Stop Marketing, Start Strategizing

In this episode of Leadership Matters, host Kaylee Thomsen from the Bailey Group sits down with Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic, to explore what it really takes to move beyond “random acts of marketing” and build sustainable, strategic growth. Jennifer shares her unexpected journey into entrepreneurship, the market gap that led her to pioneer the fractional CMO model, and the lessons she’s learned about leadership, trust, and focus along the way. 

From defining the difference between “little m” and “Big M” marketing to navigating AI, company culture, and business uncertainty, this conversation offers practical insights for leaders looking to grow with clarity and intention.

Watch the Full Episode

Key Takeaways

• Many growing businesses fall into “random acts of marketing” because they lack experienced strategic leadership early enough to guide focused, sustainable growth.
• Effective marketing starts with answering four core questions: who you serve, why you matter, where to reach them, and how to build trust.
• Strong leadership and company culture, rooted in clearly defined values and reinforced daily, are critical to building engaged teams and long-term success.
• Growth accelerates when businesses adopt structure and focus (like EOS), narrowing their efforts instead of trying to do everything at once.
• AI will enhance, not replace, human marketers, requiring thoughtful, human-centered implementation to strengthen relationships rather than erode trust.

Full Transcription

Founding Vision & Market Gap

Kaylee Thomsen: Welcome to Leadership Matters, a podcast from the Bailey Group. I’m your host Kaylee Thomsen, president of and partner at the Bailey Group, where we believe better leaders create healthier workplace environments, healthier humans, and a better world. On this show we explore real stories, practical insights and honest conversations to help you lead yourself and others better. Thanks for joining us. Let’s dive in. 

Welcome back to Leadership Matters. I’m your host Kaylee Thomsen and today I’m joined by Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic, a fractional CMO firm specializing in partnering with clients to help them move beyond what they refer to as random acts of marketing to strategically sustainable growth. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me. 

Jennifer Zick: Thanks Kaylee. It’s great to be here. 

Kaylee Thomsen: I would love to start with your founding story and go back to earlier Jennifer, when you noticed something in the marketplace that you realized needed to change and what led you to launch Authentic. 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I love sharing this story because I wish I could tell you that I was some kind of very thoughtful entrepreneur who had a plan that I was really building toward and took a leap of faith. But in fact my launch story started just over nine years ago when I lost a job for the first time. My career prior to that had been in sales and marketing, Leadership roles in B2B professional services firms mostly around technology and I had a wonderful career in fast growing startups, large global enterprise and in a PE backed mid market firm which is where my role eventually got cut. And when that happened I was 39 years old. 

I was in the throes of raising a young family with little and middle sized kids and the loss of my job was the greatest gift I could have received because I needed to pause and take inventory of what really mattered. And in that moment I realized I don’t want to be on an airplane away from my kids. I want to be present in my own life. I want to be grounded and I don’t want to build my career faster than I can raise a family by prioritizing that. And so with that decision, within just a couple of weeks of losing my job, I also had taken some time to just reflect on what does this mean? What is next? It was important that I continue to make an income. I love to work. 

So I took myself up to our northwoods cabin in Hackensack, Minnesota. Spent some time just praying and thinking and doodling and started asking myself what would it look like if I took a bet on myself? What would it look like if I acknowledged that I did have a little entrepreneurial seed in my heart and I planted it. And, and it was scary of course, because I could fail or I could hate it, I didn’t know. But I thought, you know, worst case scenario, if either of those situations were to be true, I could get another job. And so with my husband’s blessing, I decided I was going to build a business. And up at that cabin, as I was noodling and doodling on what would it look like? I didn’t have any words to describe the business model. 

I just started thinking about what in my life had I experienced in my career that were issues that I had seen, that were patterns that I might have the skills to help solve. And when I rolled back the timeline and looked at my career, which started off in sales and then moved into marketing and then marketing executive leadership, what I saw was a pattern across those companies and others that I had consulted into along the way is that small founder led and growth companies tended to commit, as you said, what we lovingly call random acts of marketing. They start off founder led, sales driven, which they need to be. You need to prove that you can sell something more than once, repeatedly, and deliver it to have a business at all. 

