Stop The Noise Podcast Featuring Jennifer Zick

In this episode of Stop the Noise, host Susan Tatum sits down with Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic® — a fractional Chief Marketing Officer firm serving emerging growth businesses in the $5M–$100M revenue range. Jennifer shares the career journey that led her to build Authentic, including how she identified a gap in the market for strategic marketing leadership that small businesses could actually afford.

The conversation covers the role of the CMO, the value of fractional executive leadership, and Authentic’s proprietary Authentic Growth® methodology. Jennifer also digs into the realities of demand creation, the importance of focus in go-to-market strategy, and why professional services firms must lead with trust before tactics.

Listen to the Podcast

Watch the Conversation

Key Takeaways

• A fractional CMO provides part-time executive marketing leadership, helping growing businesses mitigate the risk of hiring the wrong full-time leader while accelerating strategic impact.
• Narrowing your go-to-market focus is not about saying no to revenue — it’s about directing marketing energy toward the ideal customer strike zone so healthy, scalable revenue follows.
• Demand creation takes longer than most business leaders expect: count on 18–24 months of consistent, high-quality content investment before organic leads begin to convert.
• For professional services firms, trust is the currency. Cultivating earned media, referral partners, and a strong testimonial base is often more valuable than paid advertising in the early stages.
• Marketing should function both like a checkbook (short-term campaign spend) and an investment portfolio (long-term brand value), and a strong CMO balances both.
• If you’re building in a new category, expect to educate the market first — and build content around the words your buyers are already searching for, not just the language you use internally.

Podcast Transcription

Opening and Introductions

Susan Tatum: Hey everybody and welcome to Stop the Noise. This is where we get to hear from some of the most interesting and experienced minds offering us advice and some great ideas about why and how to stop wasting money, looking and sounding like everybody else. In business, being the same won’t keep you safe. It will make you easy to replace and even easier to ignore. I’m your host, Susan Tatum. Let’s get started. Hello and welcome back to Stop the Noise. I’m Susan Tatum and today I am so excited to be talking to Jennifer Zick, who is the founder and CEO of Authentic Brand. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Susan. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Susan Tatum: It’s really good to have you here. I think you have a really incredible business model. You’ve built a community around fractional CMOs — or chief marketing officers — which begs a whole bunch of questions. But how did the thought of a business like that come to you?

Jennifer Zick: It all started based on my own career experience. When I entered the workforce, I was frankly flailing. I came out of college with a communications degree and was lucky enough to land in the early evolution of website development in an introductory sales and marketing role. I ended up building a career path in sales and marketing, mostly in professional services, mostly around technology solutions. Along the way I got to work with very small, fast-growing startups, be part of a large global enterprise, and be part of a mid-market company. After about 20 years of that experience, I had the opportunity to lose a job for the first time.

That propelled me to a catalyst moment to decide whether I would look for another job or start this little idea that was in my heart. I took the leap of faith and started Authentic Brand. I spent a little bit of time thinking about what I could get excited to solve in the world. Based on my career experience, I thought there are a lot of small businesses that are guessing their way through how to build marketing. If we could bring them wise, experienced executive leadership sooner — in a way that a small business could afford — those companies could grow stronger, faster.

The second part of the vision for Authentic Brand was that having been a fast-growth marketer through my career, I understood the tension that comes with being the head of marketing in a fast-moving organization. It’s a demanding role with high burnout, fast churn, and it’s often the first seat to be cut in lean times. A lot of my peers were asking, isn’t there a better way to live life and also do meaningful work? So I thought, what if I could build a community of brilliant, experienced, diverse CMOs who help one another to help our small business clients? That was really the genesis of Authentic Brand.

Susan Tatum: And you said that very authentically. I like the name of your company. Authenticity is something I think is so important, and people try to fake it.

Jennifer Zick: Yes. People and businesses. The inspiration for my company name came before I even had the words to describe our service. I knew I wanted to work with people I loved, doing work that we love, with businesses who were values-led, who cared about nurturing culture and doing business the right way and growing in a healthy way. We really want to be an authentic brand and we want to build authentic brands in the work we do.

What Is a Fractional CMO?

Susan Tatum: I’m not sure how familiar our listeners are with the concept of a fractional executive or with CMOs. When I started in marketing, there were no CMOs — it is a position that is fairly new in the grand scheme of things. So what is a CMO?

