Michael Baer

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Michael is an experienced, growth-focused fractional CMO and marketing leader with over 35 years of marketing and operational leadership and a track record of driving strategic insight, creativity, and executional excellence to accelerate growth. Michael leverages his diverse, end-to-end experience to help companies turn their marketing into a greater value and business development driver for their organizations.

Michael partners with healthcare and B2B companies in the marketing services, technology, and media spaces to create more powerful customer-driven brands, to professionalize and transform their marketing and business development, and innovate their Go-To-Market approaches. He is most frequently called upon by VC and PE-backed investors, Boards and senior management teams in these industries, especially start-ups and early stage growth companies, to act as interim or fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and General Manager and develop and activate comprehensive brand and marketing strategies and help align their go-to-market plans, functions, technologies, and organizations in order to generate growth.

Michael is expert at helping companies at inflection points – helping to scale-up and professionalize fast-growth organizations that need to elevate their approaches to achieve their next stage; helping unify private equity-backed mergers and acquisitions with new, more powerful and holist

Interim & Fractional CMO & CGO Engagements

Michael’s interim and fractional Chief Marketing Officer engagements have included companies at various life stages, from start-ups, to scale-ups, to SMB turn-arounds, to billion-dollar brands. These have included:

  • Digital Factory –  a geo-location mobile start-up
  • Theralytics – ABA Practice management & data collection software”
  • Hospital for Special Services (HSS) – World’s #1 Orthopedic hospital
  • GE Healthcare
  • Relevate Health – omnichannel healthcare engagement solutions
  • Haymarket Communications – privately-held global media company
  • My Diabetes Tutor – Telehealth education start-up
  • Aquestive Therapeutics
  • HealthForce
  • True North Physician Agency –Physician/provider practice management support and services

Career

During his distinguished career, key leadership positions included:

Chief Marketing Officer, MJH Life Sciences – MJH Life Sciences is the largest, privately held healthcare media company in North America, delivering content, events, education, and creative services to healthcare professionals and the healthcare industry. Michael overhauled the marketing organization, oversaw and scaled a new team, including over 110+ FTEs and across 60+ healthcare brands. He drove the development of optimized processes, best practices and playbooks, led innovation in journey-based GTM approaches, and installed a new full-stack marketing approach.

Senior Vice President | Head of Brand & Marketing, Ipsos North America – Michael was called on to provide dynamic, growth-oriented leadership to the audience measurement business after years of decline and stagnation. He developed and implemented new strategies, including a new sales GTM and prospecting plan, new products, and robust marketing programming. He also developed and instituted a comprehensive Content Marketing and thought-leadership program that resulted in doubling the sales pipeline and closing new brand clients including Cadillac, Hyundai, Northwestern Mutual, Travelers, Capital One, JPM Chase, Mastercard, Kohler, Haier, Shiseido.

Chief Marketing Officer, Laughlin Constable –Michael was brought in as CMO to help transform outdated brand perception and spark new growth at this independent B2B marketing services company. He drove a new vision, positioning, marketing strategy, launching a new website, collateral, capabilities decks and a comprehensive Marketing Plan, significantly increasing leads.

Michael is also an industry thought-leader and accomplished writer on the topics of media, marketing and advertising, primarily for the industry-leading publication MediaPost. You can read Michael’s insights on his blog, Stratecution, and on LinkedIn.

Michael received a BA in History and Psychology from the University of Virginia.

 

Bert Harkins

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Bert Harkins builds, leads and optimizes Revenue generating teams for growing companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.  He is frequently called on by executive teams, Boards, and investors to serve as interim and/or fractional CRO or CSO.  He also works extensively with sitting CROs and CSOs to build or improve their client-facing revenue generation teams.

For more than 25 years, Bert has been delivering superior revenue growth SaaS technology companies serving the corporate, fintech and social good verticals.  His specific areas of expertise include:

During his distinguished and high-impact career, Bert has served as:

VP – Sales Enablement, Blackbaud Corp. – Bert built a team to provide sales enablement services to support a sales function with 350 sales representatives. He created a global team of over 90 associates focused on Sales Training, Sales Operations, Sales Process Improvement, Sales Engineering and Sales Metrics and Planning. He created a centralized hiring process that dramatically reduced recruiting, interview, onboarding times from months to weeks, and he reduced time-to-productivity for new reps from 6.5 months to 4. He also created comprehensive list of sales productivity measures used to make actionable business decisions in real time.

