Jennifer Zick is the Founder and CEO of Authentic, a fractional CMO and marketing firm that helps businesses create scalable growth systems. With more than 25 years of experience in B2B marketing across startups, private equity–backed companies, and global organizations, she is a recognized leader in the fractional CMO space. Jennifer is also the Founder of LIFT Integrator Community™, an executive peer group for second-in-command leaders.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:19] Why random acts of marketing are the earliest phase for growing companies
• [9:41] The difference between tactical and strategic marketing
• [15:04] When marketing leadership should separate from sales
• [20:47] How fractional CMOs evaluate existing agencies, teams, and marketing efforts before making changes
• [27:17] Giving marketing leaders a seat at the executive table to improve alignment across sales, operations, and delivery
• [31:39] A fractional CMO’s approach to diagnosing gaps in strategy, messaging, and marketing infrastructure
• [46:50] Key metrics marketing leaders should track, including CAC, LTV, retention, and pipeline quality
• [53:34] How growing up with financial hardships shaped Jennifer Zick’s leadership mindset
• [1:12:39] Jennifer reflects on the importance of control, surrender, and embracing uncertainty in life and business

In this episode…

Marketing often starts as a flurry of activity — blog posts, ads, social media, campaigns. Yet many companies still struggle to see consistent growth from those efforts. Leaders invest more money and hire talented people, but results remain unpredictable and disconnected from revenue. Why does marketing feel chaotic in growing companies, and how can businesses transform it into a reliable growth engine?

According to marketing strategist Jennifer Zick, many organizations focus on tactical marketing through activities like content, campaigns, and lead generation without strategic alignment. Instead, leaders should elevate marketing to a strategic function that shapes decisions about positioning, pricing, market entry, and the customer experience. Jennifer recommends clarifying your ideal audience, defining why your brand matters to them, and building trust through consistent messaging across the entire customer journey. When marketing leaders collaborate closely with sales, operations, and finance, companies can align their strategy with measurable outcomes such as customer acquisition cost, retention, and lifetime value — turning scattered efforts into sustainable growth.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Jennifer Zick, Founder and CEO of Authentic, to discuss how growing companies can move beyond tactical marketing and build strategic marketing leadership. Jennifer explains why random acts of marketing happen in scaling businesses, the difference between tactical “little-m” and strategic “big-M” marketing, and how fractional CMOs align marketing with revenue and long-term growth.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Jennifer Zick on LinkedIn
• Authentic
• Tom Darrow on LinkedIn
  
  

Quotable Moments

• “Every business will experience a period of random acts of marketing. So it's nothing to feel bad about.”
• “Marketing fundamentals are as simple as ever, not easy, but simple.”
• “Who do we want to matter to, why should we matter to them, and how do we build trust?”
• “It takes forever to build brand trust and equity and just a few bad decisions to erode it.”
• “We're all just figuring out life for the first time, and I need wise counsel around me.”

Action Steps

1. Elevate marketing to a strategic leadership function: Treat marketing as a core part of business strategy rather than a set of isolated tactics. When marketing leaders sit at the executive table, they can help align growth decisions across sales, operations, and the customer experience.
2. Define who your brand should matter to: Clearly identify your ideal audience and the problems you solve for them. This clarity helps focus messaging, channels, and campaigns, so marketing efforts build trust rather than chasing scattered opportunities.
3. Build trust before trying to sell: Focus your marketing on educating, helping, and engaging your audience rather than immediately pushing for conversions. Trust-driven marketing strengthens relationships and leads to higher long-term customer value.
4. Align marketing metrics with business outcomes: Track meaningful indicators like customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, retention, and pipeline health. These metrics reveal whether marketing is truly contributing to sustainable growth rather than just generating activity.
5. Evaluate your marketing foundation before adding more tactics: Make sure your positioning, messaging, and strategy are clear before investing heavily in campaigns or technology. Strong fundamentals ensure that every marketing activity reinforces your brand and drives measurable results.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00  

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris  0:15  

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond. As you up arrow your business and your personal life, there's a moment in almost every growing company where marketing stops feeling fun and starts feeling frustrating. You're spending more money than ever. You've hired good people, you've added channels, you've got dashboards everywhere, and yet growth feels harder than it did two years ago. The CEO is wondering why marketing can't drive more predictable results. The CFO is wondering where the ROI actually is. Sales is asking for more leads, and marketing feels like it's stuck proving its worth instead of shaping the future of the business. Today's guest has spent the last decade inside that exact moment, helping companies through it. Jennifer Zick is the founder and CEO of Authentic Brand, where she and her team service fractional CMOs for scaling companies. She's helped hundreds of organizations move beyond what she calls random acts of marketing and build marketing leadership that actually connects to revenue, operations and long term enterprise value. In this episode, we talk about the little m dilemma, the stage where marketing is stuck in tactics when the business actually needs strategy. Jennifer, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Jennifer Zick  1:25

Thanks so much, William. I'm delighted to be here, and that was a very thoughtful and thorough introduction. Thank you.

William Harris  1:32  

Yeah, for sure. Jennifer, I always like to give a shout out to whoever introduced us, and so I want to give a shout out to Tom Darrow. He's the CEO over at Critical Coordination. He's one who put us in touch for the second time. Actually, you and I had met at like, an EO event years before that. But the funny thing about Tom is his daughter is actually on my fourth grade girls basketball team. So I'm hoping coach. My daughter is in fourth grade, and we're we're on this team. So much fun with this I actually might be having more fun than the kids are. I've got what was it I doing the other day, I had dried insects, and I brought them to practice. Whoever's last in their killers has to eat, you know, this dried cricket kind of thing, and they're just screaming. They're like, No, we don't want to do it. And so it's been a lot of fun.

Jennifer Zick  2:14  

Oh, I thank God for parents like you who step into the trenches and have the joy and the energy to do that. I'm not a youth sports coach. I volunteer in a lot of other ways. I was a cheerleader, so they don't want me coaches anyway, but I'm always in the stands cheering for my kiddos. And, yeah, I'm so grateful to Tom, who's one of our, you know, very valued clients at Authentic, for putting us in touch and for actually, for reconnecting us. Turns out, we have a lot of friends in common and and we have a lot of topics in common that we love, so I'm excited for this chat today.

William Harris  2:46  

It's gonna be a fun one last interruption, and we'll get right into the good stuff. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website, at elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com, okay. Jennifer, you've said that most companies grow through these random acts of marketing. Is that a mistake, or is that actually the necessary first phase of growth? It's like puberty.

Jennifer Zick  3:19

It's just unavoidable. And you know, our tagline, which is overcome random acts of marketing, came to me really accidentally in one of my early conversations with some some clients, when I was first getting Authentic off the ground, I was in a meeting with a CEO and a CFO, and they were sharing some of the pains and frustrations that they were experiencing and questions that they had around marketing, and the phrase random acts of marketing came out of my mouth, and they both looked at each other with eyes wide and then nervous giggling, and I knew I had hit a nerve, and so I tested that phrase over and over with other clients as we grew the business, and it always hits a funny bone or hits a painful nerve, and that's because every business will experience a period of random acts of marketing. So it's nothing to feel bad about. It's nothing to feel like it's you're doing something wrong. It's the natural growth pain of an evolving business. And that's because every business begins at the beginning with founder or founders that have a hypothesis or a product or a service that they're ready to bring to the world. But as you bring a hypothesis or a product or a service to the market, the market tells you what it thinks about that, and it reshapes your hypothesis. And so founding brands are constantly evolving. They're constantly re articulating the value prop, or who they're going to market, to serve and their ideal audience. And so that's a natural evolution, and they are also founder led businesses that have to be sales driven first, because you don't have a business until you have a solution you can sell multiple times in order to have a business that exists and has operational credit. Mass so those random acts of marketing are simply the trying on of many different skins that happen along the way, and the execution of the tactics you have to have just to be in business. And eventually growing companies will reach a point where they know that to scale, they need to overcome Random Acts and make marketing a true strategic partner in the business. That's often where Authentic enters the conversation.

