Stephanie Ambroise

I attribute my success to two things working together: an early conviction about what I wanted to do, and a willingness to bet on myself when no one else had reason to yet.

The conviction kept me oriented through the years when the path wasn't clear. The willingness to bet on myself is what got me out of waiting rooms — for the promotion, for the invitation, for someone else's permission.

At a certain point, I realized that nobody was going to hand me the career I wanted. I had to build it. So I did.

The best advice I'd give myself is to negotiate everything — not just salary.

Title, scope, where you sit at the table, whose meetings you're in, and what counts as success.

I learned, sometimes the hard way, that nobody is going to offer you the version of the job you actually deserve.

They'll offer you the version that costs them the least.

Asking for more isn't aggressive. It's how you signal what you're worth.

Do it scared. Whether you're stepping into this industry right out of college or transitioning from somewhere else, you can make that move by believing in yourself, doing your own due diligence, and putting yourself in front of the people you want to work with.

Never settle. Always want more. Complacency is a death sentence.

Ask questions. Insert yourself. Make your presence known. When I've managed teams, I tell every person on them — junior, mid, senior — your title doesn't determine whether you're a leader. People come to you for your expertise. You support them. That's leadership, regardless of what's printed on your business card. Keeping that mindset is how you propel yourself to the next level.

And shine. Even if you're just an admin. Especially if you're the admin. Stand out, let your presence be known, and don't let anyone steal your joy. We all have greatness in us — the work is refusing to hide it.

The biggest challenge in our industry right now is structural. Agency budgets are shrinking while client expectations are growing; AI is reshaping how creative work is made and cleared; and the middle class of agency work — the mid-level roles that used to be the proving ground — is disappearing. At the same time, senior business affairs expertise has historically resided within agency pipelines, which means the caliber of representation has been available only to those adjacent to it and unavailable to everyone else.

The personal challenge runs parallel. Being a Black woman in senior business affairs has meant being underestimated in rooms where I had the most expertise, talked over by people I was hired to advise, and paid less than counterparts with less experience. What I've learned is that the work I do is the answer to it all.

When the contract is airtight, when the negotiation lands, when the campaign clears without exposure — the room recalibrates. I've stopped trying to convince people of what I bring. I let the work do that.

The opportunity I'm building toward is that this expertise doesn't have to stay within the pipeline. There's a generation of artists, founders, and creatives who have been passed over for fair representation because they didn't have access to it. That's the gap. That's the work.

Three values have stayed with me across everything — and they came from the climb, not the title.

The first is self-trust. I learned early to check my own compass before checking anyone else's. That instinct shows up in how I build my business, how I travel alone, and how I decide what to make of a room I'm walking into. I don't wait to be told I belong somewhere. I decide that first.

The second is reverence — for the work, for the people who came before me, for what slows me down enough to think clearly. I make better decisions when I make them from a settled place, and protecting that settledness in a noisy industry has been one of the hardest, most important practices of my life.

The third is refusing to flatten. The shortest version of myself is the easiest one to sell — pick one identity, one expertise, one story. I've never been able to do that, and at some point I stopped trying. The fullness is what makes the work better. It's also what makes life worth showing up to.