The useful thing about getting lost is that it clarifies where you want to be. Tina Kozak has cheerfully admitted that she has a terrible sense of direction; Waze is her indispensable app. Yet the long route of her career has been guided by a remarkably stubborn compass. It points toward Detroit.
That compass first wobbled at Wayne State University. Kozak arrived on an academic scholarship, the first woman in her family to attend college, and imagined she might become a Spanish teacher. Halfway through, she pivoted to public relations. Her first internship, at Bianchi Public Relations in 2000, placed her among automotive clients and introduced her to Tina Sullivan, now one of her business partners. The next stop was Metaldyne, the global auto supplier that later became part of American Axle.
Metaldyne turned the student into a corporate communicator. Kozak worked across public relations, advertising, employee events and international auto shows. She had not boarded a plane until she was 18. By 25, work had taken her across North America, Europe and Asia. It was an enviable itinerary, with one persistent flaw: every mile seemed to make Detroit more important.
There is a comic prelude to this polished beginning. Before the client meetings and auto-show floors, Kozak and Sullivan had managed rival ice cream shops. Years later, they would run the same agency. The detail gives their partnership a pleasingly Detroit sort of durability: competition first, collaboration later, both built on showing up for a shift. It also strips some ceremony from the executive story. Careers do not announce their useful connections in advance. The person across town worrying about cones and closing time may eventually sit beside you at the ownership table.
01 · The return route
A smaller company, a larger sense of place
After roughly six years at Metaldyne, Kozak tried another automotive supplier to build experience in the aftermarket and investor relations. The move did not unfold as intended. She worked her network and reconsidered what she actually wanted: a return to Detroit, a setting smaller than a corporate enterprise, and work that touched more than one industry.
Franco was an unlikely answer. Kozak had never pictured herself at an agency. But the firm had been headquartered in Detroit since 1964, its client list stretched from mobility to nonprofits and professional services, and its civic commitments resembled the ones she had inherited at home. Her father owned auto repair shops in and around Detroit in the 1980s. Her grandfather had run a grocery store on the city's east side in the 1950s and 1960s. Local business was not an abstraction. It was family grammar.
“I really felt called to Franco.”Tina Kozak, on returning to Detroit
She joined in 2007 without an ownership scheme tucked into her briefcase. She came ready to prove herself to clients, colleagues and the community. The distinction matters. It is easy to retrofit destiny onto a career after the titles arrive. Kozak's path was built through client service first, then through an expanding interest in the business behind the work.
Detroit supplied both context and standard. She speaks about Belle Isle as a place to walk and think, and about the city's resilience as professional instruction. She has supported Life Remodeled and coached women entrepreneurs through Michigan Women Forward. The civic thread also runs through the agency: communications, in her telling, should change organizational performance and strengthen trust, not merely polish a story.
02 · The deep end
The promotion arrived before the confidence did
In 2013, Kozak was preparing to become Franco's president through a slow, deliberate transition. Then an emergency required her predecessor to leave without warning. The tutorial vanished. The job remained.
She has described being terrified by the abrupt handoff. It is the sort of detail usually removed from executive biographies, scrubbed away until authority appears innate. Kozak kept it in her account because it explains the leadership that followed. She learned the presidency while performing it, gained confidence by making decisions, and found that persistence was less a slogan than a daily operating requirement.
First PR internship, serving automotive clients.
Returns to Detroit and joins Franco.
Steps into the presidency through an accelerated transition.
Becomes Franco's first woman CEO.
Completes the transition to majority ownership.
Enters PRSA Detroit's Hall of Fame, then receives PRSA's Agency Leader honor.
By January 2021, she was chief executive, the first woman and only the third person to hold the office in Franco's history. The milestone carried an obvious symbolic charge in a profession with a heavily female workforce and a thinner representation of women at the top. Kozak framed the title as responsibility rather than arrival. What counted was what she did with it for clients, colleagues and community.
“Take time for reflection.”Kozak's essential leadership advice
Reflection is not a glamorous executive verb. It does not clatter like disruption or scale. In Kozak's version, however, reflection is active: a leader notices, assesses, then adjusts. It is the discipline separating a manager who repeats a process from a leader willing to revise one. Her self-appointed alternate title, “Chief Courage Officer,” adds the complementary muscle. Thought without candor becomes delay; candor without thought becomes theatre.
03 · Buying the responsibility
A legacy changes hands, and keeps moving
At the end of 2023 and into early 2024, Kozak bought out longtime chairman Dan Ponder's stake. She became Franco's majority shareholder alongside minority owners Tina Benvenuti Sullivan and Nikki Little. A firm that had long been led by women was now fully women-owned.
The transaction made Kozak a third-generation Detroit business owner by her own reckoning, following the grocery store and the auto shops. It also made her custodian of an institution older than her career. Legacy firms pose a particularly elegant problem: preserve everything and they become museums; change everything and there is little left worth inheriting.
Her answer has been an insistence on “forward motion,” one of six values Franco rebuilt through what Kozak describes as a deep and vulnerable process. The list is specific enough to reveal its tensions. Empathy sits beside Courageous Truth. Family, Team and Community shares space with Opportunity. Persistence must coexist with movement. These are useful pairings for an agency whose work begins with relationships but increasingly depends on analytics, digital systems and creative execution.
Under Kozak's leadership, Franco added services and talent as it moved from traditional public relations toward integrated communications. The firm says revenue and headcount achieved double-digit growth. The central idea was to combine the old agency virtues - relationships, intuition, knowledge of a client - with digital, creative and measurement capabilities. Sentiment still matters. Now it is expected to bring receipts.
04 · When the plan meets the day
Crisis counsel for the moment after the binder opens
Kozak's specialty makes the leadership philosophy tangible. She advises organizations on crises, reputation, change and community relations. The work rewards preparation but punishes anyone who confuses a plan with reality. A protocol can identify the room and the people who belong in it. It cannot supply judgment once everyone arrives.
Her advice emphasizes clear internal communication, human instinct and empowered frontline messengers. Employees should hear difficult news from their leaders before they encounter it in a headline. The organization must consider who needs to know, what they need to hear and where the message belongs. This is empathy used as operational intelligence, not as an inspirational poster.
The communications environment has supplied fresh complications. In a 2026 industry conversation, Kozak argued that earned media was becoming newly important as AI systems lean on third-party information. The technology changes how credibility travels, but her prescription remains conspicuously human: be careful, thoughtful, ethical and authentic. Tools may rearrange discovery. They do not repeal trust.
“Confidence comes once you know what you believe in.”Kozak, on speaking with courage
Recognition has followed the work. PRSA Detroit inducted Kozak into its Hall of Fame in 2025. In August 2026, the national organization named her the Agency Leader recipient in its inaugural Women of Impact Awards. Her public reaction was characteristically team-first: individual praise makes her uncomfortable; shaping the profession around empathy, curiosity and courageous truth does not.
Outside the office, her preferences sketch the same map in lighter ink. She takes visitors to Belle Isle, Eastern Market and walkable neighborhoods such as Midtown, West Village and Corktown. She escapes to Frankfort in northern Michigan. Her imaginary dinner party seats Michelle Obama, Michael Jordan and her great-grandmother - a table that could cover power, performance and family history before dessert.
Kozak's career is tempting to tell as a series of firsts: first woman in her family to attend college, first woman to lead Franco as CEO, majority owner of the now women-owned firm. But the deeper pattern is return. She returned to Detroit after corporate travel. She returned to reflection when leadership accelerated. She returned an old agency to its values before asking it to move forward. The compass did not produce a straight line. It produced a place worth staying.