Senior counsel when the stakes are highest
Clear judgment in moments that matter
Outcomes that build reputation
24 years advising Australia’s boards and CEOs on crisis and reputation management. Personally handled by Peter. Confidential. No obligation.
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About
Wilkinson Group is a small, senior team advising Australian boards and CEOs through crisis, reputation, and issues management. We work directly with the people making the decisions, not a rotating account team learning the business from scratch. That continuity, the same adviser from the first call to the last, is deliberate, and it’s what clients come back for when the stakes are highest.
What They’re Saying About Us
”Peter Wilkinson (Wilkinson Group) brings not only enormous experience to assessing media and broader external communications challenges facing resource companies, he brings a keen ability to ‘cut to the chase’ and identify what it is required to enhance a company’s or project’s reputation and what messages will resonate with different key project stakeholders.
Simon Eldridge
”Peter has always been an approachable, professional and diligent person to work with and well understands working to deadlines from his many years of experience working in the media. I would not hesitate to recommend Peter to other organisations seeking to have a strong strategic advisor.
Anne Bryce
Wilkinson Group is not a crisis PR agency in the traditional sense. It is Australia’s senior crisis communications and reputation management consultancy, and a trusted issues management adviser. When the stakes are high and the margin for error is low, CEOs, internal PR, boards and general counsel call us.
We provide senior counsel across three areas: reputation management, crisis communications, and Wilkinson Confidante, our retained advisory service. Each is explained below.
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Crisis Communications
When a crisis breaks, credibility is the first casualty and nimbleness decides what happens next. Peter Wilkinson has guided Australian boards and CEOs through the moments that test an organisation most, from data breaches to activist pressure and major incidents. That experience is what keeps a bad day from becoming a defining one.
A crisis rarely stays a communications problem for long. It escalates in hours, fuelled by a sceptical public, competitive deadlines, and reactive politicians. Recovery demands a disciplined strategy, not just a good statement. There are no account managers between you and that judgment, no layers slowing down a decision that needs to happen now.
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
Reputation isn’t built in a crisis. It’s built in the years before one, through the consistent, unglamorous work of doing what you said you’d do, across every stakeholder who’s watching. By the time an issue escalates, that account should be in credit.
Wilkinson Group works with boards and CEOs to spot reputational risk early and act on it before it escalates. That means culture, stakeholder expectations and communication lined up in advance, not scrambled together after the story breaks. It’s slower work than crisis response. It’s the work that makes a crisis’ impact shorter.
Wilkinson Confidante
Wilkinson Confidante exists at the intersection of two scarcities, senior human judgment and trust, just as AI makes almost everything else plentiful.
It’s a deliberately an intimate, retained relationship. We work with a select group of organisations over the long term, so we understand your business deeply, not just your last headline, and help you build reputation before you ever need to defend it. That means aligning behaviours, communications, and culture with what your customers, employees, and community actually expect of you.
For CEOs, boards, general counsel, and comms professionals, Wilkinson Confidante delivers Reputation Building, Crisis Preparedness, and Risk Intelligence in one ongoing engagement. Experience delivers the counsel, AI delivers the intelligence, and the relationship strengthens both.
Peter is Managing Director of Wilkinson Group and Past Chair of Wilkinson Butler.
When a crisis hits, the difference between a good outcome and a bad one is often decided by who’s actually on the call: a senior adviser who’s seen this pattern before, or someone relaying decisions back to a person more senior. When Peter takes on an engagement, that seniority is guaranteed. No handoff mid-crisis to someone he hasn’t briefed, no rotating team learning your business from scratch while the story is already moving.
This matters because judgment doesn’t scale the way headcount does. Twenty-four years advising boards through crisis, after 30 years as an investigative journalist, isn’t a credential to list. It’s the difference between advice that sounds right and strategy-led advice that’s actually been tested time and again.
Peter Wilkinson leads Wilkinson Group. It’s not a crisis PR agency in the traditional sense, no account managers, no juniors. Every engagement gets direct, senior counsel. That’s why the engagements come back to him directly.
Peter’s skill is ensuring boards and executives can handle a crisis with confidence.
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