In this episode of the Shift Spotlight podcast, host Winter Paskins interviews Jennifer Zick about her journey from small-town pageant queen to the founder of Authentic®, a fractional CMO firm dedicated to helping growth-stage companies overcome chaotic, strategy-less marketing. Zick shares how Authentic® helps clients Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® by embedding experienced CMOs directly into client teams as W-2 employees—a distinctive model that builds deeper relationships, culture, and results.
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Key Takeaways
- Overcoming Random Acts of Marketing®: Jennifer explains the most common challenge facing growing businesses — disjointed, tactical marketing without strategy — and how Authentic® addresses it.
- Why W-2s Win: Learn why Authentic® made the bold move to hire all their fractional CMOs as W-2 employees and how this unique structure supports deeper culture and better results.
- The Power of Focused Marketing: Through compelling client stories, Jennifer illustrates how narrowing your audience can multiply growth and even attract acquirers.
- EOS and the Authentic Growth® System: Discover how the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®) influenced Authentic’s internal operations and led to the development of their own marketing OS.
- Founder Wisdom: Jennifer shares real talk about leadership, burnout, work-life integration, and why every business decision she makes is grounded in her values.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Episode recap on GCE’s website
- Follow GCE Strategic Consulting on LinkedIn
- The Components of Authentic Growth® Methodology
- Authentic’s Ally Network
Full Episode Transcription
Introduction
Winter Paskins: All right, we’ll just take a quick minute so production knows where to cut. Hey, everybody, it’s Winter with the shift spotlight. And today we are here with Jennifer Zick. She is the founder and CEO of Authentic and can be found at authenticbrand.com. So that’s a pretty easy website to remember. Welcome to the show, Jennifer.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks so much, Winter. Glad to be here.
Winter Paskins: Thank you. So before we dive into what you do and how you do it, let’s start out with something a little bit fun. Why don’t you tell us an interesting fact about you that people may not know.
Jennifer Zick: Oh, my goodness. Oh, boy. I’m just going to have to draw from what randomly pops up in my head. I don’t share this with most people because I feel like it brings on judgment, but I’m going to come into full confession mode right now.
Winter Paskins: Yes. Do it on our show. Do it on our show.
Jennifer Zick: When I was a little girl, I loved nothing more than going to my small town pageant and watching all the big girls dressed up in gowns and competing. And. And I always dreamed of doing that. And so I did that after my senior year of high school and I ended up winning the little small town crown without recognizing that I would have to go on to compete at the state level in the Miss America contest. And I was so grossly underprepared, underfunded, not equipped to be a pageant queen. But that was such a great adventure and I actually met some really fabulous, brilliant women along the way. But yeah, that’s something I don’t tout very often.
Winter Paskins: I actually love that story. And there’s some synergies. So I was a pageant little girl. My mom is the one who put me in it. I was a Wendy Ward girl. Those were big in Florida. I won a lot of awards and I’m pretty sure I won some money, but I never saw it because I was like 3, 4, 5 years old. So mom raked in on that one. But yeah, I got old enough to know what was going on and were underfunded and didn’t have all the things right. Like there’s a whole world out there. But yeah, so I also had a little bit too. So I never get to share an interesting fact about myself. So that’s cool.
Jennifer Zick: Oh, I love that we have that in common. And I still do love a nice tiara. I mean, yeah, they should wear it every day. Really?
From Pageants to Fractional CMOs
Winter Paskins: Yes. So you wear the tiara at your company. You are the CEO and founder. So at a high level why don’t you tell us what it is that you do?
Jennifer Zick: Sure. Well, when I decided pageantry was not my future path, my career actually took a lot of twists and turns through sales and marketing and executive leadership roles before I started Authentic. So Authentic is now an eight year old company. I started it before I knew what kind of business it would become. I just knew that it was going to be something to do with marketing and building authentic brands, like building marketing the right way in growth businesses. And I came to discover that the path that I was building was to become a fractional chief marketing officer firm. So for the past eight years, that’s what Authentic has done. I’ve built a team of exceptional chief marketing officers. We’re one of the only CMO organizations in the world that employs our fractional chief marketing officers.