SVP, Corporate Sales Support, Fiserv Corp. – He built and led a corporate-wide sales enablement function to support the sales teams across this Fortune 1000 organization. He also implemented consistent methodologies for proposal creation, lead management, solution architecture, sales program management, sales effectiveness and sales training. In addition, Bert built a Commercial Sales function to serve as a shared service for all sales teams to nurture leads, improve market coverage and close incremental new business.

As SVP of Sales and Marketing for Fiserv and earlier as VP and Divisional Chief Marketing Officer, included among Bert’s accomplishments were:

    • Led sales and marketing for a $200MM-revenue software division focused on payments and risk management solutions
    • Continually surpassed 100% of sales quotas
    • Managed the overall marketing efforts for a division of the company that generated approximately $1.5B in annual revenue
    • Led a team of 45 marketers in providing all areas of marketing support, including field marketing, creative development, event management, lead generation, and market awareness
    • Created the first divisional marketing organization in company history.

Earlier in his career, Bert served several roles for Checkfree Software, including VP of Strategic Marketing and VP/Regional Sales Manager. He began his career with Wachovia Corp.

He received both his undergraduate BA and MBA with a dual concentration in Finance and Marketing from the University of Tennessee.

Carrie Pastolove

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Carrie Pastolove is a digital marketing, branding, revenue growth and business development executive who helps scale New York area lifestyle companies in consumer goods, services and tech. Carrie is seasoned and passionate about purpose and service-driven brands. She has expertise in fashion & beauty, media, luxury retail, health & wellness startups and growing companies as an interim and fractional Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Brand Officer and Chief Business Development Officer.

She has held key marketing and sales development positions with world-class brands including Rachael Ray, Shape Magazine, Lucky, Details, Marie Claire and Maxim. Among her key leadership positions are the following:

Chief Business Development and Marketing Officer, LyveBee, Remote – Carrie led all Business Development and Marketing initiatives for this early-stage Health & Wellness startup, doubling business and leading a marketing and sales team of 10.

SVP, Brand Partnerships and Development, QuickFrame – Carrie drove revenue, diversified the product portfolio and developed and closed enterprise-level clients including DoorDash, Hasbro, Pfizer and Aveeno for this Video-as-a-Service Platform company.

Head of Business Development, Fur, Inc. – Fur has a line of vegan, non-toxic, high-quality beauty products.  Carrie developed business plans and distribution channels through top-tier spas and luxury hotels.

Chief Marketing Officer, Babbleboxx – As CMO for this influencer marketing agency, Carrie built programs of more than 100 influencers, including oversight of programs, promotions, research and social media.

Brand Curator and Business Development Executive, SPRING – Carrie sourced and supported more than 50 beauty and wellness brands to join a disruptive DTC mobile marketplace.

VP – Brand Partnerships, Activate Holdings – Carrie drove revenue from $2M to $12M through partnerships with enterprise brands and publishing partners and led all communications with clients and key stakeholders.

VP – Brand Partnerships, Studio 71 – Along with developing a new Lifestyle Division within a Music & Entertainment focused talent agency, generating more than $5M, Carrie led client service and relationships as the firm’s branding partnerships expert.

Carrie’s publishing a media experience is extensive, having served as an Advertising Director, Beauty and Health & Wellness director for American Media, Meredith Corporation, Conde Nast Publications, Hearth corporation and Dennis Publishing.

She holds a BA in Advertising / Communications from the Fashion Institute of Technology.  Carrie is also founding member of Chief, a women’s executive networking club, and serves on the board of Women in Influencer Marketing (WIIM).

