Matthew Strawn Has Built a Career on the Iowa Art of Showing Up

A lottery ticket is a small square of optimism sold under fluorescent light. Running the organization behind it is less poetic. There are retailers to support, technology to modernize, public dollars to account for, products to refresh and odds that will not flatter anybody. When Matthew Strawn became chief executive of the Iowa Lottery in January 2019, he inherited all of that. Soon afterward, ordinary shopping routines vanished and sales fell hard. The Lottery, which funds itself through sales rather than state appropriations, still had more than 100 employees and a payroll. Fortune had picked an unfunny moment to introduce itself.

Strawn later called those first months a crash course. It was an apt phrase for someone whose résumé already seemed assembled from several different lives: congressional adviser, lawyer, arena-football owner, state political chairman, public-affairs founder. Yet the variety disguised a pattern. Each job placed him at the meeting point of an institution and its public. Each demanded that he explain why the institution mattered, then make it work when the explanation was no longer enough.

Seven years after arriving at the Lottery, he left for another such junction. On June 8, 2026, Strawn became president and CEO of Strategic America, an employee-owned marketing and communications firm in West Des Moines. He succeeded John Schreurs, who had spent 43 years at the company, ten of them in its top job. Some new chief executives receive a blank page. Strawn received a well-read book with notes in the margins.

The résumé is a map of Iowa

Strawn was raised on his family's farm in Benton County. He went to the University of Iowa and graduated in 1996 with a bachelor's degree combining political science with journalism and mass communication. It is hard to devise a neater academic pairing for the career that followed: how power moves, and how people hear about it.

Washington came next. Strawn worked in senior roles for members of Congress, including Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Rogers of Alabama. He also earned a law degree from the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in 2003. The credential mattered, but law did not become the whole plot. Iowa kept tugging at the story.

In 2008, he joined an ownership group that brought the Iowa Barnstormers back to Des Moines. Arena football is a useful education in attention. The field is smaller, the walls are close and spectators can tell immediately whether they are being entertained. A minor-league franchise also makes lofty distinctions between brand, operations and community look faintly ridiculous. If the game-night experience fails, they all fail together.

A year later, Strawn was elected chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa. His tenure covered a 2010 election cycle in which Republicans regained the governor's office and control of the Iowa House, followed by the 2012 presidential caucuses, whose razor-thin count became a national controversy. The certified tally put Rick Santorum 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney after Romney had initially been announced as the winner by eight. Strawn resigned the chairmanship in February. It is the sort of episode that supplies a permanent lesson in the difference between a message and a fact. The former can be managed. The latter must be counted.

“People want to be told where you can take them, and then they want you to deliver.”Matt Strawn, speaking about leadership in 2011

He moved into public affairs, co-founding Next Generation Public Affairs in 2013 and serving as managing director through 2018. That same year, the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics named him a Pritzker Fellow. Together with Sue Dvorsky, a former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, he led a seminar series on the history and mechanics of the Iowa caucuses. After the noise of party competition, the two former chairs turned the caucus into a subject to be explained together. Iowa politics can be a combat sport, but it also has office hours.

When the jackpot was stability

The Lottery appointment in 2019 offered Strawn a different kind of public work. The institution touches more than 2,500 retail outlets. Its proceeds support state programs and causes, including the Iowa Veterans Trust Fund and assistance for families of public-safety officers who die in the line of duty. A scratch ticket may be bought on impulse. The enterprise cannot be run that way.

When retail activity contracted, Strawn had to learn the business while protecting it. Sales eventually stabilized. The organization modernized technology platforms, business practices and marketing, expanded self-service vending and reviewed its product portfolio. It also made a conspicuously local move: experiential prizes connected players with what Strawn called the “big Iowa moment.” State Fair outings, races at Iowa Speedway and concerts turned promotions into invitations to participate in the life of the state.

Fiscal 2024 produced $489.9 million in sales and $105.3 million in proceeds for the state, both records. Strawn was careful not to treat a peak as a permanent climate. Lottery results swing with the size and timing of national jackpots, and he warned publicly when softer lotto sales pointed toward a more difficult year. Luck may be the merchandise, but forecasting remains management.

A highly visible part of his lottery work became larger than Iowa. As chair of the Powerball Product Group, Strawn helped steward a brand with nearly $8 billion in annual sales. In April 2026, Powerball announced an agreement for its first international expansion, bringing United Kingdom players into the same jackpot pool, subject to British regulatory approval. The pitch was plain: a larger pool could make jackpots grow faster, which players consistently said they wanted.

It was a marketer's answer from a public administrator: begin with audience research, preserve the operating promise and make the benefit easy to repeat. Famous brands can coast on recognition only until the audience finds something else to do. Strawn's phrase was “culturally and commercially relevant.” Both halves count. A brand needs to belong in conversation and on a balance sheet.

Service, repeated until it becomes a system

Strawn's public language returns often to gratitude and service. These are dangerous words in a corporate setting because they can become decorative so quickly. His version tends to include a verb. At the Lottery, it meant recognizing the team, treating vendors as partners and connecting revenue to the public causes it supported. In announcing his move, he described public service as a privilege and credited the Lottery staff with the institution's accomplishments.

That habit is useful at Strategic America, where ownership is distributed among employees and the work itself crosses departments. The firm builds brands, plans and buys media, develops digital experiences, studies customers and serves clients with multiple locations. Integration is an elegant word for a daily nuisance: different specialists must solve the same problem without behaving as if theirs is the only part that matters.

“Service to each other. Service to our communities.”Strawn on the culture he intends to carry forward

His arrival also carries a delicate succession task. Schreurs did not merely occupy the office; four decades made him part of the firm's institutional memory. Strategic America planned a long handoff through much of 2026, with Schreurs continuing on its board. The arrangement suggests that continuity and change need not arrive armed for a duel. One can make room for the other.

Strawn has said the marketing industry is living through turbulent change. He does not need to exaggerate. Artificial intelligence is compressing production cycles, media habits are splintering and every client can see more data than it can necessarily use. His stated ambition is to preserve the firm's service culture while finding growth and useful innovation. The interesting word there is preserve. New leaders are often rewarded for announcing revolutions. Employee-owners may reasonably prefer evidence.

The home-field advantage

For all the national scale in Strawn's work, his career keeps returning to Iowa. The farm, the caucus, the football team, the state lottery and the West Des Moines agency are not background scenery. They are operating environments. Iowa gave him an unusually close view of how national institutions meet local reality: presidential campaigns in school gyms, famous jackpots at neighborhood counters, broad marketing strategy translated across individual markets.

That proximity may be unusually useful preparation for the agency job. Multi-location marketing is a problem of distance. A central brand wants consistency; a local operator wants relevance. Both are right, which is inconvenient. Strawn has spent years in the space between a national message and the person standing in an Iowa room. He knows that scale without recognition feels remote, while local charm without an operating system refuses to scale.

His career has never been a tidy ladder. It looks more like a collection of arenas, each with its own rules and audience. The through-line is the work of translation, followed by the harder work of delivery. Politics taught scrutiny. Football taught experience. The Lottery taught disciplined stewardship. Powerball taught scale. Strategic America now asks him to use all four without making a speech about any of them.

There is something appealingly Midwestern about the assignment. Show up. Learn how the machinery works. Remember whom it serves. Then make the numbers move. Strawn has changed industries often enough to know that luck is welcome, but it is not a plan.