Andrea L. Johnston

Founding Partner, FiftyOne Advisory Group

In 2024, Andrea partnered with her former colleague Mary Corcoran to create a new enterprise, FiftyOne Advisory Group, focused on providing highly customized business advisory and corporate communications strategy solutions.

Building on her more than 30 years of organizational leadership, entrepreneurship, successful private equity exits, and marketing communications experience, plus her deep healthcare expertise, her focus for clients is on integration work, change management, employee engagement, growing and scaling professional services firms, coaching female founders and developing corporate marketing strategies.

She is best known for founding and successfully building Pure Communications from a one-woman firm in North Carolina to a sought-after integrated marketing communications partner for leading biotech, medtech, diagnostic, pharmaceutical and venture capital organizations, with remote workers and offices from Boston to San Francisco. Pure Communications was acquired by Mountaingate Capital and W2O Group in 2016 as the first add-on to the W2O platform. Andrea merged Pure with a division of W2O and assumed the role of president of the new entity, which retained the Pure brand. Over the next two years, under her leadership, the combined entity doubled in size and revenues with best-in-class margins. She was later appointed Group President and Managing Partner of W2O Integrated Communications, overseeing nearly $150 million in revenues and a team of 600 plus. Andrea served as an integral member of the core deal team that successfully sold W2O Group to New Mountain Capital and restructured the organization (now Real Chemistry) for continued growth and diversification. She was recognized by the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association with the Luminary Award in 2019.

Andrea’s early career included leadership roles with DeVries Public Relations, DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals and Medical Imaging, Bayer Diagnostics (merging Chiron Diagnostics), Alcami and Ketchum Public Relations (establishing a global women’s health practice).

Andrea made the bold decision to leave W2O to take a much-needed career break in 2020 to focus on her family and pursue her personal goals. During this time, she obtained a certificate in nutrition and wellness from Cornell University, and helped design and launch The Forward Fund, the first social impact fund for workforce development in the state of North Carolina.

She remains active in her community as vice chair of the Board of Directors of Cape Fear Collective and a founding board and investment committee member of The Forward Fund. A graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., Andrea possesses an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in communications, law, economics and government.

Mary E. Corcoran

Founding Partner, FiftyOne Advisory Group

In 2024, Mary partnered with her former colleague Andrea Johnston to create a new enterprise, FiftyOne Advisory Group, focused on providing highly customized business advisory and corporate communications and marketing strategy solutions.

Mary Corcoran is renowned for driving transformational change and dynamic growth within a wide range of business situations. Her c-suite leadership experience spans private, public, and private equity (PE) owned organizations.

Mary has a keen ability to quickly discern a clear perspective on the current state of a business, and importantly, the factors that inform that state – organizationally and commercially. Armed with a razor-sharp understanding of change levers, Mary’s passion is to partner closely with executive teams and boards to enable the best possible commercial outcomes for investors, executives and employees.

Mary has passion and expertise for unleashing the commercial power of authentic leadership to infuse a sense of adventure and ambition into the fabric of organizations – in other words, helping clients build culture that works. With an eye for talent at all levels of business, Mary is particularly adept at helping clients cultivate high-functioning leadership teams who trust one another to contribute meaningfully to their shared objectives.

Mary also deeply understands the commercial impact of effective marketing and communications strategies – particularly in a digital context. Her work with clients over the last 25 years has been almost exclusively through a digital lens, from the very earliest days of “blogger relations” in a public affairs and reputational context to the advent of AI across every area of business and society.

Previously, Mary was the President, North America of BCW (formerly Burson Cohn & Wolfe), and prior to that, Mary held multiple roles including Chief Client Officer, Group President, and President at Real Chemistry, a $400M+ PE-owned Healthcare Marketing firm. Notably, Mary led teams to deliver double digit P&L growth across healthcare clients during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was recognized with the 2020 Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) Luminary Award.

Mary honed her leadership and growth strategy toolkit at Edelman, a $1B privately held global communications firm. Over 10 years she developed and matured over $45M in new business capabilities and was promoted multiple times, starting as a Senior Account Supervisor and advancing to the New York Region Chief Operating Officer. Her early career includes roles as a Private Equity Analyst at JP Morgan and working within the political arena.

Mary holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Smith College.