Beyond Random Acts: Building a Scalable Marketing Operating System

In this episode of RevOps Champions, host Brendon Dennewill talks with Jennifer Zick, CEO of Authentic and creator of the Authentic Growth Marketing Operating System. With 25+ years in B2B marketing across startups, PE-backed companies, and global organizations, Jennifer unpacks the predictable pattern she’s seen as companies scale: founder-led, sales-driven growth eventually leaves behind a trail of “random acts of marketing.”

Jennifer explains the “little m marketing vs. big M marketing” shift, where marketing stops being a sidecar to sales and becomes a strategic, leadership-aligned growth discipline across the full customer lifecycle. The conversation covers why marketing often lacks the right seat in the organization chart, how RevOps becomes the glue for execution and measurement, and why fractional leadership is evolving into a long-term operating model, especially as AI improves tactical efficiency without replacing executive judgment.

This episode is essential listening for CEOs, revenue leaders, CMOs, and RevOps professionals who want more predictable growth, clearer ROI, and a scalable marketing system that supports acquisition, retention, and valuation over time.

Watch the Full Episode

Key Takeaways

• “Random acts of marketing” are a natural but limiting phase of growth.
• The shift from “little m” to “big M” marketing is a leadership transformation, not a tactics upgrade.
• RevOps is the connective tissue that makes strategic marketing measurable and improvable.
• Fractional leadership is evolving from a stopgap into a durable operating model.
• Marketing maturity is a practice, not a project, and progress compounds over time.

Resources Mentioned

• The Components of Authentic Growth® Methodology
• The “Little m” Marketing Dilemma: How to move your growing business from reactive tactics to revenue-driving results
• Random Acts of Marketing Guide
• Fractional Is Forever: Why the Future of Marketing Leadership Isn’t Full-Time
• Authentic Growth® Random Acts of Marketing Assessment

Full Transcription

Introduction: From RevOps Alignment to Scalable Growth

Jennifer Zick: I think RevOps and having a very strong partner with you in that working with your internal team, whatever that looks like, is really the centerpiece of strategic marketing execution and optimization over time. Because if it’s not well-managed, you can’t see the results of what you’re doing. And if you can’t really see the results and understand the engagement around that, you can’t make it better, right? Yeah, I always talk about how marketing has gotten far more complex and complicated than when I started my career in marketing 25 years ago. 

But like the fundamentals of marketing are still simple and true, which is answering the questions of 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? And you cannot answer those questions with any clarity if you don’t have a strong marketing ops underpinning what you’re bringing to the market.

Brendon Dennewill: You’re listening to RevOps Champions, a podcast created for B2B leaders to help you align your people, streamline your processes, trust your data, and leverage technology in order to grow your business.

I’m very excited to have with me today Jennifer Zick. Jennifer is the CEO of Authentic, a leading fractional CMO and marketing transformation firm, helping growing businesses overcome random acts of marketing and build disciplined scalable growth systems. With more than 25 years of B2B marketing experience across startups, private companies, and global organizations, Jennifer has seen where marketing and revenue alignment break down as companies scale. 

In 2017, she founded Authentic and is the creator of the Authentic Growth marketing operating system, a structured framework designed to align marketing strategy with leadership priorities, revenue goals, and long-term business value. As a pioneer in the fractional CMO space, Jennifer is recognized as a thought leader helping organizations bring clarity, accountability, and predictability to their growth and to their go to market efforts. Jennifer, welcome to the RevOps Champions podcast.

Jennifer Zick: Brendan, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. It’s great to see you. Good to see you. 

The Predictable Breakdown: Founder-Led, Sales-Driven Growth

Brendon Dennewill: So, Jennifer, you’ve worked across startups, private equity backed companies, and global orgs. What patterns did you begin to notice that signal marketing was breaking down as companies try to scale? 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I you know I lived the pattern and then I saw the pattern in larger organizations that I was both consulting into and that I eventually went to work in. And that pattern is basically I came to identify that this is a natural life cycle that most growth businesses go through. Um, and the pattern looks like most businesses, essentially every business is founded by the vision of a founder or founders. So, they’re founder-led with a hypothesis or an initial offering. And then they’re sales driven because businesses have to sell more than one time, more than one thing to actually exist. And as that founder-led sales-driven business begins to grow and create critical mass and become an operating organization, they very naturally go through many different evolutions when it comes to their go-to market message and focus because they have to experiment in the early days to find that market fit and to accelerate. 

