The People Who Work for You
Dick Pirozzolo, APR
Dick founded Pirozzolo Company Public Relations in Boston in 1980 and has developed an international PR agency whose clients include the governments of Vietnam and Japan and corporations in Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany and China. Pirozzolo company was named the Boston affiliate for HFN Kommunikation, Frankfurt, Germany in 2005.
Dick has over 30 years of technology experience with both B2B and B2C clients, including Trayport Ltd, WhiteSmoke, Yoggie, PeerApp, Morpheus Technologies, Rypos, and Metcalf & Eddy Environmental Engineers.
Dick brings high-level public relations, issues management, and US and Asian business relations skills to every client engagement. His earlier work includes public relations management positions with Boston University, where he was on assignment with the experts appointed by the US federal court during Boston’s court-ordered and controversial school desegregation. Dick was a daily newspaper reporter and a freelance writer for national magazines and newspapers.
He is author of three successful nonfiction books on residential construction and of For All the Years, a history of television in New England. Dick was a public relations consultant to WBZ-TV, where he managed the creation and funding of a million-dollar endowment for the performing arts in Massachusetts.
He figured prominently in fostering US-Vietnam trade relations throughout the 1990s. In addition to arranging positive media coverage of Vietnam by the world press, Dick’s bylined articles, photos and op-ed pieces on Vietnam public policy and trade issues have appeared in the Washington Times, Insight, Transpacific, The Advertiser, Beverage World, Vietnam Business Journal, Destination Vietnam, The Boston Sunday Herald (front page), Trade Show Week and PR News.
Dick is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and was awarded the Bronze Star for service as a US Air Force captain in Vietnam where he served as a media relations officer for the 7th Air Force in Saigon. He has been an accredited member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) since 1978, and is a member of the PRSA Counsellors Academy. Dick is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (formerly Sigma Delta Chi) and the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Michael Salius, APR
Based in Torrington, Connecticut, Mike serves a client base of national, regional and local clients in the energy, financial services, health care, government, nonprofit and foundation sectors. He has more than two decades of high-level experience and is a recognized authority on strategic public relations. He has numerous professional articles on crisis management, employee communications and merger communications to his credit.
He represents the Islander East Pipeline Company, a Spectra Energy Company, formerly Duke Energy. Mike is highly regarded for having a steadfast, measured approach to media, political and community relations that safeguards Islander East and Spectra Energy interests in the Connecticut marketplace.
As national director of public relations and advertising for Connecticut Mutual Life, Mike helped this old-line life insurer transform itself into a financial services leader. He helped health care entities manage the communications challenges associated with the shift from traditional indemnity insurance coverage to managed care. In the process he worked with doctors’ groups, hospitals, drugstore chains, health insurers, public health officials and managed care consultants from Aetna Health Plans, Beacon Prescriptions, Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, CIGNA Health Care, Connecticut Multispecialty Group, Connecticut Department of Public Health, MedSpan, St. Mary’s Hospital, University of Connecticut Health Center and Yale-New Haven Hospital.
His work with the Annie E. Casey Foundation helped reshape its community investment strategies to increase accountability. Mike helped the Foundation, one of the largest in the US, shift from making grants to nonprofit service organizations to funding resident- and neighborhood-driven initiatives based on specific goals: growing the income and assets of low-income families and increasing the number of children who succeed in school.
Mike has been an adjunct professor of PR at the University of Hartford and a guest lecturer. He was president of the Connecticut PRSA chapter and was cited as the PR practitioner of the year in 2001. He also chaired Young Audiences of Connecticut for three years and chaired the marketing committee of the Warner Theatre in Torrington, Connecticut. He is a Connecticut native and a 1971 graduate of the University of Connecticut.
European Affiliate
Helmut Nollert, Managing Director, HFN Kommunikation, Frankfurt
Helmut Nollert is founder and managing director of our affiliate HFN Kommunikation in Frankfurt, Germany. Helmut studied journalism, philosophy and Slavic languages at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. After earning his degree he began his career as a business and finance journalist for the international news agency Reuters and for the German business magazines Industriemagazin and WirtschaftsWoche.
From 1979 to 1992 his various communication management positions included PR manager of Wang Laboratories GmbH; worldwide media relations director for Nixdorf Computer AG, responsible for international business press, public and investor relations; and director of corporate communications for Unisys Germany and Europe.
In 1993 Nollert founded HFN Kommunikation, which places an emphasis on corporate communications and public relations. Within HFN he is a specialist in strategic communication and in national and international business, financial media, and investor relations.
In addition to his native German, Helmut speaks English, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Czech, Italian and Spanish.