And so they’re all on staff with authenticity. And we work with companies usually between 5 million to 100 million in that established growth phase all across the US sometimes beyond. And what we do in most cases is we step in as their first executive head of marketing and we’re in there as operating leaders, as a member of their leadership team, rolling up our sleeves, building marketing foundation and acceleration and helping them really figure out what marketing needs to be in the next stage of growth.
Winter Paskins: Which as you know and I know from, I mean we’re nearing 100 episodes. So I’ve talked to a lot of CEOs but you know, it’s one of the most confusing aspects to a CEO and founder. Most, if not all are not marketers, they are visionaries. They had a great idea, you know, so this aspect of the business is one of the most confusing that I think we see out there. Would you not agree?
Jennifer Zick: I absolutely agree. And that inspired our tagline, which is Overcome Random Acts of Marketing®. It was the phrase that came to mind one day when I was meeting with a CEO and a CFO who were expressing that exact frustration. They’re like, we’ve been told we need to do marketing. We believe that could be valuable to us and we’re spending money and we’re doing things, but we aren’t clear on how that investment is translating into value in our business or into our growth. We just feel really disconnected from what the tactics are to where the results should be. Yeah. And so yeah, that’s a very common situation for almost every single growth company because they start off as founder-led with that brilliant idea.
They have to be sales driven first because you don’t have a company until you can sell something more than once and then you have to build some operating rigor. And then eventually when they get to that piece of growth, they look behind them and there’s a trail of random acts of marketing along the way.
Solving Marketing Chaos
Winter Paskins: One of my questions is about what your definition was. Because I’ve heard it. I’ve got a background in marketing and public relations. I did it for 20 years for corporate America before I started doing it for myself. So I get it. And it is random. Like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping, you know, one stick. So, why do so many companies out there, why do they all practice random acts of marketing?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, it’s because it really is like picking up where I left off. It’s a natural evolution of business growth. If you think of when you first started your business or when I started mine, we even had the advantage of having marketing backgrounds. But when you first start, you build your first version of a sales deck, perhaps maybe your first version of a landing page and a website, but you’re still determining what your market fit and focus is. You’re still figuring out which clients are the best fit. There’s this natural growth phase in an early stage startup where you begin with a hypothesis and then you test that hypothesis in the market to refine it and further refine it. So you’re constantly changing and who you will be tomorrow is not who you are today.
And so those iterations create some chaos in the brand, especially if they’re not overseen by an experienced marketing leader who can navigate those transitions along the way. And so, and then usually the first pieces of marketing that need to be activated are more tactical. Like maybe you need to put a basic CRM in place or like I said, your basic website or an email program. But often those tactics are being managed in silos by specific tactical specialists and they’re not connected strategically. And so all of that pretty quickly starts to create this mass of activity that feels like it’s all moving in different directions and we’re uncertain. And the metrics that you get out of those activities, they can be very confusing. Those engagement or vanity metrics, they can mean something, but they don’t ultimately tell you what’s the roi.
The Power of a W-2 Talent Pool
Winter Paskins: Right, right. So I’m curious, why do you employ all of your fractional CMOs? That’s kind of a unique aspect of what you do.
Jennifer Zick: I think it is unique. Yeah. We definitely chose the more invested path for growing our team. And that came as a consequence of me really searching my heart as a founder and asking myself, what do I want for this business and what do I want my end game to be? Because every founder eventually exits their business, right? And so I started with that end in mind. And when I determined that I was building a fractional CMO or and consulting organization, it was a hypothesis. And I had never heard the word fractional before I met fractional CFOs, so I didn’t know anybody else eight years ago doing what I was trying to do. It was a complete hypothesis. So to de-risk that, I originally started with 1099 contractors and marketers I trusted.
And I started building our methodology and having them implemented and working with clients and understanding the value and could this scale? And when we determined it was scalable, I sat back and I thought, okay, what kind of model do I really want to build? Do I want to build franchises and sell individual franchises to use our methodology? Do I want to have this be a licensed brand of independent agents? Do I want a gig network with a database full of names? Do I want to employ these people? I looked at every single model that was out there. Partnerships, all the things. And ultimately, for me, it came down to two things.
I wanted a tightly knit culture of people who knew each other, trusted each other, worked together, collaborated, had each other’s backs, were willing to, like, lay their marketing armor at the door and come in vulnerable and learn from each other. And I felt like I could cultivate that best in an employment model where they were required to be at meetings, they were taught how to use our methodology, they were expected to lean on each other, and. And they were expected to live our values. And so. And the second part that was important to me is that I’m building a business not just because I love what I do, but as an owner, I’m trying to create value for an eventual exit in whatever direction that takes me. And to create real sticky value, I needed to be deeper than 1099.