And when they eventually find that market fit, at some point they’re going to look behind them and recognize a trail of random acts of marketing. And that’s not a critique. That’s just a reality for growing businesses. But there will come a time for a growing company, whether it’s when they receive their, you know, first infusion of private equity funding or if it’s when the fourth generation of a family-owned business is changing hands. That organization recognizes that in order That’s what Authentic was born to do, to help those growing businesses wherever they’re at in that pattern break through founder-led sales-driven ways of thinking to become go-to market strategic thinking organizations. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. You know, as you were as you were saying, it was almost like I mean this happens to me all the time on the show where I think back to the book that many founders have read, which is the E-Myth, right? Um, and it’s almost like if you could write a version of that book, you’d probably write the “M” myth, right? Because marketing has to evolve, you know, as businesses evolve because as you say, when we start a business, we’re not, we don’t think about all the things we have to do to run and scale the business. 

The “Little m” Marketing Dilemma

Jennifer Zick: That’s right. And I have not yet written a book and the M Myth might be a title for it, but I am talking a little bit this year about what I’m calling the little M marketing dilemma. So that kind of feeds into where and how businesses get stuck with their understanding of marketing as they’re growing and evolving. So we can talk more about that as we go through this conversation. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, tell us. Let’s talk about that. 

Jennifer Zick: Well, that pattern that I described of being founder-led and salesdriven or even a company that has put a lot of effort and energy and dollars behind marketing, but they still feel this uncertainty about are we doing things in the right way, in the right order toward the right outcomes. A lot of that confusion and frustration is happening because marketing isn’t owned by the right person in the organization or doesn’t have the right seat at the leadership table. And hey, I get it. I am a founder that has bootstrapped a business too. 

You cannot hire every executive role right out of the gates. I get that. But what happens in many of these growth businesses is that the traditional org chart will serve them well in the early stages of growth and then becomes a hamstring for them because that traditional org chart will probably have a CEO role and then we’ll have a head of finance role, a head of operations or services delivery and a head of sales. And marketing ends up being this awkward area of the business that’s either tucked under sales management, maybe it’s still directed by the founder because they’re the visionary and the brand voice, or maybe it’s set over to the side and just expecting that agency partners will handle it. And in every single one of those situations, marketing is living in this little M reality where its greatest and highest potential is limited. 

For most companies, they think of marketing at this stage as being just sales support, lead gen, demand gen, get our brand out there and give us more at bats. And that’s a critical role of marketing. But what a lot of growing businesses don’t think about is what all together healthy revenue looks like for their organization. And marketing needs to play a role not just in helping to create new sales, but to ensure successful onboarding and retention of customers and clients and repeat business or retained business. That’s healthy revenue. 

So you and I live in the world of funnels. We think in terms of funnels. Too many businesses are thinking just the sales funnel, not the customer life cycle or flipped funnel that we think about. And that is what I call the “big M” opportunity. A flipped funnel. The outline of that is a big M and that’s where marketing should play supporting the entire journey. So I’ve spoken and done a webinar recently on this particular topic but you can hear it in my voice how passionate I am about helping companies understand what marketing really is and how it can support healthy revenue for their organization from end to end. 

Brendon Dennewill: So so just sort of visually so is the big essentially the same as the bow tie funnel? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Got it. I like that. And you know this is something obviously like as you said you know you and I have probably been thinking and talking about and working on a lot. You know, even if you just go back as far as 2017 when you when you started Authentic was probably around the time that I also started using the bow tie funnel to sort of really describe and understand the value that that a lot of that we saw a lot of founders and business leaders sort of leaving on the table where they were still focused on the you know the the traditional funnel of just you know getting as you were saying sort of new sort of net new customers and then and then moving on to find the net the next net new customers instead of focusing on the value that they can create um over the lifetime which of course then LTV being being the measurement but that’s right I definitely yeah I agree and I look forward to learning more and and you and you recently started a new sort of blog would you call it?

Fractional Leadership: From Bridge Solution to “Forever” Model

Jennifer Zick: Well I have gotten my hands back into blogging for sure about some topics I’m really excited about coming into this year and my latest blog is really kind of the platform for what I expect to speak about a lot this year and in the future And it’s a little bit of a shift in the way I’m thinking about our business model, not just based on wishful thinking, but based on measured impact with our client relationships over the past nine years, but particularly in the past two years. So my most recent blog on our website is called Fractional is Forever. 

And really, Brendon, the premise for this, when you and I met, like you said, in 2017 and had our first cup of coffee, I still didn’t know what kind of business I was building, right? I just knew that small businesses needed access to the wisdom of executive marketing leadership sooner than they thought they needed it. And I wanted to provide a business model that would get that executive wisdom to their table in a flexible part-time role. And as I went down the path of building authentic, I came to learn the word fractional. I learned it from looking at other fractional marketplaces that have existed for some time in finance and HR and other back office areas. Mhm. 

