---
title: "Be the Guide, Not the Hero: A Fractional CMO’s Playbook for Manufacturers"
id: "18011"
type: "podcast"
slug: "be-the-guide-not-the-hero-a-fractional-cmos-playbook-for-manufacturers"
published_at: "2026-05-12T03:11:00+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-05-12T13:02:32+00:00"
url: "https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/be-the-guide-not-the-hero-a-fractional-cmos-playbook-for-manufacturers/"
markdown_url: "https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/be-the-guide-not-the-hero-a-fractional-cmos-playbook-for-manufacturers.md"
excerpt: "Most small-to-mid manufacturers know they’ve under-invested in marketing, but where do you even begin? Javier Lozano, Founder of Bolder Media and a fractional CMO, joins Carman and Jeff to lay the foundation. He explains why your founder's origin story falls..."
---

#### Episode 390

**May 12, 2026**

Most small-to-mid manufacturers know they’ve under-invested in marketing, but where do you even begin? Javier Lozano, Founder of Bolder Media and a fractional CMO, joins Carman and Jeff to lay the foundation.  
 He explains why your founder’s origin story falls flat, how to mine real differentiation from customer interviews, and why your brand should be more Yoda, the guide, than Luke, the hero. Plus: how to find a wedge in a “red ocean” without making yourself unfindable, and what a fractional CMO actually does that a consultant or full-time hire can’t.

##### *Be the Guide, Not the Hero: A Fractional CMO’s Playbook for Manufacturers* Transcript:

**Jeff White:** Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir?

**Carman Pirie:** I feel like I have attention Deficit disorder, Jeff. That’s the truth of the matter. We’re recording on a Friday. I don’t even know why we do this to ourselves. You’re just focused on other things and then…

**Jeff White:** Yep.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah. I mean, it’s not that you’re focused on other things; it’s just that the mind can wander.

**Jeff White:** It does, and it wonders at the best of times. So you know…

**Carman Pirie:** Exactly. No, I’m excited for today’s conversation. I think today’s guest has a unique perspective on a challenge we’ve discussed many times, in various ways. It is just like how, and I do think it’s easy sometimes to kick industrial marketers and manufacturing marketers when they’re down a little bit, or industrial manufacturing brands, to suggest that they don’t focus on marketing or that they don’t care about it. In some instances, and that can be true, I think it can be true of a lot of brands, but they aren’t industrial for that matter. And I do think some of that stereotype is overcooked, but at the same time. I think we have to acknowledge that there are a number of manufacturers, particularly small to medium-sized manufacturers, that have not focused at all on marketing, and they’re standing in their own way of significant growth as a result. And they may be sitting there, coming to that realization and wondering, what does building a foundation look like? And what’s the destination, what happens after that? And that’s what I’m hoping today’s guest can illuminate for us.

**Jeff White:** Yeah. And to your point, it’s not that you’re kicking manufacturing marketers when they’re down. It’s, there’s rarely a marketer in it to be kicked.

**Carman Pirie:** That’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah. At least at a certain size and scale. And I think it would be worthwhile for even manufacturers that are… That does invest properly in marketing. They’re probably the ones who are most acutely aware of how little others in their space do. I don’t think we’re saying anything that folks in the space don’t understand, but at the same time, okay, you haven’t been investing in it.

**Jeff White:** Yeah. So, joining us today is Javier Lozano, the founder of Bolder Media. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Javier.

**Javier Lozano:** Thanks for having me, guys. I’m really excited about having this conversation. Love how you guys kicked it off, too. It’s probably a good thing it’s not later in the afternoon, ’cause I might have a beverage of choice over here.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, it’s late here. We’re way over on the East Coast, so it’s like late in the afternoon this year. So…

**Jeff White:** I will remind you, Carman, the keg is full.

**Carman Pirie:** There you go. It’s full. So that tells you that we haven’t been doing our job.

**Jeff White:** Exactly.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah. Javier, it’s really lovely to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. And I’ve gotta say, with a name like that, if we don’t get, if we don’t just litter this episode with No Country for Old Men references the whole time, then it’s gonna be a win because that’s where Jeff and I naturally go, regardless, without the encouragement.

