Unlocking Growth Podcast Featuring Jennifer Zick

Our founder and CEO, Jennifer Zick, was recently the featured guest on the Chaos to Clarity podcast with host, Gary Vanbutsele.

In 2017, she founded Authentic to help growing businesses overcome random acts of marketing to achieve next-level growth. 

An experienced revenue builder, Jennifer had held sales and marketing executive roles for a variety of start-up and global enterprise organizations, where she thrived in building strong brands, teams, and customer relationships. 

It’s this experience that helped her build the model of Authentic Growth that she uses today to help Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step in growth.

Listen to the Podcast

Watch the Conversation

Key Takeaways

• Entrepreneurial businesses often start marketing from the bottom up, focusing prematurely on tactical decisions (ads, emails, search marketing) without first establishing strategic alignment. This backwards approach leads to random acts of marketing with unclear impact.
• Marketing must act like the pitcher targeting a tight strike zone, meaning laser focus on the ideal buyer for the most profitable and healthy growth, instead of trying to appeal to everyone and diluting results.
• While leaders often want aggressive growth (2x or 3x), without sufficient budget, capacity, and realistic timelines, these goals remain aspirational.
• Businesses must also develop incremental, data-driven measurement systems that evolve from information to predictive insights, enabling confident and strategic funding decisions.

Full Transcription

Show Introduction & Guest Background

Gary Vanbutsele: Hey everyone. With me on the show today is Jennifer Sick. She’s CEO and founder of Authentic Brand. How is your morning going, Jennifer? 

Jennifer Zick: It’s delightful now that I’m spending time with you, Gary. Thank you for including me. 

Gary Vanbutsele: Oh, absolutely. So Jennifer, why don’t you start us off by giving us the 30-second intro on what your business is all about, which problems you’re solving and how you’re solving them. 

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. So Authentic is a community of fractional CMOs or chief marketing officers. So we work on a part time contract basis with clients who are growth companies, usually between 5 to 100 million in annual revenue. And with these entrepreneurial growing companies, we help them to do what we lovingly call overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in growth. And growth takes a lot of shapes for growing entrepreneurial businesses, including growth of revenue, profitability and overall business valuation. That’s what we do as marketing leaders. 

Gary Vanbutsele: Awesome. It really makes me think that it connects kind of in the same way as we talk about unlocking the next level of growth. That is basically the same mission you’re on but from your expertise. Awesome. So as you know, Jennifer, we like to talk about that one golden nugget of business advice that you’ve learned over time and would love to share with our audience. So what do you have for us today? 

Jennifer Zick: Well, to synthesize that nugget, the fact is that most entrepreneurial businesses start approaching marketing backwards. They approach it from a bottom up instead of a top down. So today I want to share with you what I’ve learned about helping scale businesses, about how to reverse the script and build true strategic marketing focus through coming at it from a top down approach. 

Gary Vanbutsele: All right. Seems very intriguing. So I’m going to put you in the spotlight for the next seven to 10 minutes and let you share with us the different steps or points in getting this done in your business. So go ahead and share what you got. 

Core Problem Identification

Jennifer Zick: All right, I’m stepping up onto the soapbox. Here we go. So in the work that we do with growing entrepreneurial businesses, we aren’t usually working with an early stage startup that’s still like discovering itself and its focus. But we’re usually entering in at a later stage of an established business right around that 4, 5, 6 million dollar mark. And at that point most of the clients we work with have been founder led, sales driven entrepreneurial companies who’ve experimented and explored a lot of paths to find a point of traction for growth. And by the time they get to that point in their growth cycle, they will have naturally committed many different random acts of marketing surrounding their growth. And they probably have not yet had a senior level marketer on staff. 

They’ve built an executive team that’s been a little more operations and sales focused. That’s just a natural evolution of a lot of entrepreneurial businesses. So it’s no surprise that when we start having conversations with CEOs and executives of small and mid sized growth businesses, they’re at the point of frustration where they feel like we’ve invested time, money and resources in marketing. And we’ve tried a lot of things with agencies and freelancers and trying to hire and build a team, but we’re not sure we’re moving the needle in the right direction. And so often the conversations start with them by asking very tactfully. And this is where I talk about reversing the script. So usually the conversations start at a point of tactical questions. Should we be investing more in search marketing? Should we be investing more in email campaigns? 

Should we pull back on our ad spend? Do trade shows even fit our model? Right. Lots of tactical questions really at the lower levels of marketing. And so our job to help those businesses overcome random acts of marketing and help themselves is to challenge them to reverse the script and start at the top. And so their business has done a lot to build the growth that they’ve had so far. Now they need to align marketing to that growth vision. We work with many businesses who use operating systems like eos, for example, entrepreneurial operating system to help organize their business vision. And that’s a great accelerant for strategic marketing. But even if you’re not using an operating system, some of those core questions that you would use to articulate your vision are still really essential to guide your strategic marketing program. 

So I’m going to articulate six of the questions or the steps that a business needs to take to overcome random acts of marketing. 

Gary Vanbutsele: That’s fantastic. And I can already say I’ve been down the path of starting with the technical or tactical questions. Way too technical, way too niche. So I’m going to be all ears on what you’re going to tell me. Next, Good. 

