Jennifer Zick, Authentic’s Founder and CEO was recently featured on the The Future of Private Equity podcast with host Leah Berend. In this episode of The Future of Private Equity, Jennifer Zick explains Authentic Growth® marketing and the importance of it within companies. Jennifer explains the insights that she has learned through years of experience in the industry that resulted in the creation of Authentic® and the Authentic Growth® Methodology.
“When it comes down to what Authentic Marketing really means, it’s recognizing that your brand is more than a logo and a color pallet, fonts, and campaigns, and channels, and content. Your brand is the promise your organization makes to the world around you.”
– Jennifer Zick, Founder & CEO
Listen To The Podcast
Key Takeaways
- Authentic Growth® is a comprehensive methodology that includes team structure, process, go-to-market strategy, brand messaging, and marketing maturity assessment to guide businesses toward sustainable, transferable value creation.
- Your brand is a promise, not just a logo. Brand is the lived experience of a company’s promise to its stakeholders. Authentic marketing is about delivering consistently on that promise, which builds trust and long-term equity—not just flashy campaigns.
- One of the biggest challenges is the mindset that marketing is a cost center. It should be seen as both a “checkbook” for current activities and a “long-term investment” that builds brand equity over time.
- Healthy marketing takes time, consistency, and strategic patience. Jumping from trend to trend undermines progress.
Resources
- The Components of Authentic Growth® Methodology
- What is the Authentic Growth® Marketing Maturity Matrix?
- The 16 Authentic Growth® Drivers Every CEO Should Understand
Full Episode Transcription
Introduction & Background
Leah Berend: Welcome everyone. I am your host, Leah Berend. The Future of Private Equity podcast is all about bringing the best of business and value growth into the future. Delving into the world of investments and growth strategies is not just a profession for me, it’s a passion. Joining me today is someone who is equally passionate about value creation, Jennifer Zick, Founder and CEO of Authentic®. Jennifer, will you introduce yourself and share a bit about your background and how you came to start Authentic?
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here today, Leah. I’m delighted to be part of your show and happy to introduce myself and Authentic. So I started Authentic in 2017 and we are a community of fractional chief marketing officers that helps growing businesses to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step toward healthy growth. It’s been a real joy to come alongside entrepreneurial businesses and leaders. We generally serve businesses who are between 5 million to 100 million in annual revenue. They’ve achieved critical mass, they’re growing, but they’ve reached that point where they recognize random acts of marketing are happening and unless they level up and really get strategic, they’re not going to be able to scale to the next level of growth.
Authentic Growth® Marketing Explained
Leah Berend: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for the introduction. Thank you again for being my guest today. And Jennifer, you’ve written and talked a lot about the concept of authentic growth marketing. Can you explain what Authentic Growth® marketing means, why it’s important, especially for me in the context of private equity and business growth?
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. So our company name is very intentional and our company methodology, called Authentic Growth®, is an extension of that. So as I looked back in my career and saw the patterns of where businesses made mistakes in marketing, the story was very common. It was founder-led, sales-driven, they achieved critical mass and started recognizing those random acts of marketing and sometimes then worked into a flurry of just activities trying to get more going in the market. But when it comes down to what authentic marketing really means, it’s recognizing that your brand is more than a logo and a color palette and fonts and campaigns and channels and content. Your brand is the promise your organization makes to the world around you of stakeholders who are important. And it’s how they experience you, either living up to that promise or not over a length of time.
Because whether we’re B2B or B2C or channel or whatever the business model is, we truly do business human to human and business growth. And true value creation doesn’t come out of a shiny campaign. It comes out of a long, continual build of trust with the buyers, the partners, the employees, all the stakeholders in your market. So you need to build a business. If you’re building transferable value, and that’s the goal which every business owner and investor wants, you have to do it authentically. You have to recognize the relationships that uphold your brand and how your brand needs to deliver on your promises.
And so in the context of the PE world, you see PEs who do it really well and recognize that and you see others who are forcing growth through unnatural, inauthentic means, like just get to the number through whatever means, as fast as you can. And that is going to break a brand. So what we want to support and educate in the world is how to do it the right way. Intentionally authentically honoring the relationships that are essential to create long term sustainable value and growth.
