Trust and Flexibility: Jennifer Zick featured on Fractional C-Suite Retreat

Our founder and CEO, Jennifer Zick, recently got to spend time “at the fireside” with Joseph Frost on his podcast, The Fractional C-Suite Retreat. The two talked about a lot of topics related to marketing and business growth.

Being a fractional professional requires walking the line between supporting your client and telling them what they need to change, and Jennifer sees how all of this works. She sits down with host Joseph Frost to talk about some of the latest innovations she sees in the c-suite. 

Watch the Conversation

Listen to the Podcast

Key Takeaways

• Executives are getting caught up in the minor details of the marketing standpoint and not focusing on the big picture and the fundamentals. 
• It’s important to know who your company matters to and why your company matters to them. 
• Don’t focus on pitching yourself. Focusing on how you can help your customers and that will lead to your pitch.
• As a fractional professional, you want to support your clients but you also have to tell them the truth if something isn’t working. 
• There are plenty of forums for CEOs but there isn’t much out there for integrators as the second in command.
• You have to make sure you are managing expectations properly when you are a fractional professional, you still have a responsibility to your company. 
• Make sure that the company you are going to work with already has an operating system in place. It makes it easier to be on the same level with them and know where to go from where they currently are.

Podcast Transcription

Opening & Introductions

Joseph Frost: Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be. Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what’s new in the C-Suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I’m Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by YourCMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Today’s guest is someone I’ve been wanting to have on for a while. She’s a really strong communicator, enjoys the challenge of meeting new people, and is a 40 Under 40 awardee from the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal in 2014 — we won’t date you too much. Founder and CEO at Authentic Brand, Jennifer Zick. Welcome to the show.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Joseph. I’m delighted to be here.

Joseph Frost: Yeah, I’m really excited. I’ve been watching your business grow over the last several years, and it’s just amazing to watch — all top notch. I’m super excited that you’re here to talk a little bit about your experience as a fractional CMO and your team.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you. I’m excited to have this conversation with someone who speaks my love language.

The Opportunity C-Suite Leaders Are Missing

Joseph Frost: So the question I like to start the show with is kind of a simple one, but it gets into some of the meat of what we do as fractionals. What’s an opportunity — or opportunities — that executives on the C-Suite may not be seeing right now?

Jennifer Zick: I’m going to contextualize my answer within the type of work that we do. When we enter into conversations with the C-Suite, we’re usually talking with CEOs, owners, visionary leaders of growing businesses. For us, that landscape is usually the $5 to $100 million business. And in those conversations, there are so many common themes.

I think one big thing that executives are missing right now is they’re getting caught up in the swirl of all the different tactics and things they could be doing from a marketing standpoint, and sometimes they’re missing the fundamentals — the attachment to the big picture and how marketing supports them from the most strategic vantage point. I’d love to talk today about how executives can be sure not to miss what’s most important when it comes to the role that marketing should be playing in their business.

Joseph Frost: Yeah, that’s awesome — you’re speaking my love language too. What are some of those fundamentals that just have to be there, in your mind?

Jennifer Zick: I’ll back into that question a little bit. I recently joined Vistage as a network for CEOs, so in addition to our clients and prospects, I also get to meet peers who are CEOs of a wide variety of industries. And it’s amazing how much they want to talk about marketing — but they’re also overwhelmed and confused by it. At Authentic Brand, we lovingly say that we help great businesses overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in growth. A lot of CEOs, CFOs, and COOs are doing the marketing things, but they know they’re somewhat random.

They’re not sure if those activities are directed by something more strategic or toward the right outcomes. Those CEO leaders start by asking really relevant questions: Where should we be on social media? Do I need to know about Instagram and TikTok? And I like to slow them down and start by learning about their big purpose for existing as a business first. If you start with your purpose and your why — the reason you exist in the world — and then move through the foundational components of marketing, the tactics will start to become evident. But the marketing landscape is changing so quickly, and there’s so much noise, that it tends to turn the conversation upside down. It starts with tactical questions when we really need to anchor back to the strategic.

And I like to say that marketing is simple — it’s just not easy. Twenty years ago, most of what we focused on was advertising, events, and PR — mostly paid media. With the onset of the Internet and digital, the landscape has exploded in just one marketer’s career lifespan. There are now hundreds of thousands of tools and tactics you can employ. So how to narrow that down has gotten really confusing for executives making investment decisions.

