Rediscovering Your Why: Jennifer Zick featured on System & Soul Podcast

In this episode of System and Soul, host Chris White reconnects with Jennifer Zick — CEO and founder of Authentic — for a full-circle conversation following her six-episode guest host run on the podcast. Jennifer shares how the experience nurtured a long-held dream of having her own show, and what she’s been observing across her network of fractional CMOs and integrators.

The conversation covers three grounding themes: the return-to-basics reset happening inside businesses everywhere, the trade-offs between virtual convenience and in-person human connection, and the contradictions leaders face trying to stand in their truth in a divided world. Chris and Jennifer also touch on the soul side of leadership — including Jennifer’s plan to take a full month sabbatical as Authentic enters its fifth year.

Watch the Conversation

Listen to the Podcast

Key Takeaways

• Nearly every business is returning to go-to-market fundamentals — re-examining who they serve, what they offer, and how they show up, because the world they built their strategy around no longer exists.
• Protecting a pre-pandemic strategy like a sacred object is a liability. Businesses willing to lay their old approach on the altar and rebuild from purpose outward are better positioned for what’s next.
• The shift to virtual work has real costs. In-person connection creates relational dividends — trust, depth, joy — that Zoom calls simply can’t replicate, and leaders should be intentional about creating those moments.
• The leader brings the weather. How a CEO shows up emotionally sets the climate for the entire organization — which makes rest, recovery, and personal sustainability a strategic priority, not a luxury.
• Trust is a choice, not a given. Scaling a business — and stepping away from it — requires actively choosing to trust the people around you, even when it’s uncomfortable.
• Contradiction isn’t a sign of confusion — it’s the reality of nuanced truth. Leaders who can hold two seemingly opposing ideas at once and invite dialogue rather than division are better equipped for this moment.

Podcast Transcription

Opening & Reflections on the Guest Host Series

Chris White: Welcome to System and Soul, the podcast focused on the human energy that runs your business. I’m Chris White, along with my co-host, Benj Miller. Today we have Jennifer Zick, the CEO and founder of Authentic Brand. Welcome, Jen. How are you?

Jennifer Zick: Hey, Chris, thank you so much for having me on the show again. It’s just a pleasure to spend time with you.

Chris White: Well, likewise. We’ve known each other several years now, and I really appreciate that relationship. It started in business, and now it’s blossoming into all the other stuff we’re doing together. You’ve been very helpful and beneficial for us, too. You just finished your System and Soul podcast series — six wonderful guests, six different topics. Now that they’re done, what was that experience like for you?

Jennifer Zick: Well, first, Chris, it was really humbling. It’s such a blessing that you and Benj, who have established such a great followership, would lend me your microphone and trust me to create content that would be helpful to your listening audience. It was an honor and a privilege. It also was a little bit of a nurturing of a seed in my heart — eventually I’d love to have a podcast of my own. But this isn’t the year for it, given all my other commitments. So thank you for letting me play on the playground a little bit. I loved it.

Chris White: I don’t know what you needed to prove to yourself, but you should definitely have a podcast.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you for that vote. It was wonderful to hear from friends — new and old — who are devoted listeners to the System and Soul podcast, and just to hear that they appreciated the content. It was an absolutely fun project.

Chris White: It was fun for us too. It was an experiment — thinking of something clever, how we could help our strategic partners in that way. And it was fun for me to sit back a little, because I didn’t play an active role. I just got to be a listener.

Jennifer Zick: Did you get to sit back and take a breath?

Chris White: Well, it’s not like I wasn’t working on other stuff with the startup. But it was really fun for me — hearing your guests, subject matter experts, always looking for that one nugget. They were entertaining, insightful, and some went a little deep: “Oh, that’s good, I’ve got to write that down.” Hard to do when you’re driving, so I don’t recommend trying. But I’m glad it was a positive experience. We really got to do something different. The data showed it — people were listening longer and holding on. Good content that’s helpful to these people in their businesses.

Jennifer Zick: Well, and I think the big story in that collaboration, Chris, is that we lived what you and I and Benj all value — collaboration and a mindset of abundance. I’ve always believed that when we link arms with people who share our values and see the world with open eyes and an open heart, we all go further, faster together. I appreciate that you and Benj are those people — your entire team is made up of coaches who say: this platform I built out of grit and blood, sweat and tears is a vehicle to serve the world, and if there are others who can help me serve it, there’s a place for them here.

Nurturing the Soul of the Business

Chris White: At System and Soul, we’re 100% focused on getting the people in our clients’ organizations in sync with their systems — giving both sides of the business our attention. So I’m going to the soul side. What are you doing to nurture Authentic Brand’s soul in 2022?

Jennifer Zick: I so appreciate that your organization focuses on both sides, because you can’t do well with just process without heart behind it. For any listeners who don’t know me — I’m the CEO and founder of Authentic Brand. We provide fractional CMO services to growing businesses. My team of brilliant executive marketers become marketing leaders for growing businesses on a part-time, contract basis. I’ve had the good pleasure to fire myself from most of the jobs in my own company at this point. Right now I’m the CEO and still the head of marketing for my own company.