The 6-Step Strategic Marketing Framework 

Jennifer Zick: That’s great. And neither you nor any entrepreneurs listening should feel any guilt about everything that it takes to get yourself to that first tier of growth. Now it’s just an opportunity to fine tune and get more strategic. Right? So we start with knowing and being able to articulate your purpose. I love to challenge business owners and their executive teams with this question. What is your life changing purpose for existence as a business? If you’re a leadership team and your owners can’t articulate how your business changes lives, then I don’t know why you’re in business. And maybe you’ve lost sight of that big why and big purpose along the way. Or maybe others have pulled you into their intentions and purposes and you need to re articulate that. So start with purpose. Start with why. 

Simon Sinek does a lot of great material around the Golden Circle as a tool to help with this. But know your purpose and articulate it to all stakeholders. Because when you can connect with people emotionally around purpose, that builds a ton of trust and it’ll bring the right people into your orbit. So start with that. Second, you must clarify your business goals. I should no longer be surprised by the number of businesses that grow despite themselves. They put lofty goals out there, but they have no justification for why they’re setting the goal. I talk with a lot of CEOs who say we want 2x or 3x next year. And I ask, what historical evidence do you have that tells you this is possible? Nothing. It’s just what we want. Right? Okay. 

You need to be more pragmatic about what your business goals are and how you can prove and build credibility with your whole team that it’s possible and you can get there. So you need to know what the business goals are that you’re aiming for and make sure everybody’s clear on how their role contributes to the goal. That’s number two. Number three would be you need clarity on your ideal buyer or buyers. And I’m going to say it can’t be everybody. This is where I like to use American baseball as a story. If you think of your organization as a baseball team, your outfield is your delivery engine. It’s all the things your solution or services could do, all the problems you could solve for all the possible buyers. And that’s far too wide for you to market effectively. 

You can’t possibly be all things to all people. So then your sales team is the infield. They can bring a little more focus to shaping a deal and maneuver left and right to shape that. But your marketing engine must be your pitcher. And you need to be pitching to a very tiny strike zone. You need to put all of your resources in one direction to attract the highest, most profitable, healthiest growth for your business. So that takes laser focus on who your ideal buyer or buyers are and then alignment around that. Organizationally. That doesn’t mean you have to say no to revenue that doesn’t fit that mold. But you got to get clarity. That’s number three. Identify your ideal buyer. Number four, is that from that ideal buyer, once you know who that is, then you can choose appropriate channels. 

And by channels, I mean how do you intersect their lives in a way that builds trust and adds value in a natural habitat for those buyers? Right? Not all buyers are on Instagram, not all buyers are at trade shows. But once you know who your buyer is, you can discover their natural habitat and you can create strategies through those channels to intersect their lives with meaning, value and purpose and build brand trust. And at that moment, it’s not about pitching your product or service, it’s about building trust with your brand, creating engagement, adding value, and bringing them in for the opportunity to have a conversation. Number five, once you know your channels, you need to be realistic about your resources and align your resources and your expectations. 

Those same CEOs who want 2x, 3x growth, if their marketing budget is underfunded and it’s understaffed, they’re going to struggle to get the outcomes that they believe they want. So every company has limits on human capacity, on money that they can invest and the time that they can take to get there. You know, energy, money, and time. So be very realistic and listen to experienced advisors when they tell you what you’re asking for is not achievable in the time you’re asking for it. Or here’s how we can accelerate that strategy for you. And to do so, often acceleration requires freeing up more resources. So just be realistic about your resources and finally measure what matters. 

Every CEO that I know would love to say they have an unlimited marketing budget if we could just tell them for every dollar you put into the top of the marketing engine, how many dollars spit out the backside of it as ROI and how quickly, right? But nothing is quite that simple. And so there are incremental things that you need to be measuring through different stages of business growth. Because data and analytics start by being information before they become insights, before they become predictive, so that you have a model you can trust and fund based on predictive analytics. So again, this is where you need to have expertise around helping you design what is the appropriate marketing dashboard. How do we know what matters right now to move the needle based on our business goals and our resources? 

And how do we know that we’re aiming our energy and arrows in the right direction to that strike zone and bringing in the right results? So I’ll just recap really quickly those six things. Articulate your purpose, clarify your business goals, identify your ideal buyers, choose the audience, appropriate channels, align your resources and your expectations, and then measure what matters. 

Gary Vanbutsele: You’re. You’re making my life very easy because typically that’s like my only to do at the end is to recap what the guest has shared. But you’ve done that for me. I will align with a couple of things you’ve said, like articulate your purpose. I love it when you talk to a lot of people, you seem to find that everything is interconnected. We just had a talk with Pepe at Joe Public talking about the value of having purpose. So for those who haven’t heard that specific podcast, definitely look at it. Identifying your ideal customer or buyer. You cannot hear this enough. And as an entrepreneur, you always feel like, oh, but I’m going to miss out. And if I don’t, also try to attract them and you end up shooting your arrows at way too many targets and your efficiency goes down. 

So it is something I think we need to hear over and over again and make those tough decisions. So everything you’ve shared is right on the money when it comes to my own experience and on the things I know I need to improve on. So I appreciate this super valuable golden nuggets that you’ve shared with us today. Jennifer, thank you so much for being on and hoping to talk to you soon. 

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Gary. It’s been a pleasure. I appreciate it.