The Authentic Growth® Marketing Maturity Matrix
Leah Berend: I love that. I’m a huge proponent of people and profits. Kind of combining that ethos of the fact that organizations are made up of people, you can’t extract just the financials out of that. And those who sit behind their desk at a spreadsheet making decisions on behalf of the organization and not taking into account those other aspects of people, systems, processes and profits together, they’re missing out. They might extract profits, you know, short term out, but they’re not building long term value. And so I applaud what you’re doing because the ethos of that and to keep that front of mind for people is so very important. You’ve also talked about this like authentic growth marketing maturity matrix. I know that’s kind of a mouthful, but you share about like there’s key attributes in that maturity matrix.
Can you walk us through some of those tributes and explain how they contribute to sustainable growth for businesses?
Jennifer Zick: Yes. So let me level up one layer and then break it down to that matrix. So in the context of how Authentic and our team of fractional CMOs help our clients to authentically grow, we’ve developed a proprietary methodology called Authentic Growth®. And that methodology is an entire marketing operating system. It’s not only addressing building a marketing plan and executing tactics and getting us to growth, that’s important. But it’s only one element of creating that true transferable value that a healthy growing business needs in place. And in the world of such rapidly changing marketing tools, techniques, technologies, business leaders sometimes have a hard time understanding or knowing what the components are that are going to create a strong marketing engine, team process and the execution. And so Authentic Growth® is a methodology we’ve designed that has seven core components.
We won’t go through all of that on the podcast today. There’s plenty of information on our website about that. But it really is a system designed to teach entrepreneurs and their teams how to think about marketing, how to lay in the best practices and processes and the plans and the people so that the execution is knit together from the business strategy all the way down to what’s implemented out into the market. So it’s an operating system, and within that system we have a number of proprietary tools we’ve developed that not only help our CMOs to onboard really quickly and assess the customer’s situation, but it also helps them to create baseline scores. And from those scores we’re able to level set and say, here’s where we are on our maturity journey of creating value and here’s where we need to go next.
We can’t do it all at once, but what is the next right step in the maturity matrix? Again, that’s on our site with a lot of information behind it, but there are 10 components down the left side of the matrix which are all essential pieces for a CMO to be leading through a company and to get to those flywheel results for growth and sustainability and predictability. You can’t leave any of those ingredients out. So some of those ingredients include your go to market focus, your brand, your message, your buyer journey, the technology stack that powers your marketing all the way down to your media mix, your channels, and the team behind your marketing program. So really, the maturity matrix helps us look at where we are on the journey? What do we need to do next to move through the stages of maturity?
There’s six different stages on this model to achieve flywheel results. And to be honest, the work is never done because just when you figure out what’s working, the market changes around you. So it’s an evolution, but it is a journey map. So that’s what the matrix serves.
Leah Berend: Awesome listeners to our podcast. I will put the show notes with links to Authentic’s blogs and the writings that they’ve done on this so listeners can learn more. How exactly is your growth methodology different from traditional marketing approaches?
Jennifer Zick: Well, it’s different because unlike perhaps how an agency might look at your business through the lens of their toolkit. Right? Like if you engage an agency who for instance, is a digital HubSpot agency, they’re going to see the opportunity for content creation and lead generation and the specific tools that they bring to the table. Right. If you engage a marketing consultant, they might build a plan for you, but holistically there has never been a marketing operating system that really helps educate and uplift an entire organization in the way they think about marketing, build marketing, run marketing. So really it’s not a program, it’s not a project, it’s not a campaign, it’s not even just a CMO stepping in as an interim or filling a leadership gap. It’s us stepping in to be a growth guide, a value creation partner. Yes.
Leading the marketing team, teaching authentic growth as a methodology. And then it becomes like a health journey or a fitness journey. You get out of it what you put into it. It’s not just implemented and done. You keep exercising it, you keep nurturing those muscles and that’s what creates healthy growth within a business.
Differentiating Authentic Growth® Methodology
Leah Berend: Awesome. Okay, so a private equity backed business. Right. Could really benefit from implementing that authentic growth methodology. And so what have you seen as the benefit for private equity firms, you know, really implementing this? And then also what are some of those common challenges that they can face adopting this approach?
Jennifer Zick: Yes, absolutely. Well, many of our clients are commercially funded, many of them are PE or VC backed or they’re at the point where they need to start considering being ready to raise funds. Right. So authentic growth for a company that’s already part of a portfolio is an exceptional tool set. Because often what happens in the pre acquisition phase, there’s a lot of due diligence that happens, but there aren’t always a lot of assessments and audits that go deep in really uncovering what we are buying when it comes to our brand and what exists inside the marketing organization to help us continue to grow. There might be some sales pipeline assessment, there certainly are financial assessments.