But when they reached the point of needing to scale beyond their known network and they really needed marketing expertise, they usually didn’t have that expertise in house. And most businesses weren’t going to hire a true executive marketer until they were, you know, past 100 million in revenue. So there was a gap that I saw in the market. Small growth businesses who need the wisdom of experienced marketing leadership sooner so that they could avoid the time and money and frustration, loss, all of the loss in trying to figure marketing out by trial and error. And I thought, I can do that. I can bring experienced marketing leadership to small businesses and make a meaningful impact and help them grow with more clarity and get there faster. I didn’t have the words for it. 

I just knew that there was a model that needed to exist that I had never seen anywhere. And so I set off to build it and I formed a hypothesis. And I knew from my past work experience, having worked in some really wonderfully run businesses, that having strong operating systems and processes help make services much more successful. So as I started to build the plan behind the business model, I gave myself a business plan and timeline for how I wanted to scale what my role in the business would be, and what the service would look like. And I started having just hundreds of coffee dates with people in my network to say, this is my hypothesis, give me Feedback. And it started to gain momentum, and that was the beginning of Authentic. So that was now almost nine years ago in 2017. 

Launched from my kitchen table with an idea, zero clients, and just have bootstrapped it ever since. And it’s just been the greatest joy and blessing of my life to build the team that we have today, doing the meaningful work that we do today with so many clients. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What an incredible story. 

Jennifer Zick: Thank you. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What was the biggest fear you had to get over in that season, Jennifer? 

Jennifer Zick: Well, I think the fear that most of us face that goes unnamed a lot of times is just the imposter syndrome. You know, I had built a career as being a really confident spokesperson for other people’s brands and capabilities. I knew how to confidently sell the services other people were delivering or the products and solutions that other businesses I worked for provided. But I had never sold myself as an expert. And so right out of the gates, the, you know, the nagging thought in the back of my head was, if I start to put myself out there as a leader in this space, people will figure out that I don’t know what I’m doing. It just felt really vulnerable, which was hard for me to reconcile because I’ve always been confident in representing other people’s brands and, like, bringing the spotlight to other people. 

But when it came to needing to build a brand that had to begin with me, it was really intimidating. And I remember the fear sitting in my virtual office coffee shop at the time of publishing my first LinkedIn article as Authentic, my first piece of thought leadership for my own business, and just waiting for, like, negative feedback. I just thought I was gonna be either crickets or confrontation. And it was the opposite, of course, you know, and so it’s. As people started to affirm the work I was doing and their belief in me and their belief in the model, my confidence continued to grow. But we all struggle with that imposter syndrome, especially if we get caught in the trap of comparison. There’s so much around us all the time and so many. 

So many other people are doing things that can look better, you know, so I’ve also had to learn to not let comparison steal my joy. 

Kaylee Thomsen: Mm. Really well said. 

Jennifer Zick: Thank you. 

Kaylee Thomsen: You mentioned this seed, this entrepreneurial seed in your heart. When did you first get glimpses of that seed, Jennifer? 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I was really privileged to be part of an early stage growth company that I joined. Gosh, it was my, you know, third role out of college. I was in my early 20s. I had a couple of doozies of jobs just coming out of school that taught me more about what I knew I didn’t want to do and the kinds of people I didn’t want to work with. And I had cut free from that last job and was deciding, I’m going to network until I meet the people I really want to work with. And I met two young men who were building a technology firm, and I had done enough in another company selling web services to know that I could help them. One of the founders was a brilliant technologist. The other was just a wonderful, visionary entrepreneur. 

And I became their first sales person and their first employee. And so we started this little engine that could. They were the two owners and founders, and I was their first employee. And I got to experience entrepreneurship from the second row seat. I got to be part of a founding team and be part of the evolution of that business from 0 million in revenue with 3 of us to over 25 million in revenue with 125 of us by the time I exited 13 years later. And I got to be a leader in that business through all those stages of growth. And at every stage of growth, when my role would be pressured and expanded, I always wondered, am I going to top out here? Like, have I reached my limit? Because I didn’t know. 

