Chris Bahn remembers the exact moment he decided to move beyond telling other people’s stories and start writing his own.
“My wife, Rebecca, and I were standing in the kitchen in November of ‘24,” he said. “Starting a business had been a thing we’d been kicking around off and on for a while. She turned and looked at me while we were getting dinner ready and said, ‘Hey, I’m ready when you are.’
“She was all in. She was on board, and that was amazing. I owe her a lot for believing in it and saying, ‘Let’s go make this happen.’”
The second push came from his father-in-law, longtime advertising executive Dan Kirkpatrick. Bahn walked in with a spreadsheet mindset — savings mapped out, retirement accounted for, and a runway of six, 12, maybe 18 months. Kirkpatrick was not interested in the math.
“He said, ‘No son, you burn the boats,’” Bahn said. “If you’re going to make a go of this, you have to be all in. You can’t be starting a business with one foot in, wondering, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ You’ve got to go all in and be committed to it.”
So he did; after decades chronicling other people’s careers, wins and turning points, Bahn launched C. Bahn Strategic Partners, a public relations and strategic communications firm based in Little Rock, and finally put himself in the story.
That decision clearly shows in his self-written website, which does not read like marketing copy. It reads like Bahn himself: easy, confident, direct.
“I grew up in Jonesboro, proud son of northeast Arkansas,” he said. “I knew from sixth grade on that I wanted to write for newspapers and magazines.”
The dream did not wait long to become a reality. By his second semester at Arkansas State University, his advisor, Joel Gambill, had already put him to work as a reporter at The Jonesboro Sun.
“To be 18 years old and get to immediately connect into the profession I’d known I wanted since I was 12, that was an incredible foundation for me.”
Nearly two years into running his own firm, that same clarity still drives everything. Bahn’s unofficial motto, “We’ll figure it out,” is less a slogan than a personality trait.
“I’m wired to help. I’m wired to serve. I’m wired to connect — sometimes to my detriment,” he said. “There have been very few instances where I didn’t know someone who could directly help a person who had a need.”
That instinct is the whole business model. Bahn does not sell tactics; he sells relationships — opening doors, earning trust, knowing exactly who can move a project forward and getting them in the room. It is the same philosophy that carried him through a newsroom, just applied at a different scale and with a bigger stake in the outcome.
“The scale changes,” he said. “The intent doesn’t.”
He traced that instinct back to his maternal grandfather, Ray McClintock, the first entrepreneur Bahn ever knew — long before he had a word for it.
“I had no bigger hero as a kid,” Bahn said, “and I’m not sure I have a bigger one now.”
Now Bahn is paying it forward. Mentorship is not a side project at C. Bahn Strategic Partners; it is baked into the model with paid internships and real opportunities for college students and recent grads. Their work has fueled the firm’s growth, and C. Bahn Strategic Partners is on pace to grow more than 150 percent this year.
None of it happened by accident. Bahn did not just take his father-in-law’s advice — he embodied it, day after day, decision after decision. He burned the boats and built something remarkable on the shore.
SEE THE FEATURE BELOW AND IN OUR SEPTEMBER 2026 ISSUE OF ARKANSAS MONEY & POLITICS