More About Carrie’s Personal and Professional Focus

In addition to her top flight credentials as a marketing executive, Carrie has leveraged her personal interests, training, certification and knowledge of mindfulness and conscious living throughout her career. She offers an innovative approach to managing teams and assisting executives in their personal and professional development. Carrie leverages principles and techniques from the physical, mental and spiritual realms to maximize performance from a holistic standpoint. She is dedicated to supporting executives and their teams through disruption and change using the tools she has developed through her own experiences.

Matt Oess

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Matt Oess leads TechCXO’s Executive Coaching Practice and also serves our Clients as a Strategy, Sales, and Marketing consultant or interim CRO.

*Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Consulting*
Matt has extensive experience in the adoption of practical AI technologies to help clients manage strategic and enterprise-level sales, marketing, demand-generation, and business-development initiatives in high technology markets. His client engagement and experience includes achieving cross-functional alignment between Sales and Marketing, sales process and methodology modernization, effective proposition development and positioning, and creation of global infrastructure to support customers.

Matt’s consulting practice specialty is establishing or modernizing Sales and Marketing methodologies and processes that help clients leverage:

1) be more relevant to customers,
2) create demand,
3) more effectively create and manage pipelines,
4) better onboard new and up-skill existing sales team members, and
5) fix issues with forecasting and revenue governance.

Among Matt’s client work and support as an interim executive are the following:

GE Digital, GE Transportation, GE Oil and Gas, GE Power – Outcome Selling Sales Methodology
Co-design, develop and deploy global “Outcome Selling” account and opportunity planning and coaching methodologies. Enabling GE’s Digital and IoT strategies and to transform the selling culture and competence to be more relevant to customers at a strategic level.

ZVerse, Inc – Consulting Interim Chief Sales Officer
Client enjoying 200% top-line growth (more)

Piers Mummery

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Piers Mummery is an Executive Coach, Board Advisor, and Entrepreneur. He is the UK Managing Partner of TechCXO, the leading “on-demand” executive service for growth companies. He specializes in accelerating business performance and sales growth for SMEs and tech-enabled businesses and is an active part of TechCXO’s executive operations. In 2021, Piers also launched his executive coaching business, Pierso – The Entrepreneurs Coach to support and coach entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teams on their journey to success.

Piers is a “people first” individual and has over 30 years of entrepreneurial experience as well as significant expertise and operational skills across many areas & disciplines in business. He is an active non-executive director and business advisor to a number of businesses. He works with business owners and leaders to accelerate growth and drive business performance.

As an experienced business leader, his expertise spans multiple industries and territories in both the UK, Europe, and USA. Recent roles and projects include; Interim CEO for an IT Services company in Chicago, USA, creating and launching a private tuition business, founder and CEO of the world’s first digital taxi-top advertising network on London black taxis, co-owner and founder of a successful UK garden leisure retail business that he built and sold.  Additionally, he has also managed the turnaround of a VC-backed European telecoms business, launched a Dotcom, and started his early career building marketing agencies.

As a part of his executive coaching work, Piers focuses on 3 key areas: 1) Authenticity 2) Inevitable Outcomes 3) Small changes that creates big impact. As an active networker, business advocate, and passionate enthusiast of behaviorism, he enjoys finding out what makes people tick.  He works passionately with like-minded business leaders, supporting and discussing how to scale and grow businesses, people, and opportunities.

I love being an entrepreneur and thrive on hearing people’s stories, so come and share your journey with me. Get in touch at piers.mummery@techcxo.com, call me at 073 666 55 666, or find me on LinkedIn or Facebook. I might be wrong, but I am never uncertain, and I’ll certainly lend you an ear!

Rose Lee

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Rose Lee
Managing Partner, TechCXO – Fractional Chief Marketing Officer

Rose Lee is the Co-Managing Partner of TechCXO’s Revenue Growth practice. In this role, she offers strategic marketing leadership and go-to-market expertise to help businesses accelerate growth, optimize revenue operations, and drive market differentiation. Rose is a strategic and results-oriented Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (FCMO) with extensive experience accelerating the development of B2B companies across various industries. She specializes in developing and executing high-impact go-to-market (GTM) strategies, brand positioning, demand generation, and revenue marketing initiatives that produce measurable business outcomes.

