In September 2024, Laura Van Eperen’s firm announced a new owner and CEO. The name in the announcement was Megan Neapolitan, a colleague who had already served as chief operating officer and president. Van Eperen had owned the business since founding it in 2004. Twenty years into the enterprise, she was handing over the keys. She would continue working with its public relations and public information clients.
The announcement offers an unusually useful place to begin a founder’s story: at the point when someone else gets the top job. A founding date tells you when a person started. A succession tells you that the organization now has a history long enough to belong to other people, too. For Van Eperen, the work continued after the ownership changed.
There was a neat professional coincidence. Two years earlier, she had coauthored an article about communicating C-suite transitions. Messages, audiences, timing, updates: these were matters she had already considered in print. Her own career would soon supply a reason to revisit the subject, though this time her name appeared on the departing side of the leadership announcement.
The reporter before the founder
Before there was an agency to sell, there were newsrooms. Van Eperen began her career as a broadcast news journalist in Colorado and Florida. Her work included reporting, anchoring, and managing news operations, with reports appearing on CBS and NBC affiliates and national networks. It was a practical introduction to how information gets selected, shaped, and presented to an audience.
Her education had pointed in that direction: a bachelor’s degree in communication, with a journalism minor, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The combination put the larger study of communication beside the particular demands of reporting. Later, she moved into senior communications roles at firms in Milwaukee and greater Washington, D.C. The person once working inside the newsroom was now advising people hoping to reach it.
That change of position is a useful way to read the rest of her career. Public relations asks an organization to understand an audience beyond its own walls. Journalism gives that audience questions, deadlines, and competing claims on its attention. Van Eperen’s professional history crosses the space between them. In 2004, she established a firm of her own.
- 2004Starts the firmVan Eperen & Company
- 2021Broadens the nameThe agency becomes FOVNDRY
- 2024Hands over ownershipMegan Neapolitan becomes CEO
- 2026Works independentlyVan Eperen Communications
A business with room for other people
The business began as Van Eperen & Company. It served public and private organizations, and its eventual client mix included government agencies, national associations, and corporations. The work grew beyond placing a story or preparing an executive for questions. Marketing and creative services became part of the agency’s offer alongside its public relations practice.
You can see the expansion in the jobs it added. When the firm hired graphic designer Lexie Floor, it described capabilities ranging from branding and social content to microsites, animated infographics, and video production. These are different kinds of work, requiring different professional instincts. A journalist’s eye and a designer’s hand can share a client brief without becoming interchangeable.
The business also collected recognition. In 2015, it announced a Hermes Platinum Award for strategic programs and two Gold Awards for media relations. Van Eperen’s own LinkedIn profile lists a 2017 Most Admired CEO award from Maryland’s Daily Record. Those acknowledgments mark different parts of the job: the work delivered to clients and the person responsible for running the place.
By May 2021, the company was announcing another change: Van Eperen would become FOVNDRY. The new identity reflected the broader mix of public relations, marketing, and creative services. A surname had carried the business for years. The replacement gave the expanded team a shared name, with a V doing a conspicuous amount of typographic labor.
The colleague who would take the keys
Neapolitan’s arrival helps explain what changed inside the business. She joined in 2020 in a contract role overseeing operations and client services. Van Eperen wanted to add marketing and creative capabilities to the established PR practice. Neapolitan built systems and processes and managed creative and marketing accounts. By the end of that year, her position had become permanent.
In Neapolitan’s account, the agency relaunched as an integrated business in spring 2021. That chronology gives the rebrand some substance. The change involved people, responsibilities, and how client work moved through the firm. The new name arrived with an operating model behind it. Letterheads are easy to replace; working arrangements tend to demand rather more meetings.
When the ownership announcement came in September 2024, Neapolitan was already the agency’s president. Her move to owner and CEO followed years inside the business. Van Eperen’s continuing responsibilities were also spelled out: public relations and public information clients, support for the firm’s marketing efforts, and ongoing commitments including her Maryland Marketing Partnership work. The announcement described both a change in charge and work that would carry on.
