Kara Kelley spent fifteen years at Asher Agency before becoming one of its owners. Long enough to have helped grow a major account. Long enough to have watched a major account go away. By the time she and chief financial officer Megan Bennett bought the Fort Wayne business on July 1, 2022, they had experience with the company’s possibilities and its disappointments. The purchase gave them something their management titles alone could not: a direct stake in deciding what happened next.
There is an appealingly ordinary detail in the announcement. Employees, clients and vendors were told to expect little change in their daily dealings with Asher. The new owners wanted to return the business to independent, local control. They were buying a company they already understood, and their first promise concerned continuity. In advertising, where announcing a new direction is practically a professional reflex, that restraint makes an interesting opening.
The company she already knew
The deal came after private conversations between Kelley and Bennett and months of consideration. Asher had been owned by Eastport Holding, which acquired it from the Borne family in 2014. Ash Crest Corp. joined the 2022 purchase as a minority equity investor and adviser. Kelley and Bennett became the majority owners.
But the route to the purchase had a harder turn. In her October 2022 interview, Kelley described the loss of Asher’s biggest client after a leadership change at that client brought changes to its marketing. She and Bennett worked through the difficulty together. It also created an opening to ask the holding company whether it would sell.
That sequence matters. The buyers had already shared responsibility when circumstances became uncomfortable. An ownership partnership asks people to make decisions together after the celebratory photograph has been filed away. Their account of the period before the deal offers a glimpse of what they were bringing to that partnership.
“It still seems surreal to me.”
Kara Kelley, on becoming president and co-owner, October 2022
Her reaction leaves room for surprise. Ownership had not been an ambition she described as inevitable. She had built a career inside the business; then an opportunity arrived to help own it. A familiar workplace acquired a new set of consequences.
A return ticket to Fort Wayne
Kelley was born and raised in Fort Wayne. She attended Bishop Luers High School, then the University of Dayton, where her agency biography lists a degree in Marketing Management. Her working life took her west before it brought her home.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, she worked as an account executive at a boutique public relations firm. She also served on the board of the Women’s High-Tech Coalition, an organization connecting women in public and private life and encouraging professional development. That chapter put her in a different business environment from the one in which she had grown up.
She returned to Fort Wayne in 2005, worked at Boyden & Youngblutt, and joined Asher in 2007. The dates make a useful corrective to a hurried career narrative. She did not return home and immediately purchase an agency. There were years of account work and leadership between the homecoming and the transaction.
Her recollections of school add another dimension. At Bishop Luers, she participated in swimming, tennis, Key Club and performing arts. She remembered a collaborative atmosphere and the durability of relationships formed there. Her later advice to students encouraged them to try things outside their comfort zone. Familiar surroundings, in her telling, could prepare someone to attempt unfamiliar work.
One logo, thousands of local businesses
The client work gives substance to those dates. Kelley became a leader on Asher’s Subway account. In its 2016 award announcement, the agency reported that the account’s expansion had taken it to 62 markets, more than 5,700 restaurants in 25 states, and U.S. military bases abroad.
Those are historical figures, a snapshot of work at that point in her career. They describe a large coordination problem behind a logo almost anyone can recognize. A franchise brand presents one identity to the customer while operating through many individual businesses. Marketing has to make sense at both levels.
For a franchise marketer, scale adds repetition and variation together. A recognizable message travels across markets; the places receiving it have their own customers and commercial circumstances. The agency’s present description of its franchise services emphasizes localizing brands and driving traffic and sales. Kelley’s earlier account experience helps explain why that work occupies a substantial place in her professional biography.
A presidency can look like a clean step upward on a timeline. Here, the work underneath it was less tidy and more instructive: many markets, many restaurants, a shared brand. The title followed years spent helping an agency serve that complicated arrangement.
More than 5,700 restaurants across 25 states, plus U.S. military bases abroad. The figures describe Asher’s account at the time of Kelley’s award announcement.
The customer meets a person
Kelley’s own writing gives a practical view of what she considers part of the marketing job. In her reflection on 2018, she observed that favorable economic indicators had not necessarily improved clients’ results. Consumers were harder to reach, their attention divided and their expectations elevated.
Asher’s response extended beyond marketing and media plans to help with recruitment and retention. Kelley connected those concerns to the customer experience: staff members are the people who represent a brand in an actual encounter. The campaign can introduce a promise. Someone working at the business has to deliver it.
It is an observation with consequences for agency work. If customers arrive because advertising succeeded, the business needs people able to serve them. Treating staffing as relevant to marketing broadens the conversation from the message to the conditions in which that message becomes believable.
Her reflection also applied the argument to Asher’s employees. They represented the agency through their commitment to client work. In that view, team building belongs inside the business model. The people producing a campaign and the people carrying out its promise are part of the same chain of responsibility.
A lunch table counts, too
Some of Kelley’s clearest observations about relationships came outside the agency. In her 2016 community interview, she described volunteering as a Lunch Buddy through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Indiana. She had been meeting a girl named Jay’Lah for three years.
Asked for a favorite memory, Kelley chose a teacher’s observation about their connection. The memory was not a particular book or game. It was another adult noticing the relationship that had developed through their weekly time together.
There is a modest lesson in that choice. A mentoring relationship depends on repeated presence. Its value may become visible in a comment from someone watching from the edge of the room. Kelley’s answer gave attention to that small, recognizable moment.
She traced her community involvement to her parents’ example and the pride they had instilled in Fort Wayne. She also co-founded the local charity bicycle ride Le Tour de Fort in 2009. These activities locate her public life in the same city as her career, without reducing the city to a business address.
Ownership opens another door
The ownership change also altered the agency’s opportunities. Asher received Indiana Women’s Business Enterprise certification in 2023. Kelley had discussed certification during the purchase process as a practical route to resources and growth.
On January 23, 2025, Asher received federal Women-Owned Small Business certification from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The designation made the agency eligible for relevant federal set-aside contracts and subcontracts. Kelley described an interest in bringing the team’s work to federal agencies and their partners.
Certification is an opening to pursue business, with the work of winning and delivering it still ahead. For Kelley and Bennett, it connects the ownership structure to the agency’s commercial direction. A decision about who owns the company can affect the rooms in which it gets to compete.
Kelley also spoke in 2025 about being a role model and mentor for the next generation of women in business. That ambition fits alongside the commercial one. Leadership creates decisions to make today and examples that other people may use when considering their own futures.
An anniversary with a soundtrack
When Asher approached its fiftieth anniversary in 2024, Kelley built her anniversary essay around “Rivers and Roads,” a favorite song by The Head and the Heart. She used it to consider the agency’s origins in Fort Wayne, its people and its future. A company anniversary acquired an indie-folk soundtrack; the commemorative plaque could take the afternoon off.
Her reflection looked toward changes in marketing, including personalized work using AI and immersive brand experiences. It also returned to the relationships accumulated over decades. At the June anniversary celebration, staff and clients gathered with community members, vendors and Fort Wayne Mayor Sharon Tucker. The company’s history had a local audience as well as a national client base.
Kelley has described Tom Borne as a mentor, and her ownership story includes his continuing guidance. Asher’s team page offers lighter details alongside the leadership biography: golf and learning guitar. The latter is a pleasant reminder that a president can still be a beginner at something.
Her career now stretches from leaving Fort Wayne to returning, from managing client work to helping own the agency. The next chapter carries the responsibilities of that purchase and her stated interest in growing opportunities for others. After years spent learning how the company works, Kelley has a share in deciding where it goes.