Michael Akin’s story is one of purpose translating into action. His time at George Washington University ignited a passion for community engagement and strategic communications, a passion that now fuels his leadership as President of LINK Strategic Partners. LINKSP is a game-changer in the consulting world, forging bridges between local communities, national capitals, and international actors through authentic engagement.
In an interview with Diplomatic Watch Magazine, Michael Akin discusses the challenges and successes of promoting community-driven solutions and shares strategic insights gained along the way. At the core of LINK’s philosophy is authentic stakeholder engagement, and Michael not only explains the reasoning behind this approach but also provides practical strategies for cultivating a diverse and thriving organizational culture.
This interview offers helpful viewpoints on achieving business success while making a positive social impact from a leader who is redefining the landscape of successful partnerships.
Can you walk us through your professional journey leading up to your role as the President of LINK Strategic Partners? How did your experiences in strategic management and corporate social responsibility shape your approach to community engagement?
Yeah, absolutely! So, I came to Washington to attend George Washington University. I was the first in my family to go to college, and it was a big deal. My family was very supportive of me coming here – raised by my mom, an amazing lady. But getting here, the financial burden of being in Washington and attending college felt overwhelming. So, I needed to get a job.
Like many kids who come here, I went to get an internship, and I was so excited to get a political internship. Then, after I was offered the internship, I asked what it paid. They laughed and said it didn’t pay anything; it was an internship. Well, how does that work? They said I’d be “paid in experience.” I remember thinking, “Well, I can’t eat experience. I need to be paid in real dollars.”
So, I left my political hopes in the waiting room for a little bit and went and became a caterer with Design Cuisine. That was amazing because it showed me all of the events and rooms, I would never normally be in. I was catering at embassies, the White House, and even the Reagan Building. It showed me this entire enterprise that not only allowed me to pay to be here but also gave me access to all of the amazing parts of DC that I would have had no other business in. I did that for a few years, then I became a community organizer in the Shaw neighborhood. There, I worked to help keep very vulnerable senior citizens in their homes for as long as possible in a rapidly gentrifying community. That showed me a completely different part of Washington D.C. that I wouldn’t have had exposure to if I’d just stayed in my university bubble.
So, that combination of seeing how the international parts of the city worked and then the hyper-local community aspects were both instrumental in my career development and path. By then, I went to work for George Washington University, in their government affairs office. What I learned during my time there is that the university needed a lot of support in its community engagement efforts. There wasn’t a terribly robust community engagement function there, or really at any university at that point. And that became something that I helped build. So, over 10 years of working at the university, I came in as an intern and left as an Assistant Vice President for Government, International, and Community Relations. I basically built out the university’s portfolio at its most grassroots community level all the way through its international partnerships and agreements, including its work on Capitol Hill and in Virginia. It was a truly transformational experience for me.
After that, I went to a consulting firm with the idea that we could build out community engagement as a professional service. We didn’t see many, if any, consulting firms that were working in that engagement space. You know, as an entrepreneur, if no one’s doing it, it’s either a really bad idea or no one has thought of it before or figured out how to make it work. So, that was the challenge: to try and figure out if there’s a way you can do community engagement work as a core function and bring that to market. And that’s where Link Strategic Partners was born – this idea that you could do hyperlocal engagement in a larger context. So, we started this company 12 years ago with four employees. We rented an office in the Urban League building on 14th Street in Columbia Heights. Then, fast forward to today, where we have five offices across the U.S., an office in the UK, and we’re doing a bunch of work both locally and globally. So, that’s a little taste of the journey, but I think every step of that has been very much a building block to what we’ve done.
LINK Strategic Partners is known for its authentic “hyperlocal” engagement. Could you elaborate on what this means and how it sets LINKSP apart from other firms? How do you balance community impact with profitability in your business model?