William Harris  5:21  

So not a bad thing, the necessary thing. But you got to grow up a little bit. You got to get past the squeaky voice and get to the point where you're doing something better. When founders say that marketing isn't working, then what are they actually frustrated with?

Jennifer Zick  5:36  

Yeah, I like to use a lot of like word pictures to describe what the feelings are behind random acts of marketing. So some of the word pictures I use are like rolling the dice, right? It's a gamble, or the disco ball shiny objects. We're just chasing shiny objects. Or like a large black hole that your money is just being thrown down the vacuum. These are all like word pictures that resonate for executives who are spending money and aligning resources to do marketing, but they lack the clarity and confidence to know that the marketing activities that are happening are happening in the right sequence, toward the right audiences, toward the right outcomes, in some kind of way that is scalable, repeatable, predictable and valuable for the actual business. So that's what it feels like the random acts of marketing.

William Harris  6:25  

I remember talking to a large company, and they were spending money on their blog, and they were spending, I don't remember how much, let's just say, $500 a blog post, which is a at the time, years ago, that was a decent amount of money to be spending on a blog post. And I was looking at, I was like, how much traffic are you getting? And it's like, maybe 100 visitors a month, right? How many shares you get, zero, how many comments, zero. And so it's like, you're literally, this is the equivalent of vitamins, where they say, like, vitamins, you just kind of, like, pee, most of them out kind of thing, right? Like, that's all you're doing. You're spending money. And there's absolutely nothing that you can actually show for what you're just wasting the money on this, versus maybe going to that next level. In this situation where there was the opportunity maybe, like, $1,000 blog post by a team that actually knows what they're doing, you're actually going to get some ROI from that. And sometimes it's hard to make that jump to go a little bit more when you feel like you're already not getting something from what you are investing in.

Jennifer Zick  7:17  

Well, that's exactly right. And I just have to say, man, I'm already having fun on this podcast, because we're talking about pubert. About puberty and all kinds of really interesting.

William Harris  7:26

This is the potty episode,

Jennifer Zick  7:29

super engaging. But, you know, I just actually came right before this conversation from a meeting with a prospect that was sharing with me so many very relatable experiences within their business. They have a marketing coordinator who's a creative person doing the best that she can do to keep their brand looking polished on social media and help create some posts and and things that are good. And he said, you know? And then we tried to evaluate those posts that we thought went further than others, right? We were looking at the post that got more engagement, but when you peel the onion back, what they were seeing is that that engagement was mostly coming from their own employees, right? And so while that can be helpful in amplifying that post and getting further reach through the it's not necessarily a metric that means anything. And so some of the tools we've developed at Authentic within our methodology are the tools that teach our clients how to look at the metrics that matter. We have an actual tool called the metrics mountain that I can't fully visualize for you on a podcast, but at the bottom of the mountain, it's like the hierarchy of needs for survival, right? If you Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like that. And at the bottom of the mountain, is content, okay, a blog post, is it good, or isn't it good? Well, that really depends, because if that piece of content isn't folded into a thoughtful campaign that knows how to wrap itself around different touch points, and if that campaign is not delivered through a channel that is actually a natural habitat for your audience, and if that channel isn't tied to conversion metrics, right, it has to ladder up to actual meaningful revenue and healthy growth and client satisfaction and LTV and CAC and all the things we like to talk about so content doesn't being good, content, by itself, actually doesn't mean anything. Yeah, yeah, that.

William Harris  9:25  

I mean, that's true in so many things in life, just being there, if you build it, they will come and it's just, it's the furthest thing from the truth, right? You have to have a way of getting them there. Let's talk about the little m marketing a little bit. Define little m versus big M marketing, yeah, well, and I

Jennifer Zick  9:41  

want to preface my answer on this, because this is a medium subject, and I can't wait to jump in. But I want to also recognize the fact that your audience is made up of a lot of really savvy, savvy e-commerce marketing folks, and I don't qualify to consult with them, in the sense that my whole background has been in sales and marketing around B2B professions. Professional Services, not commerce. The one thing I do well at Authentic is build a strong team that brings great CMOs in who are much wiser and deeper than me in different verticals and channel strategies. So I can't promise today to blow anybody's mind when it comes to e-commerce, but I do want to offer some kind of foundational philosophical perspectives around where growing businesses get hung up with marketing. So if some of this sounds more B2B, or sounds more relevant in a different context, just know that's coming from out of my own mouth, from my own experience.

William Harris  10:32

So I like that, though, and here's why. So we do bring on people on that are not necessarily e-commerce experts, because I really like lateral thinking. I find that by understanding the way the double helix and DNA works, we can maybe do better things over here within physics, right? Or if we are doing something in sales, and we bring that up, I brought a lot of what we do. Both my business partner, Jeff Snyder, and I have brought a lot of what we do in e-commerce from SaaS, because we both came from a SaaS background. So I like the idea of bringing things from other areas, and you're saying, I've got foundational thoughts, ideas, truths that I'm going to share, and then people can start to fill in the gaps, especially if they are savvy. So share your wisdom.

Jennifer Zick  11:09  

Awesome. Well, thank you, and thank you for creating space on your platform for that variety of experience. So the little m dilemma, this is a platform, a thought platform, a thought platform, that I started developing last year, and I've been speaking about a lot. It was an aha moment that I actually had when I was working with a consulting partner. He's our EOS implementer, because that Authentic we run on the Eos Entrepreneurial Operating System. We were in an all day off site, and my implementer, who's known me for years, years, and known my business for years, challenged me, and he said, Help me understand why Authentic philosophically believes that marketing should be a separate seat at the leadership table from sales, because many small growth businesses will tuck them together and say, here's a head of sales marketing. So I got up to the whiteboard and I started drawing it, and this just came to life and and here's what I was articulating so many founder led sales driven growth companies that have achieved operating Critical Mass don't yet have a true strategic marketing leader on their team, right. And marketing, if it exists at all, within that business, it's led by a head of sales and marketing, who, 99% of the time is a head of sales, right? A sales manager. It might also be led by the founder, because they are, quote, unquote, the brand, and they are visionary, right? So then they're in charge of marketing. But marketing is happening through lower level staff in the business or with agency partners, externally, contractors. It's, it's patched together with no true leader. When that happens, especially in organizations where marketing is sitting under sales leadership, the role of marketing becomes very limited. Little M dilemma. It's limited because it's being looked at through the lens of sales leadership, and that's a really important lens for a company to have, like net new, client acquisition, customer acquisition and growth. Revenue growth is really important. But when you put marketing under that lens, it generally looks like a hyper focus on brand building and demand gen and lead generation, and that's about it like, get more at bats for us, bring more leads in the front door. What it fails to recognize is the critical role that big and marketing ought to be playing across the organization. So for those listening who understand, you know, the traditional sales funnel looks like, we think in terms of flipping that funnel from, you know, the awareness that creates engagement, that converts to a new client or customer, into the expand in expanded funnel on the other side for retention, you know, delight, surprise, advocacy, all of those things. The Big M role of marketing spans across that entire customer life cycle, and it helps the company to tell a consistent promise to the world and to deliver on that promise consistently from marketing, sales, operations and delivery every step of the journey. So when I talk about the little m dilemma, I'm talking about marketing being minimized and subordinate to sales in a way that doesn't create long term, healthy, stable revenue growth and profitability in the business, because marketing needs to play a role in the quality of service and product delivery, in the evolution of that go to market and delivery mechanism, and in building strong advocacy and raving fans, that is the ultimate flywheel. Healthy revenue looks like retention and growth with existing happy buyers.

