8 years ago, Jennifer Zick set out to create a new marketing standard. She noticed that marketing was becoming ever more chaotic through growth in new tools, channels, and models. She also saw the rise of marketing executives that could make phenomenal fractional leaders, and that fractional already existed for finance and back-office management, but not for marketing. So she combined the two – marketing expertise and a fractional modelworking relationship, to offer what is now Authentic, a marketing consultancy that helps growing businesses “Overcome Random Acts of Marketing®”.
Both are crucial for every leader building their team, their org, and their company. Watch the full episode from the Human Cloud Podcast below from Spotify and read on for key takeaways and the full episode transcription.
Key Takeaways
- Jennifer bootstrapped her way to scale her business.
- Jennifer scaled her startup growth by balancing client delivery (50% of her time) and creating content that built a sustainable growth engine (50% of her time).
- Marketing has seen an explosion of tools, channels, and strategies. The result is that full-time marketing teams can’t keep up with the rise in tools, instead, they stick to what they know, exposing companies to missing out on the new tools or being disrupted if their competitors understand them.
- The solution to the rise of this marketing chaos is having fractional marketing expertise – backed by a community of highly qualified specialists – to orchestrate your flexible network of marketing expertise.
- Authentic is very clear about being best for $5 to 100m businesses.
Full Episode Transcription
Introduction
Matthew Mottola: So perfect. All right, Jennifer, thank you so much for hopping on. We’ve never met, right? This is our first time. And these are some of my funnest episodes because I saw something either you posted or a teammate posted on LinkedIn. And then I looked at what you were doing and I’m like, how the hell don’t I know you? Right? And so that’s it. Beyond that, we know nothing. My LinkedIn profile says Atlanta, but I’ve lived in Boston, SF, Seattle, Singapore, all over the world. Yours says Minnesota. Can’t wait to see all the places you’ve lived.
But, let’s just start and actually I’ll give a little bit of a lay of the land for you listeners. One of the overarching themes that I know you’re all thinking about right now is honestly how not to waste your money, right? Whether we call it a year of efficiency, whether we call it the year of shifting from growth to profitability. I know that, you know, making a buck turn into a buck and one is exactly what you’re looking at right now. And Jennifer, you’re the perfect, perfect person because we’re going to talk about how to overcome uncertainty in marketing and how to not waste your money, which let me just say marketing to me is the hardest to evaluate and measure and not get screwed, right? And not get sold something that I don’t.
So we can’t wait to learn from you, but I guess Jennifer, you start wherever you want, you know, where are you from? Where’d you grow up? How did we get to Authentic®? What are you doing now? I’m going to fully give you the stage and then just poke you with some fun questions.
Jennifer Zick: Well, first of all, it’s so nice to meet you, Matthew. Thank you for inviting me into your virtual conference room. And I’m just delighted to be here and honored to get acquainted. So my life story is less exciting than yours because I’ve been a Minnesota native from the day I was born. So all the places I’ve lived in range from small town, Minnesota, where I grew up to big city, Twin Cities, Minnesota, where I live. But where I’ve worked has been in local small entrepreneurial regional businesses, large nationals, and corporate global. So I’ve had the good experience of working across cultures and countries and ecosystems and all, you know, just building a large community of friends.
And I’ve been really blessed in that way. My career has spanned sales roles as individual contributing sales, sales management, marketing management and leadership and specialization, and eventually executive marketing leadership. So I’ve seen both sides of the revenue coin, both from being an individual contributor and a team leader across all those different sizes and stages of businesses. So I’ve gotten to collect some really fun experiences and see some patterns in the world.
And it’s really those patterns that inspired Authentic, which I founded my business eight years ago, almost eight years ago in early 2017. And what was really inspiring to me then is still what is inspiring to me now. And that is it falls into a two-pronged vision. And the first part of that vision is to help growing businesses Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® so that they can take confident steps toward healthy growth. And so in that regard, we work with entrepreneurial businesses generally between five and $100 million in annual revenue all across the country. And we’ve worked in seven different countries as well. So we absolutely love entrepreneurial businesses and privately held entrepreneurial companies that are aiming for strategic growth.
The other part of my vision and mission in the world is to elevate and connect marketers because in the 25, 30 years that I’ve been in the industry, it has profoundly changed year over year because technology and innovation and the way humans connect is changing radically in our lifetimes and is not going to slow down. So 25 years ago, a marketer’s toolkit was like, if I know these five things, I’m golden. Today, there’s 5,000 or more things to know.
And no individual marketer can know them all. No matter your tenure, your industry experience, you can’t have all the answers. Marketers need each other. And that’s why when I started Authentic, we are a fractional chief marketing officer firm. We can talk more about that later as we talk about talent innovation. But it was very important to me that we didn’t just have a bunch of individual bright marketers, but that all of these experienced, brilliant, wise, and humble marketing leaders had one another.
So that is foundational to the way we work at Authentic. All of our CMOs are in what we call our mind share community and they all collaborate. And that helps us unlock solutions and strategies faster on behalf of our clients. We have one another’s backs and we can share that experience and knowledge. So that’s just a little bit about where I’ve been in life and in business and what inspires me.