Absolutely, it’s such a great question. So, I think authenticity is a word we spend a lot of time thinking about. If we’re going to do community and stakeholder engagement work, whether it’s in our backyard or anywhere around the world, if we are not authentic and humble in that work, it’s never going to be effective.
We are always guests in someone else’s community, right? So, if we truly treat the community and stakeholders as the keepers of their truth, we understand that we are not coming in to teach a community more about themselves. They know themselves. We’re coming in trying to figure out truly authentic ways to engage and move processes forward together. It’s a core part of what we do.
So, in any community that we’re working with anywhere in the world, we see that local community as the experts, and we are there simply to be facilitators who move processes forward. This can look a lot of different ways, but I think that’s been a key part of what we do.
Here’s what differentiates Link Strategic Partners (LINKSP): One part of our firm focuses on all things- strategic communications, so anything to do with marketing, media, and advertising strategy – all the things you’d expect from marketing and communications – we do that. But we do it with a very hyperlocal approach.
Instead of running giant billboard campaigns (we do run some billboard campaigns), that’s a way to reach a really broad audience, right? But then there have to be ways to reach really specific audiences. Diplomatic Watch knows its audience. If we’re trying to reach your audience, we need to partner with you to reach your audience in the same way that if we’re trying to reach other audiences, we might partner with the Washington Informer or El Tiempo Latino. It’s a very hyperlocal approach to reaching audiences because we think that moves people to action much more effectively.
Then, the other part of our business is the engagement side, which is about how to effectively put together a process that moves people forward. Sometimes there’s a school system that wants to rethink its entire way of engaging with parents, students, and families. Other times, it’s governments – local governments across the country and around the world – that are trying to think of better ways to engage their citizens. Often, it’s within organizations – public, private, or nonprofit – that are trying to figure out if they’re doing what they need to do in terms of belonging and inclusion. How do we make sure that we’re moving our internal stakeholders forward? So, it’s all of those things that I think differentiate us.
LINKSP’s mission-driven work includes thousands of hours of pro bono work. Could you highlight some of the impactful pro bono projects LINKSP has been involved in? What motivates LINKSP to dedicate resources to community partners without expecting financial returns? How is that even possible?
Yeah, you know, when we set up LINKSP, there was a really honest discussion about whether to do this work in a non-profit capacity or as a private sector company. These are two very different models, right? I was intentional about LINKSP needing to be a private sector business because we have to show that it is possible to do well and do good at the same time. I feel that too often we force a distinction where one doesn’t exist. If you can’t be profitable while also doing good, the whole system isn’t working the way it should, right?
So, we do a ton of nonprofit work. We do a ton of pro bono work every year – between 30% to almost 40% of our work is low bono or pro bono. We’ve intentionally said we are not going to take on or turn down any work simply because of budget. Now, that doesn’t mean budget isn’t a consideration. It means we have a mission-driven group of individuals who want to work on things that matter and the issues of the moment. Sometimes budget supports that, and sometimes it doesn’t, so we get creative about what that looks like.
I think early on, it was understandable that people would be like, ‘Oh, that’s cute, but it’s not a business model. Then, we were named Inc. 5000 Magazine’s fastest-growing companies list in the world three different years in a row. So, suddenly, when the business model was working, people stopped thinking it was cute and wanted to figure out what it was. We have clients who pay us nothing and we have clients who pay us a million dollars. We’ve got a really good mix, all rooted in community engagement and mission-driven work.
I think it is absolutely possible to do well and do good, and it doesn’t mean you have to be naive or that everything has to be altruistic. It means you have to understand how all of this stays in balance. Here’s an example for folks who are reading this: many nonprofits we want to work with may not have a budget to hire a consultant, but most of those nonprofits also hold galas and fundraisers every year – great rooms for us to be in.
In the same way that I can’t pay $10,000 for a table at a non-profit gala, they can’t pay $10,000 to bring a consultant in. But I bet we can trade. We do a lot of work where we offer services in return for sponsorship consideration. That puts us in the room with the people we want to be with, gets our brand out where we want it to be, which will generate business, and it gives us a relationship where we can do the work the nonprofit needs without finances getting in the way. So, we try to get creative about how we structure these arrangements so they work for both parties.
