Before Scott Lawrence managed an advertising agency, he stood in front of teenagers holding instruments. His first professional room was a high-school band room in Wakonda, South Dakota. The job required timing, instruction, nerve and the tact to tell a trumpet player that enthusiasm and tempo are separate matters. Lawrence loved it. He loved helping students believe they could do difficult things, then hearing the proof when separate sounds became one piece of music.
Advertising arrived in 1984. His older brother Craig Lawrence and Craig's business partner, Paul Schiller, had already started Lawrence & Schiller in Sioux Falls. Scott came aboard as an account executive, bringing a music education degree and a candid assessment of his commercial preparation: he did not know much about the agency business. His solution was gloriously unexotic. Ask questions. Learn people. Build trust.
Within weeks, he attended a television commercial shoot directed by John Pohlman, then at KDLT. Pohlman later remembered the young account executive taking time to talk and pay attention. That small encounter lingered. Pohlman joined L&S in 1986, became a partner and eventually chaired its board. A conversation on a set became a working relationship measured in decades. The anecdote is a miniature of Lawrence's operating style: notice the person before calculating the utility.
Movement IThe rehearsal room follows him to work
Lawrence rose through account service, sales and operations. By 2002 he was president and CEO. The titles changed; the band-room logic survived. A director cannot play every part. A useful leader sets the piece, makes expectations audible, works individually when someone needs help and then asks the group to perform together. Lawrence reorganized L&S into what the agency called Directed Teams, designed to improve creative work and client service by clarifying responsibility and contact.
Get to know people, build trust and help others find relevance and pride in what they are doing.Scott Lawrence
He was not a quiet presence. Colleagues joked that his booming voice announced him before the doorway did. Yet volume was paired with attention. Pohlman described him wandering through the office, stopping to talk with employees until, over a week, he had reached everyone. Lawrence's gift was less about commanding a crowd than refusing to leave someone in the shadows.
This makes his music metaphor more useful than most business metaphors. It contains a built-in limit on ego. The conductor is visible, but produces no note. The performance exists in other people's breath, hands, judgment and practice. Lawrence would later write The Leader of the Band, a slim book drawn from band competitions, Main Street marches and the students who knew him as Mr. L. Its point was not that CEOs should wave batons. It was that leadership becomes audible through other people.
Movement IIThe surname on the door was never a birthright
There is an awkward fact inside many family businesses: a name can preserve continuity while smuggling in entitlement. Lawrence & Schiller had his family name on the building, but Scott joined after the founders and worked through the ranks. When the agency considered its future, the next generation was not automatically going to be another Lawrence. He described the goal as a multigenerational, non-family business, with opportunity moving to people who had earned it.
He had reason to take succession personally. In 1999, Lawrence helped write the plan that led to his own elevation three years later. Once in charge, he understood that a handoff assembled at the final minute is merely an emergency with stationery. By 2019, he was speaking openly about a deadline for leaving daily operations. He was cultivating partners and a leadership team, searching for the mix he valued: innovation, care for people, calm under pressure and the ability to build a team.
People development is every bit as rewarding to me as doing a great ad campaign.Scott Lawrence
In 2020, the plan became structural. Six executives took over daily management and operations while Lawrence remained president and CEO. It was a meaningful transfer of judgment, not an exercise in new titles. He had watched the team lead through a turbulent year and said they had earned the chance. Ownership was intended to follow over time.
The final change came in April 2025. Micah Aberson, who had begun his own career at L&S, returned as CEO after leadership roles in several other industries. Laura Mitchell, a 20-year agency veteran who had also started near the bottom of the ladder, became president and chief operating officer. Lawrence stayed through the transition alongside Pohlman. The baton went to people with their own histories, networks and ways of working.
That last detail matters. Lawrence had once said a successor should fit the culture. Yet the agency's announcement of Aberson also stressed the need for new perspectives and broader networks. A leader preparing to leave faces a delicate choice: clone the familiar or trust the institution to metabolize difference. Lawrence chose continuity of values with room for a different performance.
Movement IIIA city becomes part of the ensemble
Lawrence's second stage was Sioux Falls itself. He chaired the Sioux Empire United Way campaign in 2010. He spent nine years chairing the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra board, including its 100th season. His board work reached the National Music Museum, the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce and Sanford International. In October 2023, he began a one-year term chairing the Greater Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce.
He called the Chamber theme “Working in Concert,” a phrase so precisely on brand that another executive might have been advised to show restraint. In Lawrence's hands, it was less slogan than map. Business, arts organizations, civic groups and public programs were sections of the same local score. He argued that Chamber work helped businesses because it helped the city around them. Commerce and community were not rival claims on his calendar.
Editorial index: relative emphasis across Lawrence's interviews and leadership remarks, not a scientific measurement.
The personality underneath all this appears cheerful to the point of statistical impossibility. Lawrence described his glass as 90 percent full. At 67, when asked when he would be done working, he answered with another question: describe done? Daily detail no longer interested him as much as relationships, strategy and community work. He still enjoyed, in his phrase, tossing the occasional strategic elbow.
Optimism can be flimsy in executive profiles, a pleasant adjective with no operating budget. His version acquired an org chart. It meant believing younger colleagues could lead, moving decisions into their hands and accepting that they would not reproduce him. It meant seeing the agency as something people could inherit through contribution rather than bloodline. It meant treating a city that had supported his career as a place to repay in time.
My glass is always 90% full.Scott Lawrence
FinaleThe discipline of becoming less necessary
The tempting version of Lawrence's story is the costume change: band director becomes ad executive. It is neat, visual and slightly comic. The more durable story is about transfer. He identified what was useful beneath his first profession and carried it into the second. Clear goals travel. Trust travels. Individual coaching travels. The habit of listening for the entire room travels especially well.
His career also makes an unfashionable case for staying. Four decades inside one agency gave him enough time to see early conversations become partnerships, account executives become senior leaders and a succession memo become an actual succession. Longevity can curdle into possession. Lawrence tried to turn it into stewardship.
The test arrived when he had to loosen his grip. He moved out of daily operations before leaving the title. He let the leadership team practice with real consequences. He welcomed back a former colleague whose experience extended beyond the agency. Then he stepped down while the business still had momentum, staying long enough to support the transition without pretending support required the baton.
A conductor knows a piece has worked when the final note continues in the room after the hands come down. Lawrence's agency career ended its CEO movement in 2025. The company kept playing. For someone who had spent years teaching people to hear their own part, that continuation may be the most fitting applause.