Amy Power’s son had a question. “Mommy, are you a ‘pwesident’?” In the early years of her business, she had taken calls from soccer fields and written press releases after the children went to bed. The title was apparently worth checking. She told him yes. It is a small domestic scene with a rather large business question inside it: when you build a company around your own life, how do you make room for everybody else’s?
Power founded The Power Group in Dallas in 1999. Its anniversary shares a date with her son’s birthday, a coincidence she has celebrated publicly. Family and enterprise were entered on the same calendar from the beginning. Over the following decades, her job would change from doing the work herself to helping other people become capable of carrying it. That second occupation has become central to how she describes her first.
A founder can put her surname above the door relatively quickly. Building a firm that can function beyond her immediate reach takes longer. Power’s account of that transition includes an unwelcome revelation from talk radio, employees who disagreed with her about office space, and a growing willingness to accept help. The publicist accustomed to advising other businesses had a business of her own to reconsider.
A press release, a college classroom, a direction
Power’s earliest example of enterprise was close to home. Her grandmother, Eddie Lou Cooper, ran The Nifty Shop, a seamstress business in Jackson, Tennessee. Summers spent watching her grandmother serve customers gave Power a view of work that joined creativity to commerce. In 2021, she said she still carried her grandmother’s business card in her wallet. A useful family heirloom: portable, practical, and already professionally typeset.
At Mary Baldwin College, a professor with professional PR experience gave her another way to combine business and writing. Preparing her first press release helped her recognize the career she wanted. The appeal was specific. She liked writing and she liked being curious. Public relations offered a place to put both habits to work, with an audience beyond the classroom.
She began with an internship at Ketchum in Atlanta. After graduating in 1990, she moved to Dallas, where her experience included Tracy-Locke/Pharr PR and HadelerWhitePR. At the smaller firm, she worked on emerging franchise brands. These were useful settings for someone who would later serve both established companies and entrepreneurial ventures: businesses with a name to protect, and businesses still trying to make one.
The inconvenient wisdom of the car radio
There is a point in many small businesses when the founder’s freedom starts to look suspiciously like permanent availability. Power has described hearing a radio discussion about whether an owner could leave a company for a week’s vacation. If everything stopped when the owner stepped away, the speaker suggested, the owner had effectively made another job for herself. She recognized the problem immediately.
The observation matters because her original working arrangement had answered a real personal need. She wanted a career alongside raising her children. Working from home let her keep the two close, even when the timetable was untidy. But a schedule that suits one person does not automatically become an organization that can support many. The business had to acquire its own capacity to make decisions.
Even the question of where to work became a lesson in listening. Power wanted a virtual agency; her employees wanted an office. Her preference had helped shape the company, but their preference would shape its next stage. By 2025, she was discussing a journey from solo freelance work through shared professional space to owning the agency’s building. The workplace had evolved with the people using it.
There is a pleasing irony here. A communications adviser asks a question, receives an answer she did not expect, and has to take the answer seriously. The exercise is familiar to anyone who has commissioned research while secretly hoping it will confirm the decision already made. Power’s story gives the employees a meaningful role in the outcome. They wanted somewhere to gather. The company eventually had a place of its own.
The long relationship is the useful measurement
Public relations supplies plenty of visible evidence: a headline, an interview, a launch, a room full of people. Power’s career has also accumulated a quieter kind. In its 2023 directory entry, The Power Group identified Golden Chick as a client retained for more than 20 years. Longevity of that sort asks different questions of an agency than a single successful campaign does. Can the relationship keep working as the business changes?
Her experience includes Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay, Which Wich and Vacation in a Bottle. Across food, consumer products and other industries, she has worked with executives and marketing directors whose organizations are at different stages of development. The variety gives her career a practical texture. There is no single kind of client ambition to learn once and repeat forever.
Power has made a clear argument about crisis communication: listen, and make the response fit what happened. In her 2018 writing, she urged companies to let PR lead the communication effort. It is a demanding position because the response has to survive outside the meeting room. People receiving it can judge both the words and the action accompanying them.
Her professional interests also extend into how audiences form around smaller voices. In 2019, she joined Michael Lambie of CreatorIQ for a discussion of nanoinfluencers. That interest sits comfortably alongside her work in traditional media. Whether the messenger has a large platform or a small, attentive following, the relationship between speaker and audience deserves consideration. A head count alone offers a rather incomplete portrait of trust.
The Power Group ranked No. 3,876 on the Inc. 5000 and was named an Inc. Best Workplace.
Teaching the people who might take your job
Power was a Dallas Business Journal Top 25 Women in Business honoree in 2015 and a Most Admired CEO honoree in 2018. In 2024, D CEO included her among its 500 influential executives. Those recognitions tell part of the story. Her own descriptions repeatedly return to the practitioners she has helped develop. The agency is a place to deliver client work and learn how a business runs.
In a 2018 contribution about sales hiring, she singled out an owner’s mentality: someone who cares about the company and demonstrates that care through action. That observation becomes more interesting when the company bears your own name. An employee’s commitment cannot depend on sharing the surname. It has to come from an understanding of the work and a stake in doing it well.
By 2025, Power was discussing the importance of releasing control so team members could lead through their own strengths. It is easy to admire independence in theory and somewhat harder to enjoy it when another person reaches a different decision. Her emphasis on developing businesswomen asks the founder to tolerate that difficulty. People need practice at judgment if they are to become trusted judges.
The firm’s stated values put ethics, shared success and enjoyment into the same conversation. Its team page uses three short instructions: do the right thing, win together, and create happiness and fun. Power has argued in her professional writing that values should enter everyday company language. A principle recited only on ceremonial occasions has limited usefulness when an ordinary decision needs making.
“Something Happens When You Are Ready.”
Amy Power’s favorite quote, listed in her agency biography
A president who knows when to ask
Power’s relationship with Entrepreneurs’ Organization offers another view of her leadership. She served as president of its Dallas chapter in 2023. She has also described the group as a place where owners could share the difficult parts of running a business. That includes learning from people with enough experience to recognize the trouble and enough candor to discuss it.
In 2020, she encouraged leaders to find peers who could both support them and receive their support. Her advice had none of the theatrical solitude sometimes attached to entrepreneurship. Asking for assistance belonged in the work. A founder may have ultimate responsibility for a company, but responsibility does not confer complete knowledge. Keeping the two separate leaves room for useful conversations.
She also took that conversation beyond her own firm. PRSA Dallas listed her as the speaker for its January 2023 kickoff event on finding one’s purpose, with a question session moderated by broadcasters Jenny Anchondo and Samantha Gannon. A career spent helping other people explain themselves had furnished Power with material to share about her own reasons for working.
Her personality has room for lighter declarations. Her first concert was the B-52s at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. Uchi is her favorite Dallas restaurant. For karaoke she chooses The Pretenders, and she has expressed a particular appreciation for Chrissie Hynde’s bangs. A professional biography can contain a few pleasures without requiring them to become a management theory. Sometimes a song choice is simply a song choice.
Keeping a picture of what comes next
Power once wrote about sending handwritten letters to her son during military basic training. She kept returning to the picture of his graduation, encouraging him to hold that destination in mind. The family detail supplies a gentler version of a familiar professional task: help someone describe the future clearly enough to keep moving toward it.
Her recent reflections look ahead to AI, changes in communication, and continued development of the team. The ambition remains connected to people as well as client work. She began with a working arrangement suited to her family, then learned to accommodate the needs and abilities of others. The title her young son asked about has acquired a different weight over time. A president has decisions to make. She also has people to prepare to make them.