Winter Paskins: That’s right. That’s right.
Jennifer Zick: So those were my motivating factors, and I’m really grateful that we made that decision early on. Yeah.
Winter Paskins: So how many employees do you have?
Jennifer Zick: We have 27 employees today. We have a team of operating leaders in sales and marketing and client services here in our headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And then our CMOs we employ across the United States, but a good portion of them are also based here in Minnesota. We have a really wonderful talent pool here to draw from.
Winter Paskins: Interesting, interesting. So what strategies I mean, you’ve got people locally, you’ve got people over. We are fractional, but we are employees. So what strategies do you use to build strong and effective teams in running that kind of dynamic?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, well, there’s a couple different strategies that we use in different areas of the business. So first, in terms of client services and client relationships, we don’t just, you know, throw a list of names at a client and have them choose a CMO. We have a very curated fit process up front. So our business development team are consultative leaders in the process of understanding the client’s requirements, working with our client services team on a really thoughtful match process. We have a great track record for making that right match and we make it based on the relevant business model experience first, because you can’t take an E commerce consumer marketer and drop them into a B2B tech company and have them be successful. So relevant business model and industry and the right capacity and all of those components, culture, fit, personality.
And then we surround every client engagement with a right fit CMO guarantee. So the client knows at any point, if for any reason it’s not working, we’ve got their back and we can bring another CMO in. We almost never have to do it, but when we have, it’s always been seamless and we have a client services leader attached to every client account. And so our CMOs are implementing our authentic growth methodology. It’s our marketing operating system and our client services team is making sure they’re well supported in that and they’re checking in with the client for quarterly business reviews.
Just making sure that we’re maximizing the value of not only that CMO for every client, but the value of our mindshare that brings all of our CMOs together to collaborate and the value of our Authentic Ally Network of agency peers that we can refer to as well. So we really wrap our arms around the client.
Winter Paskins: I mean, like from the second you popped on here today, you know, we had this energy between us and it’s so funny because, you know, so much of what you’re saying is what we do. So GCE Strategic Consulting, they’re our sponsor and they’re known for being fractional integrators. But we do have a lot of other practice areas, HR, fractional CFOs, etc. Etc. And we do the exact same process and it did take a little trial and error to nail that process down. But it’s, you know, you match them with the right personality based on who they are. Like I’m A hit it and quit it person. If, if I get a high I personality working with me, I’m going to lose my mind.
Jennifer Zick: Right.
Winter Paskins: Because it’s just not going to work. But a lot of what you do is what we do to figure out how to, you know, make that work for the client. And, and we too, and you never hear this in the integrator world at all, but we offer a guarantee as well that if you’re not happy, we will replace them. So it’s interesting that we’ve both kind of figured that out in completely separate fields entirely. But I mean, you know, nobody. The muck in the mud that you go through to end up at that point.
Jennifer Zick: Exactly the point. It’s like we started off by talking about how a lot of this conversation will be like, where did we get it wrong? Where did we mess up? Like anything that we do well is a product of where we screwed up or had a blind spot originally and we felt some pain and we’re like, we need to resolve that what’s the right path forward and that scaling any business is successfully means constantly staying in tune with like, where are the gaps in the blind spots now or where is the past process no longer serving us and how do we adapt it? So we’ve just tried to be really intentional about that.
Client Impact Stories
Winter Paskins: So back to the types of clients that you serve so you don’t have to have names or situations but like give us an example of a client that needed your help, that you came in and fill in the blank and, and what’s the end result now?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, you know, there are a lot of business challenges and opportunities that bring clients to our front door. Often it’s, we want to drive more sales and revenue, but sometimes it’s market expansion, sometimes it’s integrating brands that have been acquired. Sometimes it’s an owner who wants to exit in a few years, but they have done some diligence and recognize their business isn’t valued at what they thought it was and they know they need to find a market fit and focus and build a brand that has more value. So one example of that was a professional services firm that specialized in custom software development that brought us in. The owner brought us in because it’s like we’ve kind of capped our growth.