When we talk about the foundational pieces of marketing, it comes down from that key question: What is your purpose for existence? Then I say there are two more questions underneath that: Who do we want to matter to, and why should we matter to them? And then: How do we intersect their world in a way that’s meaningful and relevant? And when we get to that point — instead of asking what do we pitch them — it becomes: How do we help them? And then underneath that, you start to deploy the aspects of your marketing execution to do that.

Joseph Frost: I think you did a really nice job articulating the value of a CMO in the conversation versus a more tactical marketing specialist. If you ask that same question to niche agency owners or specialists, it’ll just stay very tactical — you should be doing AdWords, you should be doing email — when the real question is: Why are we doing this in the first place? That’s exactly the right place to start. And that’s what a strategic-minded CMO brings. And in our businesses we’re able to do that in a fractional way, which now makes that specialist accessible to the masses. Most people don’t understand it because they didn’t know it was available to their size business.

Jennifer Zick: And until recently it really wasn’t. Twenty years ago, fractional was a completely new concept. It really began on the finance and operating side of the business first, as growing businesses recognized they needed chief financial expertise but not full time. When I started Authentic Brand five years ago, I didn’t even have the words ‘fractional CMO’ to describe what I wanted to bring to the world. I just knew that small entrepreneurial businesses needed the wisdom of an experienced holistic marketer sooner than they were hiring them. We needed to bring small businesses that wisdom in a way they could engage without a full-time permanent executive commitment.

I kind of tripped into learning the fractional terminology by meeting fractional CFOs and finding others starting to build capabilities like I had in mind. And now five years later, fractional CMO exists as a marketplace and it’s taking a lot of different shapes.

Cultural Fit and the Fractional CMO Model

Joseph Frost: I also think there’s a big cultural fit issue that comes into play with fractional work that’s a little different from full-time work. As fractionals, we’re almost an outsider, but we want to really get embedded. How have you addressed that in your engagements?

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, it’s a brilliant question. We’ve had to address it from two sides. Part of it comes with hiring well for our team. We’re a little unique among fractional CMO firms in that all of our CMOs are now W2 employees. So as we hire, they’re truly joining our team as employees of Authentic Brand. The first thing we do is hire for values fit — how we show up in the world and how each of us as leaders represents that.

But what became really evident is that to be an effective fractional CMO, you not only need to be a true executive marketing leader, you have to be equally strong as a confident consultant. You’ve got to stand in that space as an outside insider, representing the client’s best interests while also being the voice of loving truth. They’ve hired you with a fresh outside perspective to bring all that wisdom to bear — which means you have to be able to push back lovingly and speak the truth they need to hear. That’s not easy for everybody.

We’ve had people enter Authentic Brand who were amazing marketers, but being that confident consultant just didn’t work for them. So we’re not yes-men and women. We are: yes, no, not yet, maybe, let’s think about it, and here’s how we go forward.

On the client side, we start that process by being really clear about who is an ideal client for Authentic Brand. Culturally, they have to have a growth mindset and understand that marketing is not a faucet you turn on and suddenly have qualified leads in three months. We’re also not a 90-day experiment. We’re a transformational guide and leader on your executive team. Once we’ve qualified the fit well in terms of expectations, investment level, and spirit of collaboration, that match happens naturally. When you put two good-willed people together with the right skillset, culture happens.

Joseph Frost: That’s great. And I know it’s really interesting that you made the shift in your business model from independent contractor relationships to full-time W2. We did a similar version — we went from contractors to franchisees because we were providing so much support that we looked and felt like a franchise. So we either had to pull back support or become one. What was your reason for going to the W2 relationship?

Jennifer Zick: There were several reasons. When I first started the business, fractional CMO was in its infancy, and I knew what I wanted to accomplish and what I wanted as an end game — I just didn’t know for sure how the market would respond. So initially I started with 1099 independent contractors, but I had my end game in mind all along. I knew it would only give me a year or two of experimentation before I had to decide: Are we a gig economy matchmaker? A franchise? An employee model?

I basically spent the first two years listening to the market, researching my options, and asking myself what I value most. One thing about myself as an owner is that I’ve committed from day one to build a business that’s highly valuable so I always have an option to exit in a healthy way. But I also wanted to build a business full of people I love doing work with. And that was really going to be impossible as a gig economy model where people weren’t closely connected and collaborative.

It was also really important to me that as we developed a methodology and a proven process, I could hold my team accountable to that — which meant a lot of training and reinforcement and an operating structure. You need either employees or franchisees to deliver on that.

