A Lifelong Creative Strategist With an Operator’s Edge
Long before Michael Kahn was helping agency founders sharpen their market narratives and positioning or advising boards on how to scale with clarity, he was a kid watching the advertising world unfold from his living room in Chicago. “I grew up in an advertising household, so I was destined to go into the business from the get-go,” he says. His father spent three decades as a partner at a local agency, and Advertising Age arrived at their doorstep each week like a family heirloom—thick, glossy, and filled with campaigns that shaped a generation.
That early exposure didn’t just spark his curiosity, it hardwired him for the business. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, drawn to storytelling as much as to strategy. And when his career began, he found a way to fuse both to ultimately build a forty-year career at the intersection of creativity and performance.
Michael rose through the ranks at JWT and other global agencies before co-founding his own creative shop in Chicago, known for pairing bold thinking with operational rigor. Then came the dot-com boom. He jumped into the digital wave as head of marketing for Art.com and later took on executive roles at Performics, Digitas, and Astound Commerce. At Performics, he led one of the most ambitious global expansions of his career, growing teams from 300 people in Chicago to 3,500 across 57 countries. “It was quite a ride,” he says, looking back.
Through every chapter, Michael held onto one belief: scaling a business means nothing if you lose its soul. He built teams that thrived on creative and entrepreneurial energy, led transformative acquisitions, and proved that the best growth stories are those where left-brain discipline and right-brain imagination work in tandem.
Advising with Perspective
Today, Michael channels that experience into two leadership roles that define this next chapter of his career:
Executive Strategic Advisor at Evros Group, where he partners with founders and leadership teams to sharpen strategy, articulate value, and unlock growth ahead of transaction or transformation.
Board Director at Collective Measures, where he helps guide one of the country’s leading independent performance marketing agencies through a dynamic era of marketing, media, analytics and AI innovation.
“It’s a different phase of my career, and I’m having the best time right now,” he says. “I get to weigh in objectively, honestly, and directly, without the politics of an operator role, drawing on everything I’ve learned, where I succeeded, where I failed, and where someone can do better.”
His focus: helping founders and leadership teams find clarity in complexity, articulate what makes them different, and turn that insight into growth.
His approach is grounded in empathy and precision. Ask him what makes a great strategy, and his answer cuts through the noise. It’s not just data. It’s not just instinct. Michael believes “The best strategic outcomes happen where analytical rigor meets creative intuition,” he says. Data and operational discipline are table stakes, he says, but they don’t move people on their own.“You have to layer in the emotional and narrative side, the part that connects with people and makes them want to follow you, invest in you, or buy from you.”
The Story Behind the Numbers
At the core of Michael Kahn’s philosophy is the ability to move seamlessly between numbers and narrative, vision and execution. His work with Evros Group centers on translating performance into story, and story into value. In this way, he helps founders clarify what truly differentiates their businesses, coaches teams to communicate it with conviction, and reinforces the operator’s mindset inside a firm built by operators.
For Michael, it all comes full circle, “Great businesses are built on both sides of the brain,” he says. “Strategy without story is hollow, and story without execution doesn’t scale.”
Whether he’s guiding a leadership team through its next growth chapter or mentoring the next generation of creative business strategists, Michael remains driven by the same force that sparked his career decades ago: the drive to create connections that matter.