**Javier Lozano:**That’s awesome.

**Jeff White:** What was it like working with the Coen Brothers? It’s just that there are very few people in our circle named Javier. That’s all.

**Carman Pirie:** So we gotta get all the jokes out now.

**Jeff White:** Yeah.

**Carman Pirie:** Javier, tell us a little bit about yourself. What are you up to now, and how did you start?

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah, so typically when I start off with these stories, I go back to when I started my first company, which I started in 2008. And it was a brick-and-mortar company. Sold it in 2018. I was running a personal training martial arts studio. And basically, that was where I got my chops in running a business and understanding sales and marketing. Because you’re running your own company. You have to be good in all those areas. And eventually, in 2018, I had a very successful exit and then decided to jump into corporate and essentially reinvent myself. I got into facility services, facilities management, and a space I’d never been in before, and I was very successful there. And helped land some pretty big accounts and also get people coming in on our side, where we’re bringing in interest from companies like Dollar General, Raytheon, and Anheuser-Busch. As it was, big players and folks that were calling us, not us chasing after them, and after that was able to become an actual full-time CMO at a marketing agency. And then my most recent stint as an in-house was as the CMO at a vehicle graphics company. Helped ’em go from about a million to 20 million in that timeframe, just under four years. And really, how I look at marketing in general is that it’s interesting to tell the right story to attract the right people to your audience, so it becomes easier for your sales team to be successful. And so, as I grew some successes and wins in my in-house role, I decided to venture into becoming a fractional CMO. And that’s what I’m doing right now as a fractional: going into B2B Tech companies or tech-enabled service companies, sometimes even companies that are more on the service side or the blue-collar side, if you will. That could leverage marketing to bring in inbound motions and opportunities, rather than going out and hunting and killing your own. What you’re looking to get out there. So that’s where I tend to focus right now. And it’s been exciting so far.

**Jeff White:** Now, before we get into your thoughts on how you help those companies be successful, I see in your LinkedIn bio that you’re also a world champion athlete. Now I have to think that has something to do with your martial arts studio. Tell us a bit about that background, because it’s unique and we don’t often hear from folks who started out as athletes.

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah.

**Carman Pirie:** Other than me.

**Javier Lozano:** I competed professionally in martial arts. I’ve been doing martial arts since I was 10 years old. And it was a passion of mine. My dream was to open a martial arts studio at 14, and that is what I wanna do with my life. I expected to be doing that until I was like 65. And that did not happen. And so I competed all over the country, ended up winning a world title in 2000 or 2001, I believe.

I’m based in Colorado. I won a state title in one of those other opposite years. My title was in fighting. So I was a heavyweight fighter and was very good at what I did. And I would say that the discipline and the conviction of focusing on what you’re trying to do have carried over into my professional career. And many folks talk about how martial arts develops discipline. I really believe that any kinda support that you take to a high level of competition is gonna require a high level of discipline, whether it’s football, whether it’s darts, whether it’s martial arts, it doesn’t matter.

And so that’s carried over into my professional career. I don’t look at marketing as just kinda like fluffy stuff. I’m like, I’m looking to win. I’m looking to crush the competition, and that’s how I see it. And so that’s, I bring that kind of mentality when I work with my clients.

**Jeff White:** That’s really cool.

**Carman Pirie:** That is really cool. And if somebody is the occasional fluky dart player, I appreciate the reference.

**Jeff White:** I’m going with skateboarding. There’s nobody who has more sticktoitiveness than skateboarders. It’s insane. They’ll do it till death.

**Javier Lozano:** Exactly.

**Carman Pirie:** Javier, you mentioned that things get a little easier when there’s a proper story to tell?

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah.

**Carman Pirie:** And when you start working, as a fractional CMO, you’re not starting with a startup. Often, you’re coming into an organization that’s already underway, and they’re already telling a story. Any patterns that you’ve seen there in terms of, if you will, story deficiency or is it that people just don’t know how to tell a compelling story?