Jennifer’s Experience in Sales
Matthew Mottola: So I got two quick questions ready. First is, where’s the Midwest accent? Where, I mean, what do I gotta say to make it? There we go, exactly, okay. I’m glad I didn’t have to figure out the word, know, or get you mad. I’ll do it. Growing up in Boston, now, like I can get it out of any Boston person, I’m Matt. So that’s the first one. The second one, you said something really interesting. So you started in sales or you had experience in sales.
Jennifer Zick: Do you want to come for a ride in my boat? You betcha.
Matthew Mottola: Do you think that’s essential for a marketer to have? And is it a red flag if a marketer has not ever had to have a pipeline and a quota and a sales objective? What do you think about that?
Jennifer Zick: Well, first of all, it’s a bit of a unicorn combination. It’s very rare that an executive marketer comes up through a sales background. It’s not completely rare, but it’s not the common trajectory of a career. So no, I don’t think that it’s a limiting factor. It is an added bonus perspective to have. If you’re a marketer who has worked in sales, carried a quota, understood the customer’s needs from that side of the table. But what’s imperative, whether a marketer has ever worked in sales, directly or indirectly is that they understand the mind of sales by working closely with sales. Marketing cannot be done on an island.
And obviously we’re talking more B2B right now than B2C because in some B2C environments that we serve in, there are no sales teams. Sales is a little bit more transactional, e-commerce driven or whatever that might be. But there’s only one revenue team in any company and that’s everyone who touches a customer.
And that revenue team must be connected. And so part of the gospel that we preach is that connective tissue between sales, marketing, customer experience and success, product innovation, whatever the components are that touch the customer experience, they have to work closely together. So that alignment is essential.
Differentiating Between MQLs and SQLs
Matthew Mottola: So let’s, let’s, you know, this is fun. And this is Jennifer’s way, when I, when I, before we clicked record I kind of mentioned to you, said, Hey, I selfishly get your time for an hour and it’s, you’re going to hear why. Right? So one of the reasons is that I’m not a marketing expert and I love nothing more than being able to learn from you. And so I am so pumped to hear what you think about this next. So I want to imagine we have two islands. Okay.
Island one, the MQL Island two, the SQO. All right. And you’re seeing my like founder, like when people ask me what entrepreneurs and founders do,
Jennifer Zick: Yeah.
Matthew Mottola: We light fires and then we just hire people who are smarter than us, right? So this is my basic marketing and sales understanding is you got your MQLs. All right, people need to notice us, right? And so we’re gonna use the five P’s and all those cute little things to get them to notice us. Then you got the sales qualified lead and we need to convert. And so the good sales people know that if you take a hundred people, we’re to prioritize so that they have the band and you get the actual conversion. But so you are the expert here.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah.
Matthew Mottola: How would you describe the SQL, MQL islands? And you might even say you’re picking the wrong damn islands. But how would you describe this?
Jennifer Zick: No, I think it’s really important, first of all, that you do define islands, that you have clear terminology in your business. You know what is enclosed in that terminology, and you know who’s responsible for each interaction at each stage, and that those are knit together. So I’m a big proponent of having unified pipeline terminology. And the most common terminology that most businesses will use is an MQL, know, SAL, SQL, deal-staging relationship.
So all of that makes sense. We use that in our own business as well. Here’s where I find the biggest hang up misunderstanding missed expectation among the CEOs, CFOs and revenue leaders, mostly sales leaders that we work with. Authentic generally comes to the table in an entrepreneurial business when they’ve never had an executive head of marketing before, right? They’ve been a startup company that’s been founder led, sales driven. They’ve created enough critical mass. They’ve sold enough things enough times to actually exist as a business. So they have a swim lane. And at that point, they look behind them. And what they see is a trail of random acts of marketing. And that is a natural evolution in business. Because a founder and a founding early stage company will iterate many times to find your market fit and focus. Hopefully, you get there. If you don’t, you’re just going to be a scattered visionary forever, never going anywhere.
So the process of finding market fit and focus, first of all, creates random acts just because you have to iterate many times. When marketing comes to the table and you start building strategic rigor and you start to build pipeline processes and flows and stage gates and all of that, it can get complicated and confusing. And one of the biggest disconnects I find among my less mature business friends in systems is that they think that they can formulate this in some kind of magic you know, playbook where if I have this number of MQLs, I will get this number of SQLs eventually. Right.
And, these founders have this zero basis budget mindset where like, sure. I will have an unlimited marketing budget as long as you can tell me and predict for me perfectly the conversion ratios and improve this ROI to me. So for every dollar I put into marketing here, how many dollars I get out in this amount of time, and therefore I’m to put it back into marketing.
That’s magical thinking until you have started to build a robust marketing program that can be tested and iterated to create interactions that give you baseline data over time from which to have intelligent patterns to draw from. So that would be insights from which to have enough insights over time to have predictive analytics. That all takes time. And so in the mix of all of that hard work of building marketing momentum and the five P’s or whatever the things that are at work in your business, too many growth leaders get really impatient with marketing and they’re expecting immediate ROI and immediate predictable analytic investments. It’s not possible.
And so they go out hunting for quantities of MQLs. We just need more at-bats. How many times have we heard that? We just need more at-bats. Our sales teams need more at-bats. Well, marketing can go buy you the at-bats for quantity. And then you’re going to be disappointed because the quality is really crap.
