How Maggy Wilkinson Became One of Philadelphia’s Few Female CEOs

Leading lady: Maggy Wilkinson heads up Athena Global Advisors, named for the Greek goddess. / Photograph by Theresa Regan

It’s a gray, drizzly day in June, but Maggy Wilkinson is all smiles as she leads me through the new 20,600-square-foot office of her full-service consultancy firm, Athena Global Advisors.

“You can tell that we’re led by women,” she says in a light Southern drawl that hints at her Memphis roots. We pass by a mini fridge and private rooms designed for breastfeeding mothers. Down the hall, there’s a green room with marquee-mirrored vanities where folks can touch up their makeup or change their clothes before heading off to happy hours or client galas.

There are clothing racks filled with garment bags, and a pair of heels on the floor. It’s obviously a well-used room. Wilkinson, who wears a crisp white dress suit, is building the kind of workplace she needed when she was a young mother who’d left a career in banking to follow her now ex-husband’s job around the country.

“I had the secondary job to my husband’s. He was the primary income earner,” she says. Returning to the workforce after those years was tough: “You don’t get to come back in where you left.”

Today, Wilkinson is one of a small group of woman CEOs who have broken into the power sphere of Philly, which is still a notorious boys’ town. Not only that, but she’s seemingly (and suddenly) everywhere, her name and that of her brand on the lips of countless of the city’s movers and shakers, as her Athena Global Advisors has had a hand in shaping, branding, running and/or promoting everything from the city’s World Cup bid to the Philadelphia Cycling Classic, and worked with companies as varied as Comcast (on its Internet Essentials affordability program) and the NFL (her work with the League’s Huddle for 100 initiative, which rallied people nationwide to devote time to volunteering was “the most successful community campaign in NFL history,” Wilkinson says). Other high-profile clients include Amazon, DreamWorks, Wharton, Intuit, and United Airlines.

Wilkinson, meantime, has a rep for leaning into her role as a female leader, and for uplifting women into the corridors of power. Seventy-four percent of Athena’s more than 130 employees are women. She’s eschewed the behind-closed-doors-over- pints-and-cigars dealmaking in favor of a highly open, collaborative culture. She mentors a handful of women in Philadelphia, meeting quarterly to offer personal and professional guidance. Oh, and her firm takes its name from the goddess Athena: “She’s just really a badass of a goddess,” says Wilkinson, who studied Greek and Latin at Middlebury College. “She’s the goddess of wisdom. She’s the warrior goddess. I think we channel her energy a little bit.”

In terms of badass energy, well, Wilkinson really is on a roll: In February, Athena merged with the 31-year-old public relations firm Ceisler Media & Issue Advocacy, run by Larry Ceisler. The move represents a marriage between old and new Philadelphia power: an upstart new-media marketing, advertising, and events juggernaut led by a Philly transplant joining forces with a legacy media agency and policy firm with deep Philadelphia roots.

Now, with an equity investment from former Canadian Ambassador and Comcast exec David L. Cohen (disclosure: Cohen is also board chairman of our parent company CMG) — who will be joining Athena’s newly created board — Wilkinson is poised to leave her mark well beyond Philadelphia.

Whether it’s a story about an artist, a politician, or a businessman, the classic magazine profile of the great male genius always has that familiar trope — a line that says something like: “He knew he was destined for something great from early on.” You rarely see that kind of language about women in power. More often, women are portrayed as humble, maybe even a bit surprised by their own success.

But Maggy Wilkinson always knew she wanted to do big things. Even as a little girl. Tucked in a meeting room at Athena’s offices, Wilkinson recalls her out-until-the-streetlights-come-on childhood in Memphis in the ’70s.

She describes a boisterous childhood and talks fondly of building a tree house in a vacant lot with her friends and sliding down the chute of her grandfather’s corn crib during visits to his Mississippi farm. “I was afforded a fair degree of independence as a child,” she says. “I think you had more agency than kids do today, and you learned life skills earlier.” Still, her barefoot brazenness shocked her mother. “She’d look at my father in a panic, and he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll send her to New England for college. It’ll be fine.’”

There were many things she loved about Memphis, but by middle school she knew she wanted something bigger. She’d spend hours in the library, reading about travel. College was a way out.

After graduation, her adventures began in earnest. She lived in Italy, studying under the Vatican’s Latinist and wandering the Sistine Chapel in the mornings before tourists flooded in. After that, she spent an idyllic few years teaching in Crown Heights and — get this — living in the Colgate mansion on the Hudson as on-site caretaker. She loved teaching — and her students — but she wanted something bigger. So she took a job (“a job that I was completely unqualified for,” she says) doing equity research for an oil and gas analyst at Merrill Lynch.