But when we step into an organization that is now ready to really amplify their value creation, we can very quickly use our methodology and our tools to baseline and assess and understand where the organization is today in their marketing maturity? Where are their systems, their data, their gaps, their strengths? Where are their capabilities for their staff in house? What do they need to be coached and developed? What will they need to hire so that we can really create a plan together on the best path forward in creating value and create a sense of accountability across the entire leadership team and help them align on where those commitments are going and how we’re going to fund that and bring good industry benchmarks to the table. Right.
So we do a lot of work with that value creation period and also help really tighten up the brand and the position for an eventual exit on the other side. Right. So creating more value within the business there pre-funding. It’s an excellent tool to really sharpen the story and the message that you’re bringing to investors to build the value proposition for them on why your business is ready to create scale and value. You have to have a sharp messaging edge. You need to have demonstrated that you have a go to market focus and that you have delivered value within that focus. So it’s a really valuable system on either side of that relationship.
Leah Berend: Yeah. And it’s so beyond the financials because when I’m looking at a business to invest in, you’re trying to assess what is their moat, what differentiates them. Right. And the brand is this big huge part of it, but it’s not in the accounting numbers, it’s not in the finances. And so when you can tangibly put some construct around it, you’re able to fully value it. I mean, I think of Coca Cola as the perfect example of this. Right. Most of the value of Coca Cola is in the brand. It’s not in their capex. It’s not, you know, on their finances. It’s like this goodwill line that you know, is this intangible that is really the bulk of what they’re known for, what brings consumers to them.
So that’s really the fun part about what you’re saying is that it’s a hard thing to pinpoint because it’s just not accounted for in the financials and it’s something where it’s a really important piece of investing into a company because you have to have that brand assessment around what you’re doing in order to know where does it stand in the marketplace? What is, what is the competition, brand, what, what is the brand of this? And really it’s about the reputation and the relationships that company holds and how people think about that. Which is not in the financials at all.
Jennifer Zick: It is not in the financials. And most of the companies who are early stage PE port cos don’t necessarily have a rigor and a process and a team around capturing those inputs in a measurable way. The voice of customer research on an ongoing basis, sentiment, share of market share or the entire customer experience journey at every point. Right? Because we started the conversation by saying a brand and the value of the brand is how well have you articulated your promise, how well are you delivering on that promise? And that can’t be just articulated from within the business. That has to be measured by the outside stakeholders and the inside stakeholders. Within the business, the employees and the partners and the customers, they get to tell you how your brand is doing. We all think our baby is beautiful.
Benefits and Challenges for Private Equity Firms
Leah Berend: That’s right. That’s so good. Okay, so going into kind of our next segment here, you often in your writing emphasize the importance of building brand equity for increasing that enterprise value. And going back into what we just talked about a little bit. But why do you feel brand equity is crucial in the context of. Of private equity investments?
Jennifer Zick: Yes. Well, it starts with acknowledging and understanding that value is not measured just by growth. I mean, if you look back on the last several years of our world, a lot of businesses grew through Covid, but that wasn’t sustainable growth. That was circumstantial growth. Value is something that is sustainable, transferable, scalable. Right. And so, interestingly, I’ve attended a lot as a business owner myself, a lot of sessions on value creation and exit planning and preparation for these things. Right. And one of the big pieces that’s often overlooked is the role of protecting your brand so that it is transferable, it is sustainable, it creates long term value. Right.
So I do love to preach about this and there’s a few pieces that are really important pillars that a CMO and a marketing leader need to be able to support with the leadership team in protecting and driving value. One of them is the market niche you already spoke about that you need to be able to demonstrate that there’s a part of the market you can own, you can defend, you can shine in. It doesn’t need to be the entire market. You know, it might be that you’re a big fish in a small pond, but you need to be able to protect that space and be uniquely positioned to win in that space against the competitors. And so market niche and market fit is really important.
So many businesses have grown through that founder led, sales driven piece of growth by saying yes to any revenue that comes their way to achieve growth. But eventually that’s not healthy and not sustainable. And so many businesses find themselves in a position where they have an incredible imbalance. They’ve got three major accounts that make up 80% of their revenue, and if those go away, you have nothing sustainable. So value is not just growth and it is not even just top and bottom line. It is healthy growth within a targeted audience that you can defend. And then the second piece of that is messaging. You need to be able to articulate that story in a way that relates to the market so that they can understand the value that you bring.
