Sean Hockenbery and the art of staying

Sixteen years is a long time to remain somebody else's early hire. In Sean Hockenbery's case, it was the distance between joining a young bank-marketing agency and becoming one of its owners. He arrived at Financial Marketing Solutions in 2005. In July 2021, he and three colleagues assumed ownership. The interesting part of that journey is how much of it happened inside the same company.

Business biographies tend to favor the leap: the resignation, the launch, the daring change of direction. Hockenbery's career invites attention to a quieter possibility. Stay close to a business as it develops. Take on more of its work. Learn what the people around you do. Eventually, the place that employed you may become the place you help carry forward.

Today, he is partner, president and CEO of FMS in Franklin, Tennessee. The agency works in financial-services branding, a field where an attractive message must coexist with a decidedly practical question: can the organization deliver what the message promises? A bank can buy a new sign in an afternoon. Becoming recognizable for a reason takes longer.

Before the agency, the customer

Hockenbery's background includes a B.A. in marketing from Middle Tennessee State University, received in 2002, and graduation from the American Bankers Association's School of Bank Marketing in 2007. His early employers included American Express Financial Advisors and Union Planters, which became Regions Bank. Those names place his career on both sides of the conversation between financial institutions and their customers.

He spent three years as a client service coordinator at American Express Financial Advisors. At Union Planters, he worked as a financial services representative. Customer relations, deposits and loans were part of his professional experience before agency leadership. That background gives the later marketing work a concrete setting: people asking questions, weighing choices and deciding whom to trust.

The distinction matters when considering a banking specialist's career. Advertising can describe a service with great elegance; a customer then has to use it. The journey from a campaign to an actual conversation can be remarkably short. A lovely phrase on a website has no special immunity from a disappointing encounter at the counter.

Hockenbery's progression puts those encounters near the beginning of the story. His education supplied a marketing vocabulary. His financial-services roles supplied experience of the organizations and relationships that vocabulary would later describe. It is a useful combination for someone whose eventual job would include translating business objectives into creative work.

The promotion that followed the work

FMS was founded in 2004 by Tim and Laurie Pannell. Hockenbery joined the following year as one of its first hires. His route through the agency ran from account executive to director of client service, then managing director, and eventually executive vice president in April 2014.

The sequence is revealing. Client service comes before the larger management titles. The person responsible for an account sits where expectations meet delivery: what the client needs, what the creative team understands, what the production schedule permits. It is a useful place to learn how a business behaves when everyone has a different piece of the same problem.

When the executive vice president title arrived, Tim Pannell described Hockenbery as vital to the company. Hockenbery, discussing the promotion, singled out his enjoyment of strategic planning. He liked identifying opportunities for growth or improvement and working through the steps needed to pursue them. The emphasis was on the sequence of work.

“I love the strategic planning for a business”

Sean Hockenbery, on his 2014 promotion

There is a pleasingly practical quality to that enthusiasm. Strategic planning can sound grand enough to require its own conference badge. In the form Hockenbery described, it asks ordinary, demanding questions. Where could the business improve? What has to happen first? Who needs to understand the plan? The answers still require people to do things on Tuesday.

Four names on the next chapter

The ownership change became public on July 28, 2021. Hockenbery, Amber Farley, Clark Hook and Zach Pannell assumed ownership of FMS. Tim and Laurie Pannell moved into FMS Consulting, a separate brand consultancy and strategic planning business working alongside the agency.

The handoff followed 18 months of collaboration with the founders on leadership responsibilities. This gives the change a different texture from the dramatic arrival of an outside buyer. The incoming owners had worked together at FMS; the transition drew on relationships already inside the business.

Hockenbery spoke about complementary strengths and preserving the family culture the founders had built. The intention he described was continuity with room to develop: retain the care for the work and for the people doing it, while continuing to serve clients and the industry.

That combination creates an interesting management problem. An agency's useful habits live in people as much as in procedures. A change in ownership can preserve the stationery while unsettling the relationships. A handoff among colleagues offers the possibility of carrying those relationships across, although it still places new responsibilities on familiar shoulders.

