B2B Mentors Podcast Featuring Jennifer Zick

In this episode of B2B Mentors, host Connor Dube sits down with Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic, a Minneapolis-based fractional CMO firm, for a wide-ranging conversation on marketing leadership, entrepreneurship, and the power of community as a growth channel.

Jennifer shares her unconventional path from broadcast journalism intern to fractional CMO pioneer, the philosophy behind Authentic Brand’s “Dandelion Effect,” how she turned a free community for second-in-command leaders into her company’s top inbound channel, and what it really means to build a business — not just a job — in the consulting world.

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Key Takeaways

• Relationships built with no strings attached become your most valuable business asset. Jennifer’s 20-year habit of genuine networking — with consistent follow-through and zero expectation of return — directly seeded the launch and growth of Authentic Brand.
• The “Dandelion Effect” is a deliberate culture strategy. Making every person who touches your brand feel seen, heard, and valued creates a self-sustaining ecosystem of goodwill, referrals, and unexpected revenue.
• Community is now the top inbound channel — built entirely on generosity. Authentic Brand’s free monthly forum for second-in-command leaders grew to 1,200+ members in 48 states and countries, generating warm leads with zero direct selling.
• Building a business and being a consultant are fundamentally different choices. Jennifer intentionally designed Authentic Brand for scale from day one — using EOS, a W2 employee model, and a practice of “firing herself” from every role.
• Marketing and sales need separate seats at the leadership table. Tucking marketing under a sales leader is one of the most common and costly mistakes growing businesses make; the two functions require different lenses working in partnership.
• Random acts of marketing aren’t a moral failing — they’re a growth signal. Most businesses reach a tipping point where tactical experimentation stops working and strategic marketing leadership becomes the only path forward.

Podcast Transcription

Introductions

Connor Dube: Hey podcast listening people. Welcome to B2B Mentors — it is Monday, which means Marketing Mentors on a Monday. I have a real treat for you today: my new friend Jennifer Zick, who is a 40 Under 40 awardee, founder and CEO of Authentic Brand, a Minneapolis-based fractional CMO firm serving clients across the US. As a pioneer in the fractional marketing space, Jennifer is passionate about helping companies grow, overcome random acts of marketing, and achieve next-level growth and revenue results. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Connor. I’m delighted to be here with you and your listeners.

Jennifer’s Path into Marketing

Connor Dube: What led you into the wonderful world of marketing and CMO-ing?

Jennifer Zick: My life’s path hasn’t been a straight road by any means. I ended up in marketing because I came out of college not knowing what I wanted to do. I had a broadcast journalism-focused communications degree, but one internship in that space helped me know I did not want to pursue that career. I was a first-generation college graduate in my family, so I just launched out into the world, took the first job I could find, and started learning how to network. It was through networking and meeting wonderful, generous people that I found my first marketing and sales support role.

At that time — the early 2000s — I was working for a little web development company and fell in love with how my communications background married up with new advancements in technology that helped businesses compete. I stayed the course in that professional services, marketing, and innovation space throughout the rest of my career, moving from sales to sales management to marketing leadership and executive marketing roles. I was just a collector of relationships and experiences along the way.

How I turned my career from being a marketing leader to building a team of marketing leaders really came through a catalyst event — my first ever job loss. Just over five years ago, I was let go from a team that was bringing in new investors, and my role was cut. It felt really personal, but it ended up being a real blessing because it gave me just enough time and courage to take the entrepreneurial leap. That was the birth of Authentic Brand.

Connor Dube: What was it about your original internship that steered you away from journalism?

Jennifer Zick: My first little internship was with an affiliate station in a small town in Minnesota. Day one, the anchor woman sat me down and gave me the opposite of a pep talk — she said, ‘You think you’re going to be big in this world, but for every cute little brunette like you, there are thousands of others trying to make it. And I want you to know right now you’re never going to.’ Then they sent me out with the other unpaid intern into the news van to chase a tornado and risk our lives.

I thought there might be a better path for me. I did the internship for the rest of the summer, got a lot of great experience out of it, and then decided — I’m going to find a different path. There’s got to be a better way to make a living than this grind.

Connor Dube: But did you get the tornado shot? That’s the question we all want to know.

Jennifer Zick: We got hailed on. We got whipped around in the news van. We were a little bit afraid for our lives. I’m not sure we actually captured a funnel that day.

Connor Dube: Something you mentioned — having that background in communications and PR, but also in sales, makes you a deadly combination for senior marketing positions down the road.