We can build anything in software and we serve across all these different industries and we’re so good, but we’re like the best kept secret. So we brought a CMO in alongside of them who was able to pretty quickly identify that trying to be all things to everybody was simply watering down their value proposition. So they did an assessment of where their core strengths as a team were, where their greatest, most profitable long term client successes were. And they really helped the client narrow in on the construction industry being a niche that they could accelerate in. And they rebuilt that client’s go to market focus all around that industry focus with a proven process behind it and their own internal methodology for how they sold into these companies.
And within a matter of, I think, were there six to nine months implementing this new positioning, they had two strategic acquirers knocking on their door who were like, now that we see where you’re focused, we see how you fit within our platform and we have an interest in acquiring your business. And that business owner did sell the business much sooner than he expected for greater multiples than he anticipated just because of that right fit and market focus.
Winter Paskins: I think that’s where I see people screw up. Well, the two types of people we tend to come across quite a bit are the accidental entrepreneurs. They fell into the business, they had a good idea and all of a sudden this success hit them out of the blue and now it’s gone from hey, something that landed in my lap to complete chaos. That’s one of our specialty clients that we work with. And I think that the other one is, that we work with is the one that is trying to grow and they’re trying to be all things to all people and they’re, you know, they think that if they cast this super wide net that’s going to attract all the fish.
But you know, marketers know that when you specialize or when you dial that in, that’s really where the true growth and like the magic in marketing comes across.
Jennifer Zick: Yes. And what I find is that founders and sales leaders often have fear. You know, if you go back to the story I shared about how most businesses are founder-led and sales driven before they are going to really bring marketing to the table. To grow a business from startup to something of critical mass for a while there, you do have to cast a wide net and try different things on and figure out that fit, figure out what’s profitable. Right. You have to, but eventually you can’t scale if you continue to do that. But then when marketing comes to the table, there’s a little bit of a freak out by sales and leadership when they’re like you’re saying we need to say no to revenue.
And so I like to use a baseball analogy to help them feel better about marketing’s role because we’re not saying to turn off all the opportunities that are outside of a tiny little market focus. But what we’re saying instead is if you think of your whole business like a baseball team, your delivery, operational capabilities, the outfield, like you have a wide range left to right of what you could deliver and solutions you can provide. Your sales teams, like the infield, like, they’re narrowed in a little bit. Maybe they’ve got a black book of specific industry connections. They’re maneuvering right. But they can shape a deal left to right. But your marketer, your marketing team is like the pitcher. And for the dollars you invest in marketing to proactively go find business, they need to be aimed at a really small strike zone.
And you have to define that strike zone by like, if we’re going to go to market to look for business, we’re aiming at these criteria that make up our ideal client or customer Persona. This kind of situation, that’s our happiest, healthiest, most profitable kind of a business opportunity. And that doesn’t mean that if something comes to you have to say no to it. You can still make those exceptions and say yes thoughtfully, but at least the dollars you’re investing to go to market have more wood behind the arrow. And there I just mixed analogies because I’m talking about archery and baseball at the same time. You can’t trust me.
Winter Paskins: That’s funny. So as you’ve scaled your own business, what challenges have taken you by surprise and how have you handled them?
Jennifer Zick: Oh, boy. Probably the biggest challenge that has been surprising and painful for me has been when I’ve not hired the right person to the right seat.
Winter Paskins: Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: Like when I have believed so much in my heart that this person was going to be the right person in the right role because I loved them, trusted them. You know, they were bright and shiny. And then when they’re in the role, it’s just not happening. And I. My biggest mistake has been hoping for too long or coaching for too long or just trying too hard to make it work or just picking up too much of the slack around them because I just want to see them feel successful. So the first several years, I mean, really, up until recently, we. I moved through a few different evolutions in. Ironically, the roles that were hardest for me were on the sales and marketing side of my business, which is where my natural expertise lies. It’s almost like I’m so close to it that it’s hard.
Winter Paskins: You’re a little too close is what I was going to say.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, it’s harder for me to be objective. And so recently we’ve actually worked with a professional recruiting firm to take on some of that work. And that’s been really helpful. But yeah, the people part is the hardest part. And we’re in the people business. And so people are what we do. So that’s where it really hurts.