And then you’re wasting sales energy to disqualify a lot of things. So this is me maybe sideways answering your question, is that these islands take time to be built. They take time to be properly measured and understood within the context of your buyer environment and the lifecycle of your sales deals and what makes quality for your business. So I guess the cautionary tale here is that healthy businesses don’t get overly obsessed with measuring everything perfectly. They do the right things for the right reasons in a way that resonates with their right fit audience as long enough to learn how to make those improvements iteratively over time. And the numbers fall into place.
Essential Marketing Metrics
Matthew Mottola: So you hit a couple areas that I was like, yeah, guilty. know, like when you mentioned usually growth leaders not moving fast enough, right? So I wanna imagine, and for those watching the video, I’m gonna use my hands, okay? And so I want you to imagine that two islands are right here. Now, I am a, I’m gonna give you two different profiles. I’m a bootstrap founder.
And then the total opposite, I am a VP in product or marketing or innovation of let’s say the best tech company in the world or, you name it. They’re two totally different profiles. Now I’m sitting in SQL Island, right? I’m used to sales. I want to get to the MQL Island, but I have to go in the water and swim, right? And in that swim, I’m going to feel very lost and I’m not going to understand things.
Jennifer Zick: Mm-hmm.
Matthew Mottola: So from your perspective, one, how do we know if this is working? Two, what are some standard metrics in terms of, I mean, if it’s been a year and I have no leads, ah, you know, that I’m a little. And then three, you know, usually we don’t do this till the end, but three, I mean, I think we’re already ready to get into some massive wins, success stories of just like ways of you showing us when this really, really works. But so let’s try to swim to that MQL Island and let’s see if you can get me there. And, you know, heads up, I’m not that good at swimming, so good luck.
Jennifer Zick: To unpack everything you rolled into a question that had about 16 questions in it. Okay, I’m going to do my best. I’m going to do my best.
Matthew Mottola: Hahaha! This is like an hour, okay? It’s a one hour NBA.
Jennifer Zick: So first of all, I want to speak to you as if you’re a bootstrap founder, because that’s me. Eight years ago when I started my business, it was just me at my kitchen table writing a business plan. And I didn’t have capital to just invest in my business and hire staff. I had enough experience growing businesses to know. For 18 months, I have to be the consultant who sells the business, does the business, gets enough profitability out of it to reinvest in building my business. And so I can eventually hire people.
And then a bootstrapped founder very slowly in building a healthy business is able to extract themselves from various seats and roles in the company. A bootstrap founder, day one, is sales, marketing, operations, finance. It’s a customer experience and delivery, all of the things. And so it becomes muddy water that you’re swimming through as you extract yourself seat by seat out of those roles in the organization.
So here at Authentic, in the very beginning, the commitments I made to myself were that I’m only going to allow myself to bill at 50 % capacity at high rates because I need 50 % of my capacity to do sales and marketing for my company. I must continue that heartbeat. And because I had done both sales and marketing and management in those roles in the past, I also knew that I would need to be invested from day one. So there was a right away, even though I didn’t have a complicated budget at all and I had no overhead besides myself, I knew a portion of everything I earned would have to be reinvested into marketing.
So the first couple of people I hired, I hired a bookkeeper so I wouldn’t have to go down that rabbit hole. And then I hired a copywriter to be working alongside me to extract all my thought leadership and help me package it up and get it out into the world as efficiently as possible. Now AI can do a lot of that with good, you know, there’s a lot that can be done more efficiently nowadays, but I was investing right away in marketing because I knew I had to create content. I had to start bringing thought leadership to the world. And the reason that was important is that people had to trust me. And I knew that the people that already knew Jennifer Zick, they trusted me because they knew me and it worked with me. But I needed to start being trustworthy to people outside of the people that knew me already. And I needed to start associating my company name with that trust and pull that trust out into the market. And the same way you found me, Matthew, is the intention I had on day one.
Matthew Mottola: Yep.
Jennifer Zick: I need great content so people can find me and resonate with what we’re doing in the world. So fast forward to as I started to build a team of fractional CMOs and consultants, and I started to make hires in my business around sales and marketing. Eight years in, I’m still the strategic head of marketing in my business. I’m still my own fractional CMO for my firm, and I’m still the strategic head of sales for my sales team. So I’m still extracting myself out of those boxes.
And so this is a long backstory leading into how you get from SQL to MQL, we’re right there as our own business right now. So I’m like a living case study of that because up until this point, our sales pipeline has been completely fed and fueled by my executive network, the referral relationships I’ve nurtured and the inbound that comes in as a result of all the thought leadership we’ve built for eight years consistently. And marketing has always been the biggest part of my operating budget. Now it’s pretty equally between marketing and sales today as it is for most growth businesses. It’ll be a big chunk of the Ops budget, but we’ve stayed invested in it.
And now as a company, we’re migrating over to a company that’s not just responding to inbound leads, but is going to be pursuing outbound nurture to create the kind of magnetic attraction and nurture earlier stage pipeline that then will convert into MQLs down the road. So I give you that context to say like, Hey, I understand that bootstrapper experience and what it is to start to divide the labor and responsibilities between sales and marketing. So what else would you like me to speak to in that journey?