Jennifer Zick: Yes. How I tripped into the sales world is interesting too. My first job out of college was as a recruiter — for people who did credit card collections. It was a miserable job in a miserable company, and I was only there for six months before it sucked my soul. But in that role, I learned I was really good at sales. I also learned I could never sell something I didn’t believe in or couldn’t stand behind. It was out of that experience that I found my way into the web space and the digital innovation space and started building a career.

My advice for every young student and early-stage career person: don’t get too wrapped up in feeling like you have to know where your path is going. Take every experience as something that teaches you more about what you do and don’t want, and keep redirecting toward what you do want. Good things will keep coming.

The Power of Networking and Relationships

Connor Dube: You mentioned getting really good at networking. What does that mean, and how did it shape your career?

Jennifer Zick: If I could tell my younger self how important it was, what I was investing my time in then, I’m so grateful I did. In my 20s through my early 30s, networking for the company I represented meant being out at local and regional events, building trust and making friends. I attended a lot of business events, industry events, and leadership development programs. I was known in the Twin Cities in that era as the person you would see everywhere.

I was really adamant about the follow-through — I didn’t just want to meet people once, I wanted them to turn into real relationships. Funny thing: in my 20s and early 30s, the people I was meeting were mostly peers with great ambition but not much decision-making authority. But now they’re all older like me, and they all have budgets and decision-making authority. The relationship seeds I planted then are really what launched my business. When I hung my own shingle five years ago, it was the friendships I’d been building for 20 years — out of goodwill, follow-through, promises kept, connecting people with no ask in return — that made it possible.

Connor Dube: When you were going into those relationships — were you trying to sell something, or did you just intuitively know they might go somewhere down the road?

Jennifer Zick: It was a little bit of both. I was in sales for a little web development company that turned out to be a large player in the Salesforce.com ecosystem. So sometimes I was out networking to do business development, sometimes to build brand awareness, and sometimes I was involved in associations and memberships to build my own learning and growth. All those relationships — from every single corner — there’s somebody still part of my life and my network, either as a friend, an advisor, an advocate, a referral source, a current client, or a potential prospect.

Connor Dube: The more hands you shake, the more money you make. And not even about money — just opportunity. I have people I connected with five or six years ago and now we’re doing deals together.

Jennifer Zick: We talk about it as the Dandelion Effect here at Authentic Brand. I teach my team as part of our culture that we need to be spreading hearts and dandelion seeds everywhere we go. What that means is: if somebody interacts with Authentic Brand anywhere along the line, even if they’re not an ideal client, we want that person to come away feeling seen, heard, valued, loved, appreciated, and supported. Because in giving goodwill back to every stakeholder who touches our brand, we create an ecosystem of little dandelion seeds all around us that come back — in ways you didn’t expect — and some of them turn into really meaningful revenue that helps us keep growing.

Building Authentic Brand

Connor Dube: What are you up to with Authentic Brand now? From five years ago to where you’re at today?

Jennifer Zick: Authentic Brand was founded from my kitchen table just over five years ago, in March of 2017. I knew when I decided to start a business that I was building a company of people — I didn’t intend to be an independent consultant and then think about scaling. For about 18 months, I was a consultant at Authentic Brand, building our approach, our methodology, and starting to bring in fractional CMOs.

Today we’re a team of 24 and growing fractional CMOs who help growing businesses overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in building healthy growth. During COVID, we went from being a purposefully local team to growing nationally overnight. We started hiring nationally and our entire cultural footprint changed. Today we work nationally — sometimes globally — with employees across the country, while still having a strong concentration of CMOs and clients here in the Twin Cities.

Connor Dube: Do your CMOs match with clients by region or by expertise?

Jennifer Zick: Most of our work is done remotely. We always make the right-fit CMO match based on fit to the business need and relevant business model experience — not by geography, and not even first by industry experience. Many clients think they need someone with acumen in their specific industry, but not every industry has produced modern CMOs with the right mentality and structural approach to building a high-performing marketing team.

We hire in three broad CMO personas: deep expertise in high-tech, SaaS, and complicated technologies; depth in B2C, e-commerce, and direct-to-consumer or channel marketing; and then generalists across manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and primarily B2B industries. Those are the talent buckets, and we match from there, backed by our mindshare.

