When her paychecks kept bouncing while working as the director of communications at a firm on theMain Line, Leza Raffel, 46, decided to leave her job and take matters into her own hands. At 24 years old she started her own communications company — The Communications Solutions GroupInc., a Jenkintown-based full-service marketing and public relations company — and brought with her three clients from her former agency. “This was a business created out of necessity …

Bucks County is a large and diverse region. It has people from all walks of life, everysocioeconomic class. But, across the board, from top to bottom, there’s one thing everymunicipality has in common: a shortage of volunteer firefighters. To address this challenge, the Bucks County Fire Chiefs and Firefighters Association has recently launched several new recruiting initiatives including a new website, www.bucksfire.org. “The need for volunteer firefighters in a countywide issue,” said Rob Kay, Co-Chair …

JENKINTOWN — Like a lot of businesses, Communications Solutions Group came out of a bad period in the economy — with one larger company foundering, and employees leaving to start new ones. In this case, Leza Raffel started Communications Solutions in 1992, when it was clear the advertising agency where she was working might not weather the early-1990s recession. “The first sign was the paychecks could bounce. Then they had a state-ofthe- company meeting. They …