And every time I found that, like, I could level up, and I did level up, and I loved it. I just loved that entrepreneurial cycle. I loved being at the helm of building a strong brand with a strong culture and a strong team. That was just a really sweet era in my career, and that was where I fell in love with entrepreneurialism. Now, I hadn’t taken the risk because I wasn’t the founder owner, but I got to be part of the journey of it. And I learned so much through that experience that gave me a bit of a playbook, so that when I started my own business, I had learned enough to know the steps that I wanted to take and the kind of culture that I wanted to build. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What were some of your biggest learnings from that experience? 

Jennifer Zick: The biggest takeaway that has impacted my business today is that somewhere along the timeline of the 13 years I spent in that company, probably about eight years in, we had been this, you know, can do young team of scrappy entrepreneurial people building this web services digital firm. And we said yes to everything clients wanted us to do, which meant we had become like, 30 miles wide and 3 inches deep. Right? We had very broad capabilities, and it was a very complex business to run because we’re trying to do all the things. And we had hit a growth plateau. We were young and we did great work, but we didn’t know how to scale a business because we had never done it. And that was when our CEO, that visionary I spoke about, he was part of EO in an EO forum. 

And that was when the book Traction was recently published. And Mike Peyton was the first implementer in Minnesota, and he visited the EO chapter and our CEO grabbed onto this idea that our business needed an operating system. And so we became one of the first companies in Minnesota to implement EOS.

Kaylee Thomsen: Wow. 

Jennifer Zick: And it was a game changer in the business. It taught us the practical, everyday tools to operationalize and focus the company for growth. And with that system, we were able to take a company that had been so wide in our services and be very decisive about narrowing it down. We went from doing all things digital to becoming laser focused on being experts in salesforce.com CRM implementation and customization. And that was the beginning of our hockey stick growth trajectory. And so what I learned through that experience was like, you can have a bunch of brilliant minds, you can have good ideas, great intentions, and even great delivery, but if you don’t have focus and structure and process, you will become a shotgun approach. And so day one at my kitchen table with Authentic. 

Nine years ago, you could have found me with my Traction book, building my first VTO vision, Traction organizer, and arguing with me, myself and I about my core values. So it was great. Like, from day one, I have built my business on EOS, and that community has become very central to how we continue to build our business, because many of our clients run on eos and operating systems, and we share that kind of common DNA and commitment to the structure behind our growth. 

Leadership Philosophy and Company Culture

Kaylee Thomsen: Yeah, what a fascinating story. How did those 13 years of experience shape you as a leader? What were some of the lessons that you’ve taken into how you continue to lead at Authentic and otherwise? 

Jennifer Zick: The most important lesson I took from my 13 years in that company was how to lead with love and passion and rooted in values. That company was so deeply grounded in their values, and the employees who joined bought in 100% to that shared value system. And no matter what kind of change came our way as a company, we were ready to rally around it because we were so united in those values. I had amazing leaders who really cared, who invested in their employees and coached and developed. And it was a place where I loved going to work every day. I loved it. It was hard work. It was always challenging. We did big things together, and I really loved my coworkers. And then I have, on either side of that career experience, worked in environments that were not like that. 

And so when I started Authentic, my deepest commitment in my heart was my twofold mission. And this is the same mission we stand behind today. The first part of that mission is that we help great businesses to overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step toward healthy growth. And the second, very important part of that mission is that we help our employees to love their lives and love their work. And we do that by being rooted and grounded in our values, so that even when our business needs to change, that’s our anchor. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What are your core values at Authentic? 

Jennifer Zick: All right, let me see. Let me see if my brain will sync up with me today. So authenticity, passion, generosity, wisdom, and humility. 

Kaylee Thomsen: Wow. 

Jennifer Zick: And those five core values are underpinned by basically a values operating system that I built, being inspired by a speaker who came to the Vistage Group. I was part of those five values used to have a few bullet points attached to them, and that was helpful. But as the business grew and we added employees, sometimes the interpretation of those values was different from one employee to the next. And I wanted to make sure that everybody in the company really understood what it looks like to walk those values out every day? How do we show up? How do we live them out? And so I created 25 Authentic actions, and they describe the way that we show up in the world. And they’re very clear and very specific. 