LINKSP has successfully generated meaningful social impact while remaining profitable. Can you share specific examples of projects where these two goals intersected? How do you measure the success of your community-serving work beyond financial metrics?
No, I can give you some excellent examples of how this philosophy can work. The pandemic was a really good example, right? During the early days of the pandemic, when revenue was down everywhere, and everyone was trying to figure out their business model, we saw an opportunity.
We do a lot of work in the hospitality sector – restaurants, tourism, sustainable tourism, arts and theater – as well as the public health space. All of those industries were feeling the full brunt of this cataclysmic change. So, we all had to figure out how to adapt.
In our world, we adopted a philosophy of ‘people are communities, and our clients are part of those communities.’ So, we told our people, ‘You have jobs, you are safe, let’s keep doing good work.’ We figured out how to do that financially.
Then we went to our clients and said, ‘We know a lot of you don’t have the budget for an outside consultant right now, but you probably need us more than ever.’ To our communities, we said, ‘What are those issues we can be on the forefront of, for people who don’t even know we exist?’ We offered some of our services for vaccine campaigns and others.
Why do I mention this in this context? These often became barter-based relationships. We went to our restaurant partners and said, ‘We know you can’t afford us right now, but we also know you need support. Can we arrange something where, when this passes, our team can use a food credit at your establishment?’
We went to our theater partners and said, ‘Let’s just get through this. Maybe in the future, my team can get season passes.’ We entered into partnerships with community health partners and said, ‘You need to run campaigns in multiple languages to build trust around testing and vaccines. Let’s just get in there and do that work on the ground, and we’ll figure out the payment later.’
A couple of things happened. We kept that loyalty with our client base, and we also gained a real-time understanding of what was needed. So, when business opportunities did re-emerge, we were one of those few firms that was fully staffed, doing work with our client base, and had real-time, on-the-ground experience of how to run these campaigns.
We didn’t do any of it for business reasons upfront; we did it because it was the right thing to do in the moment. And it turned into a nice business opportunity. So, much like diplomatic watch, if you take that long-term view of partnerships, these things have a way of working out, but you have to be very specific and strategic about them.
Looking at your organization’s website, you have a diverse team with over 65% identifying as women and nearly 70% as people of color. How has this commitment to diversity influenced your company’s success? What strategies have LINKSP implemented to encourage an inclusive work environment?
It’s such a great question! People are everything. So, people hire us to bring good people to bear on the issues they need support with. Our people are our entire business model, and they’re phenomenal. Our youngest employee is 16, and our oldest employee is 96. We’re super intentional about representing every generation, right? Members of my leadership team include my Chief of Staff in their 20s, and we’ve got operations professionals here in their eighties. We’re intentional about creating a multi-generational workforce.
You mentioned some of the diversity statistics, which we’re very proud of. For us, it comes back to: Are we creating a culture of belonging? Are we creating a culture where everyone feels like they belong? Because if you belong, you can bring your best self to work, right? And I’m not meaning this in a transactional way – we’re not doing this so that people are better employees. We’re doing it because if you create a true sense of belonging and people are able to bring their best selves to work, then we’re all going to benefit from that.
Credit: Michael Akin
We’re working on really hard, complicated issues. We also have a team that has a variety of shared and lived life experiences. If we make it impossible for them to bring that lived experience to their work, we’re not going to do our work as well either. So, that real sense of belonging is something we spend a lot of time thinking about.
We also think, you know, we’re all learning all the time, so we have to create a space where it’s okay to learn from each other. Frankly, we have to create a space where it’s okay to make mistakes from time to time, as long as we’re learning from each other in a really brave way.
