Anna Crowe knows what a story is worth

Anna Crowe’s list of things she cannot leave the house without is admirably economical: a notebook, a pen and red lipstick. Two instruments for getting the idea down, one for making an entrance. It is a useful introduction to a founder whose working life has required both precision and a willingness to be seen. Before public relations, before the book and the speaking engagements, Crowe was a staff auditor at Deloitte in Manhattan. Her first professional assignment was to examine the numbers. Eventually, she wanted a hand in making them happen.

That ambition has taken her through fragrance marketing, the music business and the coffee-shop beginnings of Crowe PR. By the agency’s tenth anniversary in 2025, the solo operation had become a national team with clients around the world. In January 2026, she introduced a parent company, Crowe Media, bringing six divisions under one roof. The business keeps changing shape. Her interest in the people behind it has been more consistent.

A useful education in starting over

Crowe was born in Moscow as Anya Checklina. Her family moved to the Bronx in 1989. Years later, she would make the immigrant experience a subject of her public speaking, connecting the work of adjusting to unfamiliar surroundings with the resourcefulness required to run a company. Starting again was something she had practiced well before she had a business card.

Her 2025 TEDx talk, The power of the immigrant mindset, turns that experience outward. She asks audiences to consider the journeys behind the people they meet and the abilities developed along the way. Adaptability, in this account, has a history. It comes from having to work out how things function when the familiar instructions no longer apply. For someone whose profession depends on understanding other people, that is a consequential place to begin.

She followed a more conventional route into working life. An accounting degree at Rutgers led to Deloitte in 2000. Auditing offered a close view of businesses: how they operated, where the money went, what made the enterprise hold together. She liked learning how companies worked. She also wanted more room for creativity. Accounting is generally reluctant to supply that particular amenity.

Fragrance, records and a different kind of arithmetic

A move into financial analysis at a fragrance and cosmetics business brought her closer to brands. At Coty, her career included work on the launch of Jennifer Lopez’s first fragrance. Here was another way to understand a company: through the associations surrounding a product, the audience it hoped to reach and the story that might persuade someone to choose it.

The transition makes more sense when viewed through that shared business interest. Crowe was learning how value gets created from another angle. Financial work had taught her to examine results. Marketing offered a chance to influence them. The combination would later become central to her argument for public relations that could explain its contribution to a client’s business.

She moved to California for graduate school, earning an MBA in international marketing at the University of San Diego. In 2007, she headed to Los Angeles and a role at EMI Music/Capitol Records. One memory from that chapter is particularly difficult to improve upon: standing in during a soundcheck for Ringo Starr. The route from audit training to a Beatle’s soundcheck was proving considerably less predictable than the original career plan.

Teaching became another part of her working life. She has taught undergraduate marketing as an adjunct at the University of San Diego, returning to the institution where she earned her MBA. The classroom fits the broader pattern: learning a business, translating what matters, then finding a way to make someone else understand it.

The coffee shop becomes a company

Crowe founded her agency in 2015, starting from a coffee shop. Its initial focus was media relations. The first year brought contracts, employees and a downtown San Diego workspace. These are modest-sounding milestones until someone has to arrange all three while also delivering the work. The solo founder was becoming an employer.

The services expanded as the business grew. Social media management and influencer marketing joined the offering in 2017. A New York location followed in 2018. In 2023, Crowe PR acquired Eckis Marketing, adding design and content capabilities. Each addition changed the practical question facing its founder: how to organize work that had become too varied, and too large, to run as an extension of one person.

The growth produced a set of numbers an auditor could appreciate. Crowe PR appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2022, 2023 and 2024. For the 2024 listing, the agency reported three-year revenue growth of 171 percent and a rank of 2,939, up from 4,956 the previous year. Those figures describe a particular period, rather than a promise about every year to come. They do establish that the coffee-shop venture had acquired commercial weight.