Winter Paskins: And so, and so when you say, and we see this a lot too, where like the person comes in and you like them and they’re like you, the visionary. They’re a lot like the visionary. And that’s where I think a lot of visionaries get in trouble with the right people, you know, right seat situation, because they’re like, well, this person’s great. But, you know, there can only be one kind of visionary. And you need that person that can actually do that job and do it effectively. And I hear all the time, well, I hired him because I liked him.
Jennifer Zick: Yes.
Winter Paskins: Hired him because he was my, you know, sister’s husband and he’s loyal, he does a good job. Right. He, I can trust him. We have a client whose janitor is his vice president now. And it was all because he could trust him. Right. Wow. Is the company scaling? Is it doing what it’s supposed to do? You know, no. And those, the conversations that have to be had. But you mentioned, right. Right people, right seat. So what systems or frameworks? I mean, I’m assuming you have familiarity with EOS, but what have you used? What has helped you scale? How are you growing this? Talk about that a little bit.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. So we do run on EOS. And I had the advantage of about 16 years ago working in another entrepreneurial, fast growing company where I was the first employee with two founders. So on the founding team, I was not an owner, but I sat in what I would call the second row seat. I got to watch all the ownership dynamics without the risk, but also be a founding team member. And in that company, I was head of sales and marketing, which is a different topic for a different day because that really means being a sales manager. And eventually I moved into being the head of marketing exclusively. But along the way, halfway through our journey, we had built a business that was everything to everyone, like most entrepreneurs initially do. And we realized we couldn’t scale it.
And the book Traction was hot off the press at that point, like 16 years ago. And we became one of the first companies in Minnesota to implement EOS. And so many years ago, I had the experience of watching that transform the business I was part of then. And I knew when I started Authentic that I wanted to use the EOS framework. So even on day one, just me and my kitchen table debating over my values, building my VTO, putting it all to paper. I’ve been running on EOS from the very start, even though, you know, I was too small to really need it, but it was still helpful. And so after three and a half years or so, I hired an EOS implementer to work alongside us. And we’re still working with him, love him.
He keeps us honest. Shout out to Matt Beecher.
Winter Paskins: Shout out to Mount Beecher. Because we do keep the implementers in on these podcasts. So shout out there. Thank you for your service.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. And we, and then we’ve used Ninety as a tool to help us manage our EOS. And we’ve just been really committed to documented, proven processes and, you know, level 10 meeting cadences. And in fact, because of the company I was with previously, where I was leading marketing in an EOS run business that gave me a lot of the inspiration for what is now Authentic’s marketing operating system called Authentic Growth®, which is an entire framework that takes the little box called marketing strategy on your VTO and turns it into a full, robust, thoughtful marketing strategy and plan annual budget activation, all the things that you really need to truly lead and guide a marketing team.
So there’s a lot of, I have a lot of, just a lot of gratitude to eos and the community of other leaders in that space that are so generous. Right, right.
Winter Paskins: It’s great. Okay, we’re going to shift gears a little bit. What are some of the top things that are impacting your company or the industry right now? So this can be positive or negative, but, you know, when typically, you know, the purse strings tighten, a lot of times companies say, well, we need to look at marketing. Right. Or we need to cut back. And in my experience, this is when you should double down on marketing more than ever. But what are you seeing in your industry right now?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, that’s a great setup because we’ve been one of Minnesota’s Fast 50 growing companies for the past couple of years. We’re on the Inc. 5000. We’ve had an awesome trajectory and 2024 was a frustrating year because the market did slow down and get stodgy. Things were moving really slowly with decision making for clients. We’ve had tremendous client retention. And I credit that to the fact that not only are we bringing value every day, but we’re showing that measurably and clients understand the ROI of their investment with Authentic but new business was slower last year than I’ve ever seen before. This year, the market is still uncertain for all new reasons. Right. The clients that we serve in manufacturing and nonprofits have been hit really fast by cuts and by tariff impacts, and we’re just working really nimbly with them.
But at the same time, our new business pipeline is more robust than I’ve ever seen before. And to point back to when things slow down, you should double down. That’s exactly what we did last year. When things started to slow down, we took advantage of optimizing our entire operating structure and were more profitable last year than years prior. We also started the process of hiring for more business development staff so that if the market was going to stay slower, we’re just going to chase it harder. Right. Bring more staff in. We did not slow down our marketing investment. We continued to build that team internally. So we really doubled down and that is really showing up right now in April. We’re not done with April yet, but we’ve just had the strongest month of the year, top two in the last two years. So it’s huge.