They don’t focus on the right aspects of their history or? What would you, how would you characterize that challenge?

**Javier Lozano:** I see these stories being told in different ways. And here’s a great example: we’ve been around since 1974. My grandfather started this, my father took it over, and I’m taking it over in the next decade. That story doesn’t resonate with anybody other than the family. That’s just a generic story. There’s nothing compelling about that. If that were a movie, I would not see it. And so the challenge is that a lot of folks tend to. Try to almost ride something that they think has longevity. We’ve been here for a long time, and I’m not discounting that it doesn’t matter, but what I’m saying is that the story that you need to tell is the one that creates some sort of emotion that someone wants to go do something.

A great example is, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Moneyball. One of my favourite movies. I probably watch it a half-dozen times every year. Not kidding, repeatedly. And the story there resonates with everybody. It resonates with me, and I have nothing to do with baseball. I’ve never run a baseball team, I was never a GM, but it’s how the story is being told that pulls you in. And what you wanna do is, when you’re telling the story, know what your clients and customers want. How are we gonna pull those people in so it resonates with ’em, so that when you talk to them, it’s not about trying to convince them that your services or product is the perfect solution? It’s let me check off a couple of boxes just to make sure that we’re both aligned here. And so, when you do that, it helps. I say the other part of it, too, is like how you position yourself. What are you doing to position yourself in the marketplace so you stand out? So that you’re not going into a red ocean and competing with a bunch of incumbents, but you’re going into your own blue ocean playing with your own rules, and you’re no longer playing to everyone else’s rules and how you’re getting pigeonhole like, oh, you’re just like everybody else in this.

No, we’re not. This is what we believe in. And then I would just, I’m sorry, I’m just gonna add one la one last piece, and you can add a follow up is is then is how you create your point of view and the hill that you’re willing to die on. Then, when you find those things, the story becomes easier to tell because, all of a sudden, people are getting compelled. They wanna get behind you a little bit.

**Jeff White:** I think you’re quite right, that story does become easier to tell, but man, finding that unique differentiator with a lot of companies can be one of the hardest things to do, and also one of the hardest things to get. Everyone has to agree on it, because like you said, oh, we’ve been around since 1973. We’re a 53-year-old company. Like it’s obvious. That’s our differentiator. And you’re right to them in their minds. They may think that, but convincing them that no, like where you actually play is this one gap in the market that gives you a hinge to work with. How do you help? Your clients find that hinge, then convince them it’s the right way to go.

**Javier Lozano:** A couple of things. The first one is talking to customers. ‘Cause I can tell you right now, customers aren’t gonna tell you that we do business with you because you’ve been around since 1974. They’re not gonna say that. It’s not the first thing that’s gonna come out of their mouth. It’s gonna be something else. It’s gonna be when this happened, this is what you did for us. This is how you took care of us. So, talking to customers and interviewing five or 10 customers and then what you’ll find out is that you’ll get these signals from these customers, and they’re all the same thing.

You’re like, interesting. And then you start wanting to start putting these in buckets, if you will. So as you’re talking to these customers, you’re getting this information, and you start bucketing, these experiences like, ah, it seems as though whenever we have a client that comes in with these problems. This is the solution; we present it; these are the results. Interesting. And then we have another bucket over here that, when customers come in, this is what happens. And so you’re able to start categorizing what your, what makes you unique and different.

And then I would say the other piece of it is talking to the right leadership. And this is not just coming from the CEO, but it’s coming from probably someone in charge of revenue, probably someone in charge of customer success, someone who is seeing things in a different vision in a different way, and interviewing those folks and understanding, like, what’s your experience whenever you go through this, whenever we have clients like this. What is it that you see? Because this is what clients are saying over here. And then finding a way to marry those two perspectives into one. And when you’re able to do that, and you get literally what clients are saying about you, and then also team leaders that you know, this is what we’re experiencing, then you start creating this recipe that is compelling, and it becomes easier to go to market from this perspective.