When it comes to the soul and health of Authentic Brand — what I think a lot of business leaders and owners feel right now is, after the last two years, I’m pretty tired. There’s been a lot of pivoting, a lot of drumming up energy and belief, carrying the team along, change management every single day on proportions we’ve not seen before. And then carrying our clients and our partners on that journey — it’s been a major lift. I recently heard a business advisor share in my Vistage group a small statement that really stuck with me: the leader brings the weather. I’m responsible in my company to set the weather every single day.

Doing that with a team distributed between in-person and virtual is a pretty important role. So the thing I’ve chosen to do this year is really give myself some rest. My company is celebrating five years in business this March.

Chris White: Congratulations.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you. Five years of heart and soul and blood, sweat and tears. I’ve let my team know that in September I’m taking the month off as a sabbatical — and I’m saying it now on your show so people can hold me accountable. I need rest so I can bring positive energy back into my business. And I’ve hired good people I can trust to run it.

Chris White: I love that. One of the things I started doing in sessions with clients was setting the emotional temperature at the beginning — a simple check-in. Just one word: how do you feel this morning? That gives permission to be real. Something terrible could have happened over the weekend. When I come into a session, I want to set the emotional temperature because we are not all dealing with the pandemic in the same way. In order to nurture the soul, we also have to protect it. And you’ve got to give it time for recovery. That’s what you’re doing, and I applaud you for it. Not enough entrepreneurs come up for breath. That catches up with you. It’s not sustainable.

Jennifer Zick: That’s exactly right. An extended clarity break. My goal is to be out of my inbox for a month. I gave myself enough time to mentally gear up for it — it’s not next month, it’s September. By then I can be ready to be away for a month.

Chris White: You’re in year five, which is a pivotal year. You’re beating the failure stats. But I’m sure you’re not 100% comfortable leaving for a month.

Jennifer Zick: Oh, not at all. It takes me far outside my comfort zone.

Chris White: But the fact that you’re doing it tells us one thing: you have trust.

Jennifer Zick: Yes. And trust is something you have to choose. Just today, I had to choose to trust my teenage son who wanted to go snowboarding with a storm coming in. Trust is hard. Whenever you choose to trust, there’s a chance you might be disappointed or hurt. But if you can’t trust, you’re bearing the burden of everything on your own shoulders. And it’s not scalable. If you want to build a business, if you want to build a life — you have to trust the people around you and put yourself out there.

What Leaders Are Seeing in the Market

Chris White: Let’s go outside your organization. From a CMO’s perspective, what are you seeing that our entrepreneurs are dealing with?

Jennifer Zick: I get the advantage of seeing through the lens of an entire team of CMOs that work with clients across all industries, regions, and businesses of many different shapes and sizes. I also host an integrator community for second-in-command leaders of entrepreneurial businesses — about 1,000 integrators around the globe. From my vantage point, one of the things I’m seeing is that almost every business in some aspect or another is going back down to the bare essentials of their go-to-market strategy.

Through all the changes our world has seen in the past two years, there’s not a single industry that hasn’t felt the ripple effect of the pandemic — how it’s impacted talent, material goods, emotions, cultures. Even for businesses that had a rock-solid purpose for existence, the things that have shifted have caused their who, their what, and their how to change. We’re all in a new world, and we’re not necessarily selling the same thing in the same way to the same people. Sometimes unintentionally, we’ve had to shift our go-to-market because our previous market no longer exists. And sometimes businesses have embraced this disruption and said: now is the time for the pivot we were hoping to make three years ago.

So every business is taking things back down to the bare bones and the fundamentals — starting over with their go-to-market plan to say: here’s our why and our purpose for existence right now. Let’s re-articulate our who, our what, our how that’s going to fuel next-level healthy growth.

Chris White: That really resonates. Even some of my clients have pivoted — some micro, some major. What I’m seeing is that those being realistic about their situation, having open and candid conversations about the impact and whether to pivot, are going deeper on those conversations. Coming back to basics: we know who we are, we know our ethos, we know our purpose. Now what opportunities do we need to discuss on a weekly basis?

Jennifer Zick: Yes. And any business that is protecting their 2018 or 2019 go-to-market strategy like a sacred something is going to lose — because their competitors are getting creative and saying: besides our life-changing purpose for existence, everything else is up for restructuring. The reason our clients find confidence working with Authentic Brand is that our methodology has always been rooted in purpose first — then audience, brand, message, experience, and eventually tactics. The world is no longer safe for rinsing the same strategy and adding a new tactic. We need to be willing to lay it on the altar and ask: within this new world — anchored to purpose, nimble enough to embrace opportunity, comfortable with the chaos — how do we grow?