And I wanted to provide for my employees what they were looking for from us: strong business development and marketing so they could focus on simply being CMOs — not developing business, not worrying about benefits and architecture. They could dive right in as CMOs into the work they love most. Through our unique employment model, we’ve been able to create really special solutions for clients, like just today expanding a long-term relationship by bringing a second CMO into an engagement to bring e-commerce expertise. It’s given us the ability to collaborate a lot more closely than if we were a loosely knit group of independents.

Building Community: The Integrator Community

Joseph Frost: During the pandemic, we launched an association of fractional professionals to provide connectivity between peers — fractional CTOs, CFOs, CMOs, etc. And then I saw you did something similar around EOS integrators. Give me that story.

Jennifer Zick: This is one of my favorite stories. It was actually pre-pandemic. My business was only about two years old when I started thinking about community building and the role it could play in my business. We run our business on EOS. I come from a business I worked in for 13 years that ran on EOS, so I’ve been familiar with that platform for a long time. As a company who runs on EOS, I started attending the annual conference and meeting other leaders who were building businesses run on EOS.

I loved my conversations with the visionaries — usually founders or CEOs — and also their integrators, the second-in-command leaders. In most small businesses that’s a CFO, COO, president, or general manager. And I thought: I want to know these people in and around my community. EOS is really prolific here in the Twin Cities.

Through word-of-mouth research, I learned that most visionaries — the CEOs of companies — already had forums. But there wasn’t a really great unified forum for that integrator, that second-in-command leader. So that was the white space. We had our first event set up for April of 2020, with some pretty decent registration, when COVID shut everything down in March. We pushed pause — but then I thought: let’s make it happen virtually.

From May of 2020, we started what is now the Integrator Community. Right away the word of mouth spread way beyond the Twin Cities region. We recognized there was a need for this space for those second-in-command leaders to network, share lessons learned, and solve issues together. We’ve been hosting a free 90-minute monthly meeting for integrators since 2020, and we’ve had over 1,200 integrators from 48 states and 14 countries participate. It’s brought some really amazing partnerships with others in the ecosystem who serve entrepreneurial companies. It’s just been a real blessing.

And it’s a direct answer to our marketing question: Who do we want to matter to? How do we enter their world in a way that is natural and gives them something of value? We want to know leaders of entrepreneurial businesses — not just so we can pitch them, but so they know us, trust us, and keep us top of mind when they need what we provide.

The Fractional Life: How It Differs from Full-Time Work

Joseph Frost: Let me switch gears and talk about the fractional life and how it’s different than the full-time life. For those who don’t understand — what are the differences between having a full-time person or a fractional person?

Jennifer Zick: A lot of differences. I’ll speak first to what brings people into conversation with Authentic Brand when they’re curious about a fractional lifestyle. Usually it’s because they’ve reached a level of experience where they recognize they could take one of two paths. They’re not ready to retire; they still want to do really meaningful work. And they could either continue to pursue corporate employment and have a few more meaningful roles — or they could take the wealth of their knowledge and experience and potentially help many more companies for the remaining time they want to be actively engaged.

The other thing that brings people into considering a fractional career is that anyone who’s been a chief marketing officer knows that’s not a 40-hour-a-week job. There’s not a lot of margin left for life outside of the job. And COVID opened more conversations about how to do meaningful work and still have a meaningful life.

At Authentic Brand, our promise to our employees is: love your life and love your work, in that order. Our CMOs don’t work more than 40 hours a week — some work a max of 20 hours a week. You might carry one, two, or three client engagements at a time, generally long-term engagements of one to two or more years. There’s some ebb and flow — it’s not the same as a steady corporate paycheck every month. There’s a little ebb and flow that comes with a consulting lifestyle. But the opportunity to earn is great, and we offer a lot of upside for those willing to work their networks.

Joseph Frost: So how does that engagement feel like for a fractional CMO in their role with that client? And how is that different than a full-time engagement?

Jennifer Zick: The biggest difference — and it’s not fair and it’s not right, but it is real — is that clients tend to trust the voice of an outsider sometimes more than they trust the voice of their own people. When you come in as an outside contractor, your voice carries a lot of weight. The freedom to be the voice of logic and reason and truth in the room — without feeling like you have to safeguard your reputation or play politics or preserve your turf — is really liberating. It allows people to bring their highest-impact wisdom to an organization.