Connor Dube: What Jennifer did correctly from the beginning is she built her business for scale and exitability — setting it up properly versus creating another job for herself. I think that’s really important.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you. There’s nothing right or wrong about choosing to be an independent consultant if that truly brings you joy. But it’s very different from building a business. I consider it my primary job at Authentic Brand to fire myself from all the jobs until I achieve my highest and best impact as the chief evangelist and CEO visionary. Eighteen months into the business I became pure overhead — no longer billing my time. That was a big leap of faith. And today I still serve as the fractional marketing leader for Authentic Brand, and I cannot wait to fire myself from that job too.

Connor Dube: Is EOS the framework that’s led you to scaling and firing yourself?

Jennifer Zick: For the most part, yes. EOS — the Entrepreneurial Operating System, based on the book Traction by Gino Wickman — is a powerful framework for growth businesses to organize their vision, key milestones, and accountability throughout the organization. The company I worked with for 13 years were early adopters of EOS and it was a real catalyst for us to get on the same page and achieve amazing traction. So day one, kitchen table, me, myself, and I — building my EOS Vision/Traction Organizer.

I’d also recommend Built to Sell — a great read for professional services and agencies to understand what it looks like to build real value in your business. One other note: a lot of consulting firms build around 1099 contractors. We made a very different decision two years ago and committed to a W2 consultant model. All of our CMOs are employees of Authentic Brand. That allows us to make true our promise of quality service through a proven methodology — they get together every single week, share strategies and tools and best practices, and that makes us all smarter and stronger and faster. Our clients feel that in a way they just wouldn’t get from a loosely connected band of 1099 providers.

Random Acts of Marketing — and How to Stop

Connor Dube: Earlier you mentioned ‘random acts of marketing.’ What the heck is that, and why do you emphasize it so heavily?

Jennifer Zick: Our tagline — ‘overcome random acts of marketing’ — I consider to be a little gift from the universe to me. It came out of a sales conversation early in Authentic Brand’s growth. I threw out the phrase and the CEO and CFO looked at each other with huge eyes, like I had seen into their business. I tried it again in future sales meetings — same reaction every time. People would either laugh uncomfortably or look at each other in shock.

Random acts of marketing looks like a lot of things, but if I were to summarize across the almost 100 businesses we’ve worked with — usually $5M to $100M in revenue — the one thing they all have in common is that they’ve been attempting to do marketing at the tactical level. Lots of activities, spending money, experimenting with all the best intentions. But as scale increases, they find themselves more and more frustrated by the lack of understanding about how those investments are impacting their growth strategy. What’s the ROI? In what order should they try things? Everything is noisy and shiny. That’s random acts of marketing — the frustration of not being able to scale with confidence that you’re aiming your resources in the right direction.

That’s where Authentic Brand enters — with truly proven, experienced executive leaders on a fractional basis, backed by a proven methodology that starts at high-level business strategy, drills down to brand foundations, then channels, then tactics, and organizes the work in a pragmatic way so the business can understand results. We exist to help companies stop wasting time and money guessing at how to build a marketing team and program.

Connor Dube: What are the biggest mistakes owners are making that lead to random acts of marketing?

Jennifer Zick: It’s not even necessarily mistakes as much as reaching a tipping point. Almost all entrepreneurial businesses start off founder-led and sales-driven — they have to sell something to exist. But that’s only the beginning. The next mistake a lot of businesses make is tucking marketing in with sales, so the org chart shows a combined head of sales and marketing. We disrupt that assumption.

Almost 99% of the time, if you have a sales and marketing leader, they are a sales manager with a sales team — and they need a marketing peer, not marketing within their department. The natural lens of a sales leader is different from the natural lens of a marketing leader, and they need to work together in partnership to advance the business. We’re firm believers that any business over $5M in revenue needs an executive seat at the table for a truly experienced marketing leader. But we also believe it doesn’t have to be a full-time role to make a significant impact.

Building a Community as a Growth Channel

Connor Dube: How are you practicing what you preach — being a good practitioner of B2B marketing yourself?

Jennifer Zick: I consider it my job to make Authentic Brand the best case study in our own philosophy so that clients can look to us and see that we drink our own champagne and that it works.

Connor Dube: That’s much better than ‘eat your own dog food.’ I’m going to use ‘drink your own tequila’ because I like tequila.

Jennifer Zick: First and foremost, we put our own methodology to work at Authentic Brand. We use our own tools, build our marketing roadmap every year, and iterate quarterly using our own frameworks. We also activate our Ally Network — a curated group of over 30 agency and freelance providers who are the ninjas of execution on topics like SEO, PPC, e-commerce, web development, creative, and copywriting. I work with four allies as the fractional CMO for our own company, and together we operate a marketing function worth five to six cross-discipline experts without hiring six full-time roles.

