On May 10, 2004, Stephanie Crockett stood on the steps of Eric Mower & Associates in Syracuse for her first day as a senior account manager. She was, by her own later account, fresh-faced and convinced she knew everything. Advertising has many methods for correcting this belief. Nineteen years of clients, budgets, colleagues, pitches and deadlines will generally do it.
Crockett stayed. In a trade famous for changing agencies as casually as coffee orders, she climbed one account-management rung after another. She took charge of the Syracuse market, managed client services and led the Energy & Sustainability practice. In June 2021, she became president and chief operating officer. In January 2023, she succeeded the founder as president and CEO.
The title arrived beside a more consequential change. Five months earlier, Eric Mower had sold the company to an employee stock ownership plan. The independent agency he had led since 1968 was now owned by the people working inside it. Crockett did not simply inherit a corner office. She took responsibility for translating a founder’s long stewardship into a company where ownership had become plural.
The room gets quieter
Nine months into the job, Crockett wrote the kind of executive reflection that most corporate communications departments would soften to death. Her old peers were no longer necessarily treating her as a peer. Invitations to happy hour changed. Nobody wanted to complain about the boss in front of the boss. Meanwhile, people who had once dismissed her began granting meetings. She ignored most of them.
The essay’s title announced that CEOs get hangovers too. Its evidence was even better. In the same stretch when Crockett stood on a national-conference stage as a keynote speaker, she also crouched in the back aisles of a Denver Party City on the eve of an agency event, attempting to locate Mardi Gras beads in September. At home, prestige fared no better. There were still weeds to pull, a tortoise tank to clean and a mother capable of reviewing her eyebrows with one devastating use of the word “interesting.”
“I’m determined to build a culture where people feel comfortable to call me out on my bullshit when they need to.”Stephanie Crockett, reflecting on her first nine months as CEO
The line is funny because it is blunt. It is serious because hierarchy works against it. A promotion alters the temperature before a leader says a word. Crockett’s response has been to name the discomfort rather than decorate it. She does not pretend the room remains unchanged; she asks people to keep speaking anyway.
That frankness extends to stamina. She schedules personal time with the same rigor as work and argues that vacation means leaving email alone. Once, after departing a gathering with friends after an hour, she went home to an empty house, ordered Chinese takeout for one and found herself happier than she had been in weeks. The glamour of authority, it appears, occasionally comes with a carton of lo mein and nobody asking for a decision.
An ownership story with a long middle
Crockett’s path was visible early, though not in the usual precocious-child fashion. There was a brief ambition to be a figure skater, abandoned after the inconvenient discovery that she lacked figure-skating ability. But beneath her high-school yearbook photo, she listed the future profession “marketing analyst.” She still does not know how she learned the term. Her father was a realtor who ran his own business; her mother was a teacher. Neither worked in advertising.
At SUNY Geneseo, she studied management, minored in marketing and environmental studies, and took communications courses. The attraction was the junction between business and human behavior - psychology, sociology, the stubborn question of what makes people act. Her environmental studies minor also looks, in retrospect, like an early marker. Years later she would lead Mower’s work in energy and sustainability and guide communications for utilities and organizations including National Grid, FirstEnergy, Exelon, Avangrid and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority.
Graduates from SUNY Geneseo after studying management, marketing and environmental studies.
Joins Mower as a senior account manager and begins the long climb through client leadership.
Becomes president and chief operating officer, a formal step in a succession planned over years.
Mower becomes 100% employee-owned, preserving independence while distributing ownership.
Takes the CEO role and receives Central New York’s Crystal Ball Award.
Leads the agency through WBENC certification and another B2B Agency of the Year recognition.
A mentor at Mower became her strongest internal advocate - pushing her forward, pulling her back when necessary and giving her the sense that no role inside the company was closed to her. That kind of sponsorship is not cinematic. It is more useful. Crockett eventually stepped into the managing-director role her mentor had held, and later into a job previously occupied by a founder who had run the firm for 55 years.