Matthew Mottola: I think you answered Jennifer, I’m not gonna lie. And you actually answered for both profiles because what I took away from you was deliver, document, repeat. And I think this is where one of the biggest chasms that I’ve seen, and this is like, I’ll give you my educational background. Way overly qualified academically because I have a master’s in entrepreneurship and MBA, right? So way overly qualified. Yet none of this stuff I actually learned in education. I learned it just by getting my ass kicked with a quota and a pipeline and figuring out how to really make this work.
And I will add that in working in a large enterprise, sometimes you can get away with a lot just by being in politics, right? But then sounding smart. So for me, when I took away from what we were saying was, listen, you have to have the closest feedback loop in relationship to whatever idea of business value you think you have, right? Which for you was marketing. Then…
Jennifer Zick: Yeah.
Building a Business
Matthew Mottola: You got to actually deliver it, but document it. And I think this is what’s different about right now in the past five years ago is that it is easier to sort of tighten that feedback loop. Meaning as an individual, whether you are a VP at a company or wherever it is, it is easier to make an impact. Not to get too nerdy about it, but there’s just so many tools and we’ll talk about flexible teams later. And so, and that’s what you did. I have an interesting question for you. If this was 30 years ago.
And I’m assuming, say pre internet, pre cloud computing, pre even mobile phones, whatever. Do you think you would have been able to do this? And if yes, would it have been harder?
Jennifer Zick: It would have been very different. I would like to think that I am a problem-solving resilient person. Whatever tools are available in that time period, I’m going to find ways to use them. That’s kind of who I am. But the fact that Authentic started eight years ago and is now a national provider and with global clients, that would not have been possible. What would have been possible? I could have achieved the same scale and revenue by pounding the pavement just here in Minnesota. There’s enough wallet share for me to build my business just right here. But the fact that I have access to the technologies that we have through teleconferencing, video conferencing, sharing content through social networks that takes our brand reach. And when we are thoughtful about who we’re connected to, they become carriers of our message out into the broader world. That would have never been possible.
It would have had to be done through advertising. And just think of how expensive that would be to run a national advertising campaign on radio or TV or billboards or whatever the case is. So instead of paying for advertising, my investment has been in content that is quality enough that people want to carry it out into the world, like creating circles of trust and ambassadorship and our real strong move to becoming a national firm happened by a bit of a happy accident intersecting COVID intersecting my strategy. Because in the first few years of Authentic, my intention was to build a strong team locally with clients locally with high touch, high quality work. We also have a very tight methodology that we use for implementing marketing. So documentation is central to what we do.
And I thought we would grow by hiring consultants and biz dev people in other physical markets, right? But instead we started building a community locally that very quickly became a national community during COVID because there was a need for community and we were already on the cusp of it. And that community carried our brand nationally in a way that could never have been possible 30 years ago in those same, in the same ROI context.
Matthew Mottola: It feels, it just feels like in the, in the lens of, I’ll kind of come back to like first principles of you listeners if you’re trying to drive growth, right? So like our listeners are trying to drive growth, whatever capacity they’re at. That’s what we all really care about. And it does, it does feel like we take for granted how much easier distribution and virality is, right? And you nailed it. You said like, it’d be so expensive with ads. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.
Jennifer Zick: Mm-hmm.
Choosing The Fractional Business Structure
Matthew Mottola: Now, so we’re going to dovetail into more about you and more about the journey going and creating Authentic. And let me kind of frame why. So, all right, I already have a new pulse. I already have a new perspective on marketing, right? Which is deliver, document, and then repeat. Haven’t heard that yet, right? Really, really helpful. Can’t wait to bring that to my team. Okay. Now the next segment that we’re going to get to is how the hell do we do this?
Now, one of the key components that sort of our like guiding message right now to every business leader is that business and talent are merging. Meaning that business leaders need to understand talent strategies and talent leaders need to understand business strategy. And so from what I’ve seen, having the right team and having the right either whatever we want to call it, sourcing strategies, scaling strategy, name it is integral, right? I never took business.
So you’ve created what I’m going to call an alternative in a digital enhanced and a new type of agency model is what I’m assuming, right? So it might be Twitter, a new type of agency model, delivery model, expertise model, you name it through these fractional CMOs. But I’m just going to shut up now and say, hey, tell us about these past eight years, right? And why did you take this journey? What happened? And yeah, I’m just going to…
Jennifer Zick: Can’t wait to dive in with you on this. I want to just offer one little bridge piece of content between where we were and where we’re going on this talent thing, because I want to say as much as things are easier and more virality in the world today and more tools and more things, it’s also more complicated and more confusing. And so a lot of business leaders are strung around the wheel just thinking they need to try a lot of different tactics. And so what I would like to bring it back to is
Matthew Mottola: Do it.
Jennifer Zick: The marketing landscape is more complex and sophisticated than ever, but marketing is just as simple as it’s ever been. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s just as simple as it’s ever been, which is that you need to answer these questions and you need to do it with that connection between sales marketing, client delivery, all of these things. You need to be answering all the time, who do we want to matter to? Why should we matter to them? Where is their native habitat? Because they’re not all of them on TikTok, perhaps.