And so I often say that even with Marketing technologies, tactics, they’re changing all the time. But great marketing has never changed. The essence of what you’re doing in marketing is to answer the questions of who do we want to matter to? Why would we matter to them? How do we enter their natural habitat and when we get there, how do we build trust? Not sell something, how do we build trust? Because it’s trust that will bring you top of mind when they are ready to purchase. Right? So that message, that understanding, is what gets you there. A third piece that needs to be really proactively addressed is your IP. So in some businesses that’s simply trademarking like we’ve done with our name, authentic, with our authentic growth methodology. But those processes take years to move through.
Sometimes that means you need to protect your intellectual property, the data about your customers. There’s a lot of layers of IP in your business that you need to make sure you have your arms around. And finally, and I think most importantly, you need to have a really strong grasp on your relationships. Because if you aren’t clear about the relationships and the quality of them inside your business, do you even have a business? Right. For 15 years I was in the world of Salesforce CRM and so I learned early in my career the importance of collecting and understanding your customer data. So I really encourage growing businesses to make sure that they’ve shown their relationship intelligence, like if a sales rep leaves your business, they’re not leaving with that relational fabric. Right. You’ve captured it and you have a way to sustain it.
So those are just some of the components of how marketing builds value in a business by addressing the areas that you need to own, guard, protect and be ahead of.
Leah Berend: I love that. That is so good. Can you share any case studies or success stories of businesses that have successfully leveraged your marketing and Authentic’s marketing to increase their enterprise value?
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. There’s a lot of great stories and this is what brings me so much joy every day, as we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses across the US and sometimes beyond, across every business model and industry. But the couple of stories that come to mind, particularly relevant to the PE kind of focus investment space, are technology or tech enabled businesses. One of those stories was a technology, a SaaS company that had existed for many years and had achieved nice incremental growth. But the owner was preparing, starting to think about an exit strategy and really wanted to build the value in his business. So, we were brought in to really help them understand their competitive ecosystem and that the real aha through the authentic growth discovery was they were competing head to head on something they really couldn’t win upstream at an enterprise level.
There just wasn’t enough like white space there for them to win. Meanwhile, some of their competitors were going far downstream working with early stage startups. But the mid market was completely uncovered. And so we directed all of their content strategy and we rebuilt their marketing engine to focus on an untapped market and they grew exponentially and they were able to find great profitability there because it was a less expensive sales cycle than the enterprise deals. They ended up within 18 months being able to sell the business at an 11x EBITDA valuation. So that was a really successful story. We’ve had other clients who had basically just kind of been going through that entrepreneurial revenue is good revenue from any industry anywhere. We had a software development company that did custom development across all of these industries. They did phenomenal work.
But we really discovered that they needed to get industry specific and niched in order to scale. They were just getting diluted and everything was a build from scratch. So we helped them find an industry niche and as soon as we got them completely repositioned into that niche, buyers started coming out of the woodwork because suddenly the buyers could see the story within their business. They could see the applied value and that company was able to sell at a high multiple to a specific industry vertical need because suddenly they had told their story. The capabilities had always been there. We just had to unpack them.
Leah Berend: That’s so cool. Well, those are wonderful because they really outline the advantage that business owners can take now in growing their own enterprise value. With the end in, it’s like looking at the whole life cycle of your business and you know the traditional entrepreneurial story, right if you do it yourself. You think you’re everything to everyone and in order to scale and grow, that’s when you bring in those specialists, right? Everybody is a, you know, in an entrepreneurial organization you start with the entrepreneur, then you move over to generalists who can do everything and then you start specializing.
And in the specialization is where that growth starts to flywheel is that when you bring in and invest in that advice, and not only the advice but the plan and a toolkit in order to accomplish that’s when you start building that enterprise value exponentially. So that is so cool.
Jennifer Zick: And you asked a question earlier that I didn’t answer and I just recalled that you asked what are some of the obstacles to being successful with authentic growth or any kind of marketing strategic initiative? Here are the primary Obstacles to that. First and foremost, the biggest one is impatience. And impatience tends to amplify once you have investment partners because suddenly there are more people at your board table asking hard questions and having an appetite for growth. And so impatience will be the killer of building an authentic brand with transferable value, with all the components addressed for scale. So we actually have our clients sign off on our scope of work and understanding of like there’s nothing magical about this. Right. This takes time, CEO. It’s on you to manage stakeholder expectations. We need patience to do this correctly.