She did that for two years and then moved through a few more banking jobs before leaving the corporate world for five years to raise her kids. When she returned to the workforce, she made up for lost time, ultimately becoming the chief operating officer of a forensic accounting and e-discovery firm in 2008. She helped the company through a period of explosive growth before she left to start Athena Global Advisors out of her Providence, Rhode Island, home. “I realized, This is the time. If I’m going to do this, I’ve got to do it now. I can’t wait another 10 years,” she says.

Philadelphia came into the picture when Athena landed Comcast as an early client. Wilkinson fell in love with the city, walking its cobblestone streets and wandering the halls of the Art Museum. But what she came to love the most, she says, is the city’s underdog spirit, a commitment to rolling up sleeves and trying new things — even if they fail. It’s that spirit that’s allowed Athena to flourish after relocating.

“I don’t think Athena could have happened in another major city,” Wilkinson says. “There’s something special about Philadelphia, where, if you can show that you are able to do work at a high level, the city rewards you.”

There’s also no Athena without Wilkinson, who has in recent years added many new services to Athena’s portfolio: management consulting, data strategy building, creative marketing, and events planning, among others — because she saw that companies had a need for all these services under one roof. They risked missing deadlines, she says, when content creation, graphic design, and data visualization were managed by different partners. And: “I don’t miss deadlines.”

Take their work on the return of the Philadelphia Cycling Classic. Wilkinson’s team created branding and marketing materials for the once-beloved race that was finally making a comeback — plus honchoed a new website, and a strategic and logistical plan, says Carlos Rogers, the Old City salon owner and hairstylist who championed the return of the race.

“Maggy is a super strong, fearless leader,” Rogers says.

Her willingness to build on Athena’s capabilities and pivot as needed (Athena was initially conceived of as a regulatory, anti-bribery, and corruption consultancy) has helped her build the firm both locally and globally. One of the firm’s major projects has been a public-private partnership between the internet provider Liberty Latin America, Dell, and governments in nine Caribbean countries. That work allowed her to rub elbows with another “dynamo” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley.

“The best thing about us is that we’re not at all what I envisioned us being,” Wilkinson says. “What we are is so much more fun.”

She also got involved locally, joining the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s corporate executive board and the board of directors at City Year Philadelphia.

Now, by joining forces with Ceisler, Wilkinson is adding public relations and crisis communications to Athena’s roster. Wilkinson and Ceisler were introduced to one another a few years back by mutual clients Kera Armstrong and Michelle Singer, both senior execs at Comcast, Ceisler says. The duo met for breakfast at Urban Farmer in the Logan. It was immediately clear to him that Wilkinson cared not just about growing her business, but about making a difference in Philadelphia. “She really buys into corporate citizenship,” Ceisler tells me. “I was impressed from day one.”

Over the next few years, they worked on a number of projects together. Wilkinson liked that Ceisler shared her “roll up their sleeves and do work” ethic.

Another thing she liked: Ceisler’s deep connections to Philadelphia’s entrenched systems of power. It’s hard, Wilkinson says, to build a crisis communications practice as an outsider, particularly in a city where it’s not uncommon for people to ask one another which local high school they attended. People, be they politicos or CEOs, want to hire someone they know — and who deeply knows Philly — to handle public communications in their toughest, most embarrassing moments. Ceisler, who is originally from Pittsburgh, but has lived in Philadelphia for decades, Wilkinson says, has those kinds of connections “in spades,” Wilkinson says.

“We realized our offerings were very synergistic. There wasn’t an overlap,” Wilkinson says.

Cohen encouraged the merger, too. He has known Ceisler since the 1980s (they’ve worked together and live a few blocks from one another) and he worked with Wilkinson on his personal branding when he was ambassador, on the FIFA World Cup Bid, and on a quick turnaround project to add graphics to Philadelphia’s 2028 Democratic National Convention bid.

“I think that [Cohen’s support] means a lot to people all over the country,” Ceisler says.

Wilkinson is leading both firms into this next chapter. As part of the merger, Ceisler’s 25-employee team became an Athena company, and together, they won the bid to be the agency of record for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. They’re working on a few more bids that would “be a game changer for us,” Wilkinson says.

“Our primary goal is to come together and do work that is really meaningful and powerful at the highest level we’re capable of,” Wilkinson says. “When we do that, the rest takes care of itself.”