Yeah, there’s huge positive motion out there. And we’re hopeful that, you know, we’re going to get through some of the economic bumps and our clients will get through it and that’ll just continue to grow. I’m a firm believer in practicing what we preach. We stay. Stay invested. We want to be ahead of the demand curve as it comes back around. So that’s definitely a dynamic happening for us right now. One other dynamic is that through COVID, when I started the business, nobody knew what a fractional CMO was. COVID and all the impacts that everybody felt, there’s a huge boost in the gig economy. Right. A lot of people are taking their own careers into their own hands. There’s more fractional leaders than ever. And that’s both good and challenging.
It raises all ships in terms of awareness about the model. But the frustrating thing is that there are a lot of people using the title of fractional CMO that would never meet the credentials of being a CMO in real life in a C suite. And so we get to stand apart because of the credentials of our team. But sometimes it’s a confusing buyer market in that way.
Winter Paskins: And again with our synergies, I mean, 100% the same thing we experience. And Ken had said something on a podcast we did the other day that I think only 4% of people out there are certified integrators. You’ve got a whole bunch of people playing integrators.
Jennifer Zick: Yes.
Winter Paskins: There’s one company in particular that we’ve heard have done some really damaging things to clients, businesses, because you’ve got a lot of people in roles, right, that latched onto this very hot title and they found a way to take it and market it. But like you said, if this were a C suite position, they would not have filled it or would have never even come close to qualifying for it. So how, why are we on that? I mean, how do you get around that? How are you. Because, because buyer confusion is real. Right. You know, how do you get around the perception that, you know, not all CMOs are cut from the same cloth?
Jennifer Zick: Part of it is education. So whereas we used to educate on what a fractional CMO is, now we educate on what different models exist, pros and cons, what to look out for, how to qualify the right fit. And ultimately we trust the process. Everything is a cycle in this world. Like the bad actors will eventually flame out and the strong performers will continue to rise. And sometimes the prospect that’s looking authentic and then looking at a much less expensive backyard freelance option needs to choose the wrong path in order to understand the right path or the better. So we love them and cheer them on whatever they choose.
And a lot of times they end up back at our front door and we’re able to bring them a true executive on a fractional part time basis that is going to bring that strong, steady, strategic leadership that they need. So I don’t worry too much about all the noise out there. I just try to provide a good safe space for education and help them consider what their options are. And the right things happen in the right time for the right reasons. We just trust that.
Work-Life Integration & Personal Values
Winter Paskins: And I’m a big fan of that as well too. So a few more questions here. We’re going to shift gears one more time. You definitely have it together. You are, you know, well versed, well spoken, you definitely know your stuff. But as a leader, you know, how do you maintain work, life balance while leading a company? Because you’ve been doing this long enough to know you can’t burn the candle at ends indefinitely. And when you do, something happens. So how do you get that balance incorporated into this, these big plans you have for yourself and your company?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, well, maybe about 10 years ago or so, I had an epiphany when my kids were littler. Now my youngest is 15 and I am 15 and 19 and 21 years old. So two in college, one at home in high school. When I started my business, I had littles and middles, you know, eight years ago. And that was about the time when I started to recognize that work life balance was never going to be sustainable. And I started to embrace the concept of work life integration instead. Because I always felt like previously as a full time working mom, prior to starting Authentic, I had to travel a lot. I just felt like I was half assing it in every single category and I was down on myself about everything all the time.
Winter Paskins: Right.
Jennifer Zick: But when I had the opportunity to start my own business, I made a few decisions up front. I decided that I was not going to grow a company any faster than I could grow my family with all of my values and priorities intact. So if that meant slower growth, I was fine with that because I want to be present with my family while my kids are growing up.
Winter Paskins: Put a VTO in for your family. Family, yeah, we actually call it the ZOs.
Jennifer Zick: The ZICK operating system. Yes. We run on ZOS in my home and EOS in my business.
Winter Paskins: Hilarious.
Jennifer Zick: I love it.
Winter Paskins: True.