So my hypothesis in those early days was that if I could build a fractional CMO business and back it up with methodology that brought operational rigor to how we approach marketing, it could really teach marketing maturity to businesses. I thought of our business as being more of a bridge solution. We’ll get in, we’ll spend a year alongside the client, help build foundations, teach them some fundamentals, give them an operating system, and help them promote or hire a head of marketing. and then we would work our way out of the job. And many fractional marketing leaders still operate like that because frankly it’s a lot of fun to build a strategy and then move on to something else and build a new strategy again. 

But as we’ve gone down the path of building our client relationships, we use our own tools to measure the impact of our work. And we started to see that the longer we were with a client, the stronger their results got and the stronger their confidence in how they were spending their marketing dollars and how their brand was growing. And so I started to learn a couple years ago that we weren’t just a bridge solution. We were a long-term solution to building foundation and scale and maturity. But what I’m seeing now today as I look into the future as well is that fractional is becoming not just a short-term or even a longer term strategy. It’s becoming a forever strategy for many businesses. And here’s why. 

You and I have both experienced the power of AI in the marketer world to take some of the tactical components and make them more effective. And of course, it does not replace the wisdom of an experienced leader and orchestrator. And so I look now at the efficiencies that our CMOs have with our methodology backed up by AI to accelerate planning and research and some of those components that 2x and 3x the effectiveness of their time in that fractional role. And whereas a company might have needed a full-time CMO at 100 million in days past, you can get a lot further down the road with a fractional leader. And I believe in my own business and I see in my clients business that any leadership role that’s not a core component of what you deliver and what your core expertise is as a business fractional can be a really wonderful permanent solution to create P&L fluidity and give you the opportunity to maneuver through talent changes without a lot of disruption. 

So the future of marketing teams for our clients and the current reality is that with a fractional leader that knows how to orchestrate, you can create the right now team that you need of the right internal hires and then augmented by the right agency partners, the right contractors, the right offshore resources and AI to accelerate everybody’s efficiency. So, it’s an incredibly exciting time to be in this space and uh again, I know you can hear how excited I am about the direction that we’re helping to lead businesses.

Collaboration Over Competition in Modern Marketing Teams

Brendon Dennewill: So, no and I totally agree. Did you think much about the future world of collaboration that’s replacing the world of competition? 

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. 

Brendon Dennewill: Because because because that’s that’s kind of how I to me like everything not not just marketing and you you know earlier you mentioned how sort of sort of fractional started in the in the sort of HR and finance spaces but to me that was just those were the the initial steps that everybody were like leaders were feeling that this the sort of this outdated model that was created around the industrial revolution around competing with each other is is starting to shift and the future is is around collaboration, right? I’ve been doing a lot of work on this for the last year now and I know that the future is collaboration. But it does take a mindset shift because whatever our age is, you know, minus seven the first seven years of our lives, we’ve been essentially trained and programmed to be competitors. In other words, be go-getters. 

And that is not going to serve us going forward. So, I think the more collaborative leaders can be thinking and planning, the more successful they will be because everything I I’m I’m already seeing it. Everything just gets easier. 

Jennifer Zick: It absolutely does. And I’m really grateful to have built a culture at Authentic from the beginning that recognizes the power of collaboration. You know, one of the unique things about our model is that we’re one of the only fractional CMO firms in the world that I know of whose CMOs are W2 employees. They’re all committed exclusively to working with Authentic. And the beautiful thing is that they’re all working together. We’re a very collaborative team. You know, we hire for very bright, very talented, very experienced, true executives, but we hire those who are humble and collaborative and don’t bring in an ego and those who are willing to say out loud, “I don’t have all the answers.” Because none of us do. 

This marketing world is changing so fast that no marketer has all the answers. And we shouldn’t show up and pretend that we do. We need to lean on each other. And so I’m really grateful that I have a team that embraces that and that our solution for the client is who is the right point person backed up by the entire team. So that helps us move a lot faster when everybody leaves their egos outside and we really are just trying to find the right next step for the client.

Growth Inflection Points That Demand Strategic Marketing

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Yeah. So Jennifer, let’s go back to something that you said earlier which is so every business you know and it happens at different stages for different businesses. They have to shift from this, you know, founder-led, you know, sales-driven business to whatever comes next. So, what do you see as being the clearest signs that, you know, referrals and relationships are no longer going to be enough to support the next phase of growth?

Jennifer Zick: Well, those inflection points happen under different situations in different companies. So, I already mentioned uh generational businesses. We work with many privately held family-owned businesses and sometimes the trigger for identifying that, you know, our current network isn’t our future growth opportunity comes in a change of generation and change in vision. How are we going to see what healthy growth looks like for us in the next chapter? 