But it’s also a high-pressure role. We work part time, but we have full accountability for that seat in their org chart. We sit within their business, work under their email address, and might be working 16 or 20 hours a week while leading every single aspect of their marketing teams and programs. It means you have to manage expectations really well and very proactively. You have to manage boundaries, delegate efficiently, and show the value of your impact more quickly than if you were onboarding to a full-time role. Culturally, businesses tend to expect a new employee to take six to 12 months to fully immerse. When you’re a fractional CMO, you’ve got six to 12 weeks to do all that — and lead.

Joseph Frost: That is so true. You’ve got this gravitas you bring in as an outside fractional CMO, but then you’ve got to perform right away. And marketing doesn’t always perform right away. So you have to have those expectation conversations up front, and you’ve got to bring leadership talent to influence everyone around you to work together even though you’re an outsider.

Jennifer Zick: Yes, absolutely — Chief Collaboration Officer. The other thing that’s true about marketing is that it’s one of the most unique leadership roles in an organization. In any other facet — product development, technology, finance, customer service — they have a staff of people doing the same job. Whether it’s a team of project managers, developers, or salespeople. The finance world is a pretty linear ladder: CFO, controller, accountant, bookkeeper.

In marketing, you have a cross-discipline organization of internal and external team members who might be doing 200 different micro jobs — from creative to content to digital to metrics to data. You’re managing probably the most diverse community of talent that constantly fluctuates. There’s just nothing linear about it. A fractional CFO can work four hours a week and still get a ton of value running fairly linear, streamlined, repeatable processes. That doesn’t look the same in marketing, where it’s more like a circus landscape of many different rings with lots of plates being spun.

Ideal Clients and the Role of Operating Systems

Joseph Frost: Every engagement is truly unique for us — it starts from zero every single time. Have you identified a narrow vertical? You’ve got $5 to $100 million CEOs — that’s a pretty broad range.

Jennifer Zick: We have purposefully not picked any specific verticals that we include or exclude. What we pursue as an ideal client is a business that’s $5 to $100 million in revenue, growth-mindset-based or centered in the United States, and ideally running on an operating system — whether it’s EOS, Scaling Up, Pinnacle, or some similar structure. That means they’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting to create a business foundation from which marketing can then amplify and extend. Without that, marketing has to often help them nail down the business foundations before we start doing the marketing activation.

Some of the markets we’re most established in are connected to my background before becoming a CEO — professional services, B2B technology, and software. But now we’re working with B2C, e-commerce, distributor channel partners, across a wide variety of industries. We haven’t narrowed it down more specifically, but on the front end we really do try to find those attributes: the culture fit, the values fit, the size, the growth mindset, and the understanding that they don’t just need tactics. They understand they have a marketing leadership gap. That’s where we’re a really strong fit.

Joseph Frost: That’s so similar to what we look for. When you mention operating system, we’ve identified that as well. An organization that already has an operating system in place — it’s almost like we’re a bolt-on, easy to get started much faster. They understand goal-setting, quarterly pulsing, scorecards, weekly check-ins. But if they don’t have that, your marketing system becomes their operating system by extension.

Jennifer Zick: Yes, you can move a lot faster with a common language and mindset for how the work gets done. But we’ve had the good pleasure of introducing several clients who had no operating system to frameworks that have helped across their business. They’ve watched their CMO lead marketing and said: We need that kind of leadership across the whole business. We need that kind of plan, that kind of process. So it’s like a double blessing — showing them a better way not only to approach marketing but to run a growth business.

Joseph Frost: And we’ve even introduced them to other fractionals in other areas — sales, operations, technology. They see the value a fractional CMO brings and realize: we need that same level of fractional expertise in one of these other areas.

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. I don’t think the demand for fractional executive leadership is going to slow down. One of the biggest line items on any business’s P&L is payroll. And if you can keep executive trusted leadership in your business without the commitment of a long-term equity-shareholder role, you’ve got the flexibility to focus on your core — the product or the service — supported by expertise that stays flexible with where you’re at as an organization.

Joseph Frost: Yeah, I really believe that the best opportunity today for a growing business leader is to understand and engage with fractional leaders. Most growing business owners have been wearing all the hats when they started and slowly take a couple off — but there are still people on their team wearing multiple hats. Get those hats onto a fractional leader, whatever the discipline is, and that’s going to allow you to scale exponentially more.