A whiskey story that began at home

One client relationship started with a tasting in the founders’ home. Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey and Crowe PR were both San Diego businesses; their partnership began in 2018. For Crowe, the early encounter became a memorable example of the distance between an idea taking shape and a brand reaching an international audience.

Peanut butter whiskey arrives with a conversation already attached. The agency’s work was to help carry that conversation beyond the people who first tried it. Over the relationship, Skrewball expanded internationally and was acquired by Pernod Ricard. Crowe describes the campaign as an example of public relations contributing to a company’s growth. The product, its founders and the wider business did their own substantial share of the work.

That distinction matters to her view of client relationships. She wants the agency involved in the business discussion: the goals, the longer horizon, the measures that tell a company whether it is succeeding. A headline has more value when the people arranging it understand what the client needs to happen next. Her accounting background makes that interest in consequences particularly legible.

The founder learns to leave room

Building a team required Crowe to reconsider some of her own habits. Early on, she hired people with skills resembling hers and remained closely involved in hiring decisions. Later, she came to value a wider mix of abilities and trusted colleagues to lead more of that work. A growing company needed people who could bring something she did not already have.

She has also described the operational friction of expansion: methods that suit two or three employees start breaking as the team reaches ten or fifteen. The agency introduced the Entrepreneurial Operating System, dashboards and workflow tools. Behind the public business of storytelling sat the private business of deciding who owned a task and how anyone would know it was done.

“I think culture is intentional, not accidental.”

Anna Crowe

There are routines attached to that conviction. The team discusses its values weekly. Nest University, launched in 2024, provides internal training and development. A Culture Club creates monthly opportunities for colleagues to connect. In a company spread across locations, shared habits give a rather abstract word, culture, a place in the calendar.

Crowe’s 2019 book, Get Real: The Power of Genuine Leadership, a Transparent Culture, and an Authentic You, explored related questions about how people lead and work together. She also co-authored Lead Like a Woman, released in 2022. Writing gave her room to examine the leadership ideas that an agency’s daily deadlines might otherwise compress into a meeting or a hurried conversation.

Madame President, perhaps

The Entrepreneurs’ Organization supplied another setting for learning alongside business owners. Crowe became the first woman elected president of its San Diego chapter, serving in 2024-2025. When she announced the election, she wondered aloud whether it was too early to put “Madame President” on her business cards. Formal responsibility could apparently accommodate a little stationery comedy.

Her enthusiasm for the group reflects the importance she places on peers and mentors. A founder may make the final decision, but there is value in discussing it with someone who has faced a similar choice. The people around Crowe include fellow entrepreneurs, colleagues, students and creative collaborators. Leadership, in her telling, remains an activity learned in company.

A bigger room for the conversation

The January 2026 launch of Crowe Media gave the expanding work a new structure. Crowe PR sits alongside divisions for social media, studios, amplification, insights, and speaking and publishing. The arrangement brings communications, production and measurement into the same business. It also creates a place for Crowe to tell stories through formats she helps own.

One is The Real Shift Show, co-hosted with Emmy-winning broadcaster and media trainer Katy Temple. The pair talk with entrepreneurs, athletes and creators about consequential changes in their lives and careers. Fashion founder Ripley Rader appeared in the first episode. For Crowe, whose own career includes several changes of direction, the subject is close to the working material.

Her public writing has continued into questions about reputation, curiosity and discovery through AI. A September 2026 podcast conversation with Tom Schwab considered how a business explains its reinvention repeatedly, allowing its audience to catch up. The new name is only part of that work. People need time, examples and consistent communication to understand what has changed.

Away from work, Crowe’s preferred San Diego itinerary includes coffee, walking the dogs, Little Italy, Torrey Pines and a coastal sunset. Pickleball can make the schedule too. It is a pleasantly ordinary ending to a career story involving fragrances, a Beatle and peanut butter whiskey. There is still a notebook to carry. Presumably, there is still something worth writing down.