The Story Behind the Name

Franklin and Folger was founded by Emily Bland, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin. Based in the historic Philadelphia area, Franklin and Folger leverages its distinguished heritage and strong credentials to address your executive and leadership coaching, human capital, and change management needs with creative and customized approaches.

Emily serves as President and Principal Director, leading a team of proven experts. She has demonstrated the leadership characteristics of her notable forefather throughout her career. Emily is a published author and visionary global business executive and organizational leader with expertise in all Human Resource areas, including executive coaching, performance management, talent strategy, change management and acceleration, discrimination and harassment allegation investigation, organizational design, leadership succession, and outsourcing planning. Emily’s book, Talk Yourself Off the Ledge: How To Coach Yourself Out of Career Crisis, was designed for readers to apply her performance coaching model to build career resiliency.

In a number of leadership roles with Comcast, Emily oversaw the National Customer Operations and Customer Experience, including having strategic responsibility for 17,000 internal Customer Care agents and operational responsibility for 3,500 employees, leaders and executives representing Billing, Sales, Repair and Retention queues and five product lines. Her titles included Vice President of Human Resources, National Customer Operations and Customer Experience and Vice President of Human Resources, National Engineering and Technical Operations.

As Vice President of Human Resources for American Water Enterprises, Inc., Emily provided HR leadership and management to national and regional commercial businesses operating in the U.S. and Canada. She participated in the development and administration of acquisition and divestiture planning and transitioning, and was a key deal team member on three stock sales, two asset sales, and one company closure.

Upon the creation of DS2 (Defense Support Services), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin, Day & Zimmermann,  and Aerotek, Emily managed the start-up of the human resources function for 4,400 employees internationally, including those covered by a labor union, Service Contract Act or Davis-Bacon Act. She managed configuration and implementation of the SAP payroll system for employees at more than 75 domestic and international locations, and implemented diversity and harassment prevention training for all management and supervisory staff, in addition to benefits, compensation, talent acquisition, performance management, and organizational design. Before this, she provided faculty recruiting and selection leadership to the University of Illinois through the Chancellor’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Access. Earlier positions included Senior Human Resources Compliance Consultant and a Director of Human Resources at Day & Zimmermann, Inc., a privately held company in the fields of construction, engineering, staffing and defense solutions; and several leadership roles of increasing responsibility with Milliken & Company, a privately-owned U.S. company providing specialty chemicals, floor coverings, specialty fabrics and performance products and solutions around the world.

Emily holds a Master of Human Resource Development from Clemson University and a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Ball State University. She is certified in Hogan Assessment Systems and Prosci - Change Management. She has completed professional development programs including Women in Leadership at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Design Thinking at Harvard University. Emily is also a fellow at the Institute of Coaching and the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute.