Specialization Tags
Biography
Karen is a customer-centric fractional CMO for SaaS and telemedicine startups. She fixes growth challenges by putting the customer at the core of all business decisions and by helping founders and their teams draw customers in vs pushing the product out to drive revenue. The types of issues she fixes include product development challenges and working towards product-market fit, an unclear vision or brand strategy that isn't resonating with customers, a lack of brand awareness that is hampering leads and sales, inefficient business processes, hiring the wrong team, or simply not having a strategic business plan in place. She helps clients solve these problems by designing strategies, processes and tactics focused on the customer which she believes is the secret to business growth. Her clients are pre-revenue up to ARR of $10MM. Karen's expertise includes business strategy, brand, marketing, product management and operations. Her diverse industry background which includes technology (SaaS), telemedicine, financial services, gaming/entertainment, photography, government, consumer electronics, and digital media was honed over a 30-year career working for brands such as Fujifilm, OLG, Rogers, Intuit, Microsoft and many others. She now works exclusively with startups, following her passion to give back to the tech community to support innovation and help founders with breakthrough ideas.
What Companies and What Challenges?
Karen helps early or growth stage tech startups whose founder/CEO is wearing too many hats with not enough functional expertise in key functions such as strategy, marketing and customer experience. These founders feel like they are wheel spinning and not getting any traction but can't figure out why. They are looking for a growth focused business partner/second in command to help them figure out how navigate their startup forward. The types of problems she solves include articulating their value proposition so that it's relevant to their customers, developing their business plan or Go-To-Market strategy, reviewing their product UX from the lens of a customer and providing feedback to improve the product's user experience before launching, conducting market research or getting user feedback during the MVP stage, creating their investor deck to tell the brand narrative, and helping them create the right org structure and recruit the necessary talent.
Network
Fractional executive network of complementary skills (sales, CTO, operations, CFO, CHRO, etc) Marketing service providers (designers, writers, web developers, PR specialists, social media specialists, digital media specialists, SEO, etc.) Lawyers Bankers Digital Transformation specialists (CDAP digital advisors) Business coaches Data analytics people