The partnership remains visible in the agency's leadership today. Farley is partner and executive vice president of brand development; Zach Pannell is partner and chief operating officer; Hook is partner and executive creative director. Hockenbery holds the president and CEO role. The titles cover distinct parts of the agency's work, giving the ownership story an organizational shape as well as a personal one.

When a bank changes its name

To understand the kind of business Hockenbery leads, consider FMS's work for Blue Foundry Bank. The institution previously known as Boiling Springs Savings Bank needed a name and identity suited to its growth ambitions. FMS's project included brand strategy, naming, identity, print, digital and video.

A bank name carries several jobs at once. It must be remembered, spoken aloud, printed on a card and understood by someone encountering the institution for the first time. Existing customers bring history to the name. Prospective customers bring questions. A rebrand has to make sense to both groups without expecting either to sit through the presentation.

The work also reached television. In June 2020, FMS announced two Telly Awards for Blue Foundry spots: gold for “Manifesto” and silver for “Axis Checking.” Hockenbery, then identified as FMS president, welcomed the recognition and emphasized what it meant for the client to have award-winning brand advertising.

The awards belong to the agency's work, and the work belongs to a team. That distinction suits this particular career. Hockenbery's public milestones repeatedly place him among colleagues: the early agency, the expanding leadership role, the ownership group and the client campaign. The personal story is woven through a collective enterprise.

The work after the unveiling

FMS organizes its branding process around four stages: discover, define, deliver and develop. Discovery includes listening across the organization and to customers and non-customers. Definition produces the language and identity. Delivery takes the brand to employees and the market. Development continues the evaluation and refinement.

The fourth stage is the one that makes the sequence especially relevant to Hockenbery's story. An unveiling is easy to recognize as an event. Continuing the work is less photogenic. It involves revisiting decisions, responding to changes and keeping the organization involved after the launch has stopped being novel.

His public-facing work has also included education. In 2020, he and Amber Farley presented a strategic marketing workshop series for the Wisconsin Bankers Association. Its agenda ranged from strategy development and brand understanding to delivery channels, implementation and measurement. In March 2022, he spoke about bank brands at the Georgia Bankers Association's marketing conference.

He is also listed as the associate member representative on the Georgia association's Marketing Committee. These activities put him in conversation with practitioners beyond a single client engagement. They extend the subject from the agency's own projects to the questions bank marketers face in their daily work.

The car reviewer in the CEO's office

Ask Hockenbery about an alternative career and he heads toward the road-test column. He would like to drive cars, evaluate them and write for publications such as Car and Driver or Road & Track. His self-description includes being a car nerd. It is a rather specific daydream: the machinery, the experience and the article afterward.

His personal tally supplies a few more details. He counted 67 vinyl records in his collection and joked about the 485 horses taking him to work. The dessert count was less extravagant: zero orders of crème brûlée. Numbers normally used for business performance make a cheerful detour into the record shelf, the commute and the menu.

He also names cooking and multitasking among his domestic talents. Given a last dollar to spend, he would choose a family trip and the experience it could create. Asked to reduce his job to a phrase, he supplies three words: “Make it happen.” The answers are direct, with room for a little playfulness.

That road-test ambition is a useful detail in a story otherwise full of organizational titles. It gives the reader a person with something he would enjoy doing for its own sake. The bank-marketing CEO can imagine another kind of assignment: take the car out, pay attention to how it behaves and find the words to describe the experience.

A long horizon, spoken plainly

Hockenbery has discussed marketing in an episode of First United Bank & Trust's What Matters Most podcast. In the FMS video How Strong Brands Stand the Test of Time, he addresses investing in a community bank's brand, connecting it with employees, communities and long-term success. The recurring subject is the organization behind the advertising.

Seen together, the career milestones form a story about duration and responsibility. He learned financial services, joined a young specialist agency, moved through its management and took part in its succession. Each step brought him closer to the running of the business. Ownership made that relationship formal.

Staying has consequences. You remain available for the next stage of the work, including the less glamorous stage after everyone has approved the design. Hockenbery's career gives that persistence a specific setting: one Franklin agency, its colleagues and the financial institutions they serve. The next chapter starts in a place he has already spent years learning.