When we enter their native habitat, how do we build trust? Not how do we generate a lead? Because building trust is building a brand. And brand is what builds demand. And demand is what eventually creates a lead when that person recognizes their need intersects what you can provide and they trust you. So that’s a really important thing that I’m out teaching all the time.
Marketing all the tools and tactics and techniques have changed radically and they will continue to change radically. But at the end of the day, the purpose of marketing is the same as ever. And those same questions need to be asked over and over again in a fast changing world. And they need to be asked in terms of attracting net new prospects. They need to be asked in terms of retaining and growing your existing clients. They need to be asked of your strategic partners. Same questions. Who do we want to matter to? Why should we matter to them? What’s their native habitat? That will tell you which channels and tactics matter and will be effective, and then you execute the document, do it again and iterate. Hope that’s a helpful bridge.
Matthew Mottola: And can I get a quick story to add to that? So I could not agree more. This is where, hopefully I don’t go too deep in the rabbit hole, but most good teams are still in my, internally here, are still really not that much better than a spreadsheet and a Google doc. I know that sounds crazy for clients. It’s a word doc. Okay. Cause we have mostly enterprise clients, right? So we’re working in 365. But what I mean by that is, you know, I, when I was 24, 25 and I, know, I just intuitively, cause I had freelance back in 2012, right? So it was like working as a consultant.
So when I first had to hire something, I actually didn’t come from a place of like, let me go hire and build a team and have a hierarchy and do this. Right. That actually purely came from a place of like, this needs to get done. Okay. I know there’s a website that if I input this, I’ll get a person that might be right. So, but in the past year,
What we’ve seen when we’ve had a sort of a new content strategy is, to be honest with you, we’ve just had one person that owns it all. And we don’t know how that person’s getting it done, but they’re just using a word doc with us. And we’ve never seen more returns. And so when you say the tools and tactics are changing so fast, but the purpose has never changed, I think it’s because we’ve really, really narrowed the purpose of our marketing and that’s gotten better. But we’ve had the individuals that just take it, that personally we would never be able to hire them full time or where we are. So I wanted to add that lens, especially for you listeners out there. But so, okay. I still want some more.
Jennifer Zick: Yes. Yes. Okay, so now let me launch into the question you asked, like why build this business model, this alternative talent model? And, you know, we define ourselves as a consultancy rather than an agency because when people think of marketing agencies, they’re thinking of the delivery of some kind of creative or developed asset, right? When I first had the vision for, hey, I want to help great businesses feel more confident about their marketing investments, I did not know the word fractional.
I had just come out of large global corporate companies. But I knew, having been part of a startup in the past, that if I could bring the wisdom of experienced leadership to their executive table as an experienced business advisor and marketing leader, a true strategic leader, it would make a world of difference, even if that was a part-time role. Because that person could be the orchestrator of all the pieces that need to move underneath them.
And the fact is, true today, that neither a small business nor a large enterprise can truly afford to hire on staff all the different capabilities you need for marketing. Because marketing is not like building a finance team. If you’re building a finance team, you have a CFO, a controller, an accountant, a bookkeeper, and maybe multiple of those roles. And it’s pretty straight lined. But you’re building a marketing team and you’re constantly asking yourselves those questions. Who do we want to matter to? How do we matter to them? What’s their natural habitat? Which habitats are we expanding into?
You need different skills at different times that know how to use different techniques and tools. You need ninjas, a lot of them, at different times. Some of them are ongoing for program management. Some of them are generalists. Some of them are deeply specialized that you just need for a fragment of a period of time. But what you need above all of that so that you’re not creating random access marketing is you need orchestration. If you’re a business with over $5 million in revenue, you need a CMO who understands how to orchestrate in a modern marketing environment. And that’s why we have retainers that start as low as four hours a week just to take that responsibility off a CEO, but to provide that like an experienced lens that grows the confidence.
And like we are being good stewards of whatever the resources are that we’re investing in marketing to make sure that every piece is integrated and tied together and it’s working toward a greater strategy. So when I started my business again, I didn’t know the word fractional. I already told you my game plan was like, I’m going to make myself 50 % billable, get out in the world, start talking to people, build a business, create opportunities for other consultants and build a model with IP behind it, with this process driven structure. So as I began to do that, I met other consultants who were fractional CFOs. The category of fractional was built first in the back office. It’s existed for a long time. Fractional CFOs, fractional HR leaders, that’s been around for a couple of decades.
And when I met those leaders, I was like, aha, this is the word. This is the word. For about six months, I thought I was the very first creator of the fractional CMO category because I had never heard of it before. Later, when I searched it, I discovered there was one other company that had a national network of executives that were doing fractional CMO work. So only eight years ago, the world did not know about fractional CMO. So we were an early pioneer and an early voice in that industry.
Matthew Mottola: Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer Zick: Fast forward through COVID upheavals and economic disruption and technology enablement, there are more of what we would call gig economy and freelance and independent workers than ever before. And that’s not going to slow down. And there’s pros and cons in that way. The pro is for experienced professionals, you have more control of your destiny than ever. And there’s more ways to create business and create the life that you want to create that harmony.