William Harris  14:39  

And so to your point, going back to the puberty example, we start off this way, and it's necessary, right? Like it's a founder led, and so the founder is wearing a whole bunch of hats. And so it's it falls under the sales and marketing for a little bit, and then eventually it falls to maybe a sales leader. Eventually, maybe you should say it's time to break that out. How do you recognize. When you're at that point where you're saying, Nope, this needs to be separated.

Jennifer Zick  15:04  

Yeah. It usually is at a point where the company feels pretty confident, confident about their overall growth strategy. You know, they have a business plan, they have a strong leadership team. They know what they're aiming to do in terms of growth. And it's also when they have a critical critical mass of marketing activation happening, they are spending probably close to six figures or more, six to seven figures, depending on whether they're B2B or B2C in marketing activation, whether it's advertising spend, digital channels, marketing ops, internal staff, agency partners. They're spending a lot of money, but they are missing the the ladder that connects strategy all the way through to that execution. So they have a lot of activity, and it can be a lot of good things and a lot of good engagement, but they don't have any clear understanding of how that activity actually feeds into healthy growth for the business. So that's usually when we start to hear, you know, a recognition and sometimes a humbling from the leadership team to say, All right, we thought we knew how to lead marketing or even how to hire to build the right team, but we're at the point where we recognize that we don't and we need somebody who can be a very modern marketing orchestrator for this organization, and who can sit on the leadership team and help us think long range brand and value creation and short term alignment and enablement of sales and, you know, the operational delivery of the business.

William Harris  16:39  

Yeah, I think we, you know, you said that this is more for like, sales, but I'll clarify, this is also very much happening within e-commerce, where it's just tactical things for marketing, and so it's like they're running the ads, they're doing the emails, they're doing the SMS pushes, they're doing the things. They've got their sales that they're running right, and they're putting up the the image of their hero banner on the website, like they're doing the tactics. And there's like a calendar, there's like a marketing calendar, whatever, but there's like this lack of strategy and how it's all fitting together. What do you see as in the businesses that you work with as these warning signs that a company is outgrowing that tactical marketing and they need strategy now to come in.

Jennifer Zick  17:30

Yeah, well, by the time we start a conversation with a company, they probably have quite a bit of built up scar tissue and PTSD around the word marketing, because what has happened is, when they have felt the the angst of uncertainty about what marketing is contributing to the business, there's often a lot of misplaced blame. Agencies get fired and called incompetent employees burn out because they're completely under resourced to do the job being asked to them, because nobody's advocating and helping the leadership team understand the burden of what's being asked. So a lot of companies have gone through a lot of churn. They don't know how to make agency partners successful for them, and they are cautious and don't trust agencies anymore, potentially, and they have had turnover in their marketing department if they have marketing team members, because they don't have the right coaching, development and opportunity to grow and be successful and well resourced in their role. So that's happening. That's one of the things that creates enough pain that a company starts to say, hey, we don't know how, how to hire properly, how to manage properly. Don't know which agencies we need or when, or how to make them successful with us, right? The other thing that happens is that businesses reach some critical growth moments and crossroads where maybe the playbook that they've run to get them to the growth they have today has worked, and it's even kind of a an engine that hums along right? It's profitable. It's working. Maybe there's incremental, steady growth, but now the ownership and the leadership has decided that the business needs to grow differently. They're going to grow through acquisition, or they're going to launch a new product, or they're going to enter a new market where the brand isn't known, and the playbook that has worked so far lacks no strategy to guide something so pivotal in change in the business. So those are the things that happen that create the tension to say, Okay, we don't know what we're doing or how to build a team and program that can be successful in scale with us, and we can't just continue to churn and burn bridges and or we've built a great team, but the great team that we have, or the great playbook that we have isn't going to fit where we're going next, and we actually don't know how to architect that or how to think about redistributing resources. Those are two sides of what often is happening. Yeah.

William Harris  20:00  

And we see that all the time. And to your point, we've been on the receiving end of that as an agency, as a growth agency, as an advertising agency, it's like, okay, we're their fifth agency in the last six months, right? And you're just like, I mean, there's a good chance, you know, maybe that's a hyperbole, but yeah, there's a good chance that when you get to this point where you're like, I don't think that there you have a an advertising problem. I think you have a product market fit problem. I think you have a retention problem. There's something else that's going on here. Because clearly you haven't found that many bad agencies, or you could have like, I will say that that's not impossible, because there are a lot of bad players in the space that can just not intentionally, just maybe not as effective. But usually that's a good sign that you're missing something strategically that you need to break whatever that plateau is that you're at.

Jennifer Zick  20:47  

Yeah, absolutely. And a couple things happen when Authentic comes to the table. We ask our clients to not make any sudden moves. Let us get inside the business and assess your existing agency and vendor relationships, and assess your current staff. Because while they might think they have a problem with their marketing coordinator, or they might think they have a problem with their agency, what we almost always find, almost always, not always, but almost always, find that those players are competent, they're just not well directed or integrated, because nobody on the inside speaks their language and can align their swim lanes to work together. And so in the absence of good like collaboration and a common language, agencies will do their best to figure it out on the outside of the business, but they're running a little blind like you probably aren't leveraging their very best capabilities because you haven't translated them into your business and you don't have the right person there to do it. So our model is unique in that when we come in as a fractional CMO, we're not an outside consultant, we're not just one more consultant or agency, we become an insider sitting at the leadership table with full accountability to be that orchestrator and to provide that translation so that we can accurately help the company assess, do we have the right partners? Are they integrated properly? Do their capabilities fit what we actually need right now? Or are we activating a channel strategy that we're not ready for yet, and we need to slow that down and go somewhere else next so we bring that level of like confidence and thoughtful resource management, and that's that's why I've chosen not to be an agency because if we were, there are many agencies who've added quote, fractional cmo to their list of capabilities, but that fractional CMO is actually an agency account manager whose job it is to sell the agency services. At Authentic we don't have any agency services. We simply provide the right leader who represents the client's best interests, and they can be truly agnostic and dedicated resource managers.

William Harris  22:52  

You brought up this idea of marketing having a seat at the executive table, and so let's, let's run with that for a little bit more that said you also told me before that directors aren't CMOs. Explain the tension between the two?

Jennifer Zick  23:07  

Yeah, well, and there's even tension in how many of us as owners of growth businesses have been trained to think about the right org chart or accountability chart, because there is a there are a lot of materials that would say, you know, you you have a CEO or visionary. You should have a head of sales and marketing ahead of ops and delivery or services, and a head of finance and admin like that's kind of your skeleton org chart. And I know as a founder who bootstrapped my company and still am growing it that way, that you can't fill every seat with a true executive right out of the gates. You really can't, you shouldn't, but there become times when you really need the wisdom of a true executive. And that was the whole philosophy for why I started Authentic, was that I recognized that most businesses wait far too long to bring a senior level marketing leader in, and even when they do a director level is probably going to be tucked under a VP of sales and marketing, or a VP or a CRO chief revenue officer, and that person is almost always the head of sales, so it puts marketing, even with a very capable director, in a subservient role that is going to be focused on a sales funnel driven mindset of tactics that impact today's pipeline, and that is really missing out in the bigger strategic role of marketing across the entire customer journey. So I think I'm I've said enough here, William, that I actually have forgotten what your original question is now. So I might not have even answered that. I was doing a big, long setup on that.

William Harris  24:36

No, no, we're getting there. And so it's this idea of the difference between the director and the CMO and somebody, let me, let me piggyback off that. What does a true cmo do in an executive meeting that most marketers or director marketers are not doing? Yeah.