The other part is that we want to actually be innovative in how we drive growth. Our brand is actually bigger than our business — and that’s not usually true for most companies at this stage. Most forming businesses are the best-kept secret. We’re the opposite. We’re a well-known contender growing into our brand, and we’ll grow by 75% this year, 100% through inbound leads and referrals that come out of our goodwill and content programs.

Connor Dube: What’s the one top channel that’s driving that many inbound opportunities?

Jennifer Zick: Well, in the first three years, referrals were our top channel because it was Jennifer Zick’s network and everybody who knew her. But like all good entrepreneurial businesses, you get to a point where the people who knew you then aren’t going to drive your business forward. So phase two was content — we started producing great content from day one, and that drove a lot of organic search results our way. Higher quantities, lower qualification than referrals.

Right now, the biggest channel creating amazing momentum is the community we’ve been building for two years. I’m a big believer in creating goodwill through offering something of value to your ideal buyers and their influencers — without selling them anything, simply being generous. Generosity is one of our core values, so it fits really well.

Two years ago, we started a community specifically for second-in-command business leaders. CEOs have access to a lot of peer groups — EO, Vistage, Strategic Coach. But COOs, presidents, general managers — those in second-in-command roles — haven’t had those kinds of peer-to-peer forums, and they have one of the highest-pressure, loneliest, hardest jobs in any organization. So we created a space for them. The first meeting was scheduled for April 2020, got COVID-squished, we postponed a month and launched it virtually. Now it’s a community of over 1,200 second-in-command leaders in 48 states and countries.

Connor Dube: How often do you meet?

Jennifer Zick: Once a month, for a 90-minute interactive session. Every monthly meeting sees around 175 registrants from around the globe. The format: free to attendees, 15 minutes of guest presentation on a relevant topic, then a full hour in small-group breakout rooms of about eight people each, with a professional business coach facilitating. Attendees bring their issue to the table and, in a confidential environment, help one another through experience share. It’s a very rewarding program to host.

Out of that, we build friendships and trust and gratitude. We don’t talk about fractional CMOs, we don’t talk about marketing — we talk about their issues and give them the gift of hospitality by bringing them together. So they think of us when marketing hits their issues list. And that brings us business, which is a blessing.

Connor Dube: Without even hearing how you’re doing it, I kind of stumbled on the same concept. No matter what your business or industry, you don’t have to create an association specific to just your clients — the referral power is that much stronger. I launched my own community at the beginning of this year, the B2B Mentors Club, and it’s only been three months and I can’t even express what’s happened as a result of just putting it together.

Jennifer Zick: During COVID, we also launched a community called Marketers Sanctuary in partnership with a recruiter and a CMO friend. We recognized early in the pandemic that marketers were under extreme pressure — the whole strategy went out the door, all the events were cancelled, everything got turned upside down. So we created a space where any marketer could jump on once a month, share in small group breakouts, and just be together. We hosted it for about 18 months, and it was such a moment in time to build goodwill and meet each other in that moment. I’m so grateful technology has given us new ways to reach and connect more people. It’s becoming a mainstay channel for community building, and it’s much more equitably accessible.

Closing Thoughts

Connor Dube: Anything top of mind you want to touch on before we wrap up?

Jennifer Zick: I would invite any listeners who are interested in helping to continue fostering growth in their organizations — or any marketers who imagine a future in consulting and think fractional CMO sounds really great — to tune in to Authentic Brand. We create a ton of content through our webinar series, podcast partnerships, blog, and guides to help you grow as a marketer and to equip you with content that’s written to speak to your CEO and executive team about the investment that marketing deserves, the time it takes, and how to move a brand strategy forward.

Our Ally Network of 30-plus agency and freelance partners is also a free service we offer to the community — a matchmaker that never marks up rates and never obligates you to use them. We’re happy to help make introductions to resources that help you accelerate.

Connor Dube: Best way for people to find and follow you?

Jennifer Zick: LinkedIn is an awesome channel — I’m on it daily. Just look up Jennifer Zick and I should appear in the search results. You can also find us at authenticbrand.com through our contact form or any multitude of ways through the site.

Connor Dube: Jennifer Zick, I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Make sure you follow her and go check out authenticbrand.com. For the rest of you — thank you for tuning in. I guarantee there is at least one golden nugget in here that can completely revolutionize the way you’re going about your marketing, your branding, and growing your business.