Another big pivotal moment is if the company um has brought in new investors, especially private equity investors. They’re obviously looking at what are the lowhanging fruits and then how do we optimize this business and grow it beyond where it is today. That means taking what works and amplifying it and doing things differently, right? And also for earlier stage founder-led businesses even like yours and mine. You know, I knew that my initial first stages of growth for Authentic would come out of my own network and people who already trusted me. But I knew that my future growth long term had to come from clients and the positive experiences that our team was creating for them and a much broader ecosystem of trust than just relying on my founders network. 

And so these inflection points happen at different times in different businesses as they’re redefining growth. So that might mean new ownership, new investorship, new markets, new products, new services, and they start to hit up against walls where the people that have gotten them this far don’t have all the capacity to create the road map that’s going to get them to that next chapter.  

Brendon Dennewill: Again, it’s it’s I mean, everything comes back to just being more strategic, right? But again different leaders figure those things out at different times of when their strategy and mindset needs to change from you know as you as you I like the analogy of you know treating marketing as a little it’s going to be really hard. I mean of course if you’re not, if you’re not trying to grow then it doesn’t mean you know keep doing what you’re doing but if growth is important then you have to figure out how to do things differently. 

So Jennifer, how do you see sort of marketing leadership, you know, fractional CMOs and and and revenue operations becoming more interconnected as companies pursue more predictable growth and and valuations?

Jennnifer Zick: I will say that RevOps is the glue. It’s the heart of what makes the strategy possible. And I’m living this at Authentic. You know, I have sat in the seat as our, you know, visionary CEO and our own fractional CMO for these past nine years. And I see 2026 is the year that we finally appoint someone else to take on our own fractional CMO role. 

Brendon Dennewill: Oh, exciting. 

RevOps as the Engine of Execution and Measurement

Jennifer ZIck: I’m excited about that. But here within our team, we have a marketing manager who is our RevOps specialist and sits at the center of everything that we’re executing to ensure data integrity, compliance, the right kind of segmentation strategy, the right sequence of events. You know, making sure that the vision for what we’re trying to achieve in marketing is practical and orchestrated and automated so that we don’t lose the essence of our brand or the humanity behind what we’re doing. Nothing is ever automated to the point where it feels inauthentic, right? That takes a special kind of chemistry between a CMO’s vision and the orchestration of those pieces. 

And so I think RevOps and having a very strong partner with you in that working with your internal team, whatever that looks like, is really the centerpiece of strategic marketing execution and optimization over time. Because if it’s not well-managed, you can’t see the results of what you’re doing. And if you can’t really see the results and understand the engagement around that, you can’t make it better. I always talk about how marketing has gotten far more complex and complicated than when I started my career in marketing 25 years ago. 

But like the fundamentals of marketing are still simple and true, which is answering the questions of 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? And you cannot answer those questions with any clarity if you don’t have a strong marketing ops underpinning what you’re bringing to the market.

Brendon Dennewill: Right. Right. So as you know over the last nine years and and to where you are today assuming that a lot of your clients have made the shift to to the big M from the little M. How many of them actually think about RevOps specifically or is it or is it something that that that your CMOS are really having to educate them about? 

Jennifer Zick: We do a lot of educating and we do a lot of foundation building. And this is why our relationships live on beyond 12 months because change takes time and implementing new systems and processes and cleaning up data and then setting up metrics and then getting to baselines and then getting enough data over time that you have actual patterns from which you can draw insights. That does not happen overnight. So, one of the biggest educations that we lead for our clients as CMOs is you don’t just get from little M marketing to clear marketing ROI. 

Like that is not just a turn the switch on and here we go. They are always missing pieces of the foundation, pieces of the process and pieces of data. And so it takes time to build. So we just walk with them hand in hand. We use some of our tools up front to help them assess the maturity or lack of maturity in their tech stack and their marketing ops approach and then we formulate for them an action plan and an evolving roadmap for how we are going to start to fill these gaps over time. 

And it’s fascinating because there are some industries that just historically like they’ve never really believed in CRM or anything to do with nurturing relationships. They have an ERP and they know who their customers have been, but they have no data, no process, no no programs for nurturing the entire life cycle. So, it takes time, but there’s just nothing more satisfying than starting to prove the value of those investments and the valuation of the business. When the business starts to really understand and can predictively model how they’re engaging their audiences and how they’re converting that through their pipeline to drive predictive growth. That’s magic.

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Yeah. And and I mean, you know, we see that all the time too, you know, the fact that these things do take longer and I and I think it’s, you know, the whether it’s, you know, the little M and the big M or the little R and the and the big R or, you know, you could use that analogy throughout the sort of different functions of the business. It ultimately comes down to a leadership mind shift like sort of mindset shift right again just becoming more strategic so that you can grow and one of the one of the things that we talk about both from a RevOps and CRM perspective because like in our case of course there they really are to get we cannot we cannot successfully implement and operate a CRM for for a business if we don’t go through the the RevOps lens because otherwise all we’re doing is adding technology without any strategy and the the way we talk about it is it’s it’s not an implementation. 