Then, we have to have partners that help us with this. So, we do our high school-based hiring through a great partnership with a program called the Urban Alliance and the Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program. We also have a very strong commitment to second-chance hiring, focusing on formerly incarcerated individuals, through a strong partnership with the Georgetown Pivot Program. They’re one of our recruiting partners to make sure we have a pipeline that aligns with what we need.
We have a strong partnership with Generation Hope, a phenomenal program that provides support for parents who are also students. A lot of people going to college have young children, and the education system isn’t set up for that. So, this program provides those wraparound services, including an employment pipeline, where we get some great people who are looking to come in and work.
So, I think we’ve been intentional about recruiting to make sure we have the team that we need. We also believe that since we’re going to work in communities, we need to be of those communities. So, here in Washington, D.C., we intentionally recruit and hire from all eight wards of Washington. That way, when we’re doing work in all the wards of Washington, we’re not learning about that community for the first time. We’re listening to the folks on our team who have that lived experience.
I can talk about this all day – it’s something we spend a lot of time on. But I think it’s that sense of belonging that really brings it all together.
LINKSP has grown from a ‘small local shop’ to a global firm. What challenges did you face during this expansion, and how did you overcome them? How do you maintain a consistent company culture across different offices worldwide?
These are such great questions. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what organic growth looks like for us. There’s no magic number that defines success for us. It’s not like, ‘Oh, if we were a thousand people or if we had this much revenue.’ I think anytime you’re defining a number abstractly, it sets an incentive structure that might come into competition with the mission-driven work we’re doing. So, we’ve decided that we’re going to take a very organic approach to growth, but also a very ambitious approach. Those two things can be true. We are not going to turn down opportunities, but those opportunities need to make sense for us.
When we started, we were in D.C. and we were D.C.-based. We had a real sense that we knew this city and these communities, and that’s where we should do our work. We then got invited to do work in the region, and we said, ‘You know, can we do that or not?’ We tried that approach, and it worked. Then, we got invited to work in a school system across the country in the South. I remember flying to that meeting, reading my briefing book, and interviewing publicly with a school board whose meeting was being broadcast live. All these people were watching, and the school board asked me a great question: ‘What do you know about our city? Why should we hire a consultant that’s not from here?’
I said, ‘That’s a great question. I know the 700 pages of briefing materials I read. But that means nothing. You will always be the experts in your community. This will only work if you are comfortable being the experts in your community and there’s room for somebody to come in and help provide expertise on what engagement looks like.’ And that approach worked. That’s the approach we take everywhere.
So, as I said before, parachuting into places isn’t authentic. If we can find that real partnership, it works. Taking this into a global context has been the next frontier for us. There was a long time that we thought this hyperlocal approach might or might not work in other places.
Here’s where we are now, after over a decade of doing this work: I’m not trying to make any grand political statements here, but what I’ve come to realize, and I think our team reflects this, is that many of the large global challenges we’re facing aren’t being solved well in an only-global context, right? Some of the big global institutions were all doing great work – I think we’re all learning the limits of how much global challenges can be solved only through global solutions. It seems like many of these global challenges require hyperlocal solutions, and that’s where we operate.
So, some of the travels you talked about at the beginning and some of the places we’ve been – it’s been a concept of just trying to figure out: Are there local solutions that could be brought to the forefront with the right level of engagement that might move us forward on some of these challenging issues? So far, we’ve found a very good reception to that, but it’s very much an exploration process, and that will continue in our work.
LINKSP has been a recipient of several awards. What do these recognitions mean to you and your team? How do you sustain excellence and innovation within LINKSP?
Yeah, awards are fun things, and I smile about them because I think you know, if you’re doing the work for the awards, you’re probably not doing it for the right reasons. But awards can be nice validation for our partners and our communities. So, when we get an award, it has to be because we’ve done really good work with our community partners. If those awards can shine a light on what they do, that’s a phenomenal thing.
