Erin Flaxman

Erin Flaxman helps agencies and marketing services firms build the commercial foundations they need to win more business.

Her perspective comes from nearly thirty years inside global agencies including Havas, Assembly, PHD, Initiative, Mindshare, and Starcom, where she helped win more than $3 billion in new-business revenue.

Erin began her career in media strategy and planning in Toronto, working with brands including Diageo, Four Seasons, Kraft, Nintendo, Procter & Gamble, and Pillsbury. 

For the past two decades in New York, her work has centered on growth and communications, leading pitches and building new-business operations across North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Growth as an engine, not a scramble

When agencies treat new business as a series of sprints, they spend too much time starting over. Erin approaches growth as a commercial function that can be designed, staffed, measured, and improved.

As Global Chief Growth Officer at Havas Media Network, Erin led a team of business development and marketing communications specialists across 10 major cities worldwide. Together, they won and retained more than $2 billion in global new-business billings.

The result was impressive, but the system behind it is the more useful story. Erin built a connected global operation with shared tools and platforms, documented best practices, disciplined lead generation and pipeline management, and actively managed relationships with the consultants influencing major reviews.

Today, she brings that experience to agencies and marketing services firms that need a more effective way to grow. Depending on the problem, that can include positioning and commercial narrative, prospecting and pipeline strategy, credentials and case studies, pitch conversion, or coaching leaders and teams to perform at their best.

The pitch is a craft, and Erin has built every part of one

Erin has remained hands-on throughout her career. She has written proposals, built credentials decks and case studies, developed videos and websites, created staffing and compensation models, coached presenters, and designed what she affectionately calls “room theatrics.”

She knows what a winning pitch takes because she has done the work herself.

Excellent work does not always sell itself. Credentials that land in one market can feel generic or unfocused in another. Agencies with comparable capabilities can produce very different outcomes depending on the strength of the argument, the evidence supporting it, and what happens in the room.

That is the gap Erin is built to close.

She has also run a business, not just pitched for one

Between agency roles, Erin was selected as one of ten candidates in Canada for The Home Depot’s North American Leadership Program. In that operating role, she ran a $30 million P&L and led a team of 180 people. She also earned a Six Sigma Green Belt and conducted the company’s first Canadian study of gender diversity and talent retention.

That experience still shapes how she advises agency leaders. She understands the operational and financial pressures behind commercial decisions because she has carried them herself.

Years later, Erin returned to The Home Depot from the other side of the table as part of the agency team that pitched and retained its media business at IPG.

Living the Collective model

Erin joined Chameleon Collective as a Fractional Chief Growth Officer in early 2026.

The Collective model reflects the way she works because growth problems rarely sit within one department. Positioning may be creating a sales problem. The customer experience may be undermining the promise made in the pitch. A pipeline problem may be a proposition problem.

Through Chameleon Collective, Erin can lead an engagement herself or bring together senior operators from across brand, marketing, sales, customer experience, commerce, and technology. The result is support that can move from diagnosis into implementation, with experienced people doing the work.

What's next: Resting Pitch Face

Erin is writing Resting Pitch Face, a satirical business narrative inspired by more than two decades inside pitch rooms around the world.

Through composite and exaggerated stories rooted in real experience, the book explores what a pitch can reveal about a business and the people leading it: the avoidable chaos, internal politics, questionable judgment, emotional spirals, flashes of brilliance, and human behavior that emerge when everyone wants to win.

At its heart, Resting Pitch Face is about what Erin learned from watching herself and other leaders in those rooms, including how to trust that you will figure things out, and keep your sanity, self-respect, and sense of humor when the room goes sideways.