It’s a practice, you know. So, we compare it to sort of a yoga practice or if you have a fitness regime, um it’s not you’re not going to just do it for a year and then and then you’re done. If you want to keep getting fitter or stay in better shape or have better wellness, you have to keep doing it. And we kind of look at whether it’s sales, marketing, customer service, RevOps, CRM, they’re they’re all they’re all the same. It’s a practice. It’s not an implementation. 

Marketing Maturity Takes Time and Practice

Jennifer Zick: Right. You’re so right. And I love that analogy. And I started strength training two years ago. And I can tell you that life mirrors the work that we do.  I strength train and every quarter they do an assessment and they check my results this quarter versus last quarter and they show me the tangible gains. And those are gains I can’t feel dayto-day because it doesn’t feel like I’m doing much of anything different. You know, it doesn’t feel like great progress. But when you add up the gains, little as they may be, quarter after quarter, year after year, your life starts to change. And it’s the same with marketing. 

It’s the same with any discipline in a business. Those of us founders who have been growing growth companies know that like every single stage requires a new stretch. You’re never done. And that’s why Authentic doesn’t take on projects. You know, we don’t come in and just do a three-month assessment and planning and hand you back your marketing roadmap because those businesses don’t actually know how to implement it. And even if they can implement the initial steps of it, they don’t have the maturity to continue to repeat the steps to reformulate that strategy to match what you’re learning from the steps taken. So, yeah, it’s a discipline.

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Yeah. I said and again going back to what you were saying in the in the beginning as far as like you know every entrepreneur or founder when they when they first start a business of you know of course the ideal would be just have the best people in every functional area from day one but of course that’s that’s not going to happen and if you if you think about that’s really what it comes back down to is they don’t yet it’s the sophistication comes from not having people who have that sophistication. So whether it’s experience or knowledge or whatever it is, that’s what’s missing. 

And and I guess one of the one of the reasons that any sort of fractional role began because it didn’t make sense to hire someone for $150,000 or $250,000 when you could get them at a fraction to start making the progress so that when once a business gets to that point, you know, they can they’ve they’ve grown, they have the revenue to start investing in in some full-time staff potentially if it makes sense at that point. But now one of the interesting things of course looking back is now you don’t necessarily have to make that switch but you now have options. It’s always so like our RevOps model is and people who listen to the show more frequently know it’s people process data and technology in that order. We cannot be successful with the technology that we’re implementing and optimizing for a business if we haven’t gone through the steps of knowing that they have the right people, the right processes, and they’re measuring the right metrics and data. 

But it always starts and ends with people. And you can only really make progress once you have the right person in the right seat. 

Reducing Marketing Leadership Churn

Jennifer Zick: Right. That’s right. And right person, right seat is another one of the reasons that I am kind of standing behind this fractional forever model particularly in fractional CMO because those of us who’ve been CMOs and executive heads of marketing understand that you reach a point in your career where you are sitting in the hottest seat at the leadership table. That marketing leadership role is one of the most volatile and fastest turned over roles on any leadership team. It has a life cycle, you know, 18 months to 24 months in many organizations. And when you think about that as a full-time executive headcount with a bonus, with the benefits, with the cost of maybe recruiting them into the role and the time to on board and then the cost of the loss of progress and the the cultural shakeup of the loss of a leader and the cost to replace, this is a this is like the turning door cycle for a lot of businesses with their marketing leadership role. 

And so Authentics’s model is designed to get rid of that friction. There will be times when you need a different leader because the leader that you might be matched with today perhaps has led your current business into, you know, through three years of growth, but now you’re going to open a new line of business or maybe you’re moving from a distribution to an e-commerce strategy. Now you need a different kind of marketing leader. 

We’re designed to have those colleagues at the ready without disruption to your business. all operating from the same marketing operating system so that the language, the pro the programs and the processes keep running even through those times of transition. So I’m really excited to be talking with more businesses about helping to reduce the disruption of the marketing leadership seat churn.

Brendon Dennewill:  Yeah. And what is how much of that is connected to your sort of little M big big M work or do you think even companies that are that have that realize that the M is big even they need to go through the sort of evolution of what is required from that marketing leader seat. 

Navigating Disruption, Change, and Valuation Events

Jennifer Zick: Yeah. Well big M marketing isn’t like you arrive and you’re happily ever after. Like we’ve seen businesses hit that like brand nirvana and flywheel of revenue growth just to experience a massive market disruption like new tariffs or COVID or a disruption that’s a good disruption like they’ve just acquired another business or been acquired by another larger organization. 