And Authentic will not step into an engagement where they think that in 90 days to six months, all of a sudden qualified leads are just the light switches coming on and we’re just going to have all the at bats and wins. That is a narrative that has been sold through by agencies that can’t deliver on it. So we need to boost our patience for healthy growth. Secondly, we need to really work hard against shiny objects. Entrepreneurs love new shiny objects. And so our authentic growth methodology puts us within an annual budget in a 90 day cadence with commitments that we have identified are the most important priorities. And if those commitments need to shift, then we have to have an honest conversation about what else shifts, Right? Yeah.
And finally, the saddest truth about the marketing world is that marketing continues to be seen as an expense, not an investment. And so, all the time, I hear business owners talk about, especially right now, uncertain economic times, presidential election coming, there’s two things I can control, my head count and my advertising budget. And they still call it an advertising budget instead of a marketing investment. So those are like the first things that they’re looking at on the chopping block. And the biggest killer to healthy sustainable growth is the starts and stops. Because every time you stop and pull back, you lose market share advantage, you lose that brand promise, making you fall backward and you have to start over and you’re wasting dollars and resources. So there are really rational ways to manage resources during difficult times wisely.
And that’s where a CMO at the table, even on a part time basis can help you make good rational decisions.
Leah Berend: You are speaking my language. I love this because I think of stock market investing when you’re talking like if you get scared and pull out all of your money in a downturn, you’re going to lose out on those, the biggest days of growth in the stock market.
Jennifer Zick: Right.
Leah Berend: So it’s really that same kind of thing. You keep the investment going a little bit at a time and over time, it exponentially pays for itself.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And I also like to use the analogy because I feel like most business owners and leaders, they understand the stock market component that’s been grilled into us, but they don’t understand marketing. So I like to break it down to a simple analogy. Marketing, your marketing budget is both a long term investment account and a checkbook. Here’s how it works. Your checkbook is what you’re spending day to day, month to month, week to week on activation, campaigns, content, and activities. Your long term investment is that brand value that you’re creating. It’s the promise you’re making, how you communicate the promise, how you keep the promise. Like when times get tough, we do have to pull back on the checkbook activity. We just have to, and we have to be really wise about that.
But we don’t pull back on the brand value creation, which is difficult to tangibly quantify. But if you’re starting to erode your prospect, customer, and partner experience with your business because you’ve gotten cheap, you will lose, you’re becoming a losing brand. You can’t. It takes forever to build trust and it takes a moment to lose it. So like, those are the hard decisions that need guidance and wisdom.
Building Brand Equity in Private Equity Investments
Leah Berend: That is so good. And I believe that’s a Warren Buffett quote coming back to the investment. Jennifer, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you again so much. To wrap up, would you summarize the key takeaways for our audience regarding the importance of authentic marketing in driving growth, increasing enterprise value for businesses operating especially within the private equity landscape?
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Well, I think there are some really important ingredients for companies who want to create healthy, sustainable, flywheel growth that honors the people in and around their business. To reiterate what I already said, patience is the number one ingredient to the formula. And I know it’s challenging for business leaders and owners with PE partners to find the common ground on expectations, but that’s really essential and it starts with navigating that partnership before it starts making sure you have the right cultural and values and expectation alignment so that you can take a journey in a way that is honoring to the people in the profit both. Right. Secondly, it’s important to recognize when you have experienced, been there, done that, wisdom at the table that you don’t already have.
Most business leaders who don’t have a finance background would not say, hey, I’m going to sit in the CFO seat and handle that. But so many business leaders who have no marketing background are like, I’m ahead of marketing you know, I’ve done some sales. I am on social media. I’m the head of marketing. Recognize what you are humble enough to recognize and when you don’t know what your business needs to know and make space for other leaders. Stay humble. Stay hungry. Be willing to learn. Be collaborative. Those are the two key components I would say bring in the wisdom and then be patient with the process and then work the process. Marketing is not a quick fix. It’s not a diet pill to hit your weight loss goals. It’s healthy food and get to the gym and do it over and over.
Right? That’s what marketing is.
Leah Berend: That’s so good that consistency is so important. And Jennifer, I thank you so much for sharing your experience with us today to our listeners. If you would like to learn more about Authentic or connect with Jennifer, you can find more information in the show Notes. Until next time, thank you for listening.
Want to learn more about the Authentic Growth® Methodology? Read more in this blog post.