**Carman Pirie:** I’ve got so many things about this. First off, I was wondering how much of it is, how much of the story. Is predicated on that kind of sensing information, which I would say is what you, what I would maybe try to characterize, what you just said, like we go out, we’re listening to customers, we’re hearing what they tell us, we’re hearing what the salespeople are telling us, or what have you.

We’re identifying the alignment between the value propositions we bring to market and what customers appreciate. That makes sense to me. Of course. Then some of it is just, I think about inverting how they talk about themselves. As you said, I’ve talked about, oh, we’ve been around since 1974, and my father owned it, and my grandfather owned it before that, and that’s why he should buy from us. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Because of your point, it’s not very compelling. But what is compelling is that we stand behind our products for 50 years, and we continue to service what we built 50 years ago today. And we’re in it for the long haul.

How do you find that there’s a balance of that? Some of it is about in some way presenting net new value props, oh, the customers are saying this, versus in some ways just inverting what they already talk about.

**Javier Lozano:** I think there is a balance, but it depends on where you bring that up. Are you bringing that up at the beginning of the conversations? Are you bringing that up on your website? I tend to, let me kinda step back here. There’s a marketer that I love to learn from. His name is Donald Miller. He wrote a book called Building a StoryBrand.

There’s a new version of it. The premise of this is essentially like a character. You have a guide, you have some problems. You got a call to action, and then you have this: “Hey, this is what success looks like, and this is what failure looks like.” What you need to do is bring your customer into that story, and you cannot put yourself in it. This is where most companies make mistakes.

They present themselves as the hero rather than the guide. Companies are putting themselves as heroes. Hey, we’re the hero. We have this new product, this new thing, this new offer, and it’s the wrong way to do it. Think about this. We’ve all seen Star Wars. The hero we all know is Luke. But the guide, the one that everyone talks about, everyone always references, is Yoda. And that’s how you want to position your brand whenever you go to market to tell that story, because all of a sudden. You have people quoting Yoda a hundred times, and you’re like, of course, Luke was successful.

And so when you do that, and you create the story and then you’re able to bring in pieces of what you already have, that’s like you’re valuing props that you believe in, but you come in from a guide perspective. That changes everything. And so I really believe that, coming in as that guide, helping people navigate, and then letting your client be the hero.

Be like, John found this widget, and it has transformed our company. Then all of a sudden, that puts a whole bunch of light on them. They become your advocates. They become the people who will always talk about you and just rave about your product or services.

**Carman Pirie:** Have you thought about it in your work in trying to tease this information out of customers? I wonder: part of me feels that customers are better at telling you why they stay than why they bought. Have you worked through that, and do you have any advice on how to tease those apart? Different pieces of information.

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah. So if you’re getting more customers, why do they stay? It’s probably because you’re not taking the time to ask them. Why they bought probably within the first say, 30 days. And those early experiences. So getting them when it’s fresh, because, think about this, like it’s no different from you getting a, we all buy things, personally, locally, in our business, if you buy something locally and you sign up for one of those reward points, you get a text message saying, Hey, tell us what you thought about our, your experience.

And then you might say, “Hey, it was amazing,” and then the review goes online. But if you get a text message six months from now about going there, are you gonna leave a review? Of course not. You’re gonna probably be like, I don’t remember going to this place. And it’s the same thing. And so the idea is to capture these moments and wins. And so you wanna put this as part of your, as your cycle, if you will, of Hey, when we onboard a new client, we wanna make sure these first 30 days look like this. And in those first 30 days, we’re gonna have a quick little checkup to double-check how things are going.

Then, from there, you have different moments to touch base, which allow the account management team or other members of the company to really start seeing the relationship, and then you’ll see the patterns. Like these are the patterns that’re going on. It’s not just three years from now; that’s why they’re staying around with us.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, that resonates with me. I think the idea of, if you wanna know why they buy, ask them sooner, to the point of purchase. That makes total sense. We can, in a future podcast, debate whether people are reliable witnesses to their own behaviour and can actually tell you why they did anything, but that’s another day.

