Friday afternoons are good for loose talk and bad for formal interviews. When Tricia Barrett arrived at Crowley Webb in 2003, the chief executive she had come to meet was in a conference room with two of Buffalo advertising's familiar faces. Barrett pulled up a chair. The interview became a conversation. Before it was over, she had something close to an open invitation: start whenever you are ready.
This was her second approach. The first, a year earlier, had collided with the rarest of office events: chief executive Jim Hettich had taken a vacation day. Barrett read the empty office as a sign and stayed in Rochester. When she finally made the move to Buffalo, she promptly wondered whether she had blundered. She wrote to her old colleagues that she missed their new Keurig machine and might have chosen wrong. She kept a copy of the letter.
Two decades later, the letter reads like a small comic prop from a much larger story. Barrett is now Crowley Webb's chief executive, the first woman to hold the job and only the second CEO in the agency's history. The path from borrowed conference-room chair to the chief executive's office was steady without being neat. It involved a difficult hockey account, a distressed company that happened to be a client, ten analysts, one global emergency, and a habit of volunteering before certainty could spoil the opportunity.
The route before the return
A communications major goes to sea
Barrett was born in Buffalo, grew up in Williamsville, and learned early how the city and its suburbs overlap. She attended Elmwood Franklin School, began high school at Buffalo Seminary, and finished at Williamsville South. College put a few hours between her and home, which was precisely the idea. At John Carroll University near Cleveland, her parents would be close enough for an emergency and too far away to materialize casually on a Saturday morning.
She tried the business school at her father's urging. Accounting, statistics, and economics did not hold her. Communications did. The classes felt less like labor and more like a clue. She also found an improbable minor in oceanography, earned during two and a half months aboard a 134-foot sailboat in the Caribbean. Her bunk was six feet by two and a half feet. The boat used its engine for only six hours. The rest was wind, work, and 24 other students learning what small quarters reveal about large personalities.
The voyage left Barrett wondering about oceanographic research in the Galápagos. Her father suggested a more immediate experiment: get an internship in advertising or marketing. Advertising had the additional advantage of looking rather glamorous in What Women Want. She soon discovered the film had neglected an entire side of the trade. Agencies also needed people who could manage projects, translate between clients and makers, and keep relationships warm when deadlines ran hot. Those things came naturally.
“I’ve never been one to shy away from joining a conversation.”Tricia Barrett
At the Wolf Group in Cleveland, a supervisor went on maternity leave and argued that the young Barrett could handle her accounts. The vote of confidence became an early pattern: somebody offered room, Barrett filled it, and the next room became larger. A move to the firm's Rochester office brought work for St. John Fisher and Wegmans. It also brought her closer to Buffalo, though not quite home. She commuted, waited, and finally took the second swing at Crowley Webb.
The assignment inside the assignment
Praxis changed the work, then the company
Barrett arrived at Crowley Webb as an account supervisor on September 22, 2003. Her first client was Praxis Communications, a Nashville startup created to recruit patients for clinical trials. By 2006, the account had become as significant to the agency as its long-running work for M&T Bank. Then the economy turned. Praxis's owners wanted out. In 2010, Crowley Webb made the uncommon choice to buy its own client, even though the company had no active projects left.
The acquisition presented a charming brand and a rather less charming book of business. Barrett went to the leadership team with a proposal. She wanted a new challenge; let her run the operation with Crowley Webb as its safety net. She recruited Karen Grobe, whom she describes as her operational opposite and right hand, to lead project management. Where Barrett preferred big pictures, networking, and the next opening, Grobe made certain that promises became work.
Their rebuilding language came from baseball, despite Barrett not being much of a baseball fan. Praxis had chased home runs. The new team would collect singles and doubles. Help a pharmaceutical company with one or two things. Do them properly. Earn trust. Let one doorway reveal another. The restraint worked.
The capability curve
A qualitative view of the work Barrett describes: Praxis expanded the agency from a creative boutique toward analytics, research, digital, UX, video, and public relations.
