Andrew Cross Put His Head Down for Three Years. Fifteen Years Later, He Runs the Place.

Andrew Cross joined Walker Sands with a clock running in his head. Three years, he decided. He would put his head down, work as hard as he could, learn the agency trade, and then consider taking his talents in-house. It was a sensible private bargain for a new graduate. A plan needs a deadline, after all, or it is merely a daydream wearing office clothes.

Three years arrived. Cross took stock. He was still learning every day. He was surrounded, as he later put it, by “incredibly smart marketers and kind humans.” Leaving would have satisfied the schedule while violating the evidence. He stayed.

That small decision is the hinge of his career. In January 2026, Cross marked 15 years at the Chicago-born B2B agency. He had entered as employee No. 13 in an entry-level public relations role. He was now co-CEO, sharing the job with Dave Parro and overseeing the teams that clients actually hire: creative, content, demand generation, strategy and insights, public relations, and client services. The three-year experiment had quietly acquired executive authority.

The useful romance of staying put

Modern career lore adores the jump: new logo, larger title, cleaner biography. Cross’s résumé makes the unfashionable case for depth. He remained at one firm while the firm and his remit kept changing. Account work became department leadership. Department leadership widened into agency leadership. Each promotion appears less like a fresh start than a new floor added to the same building.

The foundation was public relations. Cross worked on accounts that chart a lively stretch of technology business: Grubhub, Sprout Social, Worldpay, Hyperwallet and Oak Street Health. These were companies whose stories sat close to their commercial fortunes. A product launch could set a category. A funding announcement could alter credibility. A careless claim could do the opposite before lunch.

By 2013 he was an account director. In 2014, while still a senior account director, Walker Sands made him a partner. He rose to vice president in 2016, then senior vice president of public relations in 2019. That promotion followed a year in which the agency’s PR revenue grew 43 percent. His title had grown, though so had the proof under it.

Cross’s public biography calls him a people-first leader, a description that can become corporate wallpaper if no one supplies the verbs. In his case, the verbs are teach, support and broaden. He mentored founders through Techstars Chicago from 2013 to 2016. He became Walker Sands’ ambassador to PROI, the international network of independent communications agencies. He spoke at PRSA Chicago, American Marketing Association Connex, his alma mater’s COM Week and the CNP Expo. Inside the agency, he grew the largest department and began leading major clients across teams.

“I was learning a ton every day, surrounded by incredibly smart marketers and kind humans. I realized then that I had found the place I wanted to be.”Andrew Cross, reflecting on his third year

A PR person asks the dangerous question

The dangerous question in communications is a short one: did it work? The industry has manufactured many elaborate ways to answer without quite answering. Cross has spent years worrying at that problem. A 2017 article of his asked whether it was finally time to retire “media impressions,” the wonderfully inflatable number that once lent precision to press reports. His later work kept the question and changed the instruments.

He also saw early that artificial intelligence would move from novelty to utility. In 2018, he predicted that AI would travel “deep and wide,” entering customer service, human resources and other core functions. In 2019 he joined a PRSA Chicago panel on the promises and perils of AI in communications. By 2025, the issue was no longer whether AI belonged in the room. It was how a brand could be visible inside the answers AI systems produced.

Walker Sands’ answer was an AI Domain Impact Index. The framework scored media domains from zero to 100 using technical and content factors associated with appearance in generative search responses. In an early analysis of more than 600 placements across 292 domains, 51 percent landed in the high-impact tier, 44 percent in the middle, and 4 percent in the low tier. Cross called the new measurement vector mandatory. A PR executive had found a fresh way to ask his old question.

His 2025 guidance on generative engine optimization carried the same practical temperament. Search had shifted from pages of blue links toward synthesized answers. Brands would need authority, trust and machine-readable context, while the basic obligation to publish something worth finding remained. Cross’s interest is not gadgetry for its own sake. He likes tools when they make influence legible.

From a department to the whole machine

The move beyond PR became official in 2021, when Cross took the executive vice president and partner role. In July 2022 he became president. The former PR operator now led every service group: public relations, branding, creative services, demand generation, marketing strategy and web. New business, strategic client support and agency growth joined his desk. If public relations taught him how reputation moves, the presidency asked him to connect that movement to the rest of a client’s business.

There was real momentum to manage. Walker Sands reported that new client wins helped drive growth of more than 40 percent in 2021 and moved the firm from No. 29 to No. 7 on O’Dwyer’s technology agency ranking. Cross pointed to HR technology, logistics, cybersecurity, AI and healthcare as strong sectors. The agency had also acquired March Communications in 2021 and KoMarketing in early 2023, adding geography and demand-generation depth.

On December 4, 2023, Mike Santoro moved from CEO to the board and appointed Cross and Parro as co-CEOs. The division of labor was crisp. Parro took the corporate side, including finance, talent, operations, IT, and sales and marketing. Cross took the billable teams. One would keep the operating chassis sound; the other would tune what clients experience. Co-CEO arrangements invite curiosity because two people sharing one title sounds like either elegant specialization or a calendar emergency. Here, the long working history and explicit split supply the logic.

The agency’s next chapter widened again in October 2025 through a partnership with Mountaingate Capital. In 2026, Walker Sands joined forces with RevPartners, a revenue operations and go-to-market engineering firm. The combination added HubSpot architecture, managed RevOps, Clay expertise and demand orchestration. Cross framed the deal around an increasingly tangled buyer journey: marketing, sales and customer success need shared systems, data and definitions of progress.

That is a considerable distance from counting press clips, though the line between the two is straight. Cross has kept pulling communications closer to commercial reality. Brand should help demand. Demand should connect to revenue. The system should reveal where the connection breaks. A campaign that cannot survive a business question is decoration with an invoice.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”A favorite line on Cross’s official profile

The person behind the operating model

There are smaller clues in the record. Cross graduated from Illinois State University in three years with a 4.0 major GPA and a bachelor’s degree in public relations. He was a Presidential Scholar. He and his wife, Christy, met in that scholars program. His official interests include running and personal finance, two pursuits that reward consistency, modest gains and a certain tolerance for spreadsheets. The metaphor writes itself, perhaps a little too neatly.

His anniversary post offered a more human artifact: the oldest work picture he could find, from Techweek 2013. Everyone in it looks young enough to regard a conference lanyard as glamorous. A former client replied that the team had helped his Chicago startup win coverage in Silicon Valley publications. A former colleague thanked Cross for years of support. The comments read like the informal ledger that never appears in an annual report.

Cross’s current ambition is larger than the firm he entered. He speaks about building a B2B growth services company that connects strategy, execution and measurement. The 2026 growth maturity research he shared makes alignment the central problem: leaders may possess technology, data and activity while marketing, sales and executives still pursue different priorities. The next trick is organizational, not promotional.

Fifteen years ago, Cross set a review date. He reached it and paid attention to what was true: the work still stretched him, and the people still mattered. That is not a cinematic career decision. It is better. It is repeatable. Stay while the learning compounds. Take the broader brief. Replace the comfortable metric. Look again when the deadline arrives.

The original three-year plan did not fail. It worked exactly as a good plan should. It forced an honest decision, then got out of the way.