**Javier Lozano:** That’s fair.

**Carman Pirie:** You mentioned that the next logical piece was positioning. You mentioned blue ocean versus red ocean. Sometimes the trouble with blue oceans is that there’s nobody, there’s no other boats, and they don’t know that there’s anything to search for one out there if you’re the only one out there.

Anyway, have you thought about that being distinct while still being findable or able to be found? Have you navigated that in your previous work?

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah, the best story I can kinda give you is this: in my last in-house role, we sold vehicle graphics on a national scale.

So, to kinda give you an example, if Joe the plumber were starting his plumbing business and wanted to wrap his van, we could wrap it, but we would do it at scale across the country. We were doing. Thousands, per month, if you will. Now, Joe, the plumber, can go down the street and find a vehicle wraps person and just have them do it themselves. The challenge there is that these people were trying to get just quotes on what it would cost to wrap their van. And so what happened was that these people wouldn’t call back the vendors, and the wrap installers wouldn’t either. Or they wouldn’t have time to do an estimate, or they were just, like, too far booked out, or there were just a slew of reasons.

So then the customer’s what the heck do I do? So they start Googling and then we would show up, or they’d go on meta and be like, “Oh, look, there’s an ad here about a vehicle wrap company. If I can get a free quote, they’ll gimme an instant quote.” That’s pretty interesting.

And so what we did was we were. We were, quote unquote, competing with the people that we were gonna work with because we were subcontracting the installation to these vendors. But what we were doing was making it easy for them to find us. So we gave them, like, it’s very frictionless to get a quote.

To know how to get everything started. You made a deposit, and if you didn’t like your design, you got your money back. So, where I’m getting to is that you can still compete in the same red ocean, if you will, but you’re just shifting it slightly. So what we did was essentially offer a tech-enabled service. An experience that’s different: you’re getting instant quotes, instant replies, and a money-back guarantee if you didn’t love your design. And it wasn’t that we were taken away from the vendors who were doing the fulfillment for us; it was simply saying, “Okay, we’ll design everything, and then we’ll go back to Tom, who has a personal relationship with them, and they’ll do the installation for you.”

And so that kind of changed everything, it’s just really finding like, how can you wedge yourself to where people are like, oh, I see what you’re doing. You’re solving this problem. And so if you could find that one problem that everyone is experiencing, you can still be in that same kind of stratosphere, whether you’re in that red ocean, but you’re a little different now that you’ve created your own blue ocean, if you will.

**Carman Pirie:** And I appreciate that distinction because I think that sometimes people hear that advice and they think, okay, we’re not in the vehicle graphics business anymore. We’re in the business of delivering vehicle visual experiences.

**Jeff White:** Yep.

**Carman Pirie:** And we’re gonna be now found for vehicle visual. Like what? So they ignore the fact of how people actually look for this thing and try to find it, and that it

**Jeff White:** takes themselves outta the running without even realizing.

**Javier Lozano:** Exactly. A hundred percent. And that’s just it: you don’t wanna go, either. I’m not saying you don’t wanna go too niche, but you don’t wanna go too crazy. Let’s be realistic: if people are paying for these problems or trying to figure out how to solve them, then that’s where your wedge is, that’s your leverage point.

**Jeff White:** Have you found now in your current role as a fractional CMO that you are treated differently than when you were doing that role in-house, or do you find that CMOs that you’ve worked with maybe act differently or conduct the work differently than you do?

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah, it’s really interesting because you’re coming in almo almost as a consultant. And so there are a couple of things that come from this. Like when you’re coming in from a consultant, you’re. You’re probably paying a little bit more, but you’re not 100 percent committed to this person. Like when you have someone in-house, you’ve got payroll, you’ve got all those other things. When someone’s coming in as a consultant, they’re bringing in a couple of things. And so this is what my experience has been, that you have done this in these marketplaces. These are your results, and you’ve run similar playbooks. It may not be 100% like one-to-one with this company.