Jennifer Zick  24:50

So we actually have, and you can find this on our website, our Authentic growth marketing roadmap, and as part of that roadmap, we have roles along the left side. Showing at the strategy level of the organization the executive roles involved. And then as you move down the the the roadmap you get down to, like the marketing foundation. And underneath that, it's resources, it's budget and people, and underneath that, it's management of people, programs and process and under that it's tactical execution, all right, so I grew up through all of those responsibilities in my own career, I was a marketing specialist, and then became a marketing manager, and then a director and a senior director before I was ever an EVP, and those are very fundamentally different jobs a director of marketing is going to be able to play at that layer of people, program, prog, prog, Process Management, and assemble the team underneath that's going to deliver on the channel and the content and the tactical strategies. That's what a director does. A CMO knows how to navigate pivotal go to market decision making with the entire executive team, decisions around product lineup, pricing strategy, market saturation, you know, competitive differentiation, mergers and acquisitions, all of these pivotal decisions that happen to support the growth of a business at the executive level, that's where a CMO plays, And then they also lead all the way through that roadmap. So when we step into an organization as a fractional CMO, half of our clients don't even have marketing staff yet. So our role has to be incredibly scrappy. We have to sit at the top with the strategic executive expertise, and then we have to lead all the way down until we get the resources in place that can scale underneath. Right? That doesn't mean that we're writing social media posts like we're going to use our time effectively, but we have to be able to understand exactly how you build marketing from the ground up and put up pieces in place at level with where the business is at.

William Harris  26:58  

I feel like having a seat at the table allows marketing to be more cross functional, right? They're now interacting more with ops. They're interacting more with finance. When that happens, what fundamentally changes within the business now that that's more marketing cross functional?

Jennifer Zick  27:17  

Yeah, well, conversations start to happen that weren't happening before, like, I was just talking with a CMO the other day about how one of their clients had set this growth objective to, you know, whatever the growth was that they wanted to ramp up in sales, and they had built a sales organization to do that, to, like, go get all this new business, and they were starting to show some impact in their pipeline around that goal. But nobody had stopped to ask, how are we able to operationalize if we get these sales, do we have the capacity to support that growth, or are we going to get ourselves in a position to have to create a wait list with new buyers or existing customers that starts to erode the brand promise and the experience and the quality so marketing like think of the CMO as the person who's holding the hand of the sales leader who wants to go get more business, and holding the hand of the delivery leader, saying, can we even deliver and still maintain our brand promise and our experience that we want? Can this be quality, healthy, authentic growth, or is this going to be chaotic growth that demoralizes our team, strains our systems, breaks our process, and erodes our brand, because it takes forever to build brand trust and equity and just, you know, a few bad decisions to erode it.

William Harris  28:33

I've run into this exact same scenario, or like very similar scenario in e-commerce. We had a client that said, hey, our goal is to double our ad spend month over month. Like we're crushing it. Like you guys are doing a great job. ROAs is way off the charts, right? Like, let's go. We're gonna double our sales gold, and that's the bar directive from the marketing. We're excited about that. Obviously, we charge a percent of ad spend less. Very exciting thing for us. And so, you know, normal agency would probably just go and spend it without any other thought. But we're very integrated, and we believe that we're working with their CFO, we're working with their ops team as well. We think that is just necessary. And so our question is, great, how much inventory you have? Oh, you only have 50% more inventory. Well, we can't double the budget if you don't have double the inventory, because then you're just going to be end up spinning very unprofitably. This is not going to be good for your business. And so for your business. And so similarly, that's that idea where it's like even the marketing team within that organization, they weren't communicating. And so we're trying to help them build those bridges between those different functions, because that's when it allows them to grow profitably and thoughtfully.

Jennifer Zick  29:37

Absolutely, yeah. So there's a lot of scenarios there where that cross functional leadership really shows up another you know, we serve clients across all different business models and sectors, and you you tend to see that either businesses are started by visionary people who know how to sell, but might not be the people who actually develop the product or service, or they're started by brilliant engineer. Clients who know how to build a product, but they might not know how to sell, right? When we're working with engineering minded companies or even partner led firms with core expertise, they often and let's talk about a product company or a SaaS company. You and I both grew up in the SaaS world, right? So SaaS companies are usually started by brilliant technologists, right? And they care about the precision of the product. So what we generally find when we show up is that they have over budgeted into product engineering and design and development and have never invested properly in voice of customer research and market research to understand what elements of the product matter most and are most highly valued by the ideal end users, right? And so they are. They're out of balance, and marketing has to take a cross functional look at what's in the budget, who's on staff. How do we how do we create the right balance of listening to the market? Because we've all seen well established best in class Cadillac software solutions that have been around for 10 years suddenly get eaten for lunch by the new kid on the block that brought three out of their 30 components to market faster with better marketing. And it's exactly what the market needed, right?

William Harris  31:16

So let's say that we get this person at the table. Let's say that you're a $25 million brand, and we get our fractional cmo involved. What is likely? What are likely the main one or two things that they're stuck with that they likely need to come in and fix for this organization?

Jennifer Zick  31:39  

Well, I wish that I could tell you it's the same things every time that would make our success in onboarding easy, the first thing they have to do is find out what the unique answer to that question is. And so we've designed a very tight, rigorous discovery and onboarding process that allows our CMOs to step in from day one and play a dual role, as we say, be both at the helm right away as a strategic advisor on the leadership team and quickly under the hood for the diagnostics. And we've developed specific tools to help us very quickly get the voice of our clients input into that and then assess and analyze and look at the artifacts and everything that they have in motion today. Because what we're looking for is, where are there really strong muscles, where are their weak and undeveloped muscles? And how do we create balance across the body of what marketing needs to be? And it looks different in every company. Some companies we enter have spent a lot of time and have been very thoughtful in building out their brand and their message, and they've got it nailed, but they're completely not set up when it comes to a thoughtful martech stock in it, in martech stack, or any process around that. Then we come into other companies that have really rigorous marketing operations, but they've got all the all the engineering and architecture to support a really bad message, like it's not a formed message, it's not reaching the right audience. So it doesn't matter that their technology is mature, right? So we have to find where the gaps are. We always are having to help them navigate. How do they think about budgeting for marketing? What's the rationale? What are the Theses that we need to embrace? And every company has a different thesis or set of theses around marketing investment, because the benchmarks are different across industries. And then you've got businesses that are modeled differently. Some of them are VC or PE backed, and they've got money they need to deploy and quickly, and others are bootstrapped, like my business, and they're found, you know, privately held, and they want to thoughtfully invest, but it's not going to move as fast, right?

William Harris  33:40

So I love, I love that you pronounce the plural of theses correct, because I feel like a lot of people miss that. So first of all, thank you. That was very good. My little literature. Heart jumped for joy. But as far as this idea of like, there needing to be this custom, I'm going to the Timberwolves game tonight, and so that's on my mind a little bit basketball. I grew up playing basketball. I love basketball. And similarly, it's like, if you say, Well, you know, well, what do you need to do to turn a team around? And it's like, man, there's It depends. Do you have somebody who can shoot but not rebound? Do you have somebody who's rebounding but you can't shoot? And it's like, it really depends on doing that assessment first and figuring out, like, where are the gaps within the team, within the organization, and figuring that out, and then you can apply the right thing, because all of these components are necessary. Just don't know where that is until you kind

Jennifer Zick  34:24

of look totally and I don't know much about professional basketball, but I do remember a story I heard, and I don't know what team this was or at what level, but a story about a coach who inherited a really underperforming basketball team, and he actually started by changing their socks and their shoes

William Harris  34:41

really, okay. I gotta know why. I

Jennifer Zick  34:44  

gotta find this. Maybe I'll ask my friend chat GPT, where this story came from. It was because, like, they didn't have shoes with good arch support and the right grips their socks were causing, like, their feet weren't healthy, you know, like, it's he literally started at, like, super Foundation. But he ended up building an absolute dominant basketball team over a few years of like, find the problem you can fix right now that's actually going to systemically impact everything. So I got to go find that somebody who's listening knows what I'm talking about. And I didn't just make this up.