The con is that there’s so much noise now out in the market in the fractional space that it’s harder to differentiate. And it’s very hard for the buyers to qualify providers. So one distinction for Authentic is not only were we early pioneers in establishing this category, but we’re the only fractional CMO firm in the world, to my knowledge, that employs all of our CMOs as W2 employees. Like we are a true, true firm. We screen for true executive credentials.
We support them with all the benefits and back office and all, you know, and we curate the match between what our sales team is talking to the client, what they need and the right CMO from our team. So it takes the, it demystifies and de-risks the process for clients who are at the point where they really need a strategic marketing leader. But if you look at the entire universe of marketing talent, most CEOs of growing businesses don’t necessarily know how to qualify the difference between somebody whose entire career has been in strategic communications versus digital marketing versus being a specialist or a manager or a true executive. So the world is changing really quickly. More options than ever, but also more confusion than ever.
Matthew Mottola: I, I, cannot agree more. And, if you hear some yelling, by the way, my golden retriever is below me and he’s, he’s, he’s deep in sleep. Okay. So for some reason when he sleeps, he’s dreaming exactly. And, he goes from being the most like docile, submissive, gentle golden to like angry, you know, like he turns into like, yeah. That’s incredible.
Jennifer Zick: Dreaming! Okay, I love you even more. This is Gus, my golden retriever. He’s been in with me the other night. He’s so, he’s, I, yes. So we have that in common.
Matthew Mottola: That’s incredible. Yes, he’s right. If you’re watching the video, So you’ll see he’ll start kicking, now, Luca, Luca. He’ll start kicking. This is perfect. But listen, so you hit on something. So you see the fractional movement already has already happened, right? In CFOs and
Jennifer Zick: Name? Yes. Luca, mine is Gus. they’re the sweetest.
Why Choose W2 Employment
Matthew Mottola: interim has always been around, right? So like an interim there. Now, this is where you are doing something very, very, very unique. And I’ll just give you some data in the back end. From our data, we believe that there are between 800 and 1200 talent platforms, meaning that their service is to find the best talent, right?
Within that 800, there are 10 different segments of this independent or flexible talent industry. Now these segments have been broken up by horizontal marketplaces. So the big ones up work fiber verticals, which are usually they specialize in a skill, a region or an industry. And then now we’re actually seeing different types of models where you have freelance as a service. So you never see the free. So there’s always different models and then not to get too complicated.
There’s the providers, right? So you have like the compliance checkers and the payrollers and you name it just for this workforce. So yes, the complexity is crazy. But I say that to say that employing them as W2 is unique and differentiated. And I want to know why.
Right? So you’re not the first person to say this. And, you know, the majority of our business is actually on the enterprise consulting of helping enterprises build freelance programs and flexible talent programs. So for you, why did you do that? What does that really mean and what’s the impact?
Jennifer Zick: Yes, great questions. So when I first started the business and I started initially sourcing opportunities to bring other consultants on board, I was doing it in a 1099 model because I was still testing my hypothesis. Does this model work? Will business owners buy into this idea? Can we deliver the value I believe we can deliver? So the first two and a half years of Authentic was a 1099 model with regional consultants, people I trusted that I would sell the work and they delivered the work and we were learning in real time how to make it work, right? How to price it, how to structure it. Then I knew when I knew that I had a model that could work, I had to decide what kind of business I was growing up to be. And that had to come down to what I wanted as an owner. Why? What’s my reason? And my why is multifold. First of all, I’ve been part of enough businesses to know what & A deals look like, feel like, and end up as.
And I knew I wanted to create a highly valued business so that someday, however it is that I might exit my company, it’s worth something. I wanted to build a high quality business. And I wanted to control that quality by being able to actually tell my employees how they’re going to execute on the work and deliver the brand promise. You can’t instruct a 1099 on how to do the work, where to do the work, or how to maintain the level of standards within a methodology like Authentic’s.
And so, I wanted a very deep culture. So I wanted a company culture where even though we’re hybrid and we’re national, we have a headquarters in Minneapolis, but our people are not always together physically. I wanted them to be culturally and values connected. So all of that led me down the path. I explored every possible path. I explored a gig economy, 1099 talent model where it’s just a database full of names. Hey, we have a database full of names of people who want to work with us, but that did not bring me joy.
I explored franchising, but I didn’t want to sell franchises. I wanted to sell marketing services to help businesses. I explored just creating a technology platform as a talent platform, but that was already becoming a saturated market and that wasn’t like the heart of what I wanted to do. So I really looked at all the different models and I landed on W2.
With the hard fact and reality that if you’re going to run a W-2 employment business, your costs go way up. You have true overhead. You need a sales and marketing team. You need an operations team. You need a client services team. You need to be able to afford benefits and compliance and financial management. And so over the course of the pivot from 1099 to W-2, we lost a ton of net profitability because our operating costs kept going up, up. And then we had to gradually be increasing our rates up, up, up.
So to find that balance in what is the rate tolerance that the market will bear that small businesses and enterprises can afford from us, but that provides a reasonable, great standard of living for our employees, and they’re still paid and compensated well, and we can provide a great culture. So it has been a big balancing act, and that is why Authentic is not currently 150 consultants.
because I’ve never been about trying to be the biggest. We’re the best. We are the premier. We are the strongest brand in the fractional CMO space because of the way that we’re modeled between our marketers, our methodology, and the mind share of how we work together. So I’m all about premium quality, premium culture, and I’m just really grateful. Our team is a strong team. We’ve got great retention. We have top talent, and we do have a line of CMOs who want to come work for us.