So in those times of disruption, the flywheel that you’ve built that’s working with great maturity suddenly becomes unsettled again and healthy, mature, robust processes have to be redefined. So business just doesn’t stand still. It’s constantly in motion. And I don’t know of any strong, healthy, growing company that’s had the exact same set of leaders at their leadership table for 10 years straight. Like change happens and we want to help businesses be ready for that change. 

The other reality, whether we like it or not as marketers, is that when a business is preparing to be sold, there are some areas of the business that often need to be downsized on the P&L in order to bump up that EBITDA and and look, you know, ripe for acquisition, get those multiples up. And marketing is often one of the first areas to experience those cuts. 

So if you’re working with a firm like Authentic, you can create that kind of turn the dial down without losing your leader, without losing the continuity, but you can create that kind of fluidity for those events and have the kind of leader that knows how to orchestrate through change management like a merger, like an integration and carry your team through with that level of executive acumen that you’re going to need during major times of transition.

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what makes a lot of sense. So, and and hopefully for a lot of the folks listening, they’re getting some clarity if they’re going through something like that. So, you you started touching now on on some of the things that we all have to go through as founders and business leaders who have seen growth and but we also know that that growth is not always well we know that it’s not linear and some of our biggest times of growth come from come right after some of some of the the lowest lows that we’ve had and you know and I know you’ve talked about this, where like losing your job became a defining moment in in your career. 

What made you confident enough to step away from a traditional path? Because you mean you worked with some amazing people at some amazing companies of all kinds of sizes. What gave you the confidence to step away and build Authentic from the ground up? 

Founder Story: Choosing Bravery Over the Traditional Path

Jennifer Zick: I love thinking back to where I was at that moment in my life in 2017. I was 39 years old and I had been grinding it out in my career like really and joyfully. I’ve always loved to work. My husband’s been an amazing partner with me in navigating what both of our careers were looking like at every stage and raising a family as our top priority. 

But I always thought my trajectory was going to continue to be that executive, that CMO, you know, tech company, rocket ship, Bay Area. That was the path I was on. And when I ended up losing my job for the first time in a Bay Area backed company with a team of people I loved that I had built, that company was under a lot of pressure. And when my role was cut, I was not planning to start my own business. Like that was something there was this little tiny entrepreneurial seed in my heart, but I had never really watered it because I grew up in scarcity and I had a lot of I made a lot of fear-based decisions. Take the safe route, the predictable route. 

But in that moment when the job was taken off the plate and I looked at my life and took stock and realized I don’t want to miss out on my own life. I don’t want to be on an airplane away from my kids that were like littles and middles at the time. The one thing that really made me brave in that moment was that just a few years prior when I was 35, I had survived a scare with ovarian cancer and I knew in the midst of that I was at that point approaching my kind of five-year cancer-free anniversary and I was just cherishing my one short precious life and I had decided in that journey like I’m am going to learn how not to make decisions out of fear but to make them out of love and pursue big things and take big risks because on balance, what’s the worst thing that could happen? 

Like either I don’t enjoy it or I fail and so what? I’ve got a great track record. I’ll get up and look for a job. So that was what made me brave in that moment. But there have been many, many micro moments since then that have made me braver. And almost all of them have been the struggles, the losses, the loss of great team members or the roles we need to fill but can’t yet. Like all the struggles along the way are what make you braver every day in entrepreneurship. So, I’m really grateful to be surrounded by amazing people and beyond this journey. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. You know, it’s so weird because um when you and I had coffee back in what is it? Was it 2017 or was it around that time? 

Jennifer Zick: 2016, 2017. March of that year. And I think we were collaborating on an event that same year. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yes. Yes. And I guess I didn’t think about it at the time, but of course I’m even wiser now than I was nine years ago. I was not fearful for you at all because you know we were you were sitting down and I sort of asking me all these questions and I as I think back you were like you know am I doing the right thing and you know what what what what happens if I do this and what happens if I if this goes wrong or whatever and never for a minute did I doubt that that you had what it took to be extremely successful but I wasn’t thinking that you didn’t know didn’t realize at the time right.

Jennifer Zick: Well I am really grateful to you and Kristen honestly for being one of the early mirrors that reflected confidence back at me because I did have a lot of self-doubt. Frankly, I felt like an impostor for the first few years initially being a solopreneur. I remember the feeling from the coffee shop the first time I published a blog thinking to myself, okay, I’m a career marketer. I’ve been publishing content and writing content that promoted other people and brands my whole life, but I’ve never published anything with my name on it that is like thought leadership and people are going to find out I don’t know what I’m talking about. 