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. This is my first business that I’ve owned, but it’s not my first entrepreneurial rodeo. I got to be the first employee in a business that became one of Minnesota’s fastest-growing companies. And I was there from three employees to 150 employees. But we didn’t implement an operating system until we were eight years old, and we didn’t bring in senior executive leadership until maybe year 10. We were so successful despite ourselves — but we could have moved further, faster, more competently had we had wise people around us sooner.

There’s a difference between smart and wise. When you think about a fractional leader, you’re missing the big picture if you’re only thinking about it in terms of a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. That’s part of the story. But the other part is it’s a fraction of the risk — and it’s faster to impact — because the multiplier is the wisdom. And that wisdom is amplified when you’re in community with other fractional leaders. At Authentic Brand we call it our mindshare: all of our CMOs meeting weekly together to share generously so that all of our clients can solve issues faster and move to outcomes faster. You don’t get that in one single full-time hire.

Founding a Business vs. Being Employee Number One

Joseph Frost: I’m curious — how have you reflected on what it’s like founding and growing your own business versus being employee number one in a growing business? Because it’s different. What are some of the insights you can share?

Jennifer Zick: Oh, I love that question because I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Coming up on five years. First of all, I’m older and I’ve had a lot more time to live and learn. I could look back with a lot of regrets, but I don’t believe in living with regrets. I had the opportunity to be the third owner in that first business, but I was young and scared of risk. I was newly married, we had just bought our first house, I was adulting — and I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. I came from a blue-collar town and was the first in my family to graduate college. I didn’t have a safety net. So I asked for a modest little salary instead. And I missed out on ownership.

But on the flip side, in my heart, I always felt like a founder and an owner in that business because I was there from day one. Now that I am an owner and I’m older and wiser, I recognize how much I didn’t know because I wasn’t truly an owner. I didn’t have skin in the game. I thought I did emotionally, and I think I was pretty immature sometimes in what I expected from the owners because I was an original employee. It is so different being an owner. When you take on all the risk, you’re the one placing the bets, feeding the families, feeling the sense of responsibility and accountability, and paying the taxes — it’s very different.

So I’m so grateful for what I’ve learned as an owner this time. It makes me want to go back and talk to my twenty-something self and share that wisdom. But it also helps me move forward. I had a wonderful second-row seat in that business — I learned what entrepreneurial growth looks like, and I had an amazing opportunity to wear a lot of different hats as we scaled. Now I’m able to take that playbook and put it into my own business while older and wiser.

But yeah — this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Build a business. It’s scary every day. But I’m living fully by leaning into that fear and saying: I’m doing it anyway. Because I don’t want to look back and think, what if?

Joseph Frost: Kudos to you. This is not my first entrepreneurial venture — I’ve had several in totally different industries. What I love is the starting of businesses, all the variables you have to figure out along the way, and then all the structure and operations you put in place for it to be scalable. You get a unique perspective of that when you’re the owner that you just can’t get as employee number one.

Jennifer Zick: It is different. And the work never leaves your mind. You’re laying in bed at night working on the business, imagining all the different aspects of operational pipe work we’ve got to lay for the next level of growth. It’s exhilarating and it’s crazy — especially in the landscape we’re living in today where nothing is predictable.

Joseph Frost: I heard it described once as creative discontent. Entrepreneurs are always wanting to improve or innovate or think of the next thing. It’s kind of a curse that works in the back there when you’ve got downtime — but it’s what drives us, too.

Jennifer Zick: I’ve had many years of talking with God about what I felt was this curse of the drive he gave me. Life would be so much easier if I could just get content and comfortable. But I’m not designed that way. And I’m grateful that I finally was able to embrace that and say: let’s just go. Because fighting against how you’re naturally wired just doesn’t work.

And as the owner of a business, when you’re building a team and a culture and you have employees, there’s a real recognition that the leader brings the weather. When you’re a driver, an entrepreneur, a visionary, it can be easy to give the vibe that you’re constantly, perpetually discontented. So showing up grateful and joyful and thrilled with all the progress — while also still looking forward and pushing — that’s the balance.

Joseph Frost: Yes. And I imagine you’re always learning more about leadership by being the leader. That internal creative discontent makes me continue to want to be a better leader for my people and my clients. And there’s a good segment of entrepreneurs out there like you and like me who are driven and growing — and there are some that have hit their plateau and are exiting. But once you’ve tasted it, it’s hard to go back. I think most entrepreneurs are otherwise unemployable after they’ve owned their own business.

