Jessica Francois and the Art of Taking Over Slowly

Long before she owned the company, Jessica Francois was doing its work. There were administrative assignments during high school, business to pursue in Alabama during college, and an office to open in Chipley after graduation. The succession announcement would eventually arrive. By then, the apprenticeship had already acquired several addresses.

Francois is now the sole owner and chief executive of Quest Corporation of America, the Florida communications business her mother, Sharlene Francois Lairscey, founded in 1995. Lairscey remains President and Chief Sustainability Officer. The daughter leads the company; the founder continues to have a job in it. Family-business continuity can look rather less like a ceremonial photograph when everyone still has things to do on Monday.

The interesting part is the time between the early assignments and the final handoff. Quest began planning the succession in 2015. Francois became an equal ownership partner in 2018. Full ownership followed in the company’s thirtieth-anniversary chapter. Read together, those milestones describe a transition stretched over a decade, with project responsibilities and operating experience filling the space between titles.

An apprenticeship with a map

Alabama gave Francois a business-development role while she was still in college. She pursued and won work there and served as Area Manager for Quest’s Alabama efforts. After graduation, she moved to North Florida and opened the Chipley office. In 2017, she relocated to the corporate office for operations training.

Finding clients and learning home-office operations are different educations. One asks whether someone will trust the business with a job. The other asks how the business will carry that trust through its own machinery. A successor who has encountered both has something more useful than a familiar surname: experience with the promises made outside the office and the work required inside it.

In August 2016, Francois formally became a corporate officer and Vice President. That milestone arrived while Quest was celebrating its twenty-first year. The company was old enough to have habits, relationships, and an established identity. Her task was developing within an existing organization, where the past was present in the people around her.

The public has questions

Francois’s earlier assignments make the business less abstract. In 2016, she was public information officer for a $60 million, four-phase State Road 77 project in Washington County, Florida. The work involved widening a two-lane road to four lanes, along with drainage, signage, pavement markings, and other improvements.

A road project has a technical description. People living with it have their own version: a route to work, a turn into a business, a familiar stretch that suddenly looks different. Public information has to connect those accounts. A budget can describe scale. It cannot answer every practical question raised by a changing road.

That same year, Francois worked with Tindale Oliver, Escambia County, and the West Florida Regional Planning Council on branding and digital channels for an update to Escambia County Area Transit’s ten-year development plan. A webpage and social accounts gave the planning effort places to reach people and encourage their input. Even a bus plan needs somewhere to have a conversation.

From the airport plan to the contractor’s room

In 2017, Quest was providing public involvement services with Michael Baker International and the City of Tallahassee for the Tallahassee International Airport master plan and airport layout plan update. Francois described the update’s purpose in terms of long-range development and the demands an airport would need to meet.

Here the communication concerns a future facility rather than a road already being widened. The timeframe changes, but the need to explain remains. Plans have consequences before they have concrete. People need ways to understand alternatives and participate while decisions are still taking shape.

The 2026 Florida Transportation Builders’ Association Construction Symposium program lists Francois as the Public Outreach moderator and a panelist for Positive PR for Contractors, alongside Amber Mullins, Amy Lee Diel, and Margarita Rohaidy Delgado. The session addresses communication, public perception, and community relationships during construction. Its placement in a construction program gives the subject an appropriate home: among the practical concerns of delivering a project.

The sequence is instructive. An executive who has done public information work can discuss contractor communication with a project history behind the title. She has worked where the notice, the plan, and the public’s response meet.

The skills have to travel

In 2018, Francois and communications manager Sophia Fox attended a do-it-yourself video conference in Chicago. Francois was developing training for Quest employees who worked in community outreach and public information. Clients wanted more video; budgets gave that ambition a firm ceiling.

The practical response was to help colleagues learn. A professional production team has its place, and people near the project can also benefit from knowing how to record and communicate what is happening. Training makes that capability available beyond a small specialist group.