And we didn’t just write them on our website or on a, you know, accordion fold out, though we do have those assets. We practice them by reminding ourselves about them every day. So every single week, on Monday morning, one of our employees at any level in the business will put together a video. They’ll read out the Authentic action of the week, and they’ll share what it means to them and how they see it embodied in our business. And then they post that video to our internal Slack, and other people chime in on it. And then every level 10 meeting that we host during that week starts off by reading out that Authentic action. So it just becomes a part of our heartbeat and it grows in its meaning as our employees attach what it means to them. 

So it’s like every one of my employees is a brand ambassador who carries that values torch with them and holds one another accountable to it. And it’s just a beautiful thing. And after the 25 Authentic actions, there is a PS that says, no jerks. Life is short. So we don’t partner with jerks, and we don’t work with jerks. So I want to protect my team from toxic relationships, and that’s my commitment. 

Marketing Strategy and Client Insights

Kaylee Thomsen: That is awesome. I want to take a little bit of a turn here and talk about this wonderful phrase that you all have made popular around overcoming random acts of marketing, which, my goodness, I feel like we’ve all been guilty of in some way or another. Where did that terminology originate from? And why is it so tempting for even the most strategic of us to get in this spiral of activity without actually having that lead to meaningful results? 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, this is a fun story because again, I would love to say that, like, I did a really strategic, like, brand messaging exercise and did a lot of work behind. No. The way that this tagline was shaped was that one day I was sitting in a sales meeting with a CEO and a cfo. We were live in person, and for some reason, the phrase just slipped out of my mouth, something about random acts of marketing. And the two of them looked at each other and then nervously chuckled. And I knew I had hit a nerve. I knew I. And so I’m like, I’m gonna use that phrase again. And so I started using that phrase in my sales meetings. 

And every time prospects would either, like, knowingly their eyes would get wide or they would nervously chuckle or they would say, that’s us to a T. I’m like, this is the problem we solve. This is if a client can see themselves in the phrase random acts of marketing, we can be part of that solution. And so I trademarked that tagline, and I hear all the time how much it’s like, wow, that hits right on the tender nerve of what we all experience. And it’s not meant as judgment. It’s meant as. It’s just a reality check. The story I told you about the issue and the pattern I saw in the world of growing businesses, creating random acts of marketing is like going through business puberty. Okay, you can’t grow up without it, but it’s an ugly phase. But it happens. 

Because no business really knows their market fit and focus without first experimenting along the way. Just like me. I started with a hypothesis and I had to bring it to market, get feedback. I’ve had to iterate on it. I’ve had to find words to describe it. My sales deck in the first three years of my business changed almost weekly. My proven process changed, like quarterly for the first two years. You have to iterate to build a stable business. And even once you’ve landed on your go to market fit and focus. The world continues to change, right? New things happen or big things happen in your business, perhaps through mergers, acquisitions, integrations. Nothing is ever a straight line move from strategy to pure execution. There will always be random acts, but they can be less random when you have the wisdom of experience, leadership in the room to quiet the noise, and you have a structure and a methodology to guide the decision making, which is what we bring. 

We bring the marketers with the wisdom, the methodology that we call authentic growth as a framework for decision making, and the mindshare, which is our collective community of CMOs who all work together. So we have the power of all of that cross industry experience, many different business models of experience, different sizes and types of companies. We get to draw upon all of that wisdom on behalf of each of our clients because no single marketer has all the answers. So those represent our three uniques at marketers, methodology and mindshare. And the three of those ingredients together. That’s our secret sauce. 

Kaylee Thomsen: You’ve worked for almost a decade now partnering with CEOs, with organizations to really help move them into repeatable and sustainable growth. What have you learned about where most of us get in our own way when it comes to marketing? 

Jennifer Zick: The biggest problem that growing businesses have is that they misunderstand marketing. And so I hope through just being a spokesperson that I can help to provide more education around that. I’ve recently spoken on this concept of the little M marketing dilemma and the big M marketing opportunity. Perhaps the best way to explain this in a podcast format is to think about the fact that as business leaders, if you’re the CEO or you’re the cfo, you’re looking at the business through the lens of a P and L, right? And on that P and L, there’s like one line item called advertising. And that’s what a lot of businesses think marketing is. They think marketing is the dollars that we spend to throw at paid opportunities to grow our brand awareness. 