William Harris  35:16  

I believe you, but I love that. I don't, I don't know the story, but I love that idea of just, I mean, let's just even talk about feet for a second. Like, think about how foundation of it is. It's like, if you're walking, if you're running, and if you're jumping, it's like, all of those things need to happen. And it's like, what's the feet of our business? Like, what are the those things that you're you're building off of that? And it's like, well, you and I are both in marketing. Say, marketing is a big part of that, right? So let's, let's just say, what's the feat of marketing? And it is those foundational things kind of like what you're just saying, where it's like, none of the other tactics matter if you don't have a good foundation, if you don't have a good, you know, strategy around what you're trying to do. Yeah, I'm stretching it, but I like that.

Jennifer Zick  35:54  

Yeah, a couple things I want to reflect on that. So a funny quote from a past colleague of mine was in regards to like, companies that have really robust architecture and marketing automation and campaigns and content and prolific activities, but they have never really buttoned up their message and their strategy and their unique value proposition. His comment on that is, all these activities you're doing is just making your brand suck faster to more people,

William Harris  36:21  

right? That's true. Yeah, yeah, yes, that

Jennifer Zick  36:24

can happen. So like, message and brand is foundational. It's absolutely foundational. You should not be revving up activity if you're not clear on that. But also, I like to say, and you know, that in the the life we've both lived in marketing, marketing has gone from, you know, 30 years ago when I entered the scene, marketing was a discipline that had like, five tools in its tool belt, and now there's 5 million. I mean, it's just exponential the number of technologies, tactics and and tricks you could use as a marketer, it's unlimited. But in that complex landscape that's growing ever more complex faster than ever, marketing fundamentals are as simple as ever, not easy, but simple. And it's really about answering four questions. Which is, who do we want to matter to? Why should we matter to them? How do we enter their natural habitat and when we get there, how do we build trust? Right? Not sell something. Build trust, and then how do we do that at scale? Because a lot of businesses succeed in doing those things within their known networks. Right when I started Authentic, my first clients were people who already knew Jennifer Zick trusted me, wanted to work with me so I knew who I wanted to matter to, why I mattered to them, how I was in their natural habitat. I was already there, and I already had their trust, but building brand at scale to earn the trust of people who haven't known you before and then deliver on the promise that you make to them so that they trust you more and then not break that promise as you go by making bad decisions. Right?

William Harris  37:55  

So, yeah, you brought up the idea of fractional. And I think this is an interesting concept, because fractional has changed a lot over the last, I don't know, few years here, it seems like fractional is seen as a bridge. And I'd admit that that's typically how I have viewed fractional as well. You're gonna get somebody in here like this is in my thought, right? You're going to get somebody in here who is going to provide that strategic, top down cmo approach. They're going to make sure that they put the right people in place, the right processes in place, and then you let like your director take over from there. Yeah, why? Why is that wrong? That's a

Jennifer Zick  38:41  

question I wouldn't have been able to answer nine years ago when I started Authentic because first of all, when I started my business, I didn't even know the word fractional yet. I just knew that small growth businesses needed access to true marketing executive wisdom sooner than they thought they did, and the way that I wanted to bring it to them was on a part time basis, contracted, but with a seat at the table. That's what I knew. And my first hypothesis for my business was that we would be a bridge solution. I'm like, I'm going to create a methodology which we now call Authentic growth. I'm going to train our CMOs to bring this methodology, which is a complete marketing operating system, into these businesses, sit at the leadership table, help build that marketing, operational platform, address some of the weak points, shore it up a bit, and then either promote somebody in from the company to continue running it, or bring someone in from the outside to sit in that seat. And you're right that for most small, mid sized businesses, they wouldn't, at that point be ready for a full time cmo that would have been a manager or director level person. So my first generational thinking about this was, we're going to be in there for about a year, then we're going to hand it off, and they're going to smooth sailing. Well a few years down the line, that started to become challenged from two directions. First, the clients who chose to keep us on longer they're. Results kept getting stronger and stronger, so that made me question, like, if my value prop should truly be ended at 12 months, right? We were walking ourselves out of delivering greater value for the client. The other thing that was happening is, for the clients that we did hand off the work to we had finally gotten them to this big M kind of thinking, and then they put marketing in a little emerald underneath the head of sales and marketing, and it just went from being think strategically. Here's a framework to behave strategically, to operate tactically, and being asked to think strategically, but not empowered, never empowered to say no, not yet. And let me get into the conversation with you about the big things happening in the business so that I can be strategic. So those two things were happening, and so over the last several years, we've really changed the way that we approach client engagements to say we're going to be on a journey together. It's a multi year journey. A year goes quickly. You build a marketing plan and a budget for a year, and you implement it over 90 day sprints, you learn the market changes. We certainly live in a very dynamic world right now. The plan that you started the year with won't be where you end the year with, and you have to stay very agile. And then the next year comes flying in really fast. So what I'm observing now, which is super interesting, is that at least in the marketing space that we're in fractional is it went from being like a bridge solution to a long term relationship, and now I'm seeing it take a new shape as a forever solution for many of our clients, and when I say forever, I mean for the life cycle of their business, because many of the SMB companies that We work with are positioning themselves to be acquired. Many of them are PE backed, and we're going to build value with them for three to five years. It makes no sense for them to bring in a full time, permanent head count when they need to create fluidity in their P and L and be flexible. And the fact is, when they're going to lead their business through a major transformation like an acquisition, they actually need real executive advisors in there, Leading Change Management, integrating brands and solutions. So we've led M and A's through multiple acquisitions for the same core client, right? So, and then the other thing that's happening that's fascinating is that AI, which we embrace at Authentic but with what we call Authentic intelligence, which is never devaluing the human, relational aspect that is the heart of building a brand and marketing. We're not out to get rid of humans, but we're out to leverage AI appropriately and thoughtfully to make accelerate what we can do right? And it really, really does. So our CMOs, who work fractionally for our clients, are now leveraging our methodology, backed up by AI, research backed up by AI. There's so much solution that's accelerated that the role that would have been filled by a full time cmo on staff can now be delivered on a part time basis with much more efficiency. And the teams underneath are changing shape too. What used to be marketing teams that were made up of a variety of internal roles and agency partners outside are now more often made up of a fractional cmo one to two program, project or operating leaders day to day, spinning the plates and then a variety of agencies, contractors, offshore, AI solutions. So it's a dynamic time to build a marketing organization, and a lot of executives are realizing that the marketing seat is a very dynamic seat, so to fill it with a permanent head count and count on that one person's realm of experience, being able to ebb and flow with them is a pretty risky maneuver.

William Harris  43:44

We've seen this a lot of times in other areas where, let's say that you do have that really great director, right? Like they're absolutely sensational, but you no longer have that CMO over top of them, even fractionally, right? You remove that fractional cmo for a second. Let's say that you don't put them underneath the sales director. Let's say that they still operate independently, right? They have a seat at the table, but the person who's leading them, managing them, is the founder, CEO, and they have no idea how to set any measurable goals for them. They have no idea Well, the right ones, right? They have no idea how to help them fix something if it's broken or if it's wrong, they just they lack the ability to be able to effectively guide them to make sure that they're still going in the right direction. And so to your point, it's like, look, they started their course, and they are on this direction, but if they were off by one degree within a year, that's a pretty significant amount of space and distance from where they're supposed to be. And so having that that true marketing leader over top of them helps to clarify course correct make sure that they're staying on track.

