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I ask Marlena Sarunac for a story where adjusting the words moved the numbers. She doesn’t reach for theory. She reaches for a recent client.
“I can speak to maybe like a recent client that we’ve been consulting with, and they’re a very technical team,” she says. They’ve been around for a while. They were spinning out a new product, and the founder couldn’t decide if it was a feature or a product on its own.
“They were spinning out, you know, using AI, like these really complicated whiteboard images about how it works and what are all the features.” She doesn’t say what was on the whiteboards, exactly. She doesn’t have to. Anyone who has watched a technical founder run a sales meeting can fill it in: a stack of capabilities, color-coded, with arrows. Each feature is a pebble in the wall the founder is building between himself and the people writing the checks.
“I kind of forced him to step, take a step back,” she says, “and say, like, what are you actually solving for here?”
What they realized, in the room, was that the wrong audience was paying attention to the wrong things. The users of the product cared about features. The engineers who came to kick the tires cared about features. “But the people who actually were assigning the checks, they wanted to know in a high level — what does this do for me?”
Marlena and her team spent weeks with this client. Not on a logo. Not on a website refresh. On a question: what is the actual gap this product fills?
The answer, when they finally found it, was three words. Last mile gap. A phrase that a healthcare buyer could hold in one hand. A phrase that, the moment it landed in a meeting, did not require a whiteboard.
“It clicked so much quicker, and the CEO started noticing that the conversations were moving along much faster,” Marlena says. “He was getting caught up as a technical founder in these details that were glossing — you know, the buyers were glossing over.” After the phrase, the founder could finally publish content people read. He could move past the question of whether the product was a feature, an idea, a company. “He was able to accelerate from basically, like, is this a product? Is this a feature? Is this an idea? — to: no, this is a company, and we’re actually making sales now.”
I want to be clear about what just happened, because this is the kind of story that sounds, on the surface, like a tagline did all the work. It didn’t. The tagline was the visible artifact of weeks of the kind of work most people don’t see.
I ask Marlena to walk me through that. The strategic insight behind a tagline. Because when a host like me says, “they came up with a phrase,” it can sound trivial, and the marketing pros listening will groan.
“This was, uh, weeks of heads down market analysis,” she says. “Diving deep with the team. Doing workshops where we talked about the product at length.”
She tells me about the early diagnostic. An asynchronous survey her firm sends to the leadership team. Each person writes, separately, what the product does, who the buyer is, who the user is. “Nine out of ten times,” she says, “the team members differ on what they’re — what they all, how they all are interpreting the product, what it’s solving for, and who the buyer is and who the user is.”
I sit with this for a moment. Because what she just described is the actual diagnosis, the thing that is almost always true and almost never spoken: the founding team does not agree on what their company is. Marketing isn’t a wordsmithing problem. Marketing is the symptom. The problem is alignment.
“And nine out of ten times, when we start discussing the results of the survey and the inputs that they put in, they’re actually kind of realizing that’s not what they meant in words, and they need to talk it out.”
The reason a phrase like last mile gap can save a sales cycle is that, by the time the team has agreed it’s the right phrase, they’ve also agreed on something far more expensive to discover: what they’re selling, and to whom.
Marlena keeps using a baking metaphor, and I keep letting her, because it’s good. “You simply can’t skip the process of assembling the ingredients before having your cake,” she says. “And a lot of folks are like, actually, I just want the icing.” Something in her voice lands like a confession when she says it. She has had this conversation, I suspect, about thirty times.
Founders call asking for a tagline. What they actually need is the eight weeks before the tagline.
I ask how she explains this to a CEO who is paying for the work and wants something to show for it before the next investor update. She has another analogy ready. “We’ll have CEOs who are hung up on the color of the walls of the house that hasn’t been built yet.” She’s literal about it, and I think she’s literal because she had to be — at some point, a founder said something like that to her, and she had to find a way to keep him in the conversation without making him feel like a fool.
She invokes technical debt next, and the analogy is doing real work. Engineers understand technical debt. They have rituals for it. They put it in tickets. They argue about it in standups. They write blog posts about how to pay it down. “That happens in marketing and branding as well,” Marlena says. “You could start building something really great, have no brand, have no real messaging behind it. It’s gonna catch up with you, and you’re gonna have to do it retroactively at some point.”
The thing she doesn’t quite say but is implying: brand debt is technical debt with worse instrumentation. There is no compiler error when your founders disagree on what the product does. There is no failing test when your buyers and your users want different things. The cost compounds in ghost meetings and unrenewed contracts and re-architected go-to-market plans. By the time you can see the bill, you are paying interest.
I have been a designer-PM hybrid long enough to recognize this as the same conversation engineers have about prematurely scaled systems. Build it cleanly now or pay to unwind it later. The difference is that brand debt looks, to the founder, like a soft thing — like wallpaper, not load-bearing wall. It is load-bearing wall.
I ask Marlena about her own firm. She and her co-founder, Lubna Hameed, sell brand strategy alongside product design — fractional, not agency, not consulting, not the two Bobs from Office Space. When they launched The Company Advice in March 2024, they had to live the problem they solve. They struggled to position themselves.
“We thought ‘thought partners’ felt a little woowoo and loosey goosey,” she says, “and then ‘agency’ felt a little bit more predictable in a way that we are not.” When they went out to market at the beginning, “people couldn’t make sense of what we did. And we were told, it’s confusing what you do. But in our minds it wasn’t confusing. It was incredibly obvious.”
I write down incredibly obvious because I know exactly what she means and exactly why nobody else in the market did. The clearest things in your own head are the most opaque to a buyer, because the buyer hasn’t had any of the conversations you’ve had. This is the gap. This is the entire reason a fractional CMO has a job.