We sponsor events, we go to trade shows, we run print ads, or whatever the combination of those things might be. But in the world of actual marketing, advertising is a tiny little blip inside a much bigger circle of the things that actually build a healthy, sustainable brand and growth engine. And so part of what we do as CMOs is that we, it’s our job to widen the aperture, to show our clients where they might be limiting their own potential by putting marketing inside of too small of a box, or they might be deploying tactics that they think make sense because an agency prescribed them or a competitor is doing them or another company next to them. But really, strategic marketing happens when you answer four simple questions. 

It’s not easy, but the simple questions that have always been true about strategic marketing, regardless of the tools and tactics that continue to just balloon around us, the simple questions that you need to answer are who do we want to matter to? That’s your icp, right? Your ideal customer profile. Why should we matter to them? That’s your unique value proposition. And usually businesses are very myopic about it. They think they know why they should matter to their buyers, but they’ve never asked the buyers. So that takes research, it takes good voice of customer intel. So, the first question is, who do we wanna matter to? Second, why do we matter to them? Third, very importantly, how do we enter their natural habitat? That is your channel strategy. 

That is the question that when answered properly, will help you to know what tactics and what channels in your marketing program make sense. And that will quiet a lot of the other noise around you. And then finally, the last question is, when we get there into their natural habitat and we have their engagement, how do we build trust? And this is a question too many companies forget to ask because as soon as they get into that habitat, they want to pitch something, they want to sell something. And no matter what business you’re in, whether you’re selling widgets through an e-commerce site or you’re selling six, seven figure consulting deals through a high trust relationship, it doesn’t matter. What you sell is some degree of trust. There’s less trust needed at the transactional level for sure. 

But even those transactional businesses, if what somebody thinks they ordered from you isn’t what they got, or they didn’t have a good experience along the way, that’s eroding your brand trust, right? And then those of us who sell High Trust B2B Relationship Services, we know that there’s a long tail of trust building that has to happen to even earn the opportunity to have the conversation, much less to retain, to delight and to turn those people into our raving brand advocates, right? So the little M marketing dilemma that I spoke to earlier is when businesses think marketing is just advertising or just brand awareness building or just lead gen, they think of it as a sales support role. The big M marketing opportunity is when you start to understand that marketing and everything that it underpins has to do with your brand experience. 

A brand is not just a logo and colors and fonts. Your brand is what promise you are making to the world? And how does your world of stakeholders, your employees, Your partners, your customers, how do they experience that promise? Are you keeping it or are you breaking it? And that’s trust, right? So Big M marketing is looking at all of the touch points from the first engagement with your brand all the way through an existing customer relationship. Is that trust growing or is that trust being threatened at any point? That’s the role of marketing the entire customer life cycle. So it’s simple, but it’s not easy. 

Kaylee Thomsen: Was there a moment in your own life where you got out of that little m plato’s allegory of the cave to realize the Big M is the real opportunity? 

Jennifer Zick: Yes. And this happened for me. And I don’t think I could have described it this way at all at this point in my career, but it was early in that startup fast growth company I talked about being part of for 13 years. When we started building the business, we were a direct selling company. We were based in Minnesota. I was cold calling other Minnesota companies and selling them web development services and anything else around it. You know, I was just selling what I could sell. And so we were a direct go to market, very outbound, sales driven kind of a company. And it was all about building local relationships and selling our services that way. 

When we pivoted as we introduced EOS into our business and we got focused and we pivoted to becoming focused in salesforce.com deployment and consulting services, our whole go to market strategy changed. We weren’t just cold calling to get business. We started to have a meaningful partner channel relationship with Salesforce. Now they were the Goliath and were the little David. And so they had all the resources and they had hundreds of partners and were just one of them. And I was at that point starting to lead marketing exclusively for the business, had stepped out of the sales role and I was, you know, I had a communications degree but I had never done real marketing besides putting out a monthly newsletter. And so we had to actually build a strategy for how we go to market. 