But the opposite happened, like people like you and others in my community started to see what I was doing and they believed in me and they believed in and it made me braver and so thank you for being an early champion for me because I needed it badly and I hope that I can continue to be that for other entrepreneurs. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. I just didn’t realize that but as you were talking I’m like oh my god she was she wasn’t all that confident at the time but I had I had no doubt that you had what it took and thank you and of course you’ve and you’ve you’ve proven that. 

Jennifer Zick: Well I’m still running scared you know it’s it’s I’m never not going to want to have a little bit of that but bravery is not not being scared. Bravery is like recognizing the fear and deciding to move forward anyway. 

Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely absolutely and and to your you know one of the earlier points you made which you know we all we all have goals but it doesn’t mean that you know once you’ve reached that goal doesn’t mean you’re done you know you then you have to set the next goal right yes so Jennifer in in the early days of Authentic what result or realization confirmed that this was more than a marketing service and instead a different model for growth?

Proving the Model: From Solo Founder to Scalable Team

Jennifer Zick: yeah it took a few months honestly in the first few months when I was just getting started and I needed to provide for my family. I took on whatever projects I knew I could deliver, right? And my realm of experience in your introduction of me, you’re absolutely true. My whole background has been B2B professional services, sales and marketing, and that’s what I knew. That’s the world I knew. Um the big stretch for me came in deciding that after several engagements where I placed other CMOs in B2B engagements that were successful and had longevity started to prove out the model. 

Once we had enough proof under that model, I needed to place a bigger bet and that was converting to a W2 hiring model and starting to hire CMOs who had expertise that I did not have. So I started to build a team that included B2B and B2C expertise and all of these different business scenarios I had never worked in. And so the proof came when we were able to sell the concept of a right fit fractional CMO for each client regardless of their industry or business model and have the team to back that up and to consistently deliver consistently earn the trust of clients and deliver value quickly leveraging the Authentic Growth® Methodology I had developed and that I would continue to redevelop over the years with that diverse CMO mindset around me. So, it’s been a slow burn, but it’s been in me, you know, being brave enough to know what I don’t know and then to continue to just bring really experienced people around me and be surrounded by marketers so much smarter and more experienced than I am. They are what makes this model work. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Well, and of course, it’s like every other business or industry or career path, profession. You know, everybody has unique experiences and that is what makes each of us unique and you cannot learn everything that another human has learned. It’ll take you their entire lifetime to learn it. Obviously, now with AI things will be a little you can learn a little more a little faster, but I mean it comes back to the sort of teamwork and collaboration piece, right? It’s like if you have a team of two, three, 10, whatever it is, you have more experience, more expertise, and therefore you will be making better decisions and providing much higher quality services. 

Jennifer Zick: Yes, indeed. I am smarter every day just by sitting in the company of the people I work with. 

Creating Alignment Through Assessment and Clarity

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. For that. Well, like you know, like we tell our kids all the time too, you know, just it’s all about the five people you spend the most time with. Okay. So Jennifer, as we wrap up here, if a CEO or revenue leader listening today could ask their team one question this week to improve revenue alignment, what should that question be? 

Jennifer Zick: Okay, I’m going to offer more than one question, that’s because there are so many things I would want them to ask and maybe out of this they could find the one question. One of the tools that we use to baseline a new client and help them understand how mature or random or not random is your marketing and is our random acts of marketing assessment. So this is a simple tool. It has 20 questions but it’s available for free on our website under our resources. These 20 questions are simple questions. And if you were to have the folks on your marketing, leadership, and sales teams take this simple survey. 

Not only will it show you where there might be weak spots and opportunities, but it’s going to show you where there’s misalignment, where maybe the CEO thinks that marketing is really strong in this area, but the person sitting in the marketing seat sees it very differently. That is where there’s opportunities for alignment to understand one another’s worlds better and to create clarity. So I feel like I’m cheating by not offering just one question, but I really think that this tool which underpins our methodology and helps to demonstrate the impact that our CMOs have in leading teams forward is a powerful tool for kind of sussing out what might be broken and what might be frankly just misaligned.

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that makes total sense because you have a lot of IP and work that you’ve put into coming up with that assessment. So, that probably is one really smart thing for folks to do.

Um, and that’s and that’s essentially what that is all based on your Authentic Growth® Marketing Operating System is is kind of what’s what’s behind that. That’s kind of the assessment to figure out where someone’s operating system could be improved if they were to work with you.

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, it’s one of many tools that our CMOS draws from, but it’s one tool that we use consistently with every client as a baseline score and then quarterly thereafter. Not only demonstrating, and this is I’m really proud about this, that across more than 2,000 survey respondents over the last two years, we’ve been able to unequivocally demonstrate that all of our clients see improvement against all 20 of those attributes quarter over quarter over quarter. 