Jennifer Zick  44:49  

Yeah, for sure. And there's a couple other things to think about in that scenario, in particular, because if that marketing leader is on the leadership team, but working with a you know, visionary CEO. So what often happens with full time employees is that when they're hired new, they have about a year of optimistic opportunity to be change agents and bring new solutions to the table and be and have a CEO who's open minded, because they're bringing someone in New, and they expect them to make change. But after about a year, what happens for most employees is that they end up getting immersed in and assimilated into whatever the cultural norms are in that business, the politics positioning the loudest voices and and they start to whether you want to or not, you start to lead from a position of self preservation because your job is on the line, right? And so one of the real benefits of bringing in a fractional head of any department that's not your core for the business is that the person who is fractional isn't trying to preserve their full time job. They get to be and need to be your truth teller. They will challenge the CEO. I mean, if you bring a real executive in so Authentic CMOs are not yes men and women, they don't wait for the CEO to tell them what they're going to be measured by or how to fix something. They tell the CEO what they're going to be measured by and what to expect from them and how they're going to fix something. And then they look for alignment with the CEO. And if the CEO is asking for something outside of left field, they're not they're going to stand toe to toe and negotiate and understand the trade offs and then get in alignment, right? So that's the difference. You need to have executives who are not intimidated by the CEO, who want to collaborate, who are all humbly confident in representing the company's best interests, and aren't trying to posture and politic and preserve.

William Harris  46:41

Yeah, what is one metric that those CMOs should be looking at that maybe a lot of leadership teams aren't currently

Jennifer Zick  46:50  

well in the clients that we serve? It's it's sometimes shocking. It shouldn't be anymore, after nine years of this, how few real insights they have around marketing and healthy revenue performance, and often that's because they've never had the leadership to put systems in place to collect accurate data, which can gather over time to become insightful organized data with patterns. Once you have enough data, over time, you can see patterns, and once you can see patterns, eventually you can glean insights, right? And that takes time to stack up over years of bringing data together, so many of our clients have been stuck in performance metrics, engagement metrics, activity levels, rather than the kinds of marketing metrics that help them measure healthy contribution to the growth of the business and the value creation of the business. So some of the metrics that we home in on in our role, or we build the infrastructure to be able to get to, would be CAC or cost of acquisition, LTV, lifetime value of any customer you we're looking at NPS scores, net promoter scores, CSAT, customer satisfaction. We're looking at retention and churn. We're looking at, you know, cross sell up, sell within accounts. We're looking at, how long does it take to close a deal? How clean is your deal pipeline? Are they sandbagging? Is it or is it real? Can we actually accurately forecast on this? You know, all of those kinds of things are the the metrics that really matter to help turn the dials and the levers to optimize the performance between sales and marketing, if you're a B2B or B2C, company that has a sales organization and a marketing organization, those metrics bleed together, and they have to work together.

William Harris  48:46

You said home in you don't know how happy I am to hear you say that one correctly, too. These are things that people get wrong all the time.

Jennifer Zick  48:54  

I pick these little fights with my team all the time, and I'll ask them, Do you think it's this or this because I'm a I'm a Communications major in an English minor. Okay, now that I've said I'm a nerdy word girl, I will definitely say something wrong on this the rest,

William Harris  49:08  

Oh, for sure, that's how it goes. I have a poem that I have to send you. It's called the chaos by Richard, something I don't remember his name, really, really interesting, but it's just like all of these different English words and how they're not spelled anywhere, like what you would think they're very, very good. I think, I think he was, like, a French guy or something, but I will send it to you afterwards. I don't have it all, remember, but it's called the chaos. But I'm also very wordy nerd person, and so I just You said it, and I was like, man, everybody gets that wrong. And I appreciated that. Okay, back on track here. If marketing is working perfectly, then, so we bring in the right fractional person, we set all these things up. We're tracking the right things. What's that CEO going to feel? How do they know that it's finally working correctly and that it's not just we've got a bunch of metrics that says that we're doing a good job, but you know, business isn't any different. Like, how do they start to know that this. Says it's on the right track and that things are about to shift for them.

Jennifer Zick  50:03  

Yeah. Well, there's two things I want to say to this. I'm going to write them down a little bit so I don't lose my thought, CEO, okay, so first of all, Nirvana might get reached in terms of your marketing program and plan and performance, and it's never, ever permanent. Because just like we saw this past year in America, we had clients whose, you know, everything that was in place was working, all ships were rising, things were humming along, and suddenly tariffs changed, yeah, and everything went up in the air, and suddenly you're built, rebuilding a plan in real time for how do you go to market and make a brand promise while knowing your pricing is going to change every single day, because you don't know Right? Like, how do you carry your brand promise through times of volatility, times of rapid change? So first of all, a CEO should never bank on Well, we're going to get our sales and marketing teams, you know, to build a strategy and build a plan and build a program, and then it's going to create a flywheel that just keeps producing. There is no golden goose when it comes to this, because markets change and businesses change. But in our engagement, within our methodology of Authentic growth, we use a tool, a simple tool, a 20 question survey called the random acts of marketing assessment. We also use another tool that we've built, called the growth survey. When we onboard clients, we have various leaders in the organization take the random acts marketing assessment, and then the top two to three executives take the growth survey. We repeat the random acts assessment every single quarter, and we repeat the growth survey every year. And so we're we're comparing their own assessment to their prior assessment, so we're baselining that, and we're looking across these 20 different question attributes in that assessment. And what we find consistently, when I did an analysis of over 2000 responses last year is that across the board, in our client engagements, not only do clients report a lift on four or five of the attributes, but consistently across the board, all 20 of those attributes are rising, rising, rising in in the confidence, clarity and performance. And the first thing that changes in that assessment is the question around the confidence that they have, in that they have a marketing leader who has the skills and the ability and the capacity to lead that they feel confident in that when we start, they don't have that confidence because they haven't had that person. The first thing that spikes in their survey by the first full quarter is their confidence in the leader, and then all the other metrics follow behind. So it's not auto magical. You know, you're not going to move from a 35 you know score out of 100 on your random acts of marketing assessment to being an 85 next quarter, but you will make that progress with us, quarter over quarter over quarter, and that's why we've gone from being a bridge solution that just teaches you how to do this to being a confident leader that stays with you on the journey. Because progress is forever. Markets will keep changing. Your business will keep changing, so there's always work to be done. So that's what a CEO in the leadership team is going to feel. They're going to feel confidence, clarity, alignment, and that they have the right sized resource plan around their marketing

William Harris  53:14  

huge I always think it's interesting to learn more about the human beings behind these wise words. And so I want to learn more about Jennifer Zick today. You told me that you kind of grew up in scarcity a little bit. Tell me about that. And how did that shape you to be the leader that you are today.