The audience inside the office

Francois’s interest in communication extends to colleagues. In 2018, Quest surveyed employees about improving engagement, and community giving emerged among their priorities. Francois described an approach that combined a central volunteering and fundraising program with causes that mattered personally to employees.

There is a useful distinction between selecting a cause for a workforce and listening to the causes a workforce already cares about. The second approach gives colleagues a part in deciding how the organization participates in community life. It treats enthusiasm as something to discover rather than assign.

Her comments about other leaders follow a similar pattern of attention. When Mary Brooks was recognized as the 2025 Woman of the Year by the WTS Central Florida Chapter, Francois emphasized her influence on other communicators.

“Her leadership goes beyond projects and deliverables.”

Jessica Francois, on Mary Brooks

When Karen Harrell was promoted to Executive Vice President of Quest’s North Florida Region, Francois praised her steady leadership and care for the people and communities the company serves. Both comments focus on how work affects others. They offer a glimpse of what she chooses to notice when recognizing colleagues.

The quiet work behind the update

Some of the work Francois discusses has little prospect of becoming a glamorous photograph. In 2020, she drew attention to compliance specialists Amanda Hopkins and Sandee Launch, praising their analytical, methodical approach. She described colleagues reviewing files and sharing experience to support one another’s work.

That example belongs in a profile of a communications executive because Quest’s services include construction compliance as well as public outreach. The job may involve a public explanation on one side and careful records on the other. Both depend on people attending to details someone else may never see.

A file review is a modest unit of teamwork. It puts another set of eyes on a project and gives someone’s experience a chance to help a colleague. Francois’s description treats that exchange as part of the work’s value. For a business owner, knowing who checks the details is as necessary as knowing who will deliver the presentation. The microphone gets an audience. The files still need to be right.

A career someone can picture

Northwest Florida Construction Career Days gives Francois another audience: students looking at an industry they may not yet understand. Quest’s involvement includes publicity, photography, drone videography, and digital outreach. Francois works with journalists to arrange access to activities and interviews with students, educators, and industry leaders.

Her stated aim is direct: “I want to help the media capture the energy and impact of the event”. She has also described the work as a personal passion, particularly the experience of watching students discover possible careers and seeing industry leaders invest in them.

That is communication with a destination. An event brings people together for a limited time. Coverage carries some of the experience beyond the site, giving families, educators, and prospective participants a view of what happened there. The opportunities need an audience before they can become someone’s choice.

The connection to her own career is appealing. Francois learned an industry through actual assignments. Career outreach gives younger people a first encounter with work that might otherwise remain a distant collection of machinery and job titles. Curiosity benefits from something it can see.

Ownership, with work attached

By 2020, Francois was leading public information activities on a $25.5 million State Road 369 improvement project in Wakulla County. Community outreach sat alongside social content, stakeholder database management, newsletters, and video. These are several channels serving the same project, with information moving through each.

The list explains why a communications business requires operating discipline. The public-facing result may be one update. Behind it are people coordinating content, contacts, production, and delivery. A leader has to understand those dependencies as well as the final piece someone reads.

Francois’s public LinkedIn profile places her in Pensacola and lists the University of Alabama, public involvement training through the Florida Department of Transportation, and professional organizations including IAP2 and Pensacola Young Professionals. They locate her career in a wider community of participation and local involvement.

Quest serves clients nationally, but Francois’s working history keeps returning to specific places and assignments. Alabama. Chipley. Washington County. Escambia County. Wakulla County. The geography is useful because it stops the executive title from floating free of the work that preceded it.

When she shared a company post celebrating its mother-daughter leadership, her own response was brief: “I love what I do!” It is a small statement, with the advantage of sounding like a person.

The ownership announcement gives this story its milestone. The earlier assignments give it its substance. Francois’s next chapter at Quest begins with a company to lead and a founder still involved, after years in which the responsibility was already becoming hers. Taking over slowly turns out to require quite a lot of doing.