Susan Flinn Cobian Built Her Career on the Words: No One Else Will

The office contained one woman, one fax machine and a Rolodex. It contained no clients. This was Chicago in 2002, and Susan Flinn Cobian had been sent west to open an outpost for Robert A. Becker, the New York healthcare agency. An office is a generous word for what she had. It was a shared suite, an address and a wager on old relationships. Cobian went door to door with a proposition about a different sort of agency. Three former clients said yes. In less than three years, the lonely fax machine had acquired 35 colleagues, about $15 million in annual revenue and a rather convincing answer to the question of whether the wager had been sensible.

The anecdote has survived because it is clean and cinematic. Cobian's career is messier, and more instructive. She did not simply build one office. She built two agencies from scratch, helped revive three others, learned how to turn a network into a business without turning friendship into a transaction, and acquired the sort of professional confidence that can be mistaken for audacity by people who have not seen the preparation underneath it.

Today she is the founder, president and CEO of SFC Group, the independent agency she started in 2018. The title sounds polished. The route to it began with a history degree, second thoughts about law and the practical advantage of typing 120 words a minute.

Typing speed opens the door

Cobian needed a job after college. Kallir, Phillips, Ross needed an executive assistant. The agency had pharmaceutical business; Cobian had quick fingers and, as it turned out, a useful instinct for strategy. She worked for the pioneering executive Marcia McLaughlin and rose from assistant to account coordinator, account executive and account manager. The education was practical. There were no polished training programs waiting to explain the machinery. People handed her problems and expected the machine to run.

She passed through agencies whose names map a generation of the business: Goble & Associates, Abelson-Taylor, Topin & Associates, Becker, Lyonheart, Flaum and Interlink. She worked in New York and Chicago, collected mentors and kept the Rolodex current. Her career became a long seminar in what makes an agency cohere and what makes one come apart.

“It was me, a fax machine and my Rolodex.”

Susan Flinn Cobian, remembering the Becker Chicago opening

The Becker office proved she could start at zero. Lyonheart Communications tested whether she could reverse a slide already in motion. As president, Cobian led business development and operations for the 250-person shop, restructured and rebranded it, landed five clients in six months and lifted annual revenue by 22 percent. An internal recognition program cut attrition by more than half. The creative team collected 12 industry awards. Culture, in this accounting, was not mood lighting. It showed up in retention, work and revenue.

A voice calibrated by resistance

Cobian's management style carries the memory of rooms in which she was expected to sit quietly. Early in her career she picked up dry cleaning, fetched coffee and accepted errands as part of the apprenticeship. Later came subtler instructions. One boss told her that her voice was too loud and should sound more feminine. At the next meeting, she spoke louder.

The punchline can obscure the discipline. Cobian did not merely insist on occupying the room. She worked to become useful enough that the room would seek her judgment. She tells younger colleagues to ask for what they want, take a seat at the table and withstand a no. Her version of confidence comes with homework.

That is why one of her favorite interview questions is so revealing: when did you last come up with a new idea for a client's business? A vague answer about collaboration will not do. She wants people who can think independently, defend an idea and then execute it. Her reported “velvet hammer” style makes room for debate while keeping a sharp eye on manners, grammar and follow-through.

She has used an improv troupe to loosen habitual thinking, monthly employee presentations to distribute the microphone, escape rooms and scavenger hunts to teach improvisation, and an etiquette coach to help young account people become comfortable with clients. There is comedy in the list. There is also a coherent theory: an agency is paid for judgment under uncertain conditions, so its people must practice conversation, adaptability and nerve.

The useful art of refusing to disappear

A revealing persistence story begins with losing. HYC Health had failed to win a coveted Roche International assignment. Cobian stayed in touch anyway, sending competitive intelligence, articles and ideas rather than increasingly desperate reminders of her existence. When leadership changed, she bought her own ticket to Zurich for a one-hour meeting with someone she had never met.

The executive mentioned an urgent problem: a two-day workshop for 25 members of a women's health team. Cobian volunteered. The next day she flew to Montreal, led the workshop and was awarded the business on the spot. The flights supply the drama, but the method is more interesting. She made herself useful before there was a contract and arrived prepared when usefulness became urgent.

Another day found her pitching in New York, flying across the country and pitching again in San Francisco. She won both. Cobian's idea of work has always had a competitive pulse. Golf and paddle tennis appear among her hobbies; a half-Ironman sits on her bucket list beside singing on the Grand Ole Opry stage and spending two weeks playing golf in Ireland and Scotland. Even the leisure ambitions have scorecards.

“I've built a wide network of people upon whom I can depend, because they know I'll always have their backs.”

Susan Flinn Cobian on loyalty as operating capital

An independent agency, built without the office theater

By 2018, Cobian had spent more than three decades accumulating a private catalogue of agency virtues and vices. SFC Group became the independent version of that catalogue. It was woman-owned, focused on healthcare and designed around close client service. The firm was originally meant to have a conventional office. Cobian soon realized that a virtual model allowed her to choose experienced people without consulting their ZIP codes.

This was two years before remote work became compulsory for much of the professional world. By 2020, team members were working across several American states and in Sydney. The decision was not a lifestyle ornament. It was an operating choice: talent over real estate, collaboration over the daily performance of looking busy in the same room.

The company grew. In 2024, SFC acquired CareContent, a Chicago content agency founded by Kadesha Thomas Smith. The deal began over coffee. Cobian saw familiar traits across the table: a woman-owned company, a healthcare focus and a similar standard for the work. The acquisition added content strategy, websites, podcasts and social capabilities. It also extended an old Cobian habit - recognizing the people with whom a hard job might become enjoyable.

Recognition followed the work. Her earlier honors included PharmaVOICE 100 selections, two PM360 ELITE awards, MM+M's Hall of Femme and a Chicago Business Journal Woman of Influence designation. In 2025, she joined MM+M's Pinnacle class. The release announcing it noted that SFC Group had earned more than 100 industry awards in the previous year. Cobian's own response returned to her usual distinction: creativity mattered, but impact mattered more.

The blank page remains undefeated

Nearly forty years after a typing test let her into the business, Cobian still describes learning as the condition that keeps the job alive. She has said she will retire and work on her golf game when she stops learning something new every day. It is a clever hedge. The world will probably continue supplying both new things and difficult lies on the fairway.

The common thread in her career is not advertising technique. Media change. Agencies merge. Names disappear into holding companies. Cobian's durable skill is beginning before all the reassuring pieces have arrived. A blank office can become a $15 million business. A rejected pitch can become a workshop in Montreal. A consumer shop can grow a healthcare arm. A virtual start-up can become an acquisitive agency.

She has always wanted to build the place both clients and employees want to choose. The ambition sounds hospitable, but it carries a stern requirement. People must bring ideas. Leaders must have their backs. Service must survive contact with inconvenience. And when someone says a thing cannot be done because it has never been done that way, the proper response is not a slogan. It is to reach for the Rolodex, find a fax machine if one still exists, and begin.