Inbound Back Office podcast featuring Jennifer Zick

In this episode of the Inbound Back Office podcast, host Holly Reed sits down with Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic, for a candid conversation about why marketing agencies are often the worst at marketing themselves — and what to do about it.

Jennifer shares the case for dedicated marketing leadership in growing businesses, explains how fractional CMOs de-risk the hiring process, and gives practical advice for founders who are ready to let go of the vine and scale beyond their personal brand.

Listen to the Podcast

Key Takeaways

• Marketing leadership isn’t the start of marketing activity — it’s the moment when growth demands strategy. Founders typically recognize this need after enough frustration with random, uncoordinated marketing efforts.
• Agencies are uniquely prone to neglecting their own marketing. When everyone is billable, brand-building sits on the back burner — and credibility suffers when an agency doesn’t practice what it preaches.
• Fractional CMOs offer lower risk and faster impact than a full-time hire. Growing businesses get senior-level wisdom ahead of their growth curve without the cost or commitment of a full-time executive.
• The value isn’t just one person — it’s a team. Authentic Brand’s model gives clients access to a collaborative community of CMOs, multiplying the expertise behind every engagement.
• Making yourself less essential is how you build a more valuable business. Founders who tie their agency’s health to their own personal brand limit scalability — and eventually, saleability.
• Strategic marketing is a long-term investment, not a monthly expense. Like a financial plan, it requires planting seeds today that will produce revenue years down the road.

Podcast Transcription

Introductions

Holly Reed: Welcome to the Inbound Back Office podcast where we chat with smart agency owners about agency challenges. I’m Holly Reed, strategist at Inbound Back Office — plug and play back office support for your marketing agency. Today on the show we have Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic Brand, to talk to us about why marketing agencies need marketing leadership. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you so much, Holly. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Holly Reed: Excited to talk about this topic with you. But before we get started, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about you and what you do.

Jennifer Zick: As you already mentioned, I’m the founder of Authentic Brand. We are a community of fractional CMOs working with clients all across the US and sometimes beyond, helping growing businesses to overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step toward healthy growth. We love working with B2B and B2C companies across all different kinds of industries. Our sweet spot clients are usually between $5 million and $100 million in annual revenue — that’s usually where we enter their growth.

Holly Reed: I love the ‘random acts of marketing.’ That is something I feel like a lot of people do.

Jennifer Zick: It’s a tagline that accidentally became part of our story early in the business. Every time I said that phrase, the CEO and the CFO’s eyes would open wide and they would either giggle nervously or look at each other with fear. So we struck a real emotional chord with that one.

Defining Marketing Leadership

Holly Reed: Let’s dive into this topic. How do you define marketing leadership? What do you mean by that, and what are the steps to get there?

Jennifer Zick: My definition of marketing leadership is positioned through the lens of what Authentic Brand is and what we do with clients. The place we play is as a dedicated head of marketing on a part-time basis for growing businesses. When we work as a fractional CMO, we sit on the client side of the table as a member of their executive leadership team. With the growth businesses we work with, we are usually their first ever strategic executive marketer on the leadership team.

Most growth businesses are born out of a story that goes something like: founder-led, sales-driven, reach critical mass, create random acts of marketing, and eventually realize that scale and sustainability need to be strategic. That’s usually where the need for true marketing leadership first emerges. It’s not the beginning of marketing activity — it’s the moment at which you’ve had enough pain with your marketing activity to realize you need experienced leadership.

Holly Reed: That’s a really good point. There are different phases of your business, and what got you here won’t get you to the next phase. So I love how you define that moment when they need someone like your team to come in and be strategic about marketing.

Jennifer Zick: Today we’re speaking to agencies, and in an agency world, often the founder is a brilliant creative strategist and brand builder. And they may be a little late to recognize their need for additional leadership capacity because they are so capable — and the agency itself may have a lot of marketing-related expertise. So when you have a founder who is a genuine brand builder and creative genius, letting go of the vine to let someone come alongside and lead is a hard step to take. But it’s also really necessary for agencies that want to grow and need their CEO to be squarely in the CEO seat.

Holly Reed: That’s a good point. Letting go of control and bringing someone else on to carry your vision is scary for business owners and founders. But if you can find the right person and allow even a new update to the vision with the expertise of the person coming in, it really does pay off.

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. I’ll be the first to admit — I’m the founder of a six-year-old marketing consultancy, and for the early stages of my own company, I was sitting in multiple seats. I was the CEO and the founder, but I was also the head of sales, the head of marketing, and for a long time the head of client services. I too had to acknowledge the point at which I’m no longer the right person to lead marketing for my own business. I can still be the visionary, but every founder suffers from myopic perspective. We’re too close to our own material to be truly objective. Getting an external fresh perspective — from someone aligned with your values and your vision — is only going to help you go further.

The Agency Cobbler’s Children Problem

Holly Reed: What is interesting to me is that people look at the bottom line and go, is this billable or not? But they fail to realize that the investment of building your own brand pays in dividends of ROI that may not show up on your monthly statement right away. It’s actually your own paid marketing so that you can grow your business and get more clients.

Jennifer Zick: I like to use the analogy of financial planning in the same sense as business strategic growth. Most of us, if we’re far enough along in our lives and professions, have spent time with a financial planner. You need transactions on a day-to-day basis — the checking account — but you also need a long-term investment account. You’re planting seeds that produce a harvest way down the road. That’s how every business that wants to grow needs to think about marketing.