The tempting question was obvious: What would Eric do? Crockett decided it was the wrong one. A company can honor its founder by refusing to impersonate him. Her replacement question - what will Stephanie do? - gave the succession its proper difficulty.
Friendship, with a balance sheet
Mower describes its strategic approach through three qualities of friendship: affection, relevance and trust. The phrasing risks sweetness until one considers how unsentimental the test can be. Do people like having you around? Do you matter to their present life? Will you do what you said? Brands spend fortunes attempting to manufacture answers that customers make in seconds.
Crockett applies a similar test inward. Culture, in her telling, is not a scooter in the office or a keg in the kitchen. Those may be pleasant. They are not the work. The work is deciding with employees in mind, selecting clients who can sustain a supportive relationship and sometimes declining an attractive opportunity because it feels wrong.
Employee ownership sharpens that proposition. Every colleague has an economic interest in the company’s durability, while the chief executive still has to make choices that not everyone will enjoy. “Act like an owner” can be a slogan imposed from above. At Mower it is also a literal description. Crockett’s task is to make the second meaning rescue the first.
That effort has included a reshaped, majority-women core leadership team, programs for emerging leaders and two-way mentorship. In 2025, the agency received certification from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. Because an employee-owned company must satisfy particular ownership and control standards, the designation also tested the financial and operating structure behind the language.
A national job with a Syracuse address
Crockett was born and raised in Syracuse, as was her husband. Mower now has staff across numerous American cities and clients across multiple industries, yet her public life still has the compact geography of someone who believes a career should leave evidence where it began.
She has chaired United Way of Central New York, served as president of the Landmark Theatre board, and held board roles with CenterState CEO and other regional institutions. The Central New York Sales & Marketing Executives gave her its 2023 Crystal Ball Award for professional contribution and civic leadership. The award had gone to Eric Mower in 1984, giving the succession a neat local rhyme. In 2025 she received Key4Women’s Leadership Achievement Award for her work in business and the community.
Outside work, she prefers being outside: walking, lakes, paths and kayaking when the northeastern weather permits. Her kayaking is deliberately leisurely. No helmet, no whitewater, no upside-down theatrics. She also likes live music, entertaining with her husband and the company of a group of women friends, many of whom own businesses. Their firms range from restaurants and communications to HVAC. They found one another, she says, around a shared mix of family support, modest beginnings and the necessity of working through college.
This network makes her rise less like a solitary ascent and more like a relay of examples. Her father modeled entrepreneurship. Her mentor modeled advocacy. Her friends made women’s ownership ordinary at the dinner table before it was ordinary in agency statistics. Crockett, in turn, speaks openly about vulnerability as an executive asset and about the need for women to lead without performing an imitation of men.
“Nothing is more important than a love for the people you work with.”Stephanie Crockett
What Stephanie will do
The industry Crockett inherited is not the one she joined. Client relationships are under pressure, talent can work from nearly anywhere, and artificial intelligence is moving from novelty to infrastructure. Her recent writing on utility communications argues for AI as a tool that can help organizations answer faster and more clearly during high-stakes moments, without replacing human judgment. It is a characteristic position: adopt the machinery, keep a person responsible for the consequences.
Mower’s independence has survived its founder. Its employee ownership has acquired the discipline of outside certification. Its work has continued to collect industry recognition. None of that makes succession complete. Succession is not a date on a release; it is the slow proof that a company can remember without becoming a museum.
Crockett’s contribution may be the permission to remain unfinished in public. On her first day, she thought she knew everything. As CEO, she writes about flaws, changed friendships, exhaustion, help and doubt. The confidence is not in having eliminated uncertainty. It is in being willing to make the next decision without borrowing someone else’s personality.
There is an appealing symmetry here. The teenage marketing analyst grew interested in what makes people tick. The executive now leads a company built around relationships. The local volunteer runs a national agency. The employee became an owner among owners. And the successor stopped asking what the founder would do long enough to become, distinctly and usefully, herself.