some CEOs made fear-based decisions and didn’t speak up while federal agents were swarming the Twin Cities and detaining undocumented immigrants and some citizens.

“That silence can be deafening to employees and other stakeholders who have an expectation that you have a role in commenting, taking action,” she said. “CEOs have a responsibility to communicate honestly and clearly. That’s how they build understanding and trust.”

She wasn’t surprised that some Minnesota CEOs received backlash comments because they didn’t make strong statements about the immigration sweeps.

But Hannum doesn’t argue that CEOs should constantly be weighing in on public topics.

“When there are issues and decisions that influence the business, the products, and all of those people who’ve agreed to have a relationship with you, CEOs have got to communicate consistently and through the lens of their corporate strategy,” Hannum said. “Those are the issues that you don’t get to take a knee on.”