With a proven track record of success, Rose has spearheaded marketing transformations for organizations providing SaaS solutions, managed IT services, financial services to the automotive industry, and government technology procurement software for local governments and municipalities. She has also spearheaded the GTM strategies for design and digital collaboration lifecycle software platforms for global iconic brands, optimized marketing for a reflective material and trim manufacturer, and developed thought leadership and content marketing strategies for a venture capital firm.

Expertise:
• GTM Strategy & Execution
• Demand Generation & Lead Nurturing
• Brand Positioning & Messaging
• Marketing & Sales Alignment
• Revenue & Growth Marketing
• Revenue Operations & Analytics
• Digital Transformation & Content Strategy

How Rose Has Helped Businesses Grow

• Fractional CMO – Accelerated Market Expansion for Value Management Software Firm
Developed and executed a data-driven go-to-market (GTM) strategy that repositioned the company as a reliable partner for mid-sized businesses. Implemented automated lead nurturing and content marketing, resulting in a 140% increase in average website engagement and driving double-digit revenue growth.

• Fractional CMO – Launched a revised brand positioning, messaging, and website for a global brands’ digital collaboration lifecycle software platform. Led the market introduction and product positioning of a cloud-based collaboration platform utilized by iconic global brands. Developed a multi-channel demand generation strategy, achieving a 40% increase in enterprise adoption and significantly accelerating the pipeline.

• Fractional CMO – Revitalized Marketing for a Reflective Material and Trim Manufacturer
Conducted a brand and market analysis, identifying untapped opportunities in the safety sectors. Developed an omnichannel marketing approach, increasing customer engagement by 35% and driving a record-high number of inbound sales inquiries.

• VP Product Marketing, Corcentric, Inc. – Integrated and spearheaded a comprehensive international go-to-market (GTM) strategy for a leading Source-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash software, advisory, and payment services firm. She repositioned a complex and sizable B2B four-way merger alongside an 8+ product portfolio of solutions and services aimed at highly targeted personas through campaigns, thought leadership, and strategic product development marketing.

• Chief Customer Officer & SVP Marketing, Determine, Inc. – Rose was responsible for the global marketing strategy, go-to-market initiatives, and customer relationships for a $30M+ enterprise SaaS software company. She and her team of 50 international marketers achieved a 150% increase in revenue and enhanced customer satisfaction advocacy.

• Vice President of Demand Generation and Customer Marketing, Youbet.com – Thanks to Rose’s effective B2C digital marketing, customer engagement, and win-back strategies, Churchill Downs, Inc. acquired this online gaming enterprise valued at over $500 million

Katherine Hunter Blyden

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Katherine Hunter-Blyden is a results-driven marketing expert, specializing in maximizing marketing ROI and increasing efficiency for her clients.  She leverages her P&L management experience, honed through roles with Fortune 500 companies, mid-tier businesses, and startups, to deliver data-driven, quantifiable results. Katherine’s expertise is frequently sought by boards, executive leadership teams, and investors for interim and fractional Chief Marketing Officer engagements.

With a strong analytical foundation and entrepreneurial spirit, Katherine brings a unique blend of discipline and resourcefulness to her client engagements. She provides honest, insightful feedback to business leaders, enabling them to craft and optimize high-performance marketing plans that align with growth objectives. She believes in focusing on what’s right and relevant for each business, rather than chasing fleeting trends.

Katherine’s career spans from founding startups to leading initiatives within multi-billion-dollar corporations. This breadth of experience, coupled with her work coaching small business owners, has provided her with a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities businesses face across various stages and industries.

Her track record includes developing multi-million dollar advertising campaigns at Ford Motor Company, driving significant revenue growth at Progressive Insurance, and turning around an underperforming $1.3 billion product line at Farmers Group, Inc.

Katherine is particularly passionate about helping small and middle-market businesses achieve stellar growth. For over a decade, she has consulted with organizations in diverse sectors, including software, legal, climate tech, insuretech, education, and non-profit.