And so what that does is that it says, look, you’ve got a ton of insight from seeing what other companies have done and what success looks like and what failure looks like. Can you guide us more so we can pivot a lot quicker or see signals a lot faster, so we can make these decisions more quickly, make the right kind of hires, and build that foundation? So that’s one piece that really changes when you’re on the fractional side versus being full-time. And this has nothing to do with full-time being bad. It’s just that you bring a bunch of different knowledge. It’s like a football coach who’s coached at different universities or teams, rather than staying in one system.

They’ve seen a lot of stuff that they can bring to the table, and then it helps everyone see oh, this is amazing. Like we’ve got a little bit of this, we’ve got a little bit of this, makes sense now, let’s make our own type of recipe.

**Carman Pirie:** Man, I’m angry at Jeff for tugging us down this path because I thought I was going to be able to introduce this and sound all clever. And the whole category has already been talked about, but. I was wondering a similar thing. So you’ve talked about the difference between being a consultant and an employee, but if you think about it, a fractional is almost halfway between the two.

**Javier Lozano:** A hundred percent. I’m glad you said that.

**Carman Pirie:** And I think that can be powerful. And, I know a few fractional CMOs, some better than others, and one that may be listening to this, actually. How to govern myself here. I guess one thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes fractional CMOs can get pulled in too far.

They then know too much. They lose that perspective outside the jar. That a consultant maintains because that’s just the nature of the beast.

**Jeff White:** Correct.

**Carman Pirie:** But a fractional, you’re it sometimes feels like you have one foot on either side of it, which I think can be a benefit and a curse. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that as somebody who experiences it more directly than I do.

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah, no, that’s a great distinction. So for your audience to kinda understand this, consulting is probably gonna be. And I don’t wanna speak for consultants, but they’re gonna probably be more removed.

But they’re given advice on a fractional side, you are embedded with a leadership team. So I look at that as if you have a CRO, a CEO, a CFO, and a COO, and you have weekly Monday meetings. That fractional CMO is a part of those meetings. They’re helping you build out those quarterly goals. They’re helping you build out that go-to-market motion. They’re helping in those areas, aligning with revenue and ops to ensure fulfillment is done well. So they’re embedded into the team. And then the other part of it, too, is that they’re also leading the team as well.

So if there’s already a marketing manager there, they’re guiding that person. That person might be a Swiss Army knife, if you will. They can do a little bit of everything. All right, but now that person has more strategic guidance because that factional is saying, okay, this is what we agreed on as far as a strategy. I sat down with the CEO and our CRO, and this is how we’re gonna try to get to X million by the end of the year: we’re gonna chunk it down into these four quarters. And this is gonna be our strategy. And so what I need you to start working on is X, Y, and Z. So this fractional is gonna be embedded. But then they’re also not gonna be, like, literally doing all the work. So there’s gonna be members of the team, or you’re gonna bring in resources if there’s not already somebody in there to actually start executing. So this is where you don’t get too in the weeds. As a fractional, where you’re doing the day-to-day. The other part of it, too, is that typically a fractional is gonna probably be, like for myself, I’m working 10, 12 hours a week for that particular client, so I’m not putting in a full 40. And you might be saying that’s not enough time to understand. The thing is that to get these things implemented and executed. You can do this a lot quicker; you can guide the team much faster and know exactly what good is good and what bad is bad, as opposed to trying to figure it out. And so that’s the other piece of it as well: if you’re there full time, you might be twiddling your thumbs for the last 20 or 30 hours per week because you know you’ve got most of your job done.

**Carman Pirie:** I hear what you’re saying there. I think the piece that I was trying to inquire a little bit more about is mainly I think that they do so because you’re in those meetings, for instance

Then you’re sometimes pulled into their internal dysfunction. You are pulled into the side conversations where people are seeking support for their side of the argument, whereas a consultant isn’t; a consultant will be, will stay above that.

