A story in three chapters, one changed chair and a very good exit
At six years old, Laurie Fleck discovered that a good cause improves dramatically when it has a guest star. She was organizing a neighborhood carnival to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. The proceeds eventually reached $125, a respectable sum for children armed with games and optimism. Fleck's promotional masterstroke was to invite Wizzo the Wizard, the local television personality from Bozo's Circus. Wizzo came. The carnival got attention. Fleck got onto television.
Childhood anecdotes are often asked to perform more destiny than they can bear. This one can carry its share. It contains the ingredients of Fleck's later career in miniature: a purpose, an audience, a daring invitation and the instinct that attention should go somewhere useful. She would spend nearly four decades in marketing and communications, much of it translating the complicated business of agriculture and food for people who did not have time for a seminar.
In May 2026, she finished her last day as CEO of Curious Plot, the Minneapolis agency where she had worked for 15 years. Her exit had none of the customary corporate weather - no storm, no sudden “effective immediately,” no awkward sentence about pursuing other opportunities. The firm had planned the succession over time. Mitch Van Kampen, a 14-year veteran of the agency, moved into the top job. Fleck left with a striking line about executive tenure: “The role of CEO was not meant to be permanent for me. It was always meant to be purposeful.”
“The role of CEO was not meant to be permanent for me. It was always meant to be purposeful.”Laurie Fleck, on leaving Curious Plot
A change of chair
Years before the corner office was hers, another executive lent her his. Fleck was in a junior agency role when a client, the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, called her in to discuss campaign strategy. He invited her to sit in his chair. Perspective, he told her, was everything. Consider the message through the eyes of the chief executive, but also through the eyes of everyone else it might reach in the market.
Fleck remembered the lesson with unusual literalness. When a problem resisted her, she said, she would switch seats or surroundings to get another angle. This is delightfully low-tech behavior from an executive who later expanded her agency's work in emerging media and marketing automation. There is no dashboard for the view from the other side of the desk. Sometimes you must simply walk around it.
That lesson became an operating preference. Curious Plot combined creative work with consulting and market research rather than treating research as an accessory purchased later. Fleck liked subjects that could not be explained by sprinkling them with slogans. The agency would tackle CRISPR, water preservation and supply chains; it could also make the case for mushrooms on a menu. Its board of advisers brought experience from crop and animal production, distribution, grocery, nutrition and international marketing. The point was not to sound expert. It was to do the homework necessary to become useful.
The long way to a specialty
Fleck's route to the CEO job was long enough to inoculate her against overnight-success stories. A Chicago native, she studied journalism and mass communications at Iowa State University from 1983 to 1987. Then came Miller Meester Advertising, where she spent more than 13 years; account work at Martin Williams; a vice president role at Meyocks; brand development at ABG; and internal communications leadership for Syngenta's seeds business.
The client list accumulated the way a practical education does: 3M, AGCO, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health, Bayer Animal Health, Land O'Lakes and others. Consumer products sat beside crop inputs and animal care. She learned the difference between broad reach and relevant reach. Agricultural marketing punishes bluffing. Farmers and technical buyers tend to know when the copywriter has skipped the fieldwork.
In 2011, Fleck joined Farmer Lumpe + McClelland as a vice president in its growing Minneapolis office. She became a partner in 2013 and managing partner of the office in 2014. By 2017 she was chief operating officer. In 2018 she took the CEO role. The sequence matters: client service, internal communications, brand development, operations, then the chief executive chair. Each promotion enlarged the problem, but not beyond recognition.
The name became an instruction
In 2021, FLM Harvest became Curious Plot. The ownership, leadership, staff, clients and services remained. A cynic could therefore ask whether anything had happened besides the purchase of new stationery. Fleck's answer was that the identity announced an evolution already under way. “Curious” stood for continuous learning. “Plot” carried the work of narrative. Together they gave the agency a compact assignment: get grounded in truth, then tell a story that causes something to happen.
Fleck later called the rebrand a business decision, not merely a name change. It sharpened the agency's focus on food, agriculture and companion animal care and supplied language for the company it intended to become. The timing was not comfortable. Markets were moving quickly, the pandemic had tested collaboration, and clients faced disruptions running from supply chains to changing consumer behavior. But comfort would have been a strange ambition for an agency putting curiosity on the door.
She also returned to school that year, completing Northwestern University's executive series in marketing automation and performance marketing. The detail is small but revealing. After more than three decades in the business, she was still taking notes. Curiosity had to be more than a quality admired in junior hires.
The Fleck tenure, in plain numbers
By the succession announcement in April 2026, Curious Plot said it employed more than 125 people across 20 states. During Fleck's nearly eight years as CEO, total billings had nearly tripled and the team had more than doubled. The firm broadened its services while concentrating its category expertise. Growth, in other words, came with a narrower answer to the question “What are you especially good at?”
The last campaign was succession
The most revealing statistic may be the one Curious Plot did not need to publish: zero months of leadership suspense. Fleck and the board had a successor with 14 years inside the company. Before the handoff, the executive bench expanded across finance, creative, strategy and account leadership. Succession was treated as architecture rather than emergency medicine.
Van Kampen was not imported to manufacture novelty. He had joined in 2012 as an account supervisor, moved through strategy leadership and became president in 2022. He knew the clients, categories and culture because he had helped construct them. Fleck's task was therefore subtler than choosing a replacement. She had to leave enough strength for continuity and enough room for change. A well-made handoff preserves the institution without trapping the successor inside a museum of the previous leader's preferences.
This approach suits Fleck's stated preference for accountability. She saw the agency as an extension of a client's business, answerable for the work and to one another. Applied internally, the same principle makes a CEO responsible not only for today's results but for tomorrow's capacity. A company that cannot continue without its leader has not been led quite as well as the farewell speeches suggest.
Her final essay for the agency divided its history into seasons. The startup years created belief. The stable-growth years created strength. The next period, under Van Kampen, would have to multiply what was possible. She did not pretend that her chapter had completed the company. “A business is never finished,” she wrote. “That is the beauty of it.” It is both a generous statement and a useful defense against executive vanity.
“A business is never finished. That is the beauty of it. Every chapter creates the conditions for the next one.”Fleck's final-day reflection, May 2026
Respect, humor and the next chair
Fleck's management language can be warm, but it is not misty. In a 2024 reflection on lessons from her father, she wrote that respect outweighs popularity, that punctuality signals respect and that trust must be earned. Her most portable question was a brisk upgrade from “So what?” to “So, what now?” The first phrase dismisses. The second accepts the fact and asks for movement. It may be the most agricultural of philosophies: weather happened; what are we doing with the field?
Her encore chapter is not a vanishing act. Fleck has said she expects to take on selective consulting and board service, to keep contributing to an industry that shaped her, and to spend more time with people she loves outside work. The schedule will change. The habit of looking from another seat probably will not.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. Early in her career, an executive gave Fleck his chair so she could learn perspective. Much later, she gave up her own chair because she had perspective. In between came clients, campaigns, a new name, more than 125 colleagues and a six-year-old's enduring conviction that an invitation can move people toward a purpose. The exit was not an interruption of the work. Properly planned, it was the work.