And we had to be thoughtful about what amount of energy, effort and what was the approach to build relationships with this partner channel, which was the much more fruitful way to grow our business. Because when the Salesforce reps understood uniquely what we did, they would walk us right in the door of a qualified opportunity versus us trying to go compete against hundreds of others in the industry and try to win the next deal directly. Right? So that was when I started to learn the importance of marketing across the ecosystem of relationships, how to build trust in partner channels, and how to build trust with customers from onboarding through retention and account growth strategically. And it all came down. It always came down to trust. Did the partners in the ecosystem trust the story we’re telling? Could we deliver what we promised? 

Could we scale the delivery of that promise over time? Were we stable? As we scaled, it was always a matter of trust. So trust has always been at the heart of everything that I do as a business founder and leader and in how we think about our client relationships. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What an incredible insight to have that early into your career. 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, and again, I just give credit to the caliber of the people I worked with in that company and the strength of our culture. We were young and inexperienced, but we cared really deeply and that’s what built strong relationships. 

AI Adoption and Technology Integration

Kaylee Thomsen: Mm. I’m curious. You’ve talked a lot about incredible insights related to how to think about marketing and leverage it and build trust in really high integrity ways. AI is all abuzz right now and I’m super interested to hear your take on AI not only from your exceptionally skilled marketing background, but also as CEO of a growing organization. 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I am actually having a lot of fun with the new evolution of technology that’s coming our way. It certainly brings a lot of pressure, a lot of angst, a lot of uncertainty, but I had the good fortune of growing up always on the leading edge of technology. So I was in the tech field when the first cloud computing solutions came. My career has grown up during the evolution of the early Internet, the first wave of mobile devices, social media boom, marketing automation tools, and the landscape of marketing tech just absolutely exploding. And if you don’t love innovation and you don’t love learning and applying new tools, you shouldn’t be in marketing. So thankfully, I have always loved and have enjoyed being around futurist technologists who are driving the next wave of innovation. 

I’ve also learned that in every new wave of innovation and technology, business leaders tend to think that now there’s an easy button. This new automagical technology will replace all of these humans and make things so efficient and save us so much money. And anyone who’s spent time actually building out a marketing automation platform knows that the opposite is true. There’s nothing automagical about any of that. Those systems need a lot of human wisdom around them. They need love and nurture. They need constant content creation and innovation. So the same will be true for AI. It’s not going to replace the value of humans. It is accelerating our ability to leverage our own wisdom for sure. And we’re using it across the board at Authentic both within the walls of our business and in our CMOs. 

How they’re guiding clients to properly adopt technologies that support the human relationships within their business and don’t erode the trust. So we would never turn on an automation just to create an automation. We want to manage for the ripple effect of the impact to the humans that are touched by those automations and those communications along the way. So it’s wisdom guided human centric tech embracing innovation within marketing. So it is completely changing every role within our organization and it’s changing the way and the pace at which we can accelerate strategic planning, research and iteration and testing for our clients. And that’s all a positive thing. Certainly many of our clients are feeling angst, pressure and uncertainty about what that means for the shape and size and type of team that they’ll need in the future. 

So we’re holding hands with them and helping to advise on how to help make their current team members more successful, how to elevate their agency conversations and relationships and accountability. All of those things happening while staying steady at the helm of Just because new technology is available, that doesn’t mean we lose our North Star. Right? We stay with strategy, we’re guided by wisdom, we keep relationships at the heart of what we’re doing and then we layer in, you know, innovation along the way. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What are the biggest risks or downsides you see to AI? 

Jennifer Zick: Well, a lot of the risks as we get further into adoption of AI, I feel are a little bit overhyped. You know, everybody was afraid right away when ChatGPT became more broadly available and then Claude and Perplexity and other solutions that their private data would get, would be teaching the machines and become available to other companies. I think most business leaders have adopted some strong best practices to make sure that if they’re deploying AI solutions within their business, it’s proprietary or it’s protected on a team or enterprise basis, you know, and we’re trusting these technology platforms with their privacy promises the same way that we would trust salesforce.com or other technology platforms with the privacy behind our data. Only they know, you know, how firmly they guard that privacy. But I think there’s less concern about that piece of it. 