Jennifer Zick  53:34  

It brings me a lot of joy to think back to really God's faithfulness in my life at every single step and kind of where I started, and the life I started in, and also the way I was provided for, and how that life has grown and changed. But yeah, when I was born to teenage parents, my mom and dad were teenagers and had four kids. By the time my mom was 24 they didn't have any financial support from their families, and so they certainly struggled. And my dad struggled with drug addiction. From, you know, from the beginning, my mom was a person of great faith and fortitude in the midst of the struggle. Not to say she didn't have her challenges, but she made a stable life for us, even in those times when, you know, we lived in the trailer court and we were living off of food stamps, and my dad would disappear for long periods of time, and so we didn't have stability, but we had a lot of love and a firm foundation through our mom. And so I definitely grew up in a in a home that didn't have extra resources, though there was a lot of stress around finances. By the time I was 12, I was earning my keep and, you know, working extra jobs to afford whatever it is that I might need or want above and beyond my basic needs, but I built a really strong faith basis and a really strong work ethic from a young age. And the people around me, including my mom, my grandma, teachers, a. Others poured into me and spoke into my life about strengths that they saw. And I just caught a vision for a bigger life than the life that I had seen around me in my small town. And I was given some opportunities to experience a world that was bigger than that, and I fell in love with that. And so I just, you know, I continued making cautious decisions as I went through college and into marriage and into my career, but I also was blessed with a lot of really amazing experiences along the way. And it was several years ago, when I was 35 years old and I had three little kids that I and I had a great, stable career at that point, a really meaningful career, and so did my husband, and we were so blessed. But when I was 35 I survived ovarian cancer, and that experience, anybody will tell you, that's faced, you know, the possibility of imminent mortality. You know you face your mortality like that. For some people, like for myself, it wakes you up to the preciousness of life we all have just this one short, precious life. And you know, I'd always been a person of faith, but I started to recognize that I had made a lot of decisions out of fear and scarcity, and I wanted to learn how to make decisions out of faith and abundance and joy. And so that's been a journey I've been on, gosh, I that's been over the last 10 plus years of leaning into more faith, more joy, in my decision making and learning to make decisions out of love. And that's taken a lot of therapy, a lot of inner work and healing a lot, but it's totally transformed the way I think about the world. And when I was 39 so a few years after that cancer scare, was when I lost my job for the first time, and I had still been building a thoughtful, cautious career, you know, with a steady paycheck. And when I lost my job, it pushed me off a cliff in the very best possible way, because it gave me just that moment to evaluate my life and what I really wanted from life, and decide to make some decisions out of belief and faith and joy and nurture a little entrepreneurial seed that I hadn't even necessarily recognized, that I had. So that was when I started Authentic from my kitchen table, without much of a plan at all. Love it, but with a lot of faith, and it's just been a real blessing to build this business and build it from a place of love. I definitely also brought some you know, losing a job creates a lot of emotions, too. So you could say that the launch of my business was fueled a little bit by that loss and anger and like I will show you, but it really quickly turned into an opportunity to heal, to grow and to lean into love. So that's been my journey, and I'm not perfect at it. Yet I still catch myself sometimes being tempted to make a decision to avoid pain or because I'm afraid of something, but at least I can see it more now.

William Harris  58:00

I love that you are able to look at things that other people would say are, you know, tragedies, very bad things, and you look at them and you're calling them blessings, more or less. What are some of the ways, I mean, you've talked about therapy and things like that, but like, what are some of the practical ways that you have begun to shift your mindset away from seeing them that way, and being able to say to your point, like having a different frame of mind around those events, practical things that other because I guarantee there are other founders that are going through things, that are struggling with, things that are making decisions out of fear, like, how do you how did you break that cycle? What are some

Jennifer Zick  58:45

practical things? There's a lot of things that I threw into the pot together that have been a recipe to help me in this way. So I'll share a few of them. So first of all, you know, you hear that you become like the five people you spend the most time with, right? So I have really intentionally built friendships with successful entrepreneurs that I admire for the way they hold their values front and center, they prioritize their families. They give their everything like they have high energy and enthusiasm about what they do, but they don't lose themselves in the process of it. So I try to stay close with people who whose lives look like what I'm aspiring to live. I start every single day with time reading my Bible and in prayer and just getting centered on foundational truths that help I feel help keep me rooted and grounded in making decisions out of a center of values and peace and faith and not fear. I put myself through a 12 step program because as the daughter of an addict and the daughter of a codependent married to an addict, there were a lot of things that were wounds from my past that I had never been given language to understand that I needed to go through a full. Year program of documenting and looking at through completely new eyes and with mentorship and group talk, that was eye opening for me, because I always thought only an addict needed a 12 step program. But it turns out, any human being who's ever faced a struggle, which is any of us can benefit from that. I worked with a therapist, myself, doing some EMDR therapy and other things to just work through past trauma. My husband and I went into therapy to start building a vision for the marriage that we're crafting, not what we necessarily inherited. We've changed advisors in my business and in our life to help align with that vision. And I hired a business coach last year, an entrepreneur that I really admire, who has done some things really, you know, hard fought but well earned wins, and I've been getting guidance from her, and I sit in two other CEO peer groups as well, because I shared with you before, like, I keep this scripture by the side of my desk, Proverbs, 522, that plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors, they succeed. And I don't actually know what I'm doing. You know, every single day I'm living life for the first time and running my business from a new perspective. You know, we're all just figuring out life for the first time, and I need wise counsel and wise advisers around me in functional advisory roles, mentors, spiritual guides, my personal strength training, trainers. You know, all of those things, they all so all those are a lot of the things I've thrown into the pot that has helped, you know, bubble up and refine I think who I am, and I really feel like I am a different person than I was nine years ago when I started this business, and I need to be to continue building the business and and building the life that I see in front of me now,

William Harris  1:01:58  

congratulations, it's it's so encouraging. There's so many things that you talked about that I absolutely love there. I'm with you on reading my Bible every morning. That is, it's a non negotiable, right? Like, I need to do that. I need to you called out, like, this idea of starting with foundational truth, and it's like, you need to have that thing that you can stand on, that you're like, but this here is a rock. This is true. And once I'm on solid ground, it makes all the other decisions a lot easier to do. And I really appreciate that verse of having wise counsel around you. I feel like I've been blessed to have so many good mentors as well, spiritual mentors, business mentors, you know, going to parenting and like, all kinds of things, right? Like, whatever it is that I'm trying to work through, I think that's just really, really cool that you've gone through that. Thank you. Wow. Thank you.

Jennifer Zick  1:02:51  

It's again, that's like, one of the blessings is to be able to share that part of my story. And I really do count all of the all of the bumps along the way, really are blessings when you can understand that what's happening isn't happening to you, it's happening for you, and when you embrace that, it's happening for you, it's not just happening for you, it's happening for the people whose lives you get to touch. You know that we, I hope, that we can be shining a light and being an encouragement, because the world needs it now more than ever,

William Harris  1:03:18  

for sure. Yes, we need a lot more light in our world. Tell me about your mom closet.

Jennifer Zick  1:03:28  

I love this. Okay, well, and if you saw my LinkedIn post from today, it was my mom closet is mentioned. It was about comparing the role of a fractional CMO to the role of a general contractor. And this, you know, is because my husband and I have embarked on finishing our basement. We've lived in our home for 21 years. We always thought we would be moving somewhere else, but our kids have gotten so rooted where we live, and now they're launching. We've got one out of college, one in college, one in high school. The family dynamic is growing. And the really weird thing that happens that nobody told me would happen at this stage of life, you start to think that maybe you could downsize your home. But instead, what happens is the kids are gone most of the time, but when they come home now they're bringing plus ones. My daughter's bringing a cat. We've got two dogs. My kids are like full grown adults who need more space of their own. And then they bring all their friends over, which is, like, truly my dream. I love being the house with all the friends, but like, we don't need more space all the time, but we need more space. And we each need more personal space, because all the bodies in the house are big, grown up people now. So when we decided to finally finish our basement, which used to be just the kids hockey rink down there, I had to carve out a section that I call my mom closet, because nowhere in my entire house do I have a room that's just for me. I do not work at home, so the home office is my husband's because he works at home. So I don't have any place I can close the door and be alone without my dogs and my kids nearby when they're there. So I have a mom closet that's being. Built now, and it doesn't even have a single window, but it has all the space for me to organize the things that I want. And I told you, William, that I actually started a new hobby for the first time in, Gosh, 25 years. So for the first time since I, like, got married and started having children, now that they're launching, I have a little extra margin to do things that I want to do for myself, including art. And so now I have a space for my supplies. It's blissful. I go down every day and look at how the construction progress is coming along. It's all framed in my outlets are ready to plug my, I don't know, hot glue gun into. I don't know what I'll plug in, but I'll find something.

William Harris  1:05:37  

Yeah, so like, what is, what is your your art medium of choice?

Jennifer Zick  1:05:42  

Well, you know, I went into college as a studio art major and a vocal music minor, because I came out of high school passionate, a passionate performer. I was a theater girl and a music girl and choir and band and a Speech and Drama girl, right? And I didn't know how to convert that into a career, and I was the first in my family to go to college, so I also didn't know what to do with myself, so I went in as a studio art major and realized I'm not good enough to actually make a career out of any of this. I need to pick a real career path. But in college, I got to dabble in in pottery and ceramics, which I absolutely love, and I will do that again someday, but you need to be able to be in a studio several days a week, and I can't do that yet. So what I've chosen for right now is watercolor paint. And I am having so much fun, because when I stop and I get all my supplies out and I sit down, time slows down, my brain declutters. I'm not thinking about work. It's I love it. It's very therapeutic. And I've started getting my kids and my mom involved, so when they're around, we do it as a group project. It's so fun.