But it also underscores the journey that marketing is because we have clients start off with us at a scale of 20 to 100 points. They might start off with us at a 36 and after the end of the first year they’re a 68. I mean, we have not yet arrived, right? But it is kind of known and we have yet to have a client that hits a 100 because nothing’s perfect. There’s always room to optimize and improve. But it definitely helps build confidence that okay, we know where we are now. We can identify where we need to start improving. 

Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Just creates that clarity again. You know, and I know, you know, you and I and a lot of the people listening live in this sort of 90-day world. And again, having that clarity of knowing what we and the team need to work on for the next 90 days to sort of improve that score, which means that you’re also then, you know, driving revenue and growth and systems and structure that’ll increase the value of the business. That makes total sense. That’s right. 

Jennifer Zick: Because ultimately at the end of the day, we’re in the revenue game. That matters greatly. But the true role of strategic marketing in an organization is to increase revenue, increase healthy revenue and profitability. And in doing so, in building a strong brand, increase the value of the business. So, yep, that’s the real reason for what we’re doing. 

Brendon Dennewill: Okay. Well, then in that case, I need to ask you one more question. Okay. because which comes back to sort of the the measurement piece and you know we talk about this a lot and and it’s interesting because it it also depends on on the maturity of of a business and so the two metrics that I always start with are LTV and and CAC right um however a lot of businesses aren’t yet at the point where they’re measuring those two metrics unless of course if they’re in the SAS space then typically that they’re measuring those but for for any business that’s not technology or SaaS. LTV and CAC seem to come much later in their sort of maturity. 

What are the other sort of big metrics that you look at as a team as your clients mature in their growth and scalability? 

Jennifer Zick: Yep. Those two are like the big two that we’re aiming to understand with clarity and to direct our strategies around. We’re also looking at NPS or some kind of equivalent score about customer satisfaction and net promoter score because we’re looking for the strength of advocacy because for a business to really achieve that flywheel result, the word of the buyers will begin to outweigh the word of the brand if things are going well. 

So, we really want to measure the sentiment of the stakeholders around the business. That even includes ENPS, employee net promoter score. We want to look at the health of the relationships that surround that business. Obviously, more tactically, we’re watching funnel conversion metrics, right? We’re looking at conversion from engagement to a marketing qualified lead to a sales accepted to a sales qualified to a new buyer. We’re looking at all of those metrics along the way. And we’re looking at not only conversion percentages, but time to close. And that might be more of a B2B metric because consumer purchases happen faster. 

And we’re looking at different metrics there. But we want to be looking for the levers and the dials, right? Like where in this business can we speed things up and still keep the quality? Where can we lengthen and strengthen the relationships? Where can we add value and thereby increase the profitability and the longevity of this relationship? So, we’re always looking at the things that help us understand the levers and the dials. But you’re right. I’ve done some webinars and have some content on our website. I’m sure you do too on helping businesses understand what is lifetime value, how do you measure it, what is cost of acquisition and how do you measure it? There are some simple formulas. There are some more complex. The important thing is to have a formula.

Brendon Dennewill: And I guess I wasn’t meaning to geek out on this at all, but the one measurement that we’re seeing more and more now with some of our bigger clients that seems to becoming um a really core metric is net revenue retention, NRR. How often do you see that showing up? 

Jennifer Zick: Well, that matters a lot in models where long-term contracts or renewals and subscriptions are present. It’s a different kind of a formula in a consumer relationship where purchases might be transactional or seasonal. But even to make it personal at Authentic, our fractional CMO services are all packaged as retainers. Our CMOs are all paid the same rate. So we offer flat rate retainer pricing. Our contracts are flexible. They’re always the current month plus the next 60 days. So you can see how we can do accurate projections because we have a forward forecast but we also have to be earning and creating value in order to retain that business. 

And it’s a balance of understanding like what is our net recurring revenue month over month, year over year and then when we set our new goals for the year what can we count on for retained revenue versus and then it gives us intelligence for how we think about setting goals, right? like what percent of our revenue is going to come from retained client revenue versus how much do we need to go win net new at what level in order to hit the goals that we have and this kind of balance of metrics driven decision-making and goal setting is what creates healthy cultures because otherwise, I see leadership teams just like shot in the dark goal setting like yep we need to 2x again next year I’m like how are you going to do it who’s responsible for which piece of that how sure are you of your existing customer relationships and they have never answered those questions. It’s just crazy to me. 

Brendon Dennewill: Wow. And of course, now you just mentioned the 2x um which I could take the conversation in a whole another direction because um I’m a big believer that that 10x is easier than 2x. Uh anyway, that’s a different conversation for a different day. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today. It was so great to catch up and um I wish you and the team at Authentic all the best for 2026. 

Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Brendan. It’s always great to have a little reunion with my friends at Denamico and I’m always cheering you on. So, keep up the good work and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you.