And we’re only going to hire at the pace at which we can maintain the quality and the brand integrity.
Matthew Mottola: I love it, so fascinating. I mean, tell me about the pivot, right? Because you mentioned I mean, you got a 1099 network. And yeah, you’re gonna give up a lot of profit margin, right? And so yeah, so
Jennifer Zick: Yes, a lot. A few more houses if I wanted, but that’s not what I want. I want a healthy business.
Matthew Mottola: And maybe you were about to get the second or third or fourth house and then the IRS came back and said, actually, you owe us five million in back taxes. So maybe I did not get the house. But so tell us about that pivot. Like what?
Was there a spark where you were seeing that certain people were performing better or people were asking for or yeah, bring us in that moment. And it takes balls, Paul says, I mean, he’s a word that’s kind of very, it takes balls to make that pivot. But tell us about it.
Jennifer Zick: Accept it, yes. It’s scary. The scariest thing I ever did in building this business was my first full-time operating hire, because that’s pure overhead. This isn’t a consultant delivering. So that was the first scariest thing I did. And then the next scariest was pivoting the whole company to W2. So the way that I did it, it had to be a win for the consultants too, because I wanted, at this point I knew exactly who my strong players were. So we basically raised their rate for those who chose, we gave them an option.
They could either stay 1099 because some of them had already started to build their own personal brands and were attracting different kinds of work and that’s what their heart wanted. And so we’re like, we love you and we want you to love your life and love your work. That’s what we’re all about here. So if loving your life and work is staying independent, we love that for you. So finish up your current authentic client engagements and we will celebrate you sailing into your own sunset for those who want to stay independent.
For those of you who are loving life at Authentic, where we’re sourcing opportunities for you and this brand is the culture we’re building, we’re giving you a raise if you flip over to W2 with us, which again, cuts even more deeply into my margins. But I needed it to feel like a win to them because they used to get a paycheck without taxes taken out of it. Now they were going to get a paycheck with taxes taken out. It was going to feel like less. So I made it more.
And I just knew that we weren’t going to make a lot of money as a company for a couple of years while we were raising our rates to test the market so that we could get to a healthier balance. And so we ran really lean. We just leaned all the way in. The wonderful thing that happened that I didn’t expect was that a couple of people who I thought for sure would stay independent started to see the momentum we were getting with our W-2s and ended up opting in. So we ended up retaining 100 % of the CMOs we wanted to retain. We were able to celebrate the CMOs who had been kind of founding members and contributors to our team, but weren’t going to be long-term fit. And then as the company grew as every company does. We kept leveling up that CMO role as we grew. We started attracting even higher caliber talent over time, and we’ve just been able to kind of naturally build in all the talent at a very high level and sunset any CMOs that weren’t going to grow with us to that level. So it’s been and I think we’re at a really wonderful stage as a business because we have such diverse clients.
We serve across six major vertical categories across B2B to B2C, but a whole bunch of other little micro industries in there as well. And so we’ve got that diversity and depth. And I just feel like we got to a really good place. And now we’re really at the point where we have for a professional services firm, the healthy kind of margins that we need for gross profit and net profit to create a business that looks valuable for a, you know, much further down the road, a successful transaction.
Matthew Mottola: That’s incredible. And when you say W2, are these 40 hour weeks W2? So like full time, full time or part time?
Jennifer Zick: They are not salaried. Are my operating team members all full time salaried? Oh, it looks like your pup woke up cutie. Hi, I have a little tail wag there.
Matthew Mottola: Yes. Yeah. Actually, no, we’re talking too loud. He’s looking away. Yeah. He’s a player.
Jennifer Zick: Gosh, I love him. Sweet. Okay. Get back on track. A golden gets me off track real fast. That’s why I don’t work from home, but sometimes Gus comes with me. Anyway, anyway. So all of my operating staff are full-time salaried folks, like on the sales marketing, client services, finance, and then my CMOs are all hourly employees and they determine what level of engagement is their optimal amount of hours on an average week.
So anywhere from, we ask them to be available anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week. And then that ebbs and flows depending on which client assignments. we’re not the company that’s going to hire somebody on a salary basis and have them sit on the bench and be inefficient, but we’re also not a company that’s going to hire consultants who need and expect a full-time consistent salary. They’re at the point in their lives where they want the love my life, love my work balance of flexibility, and diversity helping small businesses and sometimes large businesses be successful. They understand the ebb and flow of that consulting world. And there’s also incentives for them. If they want to go out and network and generate their ideal clients, there’s added incentives for them to be out as advocates for Authentic as well.
Matthew Mottola: Yeah, no, I love it. Listen, we’re gonna talk more about that. We’re gonna talk more about that. I got a little surprise for you in about eight minutes, okay? But before that, our last segment, okay, is that I just wanna hear about the big wins, right? So far, if I could summarize this episode. We went straight into what the hell is marketing and marketing is the who do you want to matter to the why do we matter the way or where are they and then how do we get them to trust us? That’s that’s it and the tools and the tactics they’re changing all the time, but that’s what really matters.