Finding the Trade-Offs: Virtual vs. In-Person Connection

Chris White: I wrote something down from our conversation earlier and I want you to expand on it. You said: it’s about finding the trade-offs. Where were you going with that?

Jennifer Zick: I was thinking about this on my drive in this morning, reflecting on last week. We had the opportunity to gather a handful of our core operating team here in Minneapolis and visit one of our new clients — also based in the Twin Cities — spend a half day on site with them, tour their facility, learn about their product, celebrate our partnership. I came away from that really rich, relationally intensive day thinking: we are living in a time where we really need to thoughtfully explore the trade-offs between the comfort and convenience of virtual work and the true human relational connectedness that really can only happen in person.

When you have the margin to have a happy hour and learn about someone’s children, their history, get to know a person outside the context of a meeting — there’s something there you can’t replicate virtually. I’m an extrovert, and I had to drum up a lot of energy to say to my team: we’re going to spend a half day doing this. But I truly believe the return on that investment has a multiplier effect. Real connectivity creates relational dividends you just can’t get through a virtual experience.

I’ve been trying to swallow the pill that we’re going to do business virtually from here on out, and it has never gone down well for me. But it also doesn’t go down well to say we’re always going to do things in person — that’s no longer realistic with a team spread across the country. So I’m settling into this space of: where are the trade-offs? When and how does it make sense to create those in-person connections? How do we get the most richness out of those moments?

Chris White: When’s the last time you did a visit like that with a client?

Jennifer Zick: Oh my gosh, two-plus years ago. You and Benj, I consider close friends of mine at this point, and we still haven’t met in person. I think that’s weird.

Chris White: The day that we actually don’t have that human connection — I don’t want to be in business.

Jennifer Zick: Well, coming back from that experience with our client last week, I was literally just overflowing with joy and energy. This is how I used to work. And I miss it. I think we’re doing ourselves an injustice to pretend we’re all okay just working from home, not seeing people. One of the greatest parts of the work I’ve done in my career has been the friendships I’ve made and the true relationships forged along the way. I just don’t think that can be replaced. And I don’t think work can have the same meaning if we don’t have real relationships — and real relationships in 15, 30, or 40-minute Zoom calls are really difficult to foster.

Navigating a World of Contradiction

Chris White: One more thing I wrote down: you said “we’re in a world of contradiction.” What contradictions are you seeing out there?

Jennifer Zick: This is one I wrestle with daily. I want to believe that if I just show up, shine my light, be kind, everything will work out — and I truly believe I can find common ground with almost anybody. But that’s not our world. Technology has brought a lot of benefits, but it’s also created a lot of opportunity to bifurcate relationships and create divisions and fracture points that don’t need to be there.

Here’s one I was recently thinking about after a conversation with my team about diversity: I happen to be a woman who’s a founder and a CEO, and I’m proud of all those attributes. You can look at the world and say on one hand, we want to celebrate women in leadership — XYZ Corporation just appointed their first female CEO ever, and that’s a cause for celebration. But on the other hand, there are a lot of women who would also say: don’t call me a female CEO, call me a CEO. I’ve earned that title just like anyone else. And they’re both true. Those are two truths that look like they’re in opposition and create a contradiction. Is it okay to say they’re both true? For me, they both are.

I just want to acknowledge that there’s contradiction there that makes it hard to stand in your truth and feel confident about it. Cancel culture wants to find a wedge and push into it where there doesn’t need to be one. And I invite people who have different views — enter my world and let’s have discourse, let’s get to know each other, let’s build a relationship, trust and respect one another for all the things that are different in our experiences. That’s how we learn and grow.

Chris White: We all seek peace. Most people don’t want confrontation — they want harmony. And the only way to get there is through an open dialogue. The willingness to have that open dialogue. Why does everything have to be divided?

Jennifer Zick: It’s not logical. I’m a person of faith and I see a bigger picture above what’s happening at ground level. My heart goes out to the people who are part of the division. Everybody’s looking for their place in the world, their voice, their people. Social media has its attributes — I use it prolifically in my business and I see the good it can do — and then I see the harm. We all just have to take responsibility for our own selves. And knowing what we can control and influence, then letting go of what we can’t — that is the mastery of life, isn’t it? But I haven’t achieved it.

Chris White: That’s why it’s called a path to mastery.

Closing

Chris White: For our listeners who are note-takers: we talked about the recalibration of going to market, finding your trade-offs, and the world of contradictions. Our time is up. I knew it would go by fast. For those who haven’t caught Jennifer’s guest host series yet — six recordings, six different topics, a lot of good stuff. Go listen if you haven’t. Jennifer, thanks again for your support and sharing your wisdom and knowledge. We truly appreciate it and look forward to having you back real soon.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you so much for the opportunity to share your virtual living room again today. I hope to meet you in person sometime soon.

Chris White: We’ve got to make that happen. Come to Florida, not Minnesota!