Katherine’s skills include:

  • Marketing Budget Optimization
  • P&L Management
  • Customer Acquisition, Retention & Loyalty
  • Digital Marketing
  • Product & Brand Management
  • Strategic Marketing Planning

Drawing inspiration from Warren Buffett’s long-term investment philosophy, Katherine emphasizes sustainable growth strategies and builds lasting client relationships.  Her commitment to community work reflects this same dedication to long-term impact.

Katherine holds an MBA from Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School and an MS and a BS in Mathematics from Creighton University. She is actively involved in community organizations, including SCORE Greater Los Angeles, City of Hope, and the Pasadena Tournament of Roses.

Lewis Goldman

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Consultant who Scales Businesses

Lewis Goldman is a TechCXO executive in its New York office, and a marketing consultant specializing in scaling businesses rapidly through marketing, new products, new channels/partnerships, and leveraging customer data to cross sell and upsell existing customers. His focus on accelerating growth comes from extensive experience as a CMO and heading up growth, digital marketing, and E-Commerce efforts at companies ranging from Citigroup and MetLife to LinkedIn, Amazon, and LendKey.

Customer Centric

Leveraging his experience in marketing, digital transformation, and data/analytics, Lewis specializes in leveraging a customer centric approach to innovation through using digital, data, and identifying new market opportunities to accelerate revenue growth.

Beyond Marketing to help scale organizations

Lewis helps smaller entities scale their organizations and processes by using his experience building or reorganizing 7 different marketing/E-Commerce organizations ranging from startups to new businesses within Fortune 50 companies.

During his distinguished career, Lewis held the following positions:

Chief Marketing Officer, LendKey Technologies, Inc. – As CMO, Lewis was responsible for accelerating LendKey’s growth by creating a strong brand position, driving the vision and execution of its marketing efforts, and expanding its business development and customer acquisition initiatives. LendKey is a digital lending platform that partners with community-oriented financial institutions to offer consumers a range of products, including private student loans, student loan refinancing and home improvement loans.

Chief Marketing Officer (US) – Global Life Distribution Holdings Ltd. – Lewis served as head of marketing and acquisition for this privately held, international direct to consumer life insurance distributor offering insurance products under the Cherish Life brand.

SVP, Customer and Product Marketing, US Direct – MetLife – Lewis created and managed a $100M marketing, segmentation, CRM, and product development budget and 90 person staff in a high growth start up business within a 145-year-old company. He was focused on offering Life Insurance directly to Middle Market (Under $100K HHI) and Multicultural customers through DRTV, eMarketing, Direct Mail, and Walmart stores. Year over year sales doubled, exceeding plan by 20%.

Founder and President, New Media Consulting – Lewis created this firm focused on research and identifying target customers to develop brand positioning, strategic marketing plans, and execute tactical revenue generating initiatives.  His clients included Amazon, LinkedIn, New York Life, and numerous startups and midsize companies.

SVP, Marketing (CMO), 1800Flowers.com – Lewis managed a $60M marketing budget and 55 person staff for this $500M business. Among his accomplishments were stabilizing market share via new product/channel expansion.

(Multiple SVP and VP Roles), Citigroup – Lewis had broad P&L responsibilities for multiple business units, distribution channels and product lines, including working in all consumer lending businesses, launching several new direct to consumer channels and playing a key role in developing Citigroup’s internet marketing and distribution strategy as well as it’s E-Commerce platforms.

Adjunct Professor, St. John’s University – Lewis teaches undergraduates and graduate students in a course called Integrated Advertising Communications. He has been an adjunct professor at St. John’s since 2012.

In addition, he held multiple senior marketing positions at Sony, CNBC and Colgate Palmolive.

Lewis’ areas of expertise includes:

  • E-Commerce
  • P&L Management
  • Marketing Optimization
  • CRM
  • Product Development
  • Digital Marketing
  • Business Development
  • Market Segmentation
  • Cross Sell Strategy
  • Brand Positioning
  • Leveraging Customer Insights
  • Business Analytics
  • Organizational Design
  • Partnerships

He is a graduate of Harvard University with a BA in Psychology. Lewis received his MBA from Columbia Business School.