Jennifer Zick: A CMO is a chief marketing officer — the head of brand strategy and all marketing execution as it relates to business growth. A CMO is a member of the executive leadership team. They fill the seat of responsibility and accountability for all things marketing, but also brand experience, which is more of a horizontal play. It’s the way your brand is communicated to the world, the promise you make to the world, how the world experiences your delivery of that promise, and whether your customers and stakeholders trust you. A CMO really has responsibility for brand value creation, marketing execution, and the teams that drive all the campaigns, channels, and tactics.

Susan Tatum: So there’s the brand value and then there’s lead generation — that falls under that umbrella as well, right?

Jennifer Zick: It does. Demand gen sits at the intersection between marketing and sales. In some cases, people in the demand generation roles are in marketing; sometimes they’re in sales in terms of business development and qualification. Those roles can go either way depending on how the organization is structured. But historically, marketing’s singular role was creation of brand awareness and brand value. Today, marketing encompasses brand and demand and experience — cultivating relationships across stakeholder groups that creates demand, converts demand to acquisition, and then helps to retain and build true advocates for your brand.

Susan Tatum: You said something interesting earlier: that you have a sales background as well as a marketing background. You don’t see a lot of people like that.

Jennifer Zick: There’s so much that marketing can do to create opportunities for sales and to support the whole sales and customer retention cycle. One topic worth noting is that more businesses today than ever are understanding the importance of marketing in supporting the employment brand and the employee experience — talent attraction as well as buyer attraction. It all has to knit together under one truly authentic brand umbrella. You only have one brand, but it’s experienced uniquely based on who the stakeholder is — whether a prospective customer, a current customer, an investor, an employee, or a prospective employee.

Susan Tatum: That brings in corporate communications with investors and the HR function with employees — and now you see it being housed under the CMO.

Jennifer Zick: All of those tie into the role of a CMO. Which is why it’s become mission-critical for marketing no longer to live under sales. Let me back up and answer about the fractional leadership layer. After 20 years in business, I had never heard that phrase until I started Authentic Brand. I met my first couple of network connections who were fractional CFOs and learned that was a thing. Fractional simply means a part-time person working with accountability for a role. A fractional CFO might have a book of five to ten clients and works part-time across all of them to bring strategy to the finance side of a growth organization.

I felt like I invented fractional CMO — and then I discovered there were some providers in the market already, which actually helped justify the idea. In Authentic Brand’s case, we focus on serving the emerging growth business: roughly $5M to $100M in revenue. We don’t usually work with pure startups because very early stage businesses should be mostly sales-focused — making sure they’re bringing something of value to the market with repeatable appeal. That’s when you start layering in strategic marketing.

The Baseball Analogy and Go-to-Market Focus

Susan Tatum: My experience has been that first customers are often part of a founder’s personal network, and it’s when they hit the point that they can’t bring in enough opportunities by themselves that they start thinking about marketing.

Jennifer Zick: That’s one trigger. The other thing that happens is that early-stage businesses are often at risk of saying yes to any revenue rather than purposefully pursuing healthy revenue and healthy opportunities. A lot of businesses manage to, despite themselves, get to their first 3, 5, or $10 million by selling anything people want from them. Then they start to realize it’s making the business unhealthy. Nobody knows where to focus, they don’t have differentiation, and nobody knows what they actually do. That’s another catalyst for where we enter the scene — to help a company assess the sandbox they’re playing in and decide what’s their path to grow into. And that’s a hard pivot for a lot of small businesses to make.

Susan Tatum: I know you have a baseball analogy for this.

Jennifer Zick: I share this because it’s a bit comical, but it makes a lot of sense. Business owners and salespeople tend to get nervous when a strategic marketer steps in and starts talking about focus because they think marketing is saying we have to say no to revenue. But really, I like to give them the visual image of a baseball team.

Think of your delivery organization as the outfield — they have a wide berth because there’s a good chance your business could do a lot of things. Your sales team is the infield — a bit more narrow in focus, but they can still maneuver. They kind of know what a good deal looks like but can take deals in different directions. But your marketing team and your marketing leader are the pitcher on the team. Their role is to focus on a very tiny strike zone and to take all the resources for how you go to market and point them in as singular a direction as possible. You’ve probably heard the phrase: there are riches in the niches. The tighter you get your go-to-market focus, the more likely you are to attract healthy, high-producing, happy revenue.

So don’t hear marketing say you can only do business with what’s in the strike zone — but you should put all your marketing efforts and energy in that direction, purposefully pursue the healthy, specific kind of business, and then give yourself some latitude to shape the sale once you’re inside an account.