Patient recruitment demanded more than good-looking work. It required evidence. The creative boutique began building the science behind its marketing, eventually assembling an analytics group of ten people, including PhDs. The two businesses kept separate client teams where necessary but shared much of the agency's talent. An insight from a clinical-trial campaign could travel across the room and improve a bank campaign. The Latin roots behind the Praxis name - art, science, and skill - became an accidental description of the whole shop.
Barrett became a vice president in 2008, then the youngest member of the agency's management team. She was named senior vice president in 2016, a shareholder in 2019, and chief operating officer in 2021. The titles matter less than the sequence beneath them. She did not simply manage the business she inherited. The business she took on changed what Crowley Webb was capable of selling.
Twenty-three years, six turns
Leading before the announcement
The title arrived after the test
The formal succession was already in motion when the pandemic disturbed it. Hettich, Barrett's predecessor, was a financially oriented chief executive. Barrett saw herself as the people-minded candidate. She asked to lead the daily response while he concentrated on stability. It was uncomfortable, public, and clarifying. Praxis's work expanded as it helped recruit participants for Moderna's vaccine trial, and the combined organization grew to 150 people at its peak during that period.
Barrett has been candid about the unease that accompanied taking the baton from a long-established leader. The useful detail is that confidence followed action, not the reverse. Employees saw her lead before the board made the arrangement official. When she became CEO in June 2023, the appointment confirmed a role she had already begun to perform.
“Serve.”The one-word sign in Barrett's office
That word is how she frames the job. It means service to employees and clients, but also to the city that drew her back. Her documented board work includes United Way of Buffalo & Erie County, Buffalo Prep, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. She has described becoming more intentional about community commitments tied to equity. The national pharmaceutical work may happen elsewhere; the obligation she feels is stubbornly local.
Recognition has followed. Buffalo Business First gave her a C-Level Executives Award in 2024 and placed her at number 67 on that year's Power 200 Women list, nearly 100 places higher than the year before. In 2025, AAF Buffalo gave her the Levy-Osborn Award for a record of achievement in Western New York advertising. Awards are flattering; longevity is more revealing. Barrett still talks about colleagues, clients, and mentors as reasons she remains eager to work.
The next forty
Keep the thinkers, change the shape of the job
Crowley Webb marked its 40th anniversary in 2026. Barrett had been there for 23 of those years. In an anniversary reflection, she returned to the agency's old principles: teams pull together; substance outlasts spectacle; disagreement can sharpen work without making people disagreeable; small companies may think at a larger scale; calculated risk is sometimes safer than caution. They are durable lines because they permit change instead of protecting habit.
The current changes are easy to name and difficult to manage. AI is moving through every department. Barrett's interest is less in defending traditional job descriptions than in finding useful new ones. She has watched the agency hire specialists for platforms that did not exist when she started. She expects careers to move like jungle gyms, with lateral reaches and improvised footholds. The task is to preserve talented people while repurposing what they know.
The work itself has widened. For Highmark, the agency built a trailer where Buffalo Bills fans could record memories of the old stadium. It gathered more than 800 pieces of content, a project closer to oral history, live event, production studio, and brand campaign than to a conventional advertisement. Barrett sees an opening for independent agencies in precisely this sort of borderless brief. While large networks negotiate consolidation, a smaller shop can still gather in a room, pull up a chair, and decide to try the odd idea.
There is room for play in the seriousness. Barrett spends summer time on the water with her family, follows hockey, travels, and has taken up golf partly because women deserve access to the relationship-building that men have long enjoyed on the course. Her best two-truths-and-a-lie fact is true: she once went fly-fishing with President Jimmy Carter at his home in Plains, Georgia. The woman who nearly chose the Galápagos did, eventually, find a memorable body of water.
And somewhere in her papers is the note about the Keurig. It preserves the wobble usually edited out of career stories. Barrett came home, worried she had made a mistake, endured an early Buffalo Sabres meeting so unpleasant she wanted to disappear beneath the furniture, and stayed. Staying was not passive. It gave her enough time to find the assignment that needed rebuilding, the partner who complemented her, and the moments when leadership required a raised hand.
A career of this length can look inevitable from the far end. Up close, it looks more like that first Friday afternoon: an unfinished conversation, a spare chair, and a person willing to join before anybody has arranged the room.