**Javier Lozano:** Yep.

**Carman Pirie:** An employee. Almost always will be engulfed in it. And I find that the fractional ones are the ones that they really struggle with. Do they get pulled into that or not? I think it can be a challenge. Not that I have any kind of recommendations there, and it’s kind of a real point. It’s just one of the things I find really sticky about that role.

**Javier Lozano:** That’s where the guardrails have to be put up. Before you start bringing those folks in as a partner, there were guardrails: you say, Hey, if you’re gonna be pulling me into these non-revenue-generating meetings, this is gonna go against the time we’re allocating to you, and we’re not gonna get anything done. And so you’re gonna be unhappy with this engagement. I’m gonna be unhappy with this engagement, and we’re not accomplishing anything. So I think it’s really important that you put those guardrails ahead of time. And really, just say I’m here to build a strategy and win. I’m not here to play politics.

I’m not here to champion someone else’s ideas. It’s if this is gonna impact revenue; that is what we’re going towards. And so I think it’s important at the very beginning, you lay those guardrails early so that everyone knows that, Hey, this is how Javier works, this is how he’s gonna be embedded, but he’s also gonna be removed.

**Jeff White:** If a VP of marketing, or like a director of marketing at a midsize manufacturer, is listening to this and they’ve never had a real planning conversation with the CEO or the C-suite, what would be the first thing that you would recommend that they do on Monday morning?

**Javier Lozano:** I would say that you’ve got to start planting those seeds. So on Monday morning, I would literally say, if you’re. Going to the CEO: Hey, can I have, like, once a week, 30 minutes of your time, and start asking you about your goals? I start asking you a strategy. I start asking you the day-to-day so you understand their vision and get an agenda out of this. 30 minutes. No more than that. And the reason I’m saying this is that a lot of the time, these leaders have a lot on their minds. They don’t know how to get it pulled out sometimes. So you need to go in there and interrogate, if you will, but in a positive manner and use that as a way of okay, I see where they’re trying to build this.

Let me see if I can start building a strategy. That’s one way. Another one is once you’ve done that, I would start looking at creating a very simple basic. This is the simplest marketing strategy I create each quarter. You have a goal, a strategy, and tactics. If you know what the goal is for the quarter, whatever that number is, and then you start working backwards, and you say, okay, if the goal is, call it $10 million for the quarter, all right?

And then you say, I believe that in order for us to get to that $10 million, here are two or three strategies that I believe could actually help us get there. Maybe it’s a channel, maybe it’s events. And then, from there, you start laying out the tactics for each one of those. So within channel, we’re gonna be doing these tactics, within events, we’re gonna be doing these tactics, and then you start measuring that. But you need to get guidance from your leader. To make sure you’re putting in the time and effort correctly and that it aligns with their vision. And then you start laying those things down. And that’s the most fundamental way of how I would approach it. There’s more to it, but that’s how I would do it on Monday morning, literally.

**Carman Pirie:** Javier, I really appreciate you bringing your experience to the show today. It’s been lovely to have you, and I didn’t think we were going to at all get to World Championship Martial Arts at the same time as the political dynamics of being a fractional CMO. But here we are. So thank you for taking us on this journey.

**Javier Lozano:** Yeah, no, thank you, Carman. Thank you, Jeff, for this opportunity. This has been great. Hope your audience enjoyed it.

**Jeff White:** Thank you.

[Read Full Transcript](#podcast-transcript)

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#### Featuring

### Javier Lozano

Founder at Bolder Media- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierlozanojr/)

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The Kula Ring is a podcast for manufacturing marketers looking to enhance their impact and grow their organizations.

Hosted by Jeff White and Carman Pirie, it features discussions with industry leaders who share their experience, insights and strategies on topics like account-based marketing (ABM), sales and marketing alignment, and digital transformation. The Kula Ring offers practical advice and tips from the trenches for success in today’s B2B industrial landscape.

### About Kula

Kula Partners is an agency that specializes in maximizing revenue potential for B2B manufacturers.

Our clients sell within complex, technical environments and we help them take a more targeted, account-focused approach to drive revenue growth within niche markets.