Jennifer Zick: I know I can’t see myself constrained to just execute something. I have to create something, grow something, move into the space that’s unknown and experiment. That’s what’s important to me. And who knows where this leads. When I started Authentic Brand day one at my kitchen table, all I knew was: for the next 10 to 15 years, I want to work in a business full of people I love, doing work that brings us joy. And I want to always be in a position that if it’s the right time to exit — whether through a sale, or promoting myself to a board role — I want to build a healthy, vibrant, highly valued business for the sake of everybody who’s a stakeholder here. And I can’t believe we’re five years in already. It goes fast.

Life Outside of Work

Joseph Frost: What do you like to do outside of work?

Jennifer Zick: In my world, we live in two seasons at the Zick home: hockey season and lake cabin season. We live in Minnesota and have a lake home three hours north of the Twin Cities — pristine lake, total silence. It’s a place I love to escape. I could never live there full time because I need to be around cities and people and all the things, but it’s a beautiful place to go. When I’m not at work, I’m usually hockey-carpooling or sitting in an ice rink. And our oldest daughter is now in college studying communications. So I’m just actively raising a family and doing mom life.

I keep telling myself that someday my other hobbies — theater and artwork — will come back. But in the meanwhile, I actually feel like I get to use all of those creative juices as an entrepreneur. My work is my hobby and passion, and I love it.

Joseph Frost: There’s nothing more creative than being an entrepreneur and building a business as a canvas. Outsiders don’t necessarily see the creativity that goes into entrepreneurship — but it’s intense, the amount of creativity it takes to continue to grow and adapt. So hockey season — is that right now?

Jennifer Zick: Yes, we’re in the throes of it. Our oldest son is a sophomore in high school and starting to play some varsity hockey. It’s heavy hitting, fast moving, and a lot of time. He’s about to get his driver’s license — thank God — because right now his dad is spending about three hours a night taking him to the rink, waiting for practice, and driving him back home again.

Joseph Frost: We have four kids and our youngest is a junior in high school and can drive. We feel like we’re out of the heavy lifting. But we had soccer season — all the kids played soccer. Then we did show choirs. A lot of show choir going on around here, traveling to shows. I was reluctantly dragged to the first couple and now I can really appreciate the differences and nuances between each choir.

Jennifer Zick: I would have been that girl — I was big into theater, music, choir, band, any performing arts at all. My daughter is a musician as well, a songwriter, very talented — but she keeps it on the down low. She doesn’t like the group performances. She’s a little creative person herself. It’s so fun to watch them grow up into adults and shine their light uniquely.

Joseph Frost: Yeah, it is fun to watch them grow. And my wife was just saying — you’re only as happy as your saddest child. You’re always carrying the weight of what they’re going through, good or bad. And because we have four, I don’t think I’m ever happy.

Jennifer Zick: Oh, bless her heart — I can so relate. And that’s another thing I love about my career and my workplace. I’m sitting in my beautiful office today and I’m so grateful, because whatever might be going on at home — and there’s always something — coming here, I get to turn my attention and focus and energy into the building. I’m grateful for a place to be, good work to do, and great clients. But I’m also really grateful that the people we spend time with these days — as clients and people we’re hiring — are just amazing humans. And especially, even though your business could be considered a competitor to Authentic Brand, we’ve collaborated in a lot of ways since we’ve met. There’s more than enough work for all of our teams to abundantly help each other grow.

Joseph Frost: Yeah, I’m a big believer in abundance — especially in an emerging market like this. The more awareness we can get out to the marketplace about options for fractional professionals and fractional CMOs, the better. I know I’ve sent people your way that are looking for that environment and not as interested in a franchise operation, and vice versa. There’s just no reason not to be collaborative. Thank you so much for coming on the show today — I really appreciate it.

Jennifer Zick: It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you for carving out the time and offering me the chance to be a guest. I hope there’ve been some nuggets that’ll help your listeners. We’re always happy to be a resource. And if anybody happens to be listening and has an integrator in their life, they’re always welcome to jump into our community.

Joseph Frost: Yeah, I think that’s great. My business partner has been in the integrator meetings and always has good takeaways. For the listeners out there, if you want to get a hold of Jennifer, you can go to her website authenticbrand.com or reach out on LinkedIn. Thanks again — and that’s a wrap. There’s another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuiteretreat.com.