Susan Tatum: That’s such a good point. I know almost all the clients I work with have a really hard time narrowing their focus. Nobody’s saying you can’t take opportunities that come along — it’s just that focusing allows you to cut through the noise and speak to a specific audience.

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. I had a powerful case study happen just last week — a very similar story happened last year too. One of our CMOs is working on an account, and one of the first things we did in that relationship was help advise them on their focus. They were a great company with great capabilities, but every client solution was truly unique and not very scalable. So the first thing we did was help them tighten their message and their go-to-market focus — we didn’t ask them to fire any clients, just get focused on go-to-market. Well, that CEO called me last week to let me know they’re being acquired. And he said that when they finally decided to focus, that’s the first time his phone started ringing with companies who wanted to acquire. He’s getting a much higher multiple in the sale than he ever thought imaginable.

The Authentic Growth® Methodology

Susan Tatum: Let’s talk about your framework for driving what you call Authentic Growth.

Jennifer Zick: Authentic Growth® methodology is the framework we’ve created. Three things make our approach to fractional CMO work unique: marketers, methodology, and mindshare. All of our marketers are true executives with great track records. Our methodology is a framework that helps us quickly onboard into a business through a robust discovery process — assessments, audits, interviews, and a review of artifacts. It creates a cadence of meetings and workshops that help companies create clarity and accountability, prioritize what must get done on the marketing side to reach business objectives.

It’s our way of guiding clients to demystify the role of marketing, align stakeholders, manage expectations on what’s realistic with available budget and resources, and ensure we’re doing marketing from the foundational level instead of the tactical level. The methodology helps ensure clients have answered the most critical things first: What is their purpose for existence? What are the business goals? Who are the ideal buyers? What brand experience do we want to cultivate? What messaging, what analytics, what KPIs will tell us if we’re moving the needle? When we have that foundation in place, we can navigate the right tactical mix through the right channels.

Susan Tatum: And that is so important, because you refer to it as “random acts of marketing.” If you’re focused on tactics, you’re never seeing the big picture — you’re moving from one thing to another, and even if you succeed, you don’t know why.

Jennifer Zick: Marketing, when it’s working well, operates both like a checkbook and like a long-term investment portfolio. But too many companies run marketing just like a checkbook — spending check to check, going to the mall and bringing things home and donating them back out without ever building value. A CMO’s role is to balance the long-term investment strategy of your brand with the short-term spend and campaign activations that bring in the activity you need day to day.

When Is a Company Ready for a CMO?

Susan Tatum: When does a company hit the point where they’re ready for a CMO?

Jennifer Zick: For us, we’ve identified that point as roughly $5M in revenue, but there are a couple of other things that have to be in place. They should have a leadership team. There are some companies where it’s literally just a founder with an engine of activity, but there’s no actual leadership team collaborating to grow and scale — if that’s the case, there’s no point bringing on a CMO. They also need a six-figure budget for the CMO even on a fractional basis, and a six-to-seven-figure marketing activation budget to support the doing of the marketing work.

I talk about making sure you’ve equipped your CMO with clay to work with. You wouldn’t hire an artist and not give them tools. You have to have some material investment to really justify bringing on a senior leader.

Susan Tatum: I think I saw somewhere where you were talking about how you don’t hire a fractional CMO necessarily to save money.

Jennifer Zick: Right, and that’s a little counterintuitive. In the fractional CFO analogy, you are saving money — you’re getting CFO advisory without a full-time hire. You can certainly save money with a fractional CMO too, because they won’t cost as much as a full-time CMO with a bonus program and benefits. But the real value is not just cost savings — it’s in mitigating risk and speeding up impact. Most of the businesses we work with have never had a head of marketing. They don’t know whether to hire someone with PR experience, communications background, digital marketing background, or some combination that only a unicorn has. They don’t know how to define or hire the role. That puts them at great risk of hiring the wrong person or losing a great person they didn’t know how to equip.

Demand Creation and Timeline Expectations

Susan Tatum: How long does it take to create demand? Some companies think they’ll hire someone and 90 days later the leads are going to be flowing.

Jennifer Zick: That’s a red flag for us — usually a disqualifier, or an opportunity to educate and reset expectations. How long does it take to create demand? Big fat it depends. But longer than you think, with more investment than you think. The rule of thumb I give clients is 18 to 24 months.