William Harris  1:06:46  

We moved my podcast room maybe a month ago or so. So people are watching this. Might notice the backgrounds slightly different. We moved out of the house, actually over to another location, which gave us an extra room. We turn that room into an art room. And so my wife is a lot more artistic than I am, but I like art as well. And when we do our anniversary, we always do, like a trip for our anniversary. We like to do watercolors. And we will do watercolors kind of of just like random things that we see. It might be like the place that we're staying at or, you know, we go to a wine bar and we're doing a watercolor of the people sitting in front of us, or whatever it might be, right? We just like to do this. And so I'm not good at it. It's pretty bad, but it's just fun to do it. But I would say that I like to draw a little bit of something with pen and then watercolor around it. Do you draw first or do you just watercolor? No, I just go straight

Jennifer Zick  1:07:41  

for the paint of the paper. And I haven't done any formal training. I've watched a grand total of about three minutes of online tutorials. Because even in watercolor, I have three different mediums I'm playing with, from the watercolor, like packed paint to the squeeze paint to I just ordered watercolor pens. They all, they're all super fun to play with, but I here's who I am. I don't follow a recipe. When I cook, I just throw things together till it seems like it tastes good. And I don't follow a tutorial. When I paint, I just start and watercolor is surprisingly forgiving. Actually, you can like it can start out looking really ugly and turn into something as you go. So I do look at other sources for inspiration, and then I take those concepts down to my to my paper. But it's just been so fun. I try not to give myself too many rules about it, because I just want it to be, you know, just a creative free for all. And so this morning, it was so cute. This morning, my husband said to me, because I just started this, but I have already really loving it. It's like, oh, it makes me so happy to see your little watercolors throughout the house, because I've framed a couple of them. And I'm like, Ah,

William Harris  1:08:50  

that's so good. I love that. Speaking of your husband, I understand there's an interesting story about how you guys met. Maybe the song every move you make, I'll be watching you. I don't know, this stalker idea comes out.

Jennifer Zick  1:09:07  

This is such a fun podcast, because you know so much about me already. Okay, so, yeah, so growing up in a small town with you know, my mom was a mostly stay at home mom, and a lot of the moms were that was really my vision that I had for myself. And my teachers and others inspired me to go on to college. And I thought I was going to college to get a degree, get a husband, and then work for a little while, then stay home and have babies. And I thought I would be a stay at home mom, which is a very noble calling, um, but so I had a plan, but I went into college. Um, before I even started thinking about meeting anybody. I was assigned to a registration group when we were coming onto campus that summer before classes started, and I had not yet declared my studio art major. I hadn't declared any major. I had just written on my college application that I was interested in computer graphic design or desktop publishing, which did not have a four year liberal arts. Degree. So they put me in the computer science registration group, which was a bunch of geek boys, and then me the cheerleader, and my now husband, who was a geologist, a geology student, was actually working for the admissions office that summer, and he was assigned to as the student helper to our group. So clearly, I needed a lot of guidance, because I didn't know how to register for you know, I didn't know whether I needed five credits or 50, or what general classes would be. So he literally sat beside me and helped me the whole time. So fast forward, at the end of the registration process, our faculty advisor handed our folders back, picked them up off the table. None of us knew that she had gotten she'd given my folder to him and his to me, parted ways for the rest of the summer. I didn't think anything about him. Meanwhile, he went home, opened up his folder and my photo, my senior photo, fell out because I had been told to bring it to campus for the campus newspaper. So anyway, all summer long, he had my picture. And he's a very you know, he's a shy guy, thoughtful, shy, analytical dude. He had my picture, which he thought I slipped to him. So all summer, his confidence was building that I was into him where I hadn't thought of him at all. And I'm an extrovert and very social. So when we came back to the small campus in the fall, I saw him. I went right up to him to say hello, because that's what I do, and he was all the more boosted in believing that I was really into him. And so right on the spot, he's like, Hey, we should hang out sometime watch a movie. I'm like, that'd be great, because I have no friends, right? And so we did so good, we did start hanging out, and about a month later, after we were officially dating, I saw I saw his room for the first time, and my picture was hanging on his wall. And that's when the whole story unraveled. I'm like, where did you get my photo? You stalker? So you can call it fate or intervention or just serendipity, but that's how we met, and it's been 30 years since then.

William Harris  1:11:54  

I absolutely love that story. I think it's so funny when, like you said serendipitously something like that happens that we we otherwise you can't plan for that. I think this actually happens in marketing a lot as well, in growing a business. I don't know if you feel this way as well, but there are things that we feel like we can plan where I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, and this is going to happen, and that doesn't happen, but something else happens as a result of just kind of be in the right place at the right time, and if you hadn't done those right things, and you still wouldn't be there. And so, you know, there's all the things that we can measure, and then there's all the things that we can't measure when it comes to marketing, but just life in general, oh, it's so true.

Jennifer Zick  1:12:39  

And the older I get, and hopefully wiser, the more I recognize that almost everything is actually outside of my control. There are some things under my influence, but there's almost nothing within my control, unless it has to do with my own behavior, right? So learning how like, learning to live in abundance, a big part of that is learning to live in a posture of surrender about and choosing not to be anxious about and grasping for and striving for the things you can't control, but thoughtfully intentionally planning and taking the next step, you know, bravely moving forward, and then welcoming those unknown disruptions as probably interventions, because there's a plan that's better than my plan, right? So, yeah,

William Harris  1:13:29  

it reminds me of a Bible verse that I have on my memory list that I want to memorize. I had to look it up real quick. Proverbs, 21, five, the plans of the diligent lead to profit, as surely as haste leads to poverty. It's like, oh, that's so good if we if we have plans and we're diligent, we follow through. It's like that leads towards good things, but very often, rushing hastiness, that lack of planning, whatever it's going to lead towards, sometimes very, very quick growth and then very quick decline as well, right? Or, or just no growth, or whatever it is, like, it doesn't lead towards the things that you want, yeah.

Jennifer Zick  1:14:08

And if you think about that verse that you just shared, like profit and poverty don't only have to be financial for sure, you know, there's another scripture that says, you know, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? And we see that all around us in this world, people who have the wealth, the power, the influence, but they've sold their souls to get it right, or they've stomped on relationships and they've lost trust, or they've just done terrible things, and like I would much rather be modestly successful with my values intact, yes, been very successful with bridges burned and relationships damaged and blood on my hands, so to speak,

William Harris  1:14:50  

Jennifer, you've shared so much awesome wisdom with us, and you've given me a lot to think about if people want to work with you or they want to fall. Follow you. What's the best way for them to do that?

Jennifer Zick  1:15:02  

Yeah, to connect with me personally. LinkedIn is a great platform. I'm easy to find because I'm very chatty on LinkedIn. So Jennifer Zick, to connect with Authentic you can find us online authenticbrand.com it's singular and all one word. So authenticbrand.com Yeah, we'd love to hear from you, and we'd love to be a resource. If you're in any kind of a growth role in a growing business, I think you'll find some some great little nuggets on our site. So thank you so much for including me here today.

William Harris  1:15:31  

Thank you for correcting me I said Authentic Brand at the beginning, and I'm really apologize about that. So thank you for making sure everybody heard that it is singular Authentic

Jennifer Zick  1:15:40  

brand, of course, and don't worry about it. It's a common mistake, yeah.

William Harris  1:15:44  

Well, thank you everyone for listening. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:15:48  

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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