I think the next wave of uncertainty and risk is happening at the employee level in terms of will my job be affected by this is my job at risk and happening at the automation and agentic level. So when you think about the where we’re at on the trajectory of AI adoption, it really has started out as being thought partnership and Collaboration. And that’s what most of us are using AI solutioning for right now. The next tier is in workflow automation. And many of the technologies that we already have embedded within our businesses for CRM, for ERPs, for whatever it might be, are building their own AI solutioning around that too. And then the thing that everybody is looking forward to, but aren’t quite sure what it means for their human workforce or for their budgets is the agentic solutioning. 

And part of the uncertainty about that is right now, companies like Anthropic, their models and their pricing structures are created to compel us to use their tools and get sticky with them, but they aren’t sustainable in terms of the pricing for the usage. And so none of us really know for certain, or at least I certainly don’t know what’s it really going to cost us to deploy AI within our businesses and will it offset the payroll cost of the human talent? My theory right now, and what I’m seeing in my own business in real time, is that AI will cost us more before it becomes more efficient. 

Because right now we’re in the phase where even fast moving, nimble companies like ours are needing to adopt multiple solutions to try on the fit and find the use cases and then bring the whole company along in training and change management in order to get the efficiencies out of it. Right? So it gets more complicated before it gets less complicated, if that makes sense. 

CEO Perspective on Market Volatility and Leadership

Kaylee Thomsen: I just am just so struck by so much of that wisdom and insight coming from your experience and how articulate you are at integrating that into meaningful outcomes. One of the questions that I have for you is, so as a human in the world of work, what is keeping you up at night? 

Jennifer Zick: You know, the biggest thing that I could worry about if I allowed myself to worry about it, and at times I do, is just the volatility of our world. You know, we had kind of a honeymoon period before COVID and after COVID where things felt okay, predictable. We could look at our data and kind of see what we could project off of that. We felt some certainty in the market. And I think I know I’m not alone as a CEO because I’m in two different CEO peer groups in the feeling that the world is not going to become predictable anytime soon, the world of business. And so that can feel unsettling. I think it makes the role of a founder and a CEO feel like it’s carrying a bigger burden than ever before. 

Because what we want, what I want more than anything is the certainty to know that I can continue to create great, stable jobs at scale for my team and the world around us is just a lot less predictable. You know, one change of tariffs impacts so many businesses in manufacturing and the trickle down of that affects all the businesses and services or one change in policy affects all your nonprofit clients all at once. Right. So things are happening in much bigger waves. And personally, I’ve been on a growth journey in my faith and in my just inner self over the past 18 months, really working with personal coaches, my CEO, peer groups, even with therapy to embrace the fact that this life is just uncertain. I am a recovering control freak, type A, world class, type A. 

Kaylee Thomsen: Tell that by the way with all the plans that you put in place and all the feedback you’re getting throughout your process. 

Jennifer Zick: Yes, I took a really structured, disciplined approach to building this business. It should have been a straight line up and to the right somehow. It’s been very bumpy but still full of joy and you know, it’s. I am learning to hold loosely to my best laid plans and embrace that the turbulence usually brings us into a better place than I could have planned myself. And just finding joy in the journey. Coming back to the basics, like working with people, I really love doing meaningful work for good clients that are growing, you know, their companies are creating jobs for and opportunities for people fueling our economy. Like, you know, my business is just a little blip, but we’ve touched thousands of lives around the world through the work that we do. 

And that gets me out of bed every morning just energized for what we are continuing to build. So the world is unpredictable, it’s uncertain, our lives are short. You know, it’s not worth striving and grasping to try to control what we can’t control. It’s just so much more satisfying to sit in a posture of believing that all the right things are happening the way that they’re meant to for the right outcomes. Just that posture of surrender while still being a fiercely motivated, driven person. 

Kaylee Thomsen: It’s a great balance, isn’t it? 

Jennifer Zick: It’s a weird balance, but it’s when I’m trying to, you know, by the grace of God, just get there. 

Kaylee Thomsen: What a great note to end on. Jennifer, thank you so much for your openness, your authenticity and your wisdom. 

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Kaylee, for having me on your show. I appreciate it.