You need to be tackling the day-to-day activities that keep your brand in front of people, maintain your website, keep your campaigns running. But you also need to be constantly investing for the long term, recognizing that some of what you put in place today for leadership, staff, systems, or content will take years to come back into the pipeline as real opportunities that convert into revenue. But that’s the kind of investment that grows companies in a sustainable, scalable way.

Holly Reed: People get very nervous about doing that, especially the last few years with economic chaos. But we’ve seen it countless times — the people who took the risk and got creative, especially by bringing on fractional people, are the ones who have grown and scaled their businesses.

Jennifer Zick: One of the things we talk about with our prospects is that we are not a low-cost alternative to a full-time hire in most cases — but we are a lower-risk, faster-to-impact option. If you’re a $10 million business, it doesn’t financially make sense to hire a full-time CMO yet. But by bringing on a fractional CMO, particularly through the way we deliver our services, you get wisdom way ahead of your growth curve. You get experience way ahead of where your business is, to help you confidently know what to commit to, in what order, in what way.

And at Authentic Brand, every CMO assigned to a client is also part of a team of CMOs. All of our fractional CMOs are W2 employees at Authentic Brand — which is very unique among fractional firms. So a fractional CMO working with a single client is backed up by dozens of other CMOs with cross-industry experience, different business model experiences, and experience leading through mergers, acquisitions, and integrations.

Holly Reed: And you bring up a good point — you hire a CMO and you get one person and all their expertise, which is hopefully a lot by that level. But it’s not as much as with 20 other people that person can bounce ideas off of who are also CMOs. There’s such a value add in working with a fractional CMO.

Jennifer Zick: Most growth businesses who’ve never hired a senior marketing leader don’t know how to hire for that role. The world of marketing changes so quickly that most entrepreneurs and their leadership teams don’t know whether they need a marketing manager, a VP, someone with social media experience, someone from public relations, or maybe a digital focus. So many growing businesses waste time, waste money, and go through cycles of wrong-person-in-the-wrong-seat hiring, which is frustrating, expensive, and can really demoralize a brand and a team.

Advice for Founders: Letting Go and Scaling Up

Holly Reed: What advice would you give a CEO or founder on letting go and hiring a CMO or fractional CMO?

Jennifer Zick: I would first say we’re careful never to try to convince a founder or CEO that they need to value marketing leadership. The right time for this conversation is when they’ve already landed on the fact that they have a gap — they’ve had enough growth and enough random acts of marketing to say, I’m not the right person to scale this. My head of sales is not the right person to be responsible for marketing.

Especially for an agency — most agencies are implementing technology or creative services that touch into marketing. At some point, your buyers aren’t going to trust you if they don’t see you doing what you recommend for them. If you’re a social media agency and your CEO doesn’t touch social media, that’s a total disconnect from the value proposition of your brand. You have to live your value proposition.

Then the next question is: do you have a culture and organization that is ready to define, hire, grow, and incentivize a marketing leader? If you’re not certain you know how to make that hire and make it successful and sustainable, I really encourage you to work with a company like Authentic Brand, because no two client marketing teams look the same. You have to bring in a marketing leader who understands your model, believes in your vision, and can help you design the right combination of skills — internal and external — to help you move the needle.

Holly Reed: Absolutely. And just having the experience of working with a high-level CMO means when you do hire full-time, you’ve already experienced what it looks like when someone is doing the job correctly. That gives your whole team confidence in the interview process.

Jennifer Zick: Exactly. And even those new full-time hires — be they manager, director, or VP level — when you’re coming into a smaller business or agency, it’s often a high-pressure, lonely role where you feel like you’re constantly trying to justify your existence. You’re living under unrealistic expectations from the board, investors, CFO, and CEO. That’s a reason why that marketing leadership seat has such high turnover.

One way innovative businesses are retaining the good people they hire is by keeping Authentic Brand involved as an advisor CMO alongside that new director — so they still have the wisdom and the sounding board of dozens of CMOs behind their strategy. That lets them stand toe-to-toe with a CEO and CFO and feel confident that it’s not just their own experience driving the decisions.

Closing Thoughts

Holly Reed: Is there anything else we haven’t hit on that you’d want to share before we end today?

Jennifer Zick: I would give a word of encouragement to all entrepreneurs out there, because this is not easy. The job of being a founder and a CEO and scaling a services firm is very hard. In some ways we have the hardest job of all because what we sell is mostly intangible — we’re selling trust.

If you’ve built a business and are building a business, congratulations. You’re doing a lot of things right. Now if you’re at the point where you need your business to scale beyond the communities of people who already know and trust you, to new communities that don’t yet know you but need to trust you — this is the time to get serious about your investment in strategic marketing. Move from day-to-day transactional checkbook marketing to a long-term investment strategy.

Also, as a founder, there’s a tendency for the agency’s health to be dependent on you — on your personal brand, your name, or your participation in the engagement. If you want to scale, come at that with humility and understand that making yourself less essential is going to help your business grow in a healthier, more valuable way. Just take the next right step. You don’t have to figure it all out right away.

Holly Reed: I love everything you said. As you grow and scale, it cannot be based on one name at the top — because if you ever wanted to sell your agency, it just would not work if everything is based on that one person. This has been such a fun conversation. Why don’t you tell our listeners where they can find you online?

Jennifer Zick: I’m pretty prolifically involved on LinkedIn — search for Jennifer Zick and I would love to connect. You can also find our company at authenticbrand.com — all one word, no ‘s’, just authenticbrand.com.

Holly Reed: Awesome. I’ll make sure those links are in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on, Jennifer. This was super fun.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Holly. It was fun. I appreciate it.