When you said one of the triggers for bringing in a marketing leader is that the owner has fully juiced their network — that’s not creating demand. You’ve just leveraged trust you probably built over decades. How long did it take to establish the trust for those relationships? Marketing is not going to come in with a cape, save the day, flip a switch, and have quality leads come in. If you have not started creating demand by first creating quality content and thought leadership, the heavy lift takes time.

I knew that when I started Authentic Brand. I calculated it would take two years of producing high-quality content before we’d ever see organic website traffic convert into a lead. It was exactly on point — two years. And now half of our qualified opportunities come from leads through organic traffic to our site, based on that investment of time. Five years ago, when I started the business at my kitchen table, I started blogging, writing, hosting events, creating content — because I knew I needed to build a footprint.

Susan Tatum: And it took you two years to do it. How long ago did you start doing it?

Jennifer Zick: Five years ago, when I started the business. I started blogging, writing, hosting events, creating content because I knew I needed to build a footprint. I didn’t even have all the language yet, because fractional CMO as a space didn’t exist when I found the words for it — nobody was searching Google for “fractional CMO.” Which meant we had to create content using words they were searching for, like “marketing strategy” or “brand and messaging” and “digital,” and then build the fractional CMO marketplace around all of those ideas. If you are a disruptive solution, if you’re creating a category, expect that it’s going to take extra time to produce content the market can understand before they’re even looking for it.

Susan Tatum: Because you have to educate, right?

Jennifer Zick: You have to educate. The educational component is a big lift. But if you’re competing in a well-known space where the market’s educated, then the focus is differentiation — because you’re among a lot of competitors, and you have to be careful not to be a commodity.

Professional Services: Trust, Content, and Earned Media

Susan Tatum: If somebody was starting out today in professional services — they have this idea that they’re just going to publish content, go on LinkedIn, and the demand is going to come pouring in — what would you say to someone like that?

Jennifer Zick: There are so many facets that go into being a business that other business people want to work with. A lot of small businesses think of marketing only as advertising, sponsorships, and trade shows — they’re only invested in paid media, giving other people dollars for the privilege of being associated with their platform. Many companies overlook earned and owned media.

Owned media is what you’re talking about — a blog or an event that is ours, that brings people to our platform and engages them in our experience. Earned is any opportunity you get to be affiliated with someone else’s brand without paying for it — PR, guest speaking at someone’s event, guest blogging. Those are the three primary categories: paid, owned, and earned. And it takes having the right blend. To professional services companies, I would say look heavily at owned and earned media before you look at paid media.

Professional services is one of the most difficult things to sell because you’re selling high-value intangibles. It’s a high-trust sale — people choose to work with you because they know you and they trust you. A lot of services firms don’t believe they should even do any marketing because, as they say, nobody’s ever going to Google us and choose us from the web. Okay, but when an accountant advises their client to call your firm, that client is going to check your website first — for validation. It has to be there, and it has to demonstrate that you know how to tell your story and that they see themselves in your story when they encounter it.

As a pro services company myself, I can create a lot of owned content, but Authentic Brand is a five-year-old company and I can’t do all the heavy lifting of building trust alone. I need other people in my corner as advocates. So I purposefully cultivate a lot of earned opportunities and relationships, and I try to think of the ecosystem of potential referrals around me as a channel marketing strategy. I’m not just looking to attract buyers — I’m trying to cultivate trust with the people who already have the trust of my potential buyers so they want to refer them to me. That’s a really critical growth strategy for professional services.

Susan Tatum: It’s partners. You need to have partners. And I think a lot of professional services firms, especially when they’re new, aren’t taking that seriously enough. They’re not thinking about the risk that the buyer is taking when they choose to do business with a professional services firm.

Jennifer Zick: When a company is small, you have to rely on your personal reputation. Thankfully, my reputation earned me the right to start building a reputation for Authentic Brand and attach that to our whole team. Those first-generation customers who trusted us — I value them deeply. I’m so grateful that they were willing to let me use their success as a story to extend trust to next-level buyers. I was very bullish about asking for testimonials, asking for use of logo, asking for video stories from that first and second generation pool of clients. Because why else would my third and fourth generation clients — who’ve never known Jennifer Zick — trust me?

Closing

Susan Tatum: I could talk to you for four more hours, but we do have to wrap it up here. For people who want to follow up with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Jennifer Zick: I’m really accessible on LinkedIn — Jennifer Zick, I’ll pop right up. I’d love to hear from you. And anyone who wants to learn more about Authentic Brand can visit our website: AuthenticBrand.com.

Susan Tatum: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.Jennifer Zick: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been fun.