We then got into instead of hiring every single marketer out there, you need to have the orchestrator. But that orchestrator in a fractional capacity is better than one of my fear quotes. It’s better to have a five hour a week, a player than a 40 hour a week B or C player. Right. It comes back to how all the tools and tactics are changing, but that orchestrator understands that foundation, right. And that is the real purpose of marketing.
Jennifer Zick: Yes.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah.
Proudest Client Moments
Matthew Mottola: And then we got into you doing something, which I’m still going to say. It’s crazy. Okay. It can seem absolutely crazy in terms of all of your fractional CMOs. They’re W2, right? And you pivoted the company. You didn’t start that way. You had to actually feel the pain. And so we’re going to talk about that later and for you listeners do not hang up now, but we have one last section and that is Jennifer out of, out of the last eight years.
What is either your favorite or themes are your favorite big wins from a client perspective. What happened? What was the impact on them? Yeah, I’m just going to give you the floor.
Jennifer Zick: Thank goodness. OK, well, there’s so many heartwarming stories. We’ve served hundreds of clients at this point. So I’m just going to kind of pick my brain for the ones that are close to home. I had the opportunity early on when I was still the consultant to work with a SaaS tech provider. And I came out of technology and tech services. And so I love that space. Who was a founder-led small business. They were competing in a space that was very saturated and they were really struggling to grow.
And we were able to come in and I was able to pull in some of my agency partners with me in this engagement and really quickly with the tools available, kind of assess their marketplace and the competitors in that marketplace and point out to them that they were really going after the hardest to earn revenue. They were trying to sell large enterprise accounts. We were able to help them identify white space where they had competitors selling to mom and pop shops and they had competitors selling to large enterprises, but there was no one in their ecosystem selling to that early stage middle market.
And when they pivoted their marketing program to focus on that, they started to grow like crazy. And the really beautiful part of this story is that later on, the owner of that business had an unexpected family health situation come up and needed to be in a position to exit. And because of that pivot and the growth that they had had in those two years, he was able to sell that business at like 11x multiples and put his family in a position to really meet their needs physically and financially. So that was such a feel-good moment.
Matthew Mottola: Yeah. identifying the white space is one of those terms that I think every business leader can get behind, right? Like we all know from zero to one, right? Or from great, we all know that, but.
Jennifer Zick: Totally. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And sometimes the white space is obvious because nobody’s touching it. And sometimes the white space has to be a little bubble within another area that somebody isn’t touching in that specific way. And so another one of my favorite stories was a custom app developer who was working across all these different industries, doing completely custom work for every client. And they did exceptional work. But they said yes to anything.
So they were very diluted and their story was really hard to tell. And so this is one of those instances where we were able to get a CMO in there and work with them on answering the question, who do we want to matter to? And why should we matter to them? We were able to look at the portfolio of their successes to identify a specific industry that showed great potential and re-architect their value prop and all of their messaging around that vertical area of expertise.
And because we made that pivot, suddenly their story started to resonate in a specific market with a specific audience and suddenly started attracting strategic acquirers before the owner even was expecting to sell. He had offers on the table well beyond what he had imagined was possible, and he was able to sell that business because he was receiving offers too good to pass up. And then my final story is just one that hits close to the heartstrings because I started this conversation saying I grew up in a small town in Minnesota.
There’s a large manufacturer in that small town that I grew up in that employs a big chunk of the population there and reinvests in my little hometown community and has built that community into a thriving community. So it’s a company that I just love. The biggest blessing happened last year when their marketer reached out to me saying, I’ve been following you on LinkedIn and I see what you’re doing and we need your help. And we had the opportunity to win that business this year. it totally, like it literally brought me to tears how blessed I am to literally make a difference through my business in companies that make a difference in the people they employ and the communities they touch. So that just made it really real.
So many ways that I am grateful every day for the work we get to do for great businesses. And we actively and proactively and happily disqualify any businesses that aren’t great businesses led by jerks, because life is too short. And I’m not interested in doing that business.
Matthew Mottola: Life is way too short. Listen to the small town story. That is incredible. So for you listeners out there, we are now going into the closed, not public section. Okay? And that’s where I’m going to ask you very, very detailed and specific questions. Now, before I do that though, where can our listeners find you and what is your message to everyone? What is your sort of last message to the world before we get into the back, back closed door?
Jennifer Zick: Okay, where they can find me. I personally am very findable on LinkedIn and I would love to connect with anybody out there who’s hearing this and would love to follow each other. So look for Jennifer Zick on LinkedIn. Get in touch with our company through our website at authenticbrand.com. That’s one word. There’s no S at the end. It’s just AuthenticBrand.com. And yeah, in terms of what I would love to leave our listeners with, I will give you the advice I give my children every single day. That is the advice I’m still growing into, which is, make decisions out of love, not out of fear. And go out into this world and be awesome. Go forth and be awesome. Shine your light, be a blessing, and be blessed. That’s it. That’s what this is all about. That’s what business should be about.
Matthew Mottola: I love it. All right, everyone go connect with Jennifer ASAP, LinkedIn, go to the website, you name it.