Jennifer Zick: It’s true. And so I’ve allowed myself to work fewer hours for myself than I ever worked for other people’s businesses and I really protect those boundaries. And I have been intentional about cultivating a workplace culture where we focus for all of our employees on love your life and love your work. In that order. So we let them determine what that looks like. But for me it’s been about not compromising and not saying yes to other things. You know, I recently joined a non profit board, but it’s the first other thing I said yes to in eight years because I’m like, I can’t say yes to anything besides growing a family and growing a business. So just being intentional.
Winter Paskins: No is powerful. And I, I do think CEOs struggle with that word sometimes, but it is powerful and it’s there for a reason and it doesn’t make you a bad person. And you know that pleasing people is what, it’s what gets CEOs in so much trouble. Instead of having that hard conversation about productivity at work or whatever the situation is, they’ll start taking on more and then, you know, not saying no to that event, they’ll keep going and then all of a sudden, you know, and that’s typically when they come to us and they’re at our front door, you know, but they’re like, I. I’m not in control of my life or my business, and I have no idea what happened. And it starts out slow, but those boundaries are really important.
And we’ve seen a huge spike in burnout with CEOs over the past couple of years. I think probably because from COVID everybody tried to ramp up, you know, everybody went down or a lot of people went down. GCE was like, stable, but like, you know, then they tried to ramp up and make up and you know, burnout. And so we’ve started doing a bunch of podcasts about mental health for the CEO, emotional health, physical health for the CEO. Because I think that those are like taboo conversations until now. I mean, what, the kids get to talk about their mental health all the time and they feel unsafe, you know, like, so we should be able to, right?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, we need to. A couple other things that have really helped me there is that I actually am a member of two different CEO peer groups. You need to be in safe spaces with other founders and CEOs who get it because they’re living because there are things you just can’t talk about with your spouse in a way they’re going to understand or with your employees in a way that’s appropriate. So you have to have those places where you can fully be heard and supported and understood. And then I’ve been really protective of my clarity breaks. And for me, what that looks like is approximately once per quarter I take myself out of town, usually to my northwoods cabin in Minnesota, just by myself. And I spent two days quietly, you know, with a notebook and journaling.
Sometimes I’ll work on a special project because I want to just tap into my creative juices, but I get away. And it always helps me to back up and remember my priorities, focus my vision and come back with clarity. And I actually put on my VTO several years ago, a goal to take a one month sabbatical. And I prepared my whole team for it. And I had a newly minted COO integrator, right? And it was like, I’m going to stress test this. And so I did. I took a full month sabbatical and I didn’t check my email once. And only my integrator had the bat phone for how to reach me and she never had to reach me. And the business did great that month.
There was a lot for me to catch up on when I got back, but man, it was an awesome exercise to enable and empower the rest of my team and give myself a break. And I probably should put that back on the VTO again soon.
Winter Paskins: Yeah. And. And one of the things I do is with our employee, we create a word of the month. And so, and then we. Every Monday, we have to check in on that word of the month, like, how do we do with it? And so for May, it’s going to be five, and in the second take five, find yours. Your peace. And that to me, you know, I can get so into it all the time. When it says take five, I don’t mean just take five minutes. Him, it means like, stop, get up from the computer, you know, go breathing, go walk to the cul de sac, go call a friend. Like, you know, take a minute and just bring yourself back, because then you come back and you’re more recharged or whatever.
But I love doing that with her because, you know, we have to. We hold each other accountable, you know. All right, well, what was, you know, your. What is your week like? Well, I didn’t do great with taking five, and now I need to adjust it. And so I think these little things are the difference between, you know, like, working to live and living to work. Right. You just, you get to have these little things in between there that make it brighter.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, I agree. And accountability is so important. Having buddy battle buddies. Yeah. Is important.
Winter Paskins: Yeah. Okay, so as we wrap this up, if somebody listening with you wanted to take the next step, what should they do?
Jennifer Zick: Well, they can connect with me directly on LinkedIn, find me as Jennifer Zick. It’s pretty easy to tap there. And they can also visit authenticbrand.com to learn a little bit more about the work that we do. See some case studies, reach us through our contact page, and we’ll be sure to follow up and set up a, you know, no obligation consultation. Just get acquainted and help them navigate what makes sense for the next step for them.
Winter Paskins: Awesome. Well, I immensely enjoyed this conversation today, so thank you so much for being on the shift Spotlight.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun, Winter!