I also find that awards can be good validators. As I said before, it’s easy for people to think, ‘Oh, this sounds like a cute business model. He sounds kind of naive.’ I get all of that. I see the smiles and the snickers when I talk about the work in the past of other people. Then, suddenly, you get identified as one of the fastest-growing businesses in America, right? Or you get identified as a business with a purpose. It’s a validation to be like, ‘Oh wait, maybe there’s a business model here that backs up everything he’s saying.’ And I find that that’s helpful from a business development standpoint because people want to do business with solvent businesses, right? So, it helps us to have those validators that the business model is sound and the work is award-winning for our community partners. I think if we look at it that way, awards become really helpful things.
Given LINKSP’s strategic location in Washington, D.C., with direct access to embassies, government agencies, and international organizations, how does LINKSP utilize this proximity as a business advantage?
Another great question! I look at D.C. as one of those truly unique places that’s full of very local, very regional, national capital, and global power players. I think very often, these different sectors don’t interact well. It’s possible to have only a local experience or only an international experience, and you lose out on the complexity and wonder that is everything else that makes up Washington, D.C.
So, for us, this is the perfect home because it allows us to be part of all of those things and frankly, to try to find those levels of intersection. That’s another place where I think Diplomatic Watch and us overlap. So many of the world’s forces here don’t intersect; they operate entirely in silos. So, when you can bring the diplomatic world into contact with local D.C., and when you can bring the regional stuff into contact with the national stuff, and when you can find work that’s happening on Capitol Hill that’s also happening in Ward 7, you find those moments of intentionality.
There are very few places anywhere else in the world where you can do that. That’s why I think Washington, D.C., makes so much sense for us. It’s also part of the reason why our offices are in the International Trade Center. We’re a hyperlocal community engagement firm, but we’ve set up shop in the International Trade Center because we think those linkages start to make a lot of sense.
Looking ahead, what are LINKSP’s goals and aspirations for the next decade? How do you envision the role of strategic communications and stakeholder engagement evolving in the coming years?
When we started this work over a decade ago, even terms like ‘stakeholder engagement’ or ‘community-related’ people – there wasn’t an industry around any of that. You wouldn’t find a community engagement division in any consulting firm, communications firm, or lobbying firm back then. Now, they all have them. So, part of me is proud that we’ve kind of created an industry that other people have found value in.
Now, I think our opportunity is to continue to define that in truly authentic and non-extractive ways. I’ll give you a really quick example of that. We’re helping to produce a tennis tournament in the British Virgin Islands in May. I’m flying to Grenada in two weeks to speak at this Caribbean Sustainable Tourism Conference. Why do I have any business being there? Why are we doing a tennis event in the British Virgin Islands?
Well, because we did a tennis event in Hawaii, and we did it in a way that was non-extractive to local communities. So many of these big tourism, sporting, and economic development events – all of which have good parts and bad parts – are often not seen as a benefit by local communities. They feel like they happen to them instead of with them, right? All these people parachute in, you do an event, the money leaves, and then everyone says, ‘Great, look how wonderful it was!’ The local communities are just the backdrop.
So, we’re trying to flip that model and say, ‘If we’re going to do an event, how do you build community partnership into that from the ground up?’ And that’s finding a lot of success because it’s just a very different approach. So, I think these next few years are going to be about solidifying those partnerships, really trying to find local and global applications for that approach, and then hopefully just continuing to build our team. We have a phenomenal team here, and we have several team members who’ve been with us for a long time. So, if we can continue to provide those pathways for growth and leadership within the firm, that to me is a real success metric.
What advice would you give to individuals or organizations looking to make a meaningful social impact while remaining financially sustainable?
Yeah, to me it goes back to this, and I fundamentally believe this: doing well and doing good do not have to be mutually exclusive. They shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. You can be successful and you can do good, and those two things don’t always have to conflict with each other.