Advice that preceded the handover
Van Eperen’s February 2022 article with former American Geophysical Union executive director Christine McEntee addressed a difficulty familiar to anyone who has watched a leadership announcement land: people want to know what happens next. The authors recommended a communications plan with clear goals, messages, audiences, and a timetable. They also proposed regular coordination among the executive, board leadership, and communications adviser.
Their attention extended to the unglamorous details. Who would answer incoming questions? How would staff and board members receive updates? Who would monitor external conversations? These questions turn an announcement into a continuing responsibility. Publishing the news is only one moment in the process. People still have questions on the following morning, when the carefully approved announcement is already yesterday’s document.
The article does not tell us how Van Eperen arranged her own agency sale. It does establish that she had publicly thought through the communications demands of a change at the top. In her career, advising on leadership and experiencing a leadership handover sit close together. The practical problem is the same: give the people affected enough information to keep moving.
“As long as I’m near water, or moving business forward, I’m happy.”
Laura Van Eperen · 2024
Maryland, beyond the office
Agency life was only part of her Maryland working life. Van Eperen served as vice chair and later chair of the Maryland Marketing Partnership, the public-private organization promoting the state as a business destination. Its remit gives communications a different scale: attracting companies and workers, developing a business story for the state, and bringing private partners into the effort.
During her chairmanship, the partnership’s fiscal 2024 report described business advertising expanding into the United Kingdom and Canada, along with the launch of a workforce recruitment website. Her message emphasized the role of financial partners and business ambassadors. The following year’s report highlighted a board retreat at the B&O Railroad Museum and work to focus the partnership’s efforts around priority sectors.
The settings are revealing: a communications executive thinking about a state’s economic prospects, and a board gathering in a railroad museum to consider where to go next. Her commitments have also included the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce and IABC-DC. In 2025, The Daily Record included her among its Influential Marylanders honorees in communications. The professional community around her business had become a recurring part of her work.
A photograph from an Elavaire business networking cruise gives this civic and commercial enthusiasm a less formal setting. Van Eperen appears aboard a boat, sunglasses resting on her head, with the Bay behind her. In her 2024 account of the outing, being near water and moving business forward were compatible pleasures. Some people separate networking from leisure. Here, the itinerary had conveniently combined them.
Her view of the state included a concrete policy preference. In 2024, she said she wanted Maryland lawmakers to reduce the tax burden on individuals and businesses so the state could remain competitive. The appeal sits beside her enthusiasm for doing business there: she wanted the place where she had built her firm to keep attracting people willing to start their own.
The work after the title
She has also described supporting and mentoring career-driven women during her years running a woman-owned business. In her 2025 honoree profile, she singled out lasting relationships with those women as something she treasured. Asked in 2024 what she wished she had known at the start, she pointed to female leaders being allowed to show vulnerability at work. Experience had changed the advice she would give her earlier self.
Other small details bring the agency years into focus. In July 2020, Van Eperen described a Wednesday afternoon virtual happy hour for colleagues working from home. She also spoke about beginning and ending days with walks through her heavily treed neighborhood. The walks gave her time to think. The weekly gathering gave a dispersed team a social appointment.
These are modest details beside ownership announcements and awards, but they tell us something specific about how the days were arranged. There was client work, then there was maintaining contact with colleagues. There was the screen, then the neighborhood outside it. Her account of creativity included the ordinary act of getting out among the trees.
By 2026, the professional description had changed again. A PRSA National Capital Chapter candidate biography listed Van Eperen as an independent senior strategic communications consultant at Van Eperen Communications. It also described her as the Maryland Marketing Partnership’s immediate past chairwoman and included her as a candidate for chapter treasurer for 2027. The founder’s later chapter had its own name and responsibilities.
The sequence is clear enough: reporter, agency professional, founder, employer, former owner, independent consultant. Each title describes a different relationship to the work. In Van Eperen’s case, the company she started could acquire a new name and a new owner while her career continued. After twenty years of building a business, there were still clients to advise, public questions to answer, and another professional day to begin.