Startup CMO: A Field Guide to Scaling up Your Company's Marketing Function (Bolster Startup)

You're only a first-time CMO once, but that first time can be a daunting challenge for startup leaders. Without a blueprint or a guide you're in a tough spot to manage all of the details of marketing plus grow your brand and awareness. Startup CMO was written to help the first-time CMO navigate marketing challenges and provide tactics and best practices for how you can grow a high-performing function.

Matt Blumberg, Nick Badgett, and Holly Enneking have decades of marketing and leadership experience from founding a company, scaling it, and exiting. They cover a wide range of topics from demand generation, to events, social media, product marketing, sales development, marketing operations, and more. The authors share how to collaborate effectively in the executive suite and with functional leaders throughout an organization. As an added bonus, Matt shares CEO-to-CEO advice on what a great CMO looks like, signs your CMO isn't scaling, and how to engage with the CMO.

Startup CMO will help you pinpoint gaps or weaknesses, turn those into strengths, and help you scale yourself, the marketing function, and your organization.

Matt Blumberg has spent his entire career creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn't work for other CEOs and team members in the entrepreneurial community. He is the author of "Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business" (Wiley, 2020), an influential book embraced by entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, and board of directors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Startup CEO was an outgrowth of his blog, StartupCEO.com. In 1999, he founded Return Path, an innovative email marketing company, helped it to $100m in revenues, and led it to a successful exit in a strategic sale to Validity in 2019. Along with colleagues from Return Path, Matt started Bolster in 2020, a company focused on helping startups and scaleups grow, develop, and scale their leadership teams and boards. Matt's second book, "Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams" (Wiley, 2021), was a collaboration with Bolster's CXOs to provide a blueprint for scaling up each function. Before Return Path, Matt led Marketing, Product Management, and the Internet Group for MovieFone, Inc. (later acquired by AOL). Prior to that, he served as an associate with private equity firm General Atlantic Partners and was a consultant with Mercer Management Consulting. He also cofounded and chairs the board of Path Forward, a nonprofit created and spun out of Return Path. Path Forward's mission is to empower people to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving by working with companies offering mid-career internships. Path Forward gives women and men a path to a professional career, while giving companies access to a diverse, untapped talent force. Matt is currently Executive Chair at Bolster. He earned his A.B. from Princeton University.

Nick Badgett is an experienced marketing and revenue leader with more than 20 years of experience working in both startup and enterprise environments across the B2B SaaS, telecom, and financial services industries. His approach to marketing has been shaped by experience in a variety of go-to-market roles including sales, sales support, sales development and marketing. Nick collaborated on "Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams" (Wiley, 2021), sharing key insights on scaling up the marketing function. Before joining Bolster, Nick held marketing leadership positions with Emplify, Return Path, Salesforce, and ExactTarget. Nick is a cofounder of Bolster, where he currently helps lead the revenue teams. He holds a bachelor's degree in marketing and a master's degree in information & communication sciences, both from Ball State University.

Holly Enneking is an experienced marketing leader who loves building effective teams and powerful brands to meaningfully impact the growth of a company. Holly is currently the Head of Marketing & Partnerships at Bolster and thrives on amplifying the Bolster brand and helping executives continually up-level themselves and their teams. Holly contributed to "Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams" (Wiley, 2021), sharing her experience, tips, and best practices for CMOs to scale up the marketing function. Prior to Bolster, Holly built the Marketing & Alliances team at Lev, a marketing consultancy focused on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and ran brand and digital marketing at Return Path, a global software company. She originally began her career in video and digital production before making the move into tech. She earned a BA in communication from DePauw University.