I think for folks, and individuals who are looking to get into this space, it’s important to find really good mentors. Ask for support and be open to being coached into becoming leaders in this space. It’s the same thing for me. I had a team meeting earlier today, and I was talking about a community meeting we had that was a rough one. Normally, that would be the moment where I would jump in to make sure everything goes well. But in this meeting, I stood back, and the team member who was leading it handled it not only perfectly, but even better than I would have. So, I was reflecting to the rest of the team that we have to leave room to learn from each other. I have a team member who taught me something that I would have done differently, and he got it right, whereas I wouldn’t have. So, I think you know, coaching and being coachable, finding a mentor and a mentee – I think those are key things in this space.
Mr. Akin, could you elaborate on the principles you emphasize in mentorship, particularly the importance of reciprocity and ongoing engagement between mentors and mentees?
Absolutely, and I do a lot of that. I think mentorship has to be a two-way street. If we have a partnership with the Urban Alliance and we bring high school students into our firm, but we don’t leave space for them to teach us something, we’re getting it wrong, right? If we’re doing work with a school system and we’re not looking to the students on our staff for advice on how to do that, we’re missing out. Mentorship has to go both ways.
I also very firmly believe that I can’t want this more than you want it, right? In any sort of business relationship, personal relationship, or mentor relationship, if the mentor is doing all the heavy lifting and the mentee isn’t doing their part, that’s not going to work. In the same way, if the mentee is doing all the heavy lifting and the mentor isn’t available, it’s not going to work either. As long as both parties are invested in it, it can work and it can be a really important thing.
I also think there’s often a dynamic that at some point you kind of graduate out of needing a mentor, and I think that’s foolish. We all need mentors. I’m having dinner tonight with a guy who has been my mentor since I was a student at George Washington University. Throughout both of our lives, there have been times he’s needed me and there have been times I’ve needed him. But we’ve kept that relationship alive, and I think that’s really important.
At the risk of completely over answering this, one of the problems I have, and I’ve just spoken on a panel about this, is that employers often talk about how disloyal their employees are, and that as soon as people get a better option, they’re going to leave. It’s like employers are demanding absolute loyalty but they’re showing none of that in return. I think mentorship is a piece of that. If you expect people to be loyal to you, you have to show that loyalty back. It can’t just be transactional. That’s kind of how I approach mentorship – it has to go in both directions, and we have to leave room for it to be complicated at times.
We have a question referring to something you said earlier. When you have employees and you assure them you are going to be in this, we’re not going to lose you as an employee. What happens down the line if you ever have to lose an employee for layoffs?
Yeah, great question. In the history of our firm, we’ve never laid anyone off for lack of work or any other reason. That’s part of where the organic approach to growth comes in. Everyone on my team – you could ask anyone, and they would know this because we talk about it all the time – needs to operate slightly above capacity. That way, in lean times, we’re not laying people off because suddenly the revenue dips. So, everyone who comes to the firm knows that’s the business model.
There are going to be times in the year when we’re all over capacity, and that gets us through the times when a couple of contracts we were counting on ended up not coming through. It goes back to that business model – we bake that volatility into the model, we’re very open about it, and everyone understands that.
The other thing is that not everything is going to work out perfectly. Sometimes there’s just not a good fit. As a leader, I used to take it super personally when someone left. That’s something I had to grow through, as I think a lot of leaders do. You have to realize that they’re leaving for a reason, and the question is: How can we make that exit as beneficial for both of us as possible? So, the door is always open, and when you’re going out there, please refer business back to us. We’ve evolved in that way, and I think it’s been really helpful.
The last thing I’ll mention is our robust associate program. It’s a paid professional internship program where people come in and work for four months. It’s a high-level, client-facing role with business card titles. We have people who come into that program from college, people who are changing careers, and people who’ve lost a job and are looking for something while they search for their next one. It’s a structured program that frankly allows us to test each other out before we make a more formal commitment. Then, anytime we have a full-time opening, we go to our associate program and alumni first to see if anyone is interested. It’s been a great way for people to figure out what works for them, without everything always happening in a traditional employment context.