We talk for a while about the slow, unflashy work of moving from “scrappy startup” to “feels enterprise.” Marlena pauses on Airbnb specifically, because she remembers using it when it felt scrappy. “I don’t think that you’ve noticed that they’ve changed,” she says. “But if you look at the very first iteration of the brand to what it is now, you would definitely notice that there’s been a big difference.” That’s the discipline. The market does not feel a jump. The market feels an evolution. And evolution is just a long string of small, deliberate, internally agreed-upon decisions.
Late in the conversation, I ask her what she thinks of OpenAI’s recent commercial. The one with the actual humans on a road trip, building an itinerary with ChatGPT. She lights up. “I think whoever’s leading brand there — this is, like, a classic, incredible example of people doing their market research first before blowing through gazillions of dollars of budget.”
The point isn’t the commercial. The point is the homework. “They heard the market say, ‘this thing scares us, and it’s replacing human beings,’” Marlena says. “And so for them to run that commercial, that so humanized the benefits of the platform, in such a simple way — that was a brilliant market research connected to strategy play.”
That phrase — market research connected to strategy — is the entire job. Most companies pay for one of the two. Almost nobody pays for the connection between them.
The conversation, somewhere around the middle, takes a turn I didn’t expect. We’re talking about referrals and books and McKinsey, and I float the observation that Marlena is, structurally, a trusted-advisor brand. The hard kind. The kind where the offer is not productized, where the buyer is buying you, where the firm cannot scale without you — at first, and maybe ever. I want to know what that has cost her.
She thinks about it. “I would have a seat at the leadership table,” she says, “but I was almost always, like, the founder or CEO’s, kind of like, more like a background person. Right-hand person. My job was to elevate them, their story, the company story.” A whole career of pushing other people into the spotlight. “And so now that it’s time to turn the playbook around on myself, and put myself in the spotlight — there are moments of discomfort where you kind of have to talk about yourself and validate, you know, why you are confident in this space.”
Something in her voice shifts when she says moments of discomfort. Not heavy. Just honest.
“But it’s starting to get a little bit easier,” she says, “as the years go by. I’m like, you know what, I do know some things, and I am happy to talk about them, and I am happy for the spotlight to be on me.”
I think this is the part that the headline doesn’t quite say. The story I came in with was: she found a phrase, the sales started closing, the founder won. That story is true. But underneath it is a quieter one. Marlena has spent a career doing the unglamorous, slow, specifically-not-the-icing work of figuring out what a company actually means, and now she is doing it for her own. The cake she is baking — slowly, ingredient by ingredient — is her own brand. The spotlight she has spent fifteen years deflecting onto founders is now landing on her, and she is letting it.
The last mile gap, in some ways, is also the gap between knowing how to do something for a thousand other people and learning how to do it for yourself.
Toward the end I ask the throwaway question I usually ask, the kind of question that is mostly there so we can land the conversation, and she gives me the answer that, in retrospect, is the whole essay. We’re talking about how to become a subject matter expert. How to get to the place where people request you by name. How to earn the kind of brand where someone says, we don’t want a marketing consultant, we want Marlena.
“I think that unique contribution comes from being heads down doing the grueling grunt work for a long time,” she says, “until you completely understand the problem from the inside out. You can put a shape to the problem. So when others come to you with their problems, you can — you’ve learned to identify, like, the pattern recognition. You’re like, I’ve seen this before, and I know how to help you.”
There is no shortcut. There is no GPT-ing your way to it.
“You have to do the grunt work. You have to fail.”
She says it almost with affection. Like the failure is part of the recipe. Like the cake she’s been talking about all hour was always — at the bottom of every layer — built out of the things that didn’t work.
When we get off the call, I think about the founder with the whiteboard. The one whose sales cycle was stuck. He had a real product. He had real users. The phrase he was missing wasn’t decorative. It was the load-bearing thing. It was the proof that the room had agreed on something true.
I think most companies are operating without that phrase. I think most founders are still drawing on the whiteboard. And I think that the work Marlena is describing — the workshops, the surveys, the disagreements surfaced in plain English, the cake assembled before the icing — is the kind of work that most people will only pay for after they’ve already paid the brand-debt interest twice.
Three words. Six months of stalled sales reversed. Weeks of work nobody saw.
That’s the actual rate.
About Marlena Sarunac
Marlena Sarunac is the Fractional CMO and co-founder at The Company Advice, a women-owned marketing firm serving early-stage tech startups across health tech, insurtech, and AI. Rising to prominence in the 2020s as a growth-focused operator at the intersection of complex B2B value propositions and go-to-market strategy, she became known for turning technically dense products into compelling market narratives that drive measurable revenue outcomes. She holds a Master of Engineering in Technical Entrepreneurship from Lehigh University, where she won the Joan F. & John M. Thalheimer ‘55 EUREKA! Grand Prize in 2018.
Previously, as Vice President of Marketing at Particle Health, Sarunac led the company’s marketing function from Series A through Series B over 3.5 years, building a data-driven, analytics-first growth strategy centered on revenue outcomes, cross-channel experimentation, and A/B testing across market segments. Her work established Particle Health as a trusted, humanized brand within the health data interoperability space, spanning web design, conference presence, and content programs.
Earlier in her career, as Director of Marketing at Ideon — formerly Vericred, an API platform simplifying health insurance and employee benefits data exchange — Sarunac ran full-spectrum marketing operations including content strategy, PR, SEO, and trade show execution. She directly attributed 40% of all inbound website traffic to marketing initiatives, with an additional 40% driven by an SEO program she built and managed over two years.
At The Company Advice, she created The Healthies, the first awards program recognizing excellence in marketing, branding, and product design in digital health, expanding the firm’s footprint as a thought leadership platform for the sector.
Thanks for reading this far. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.
I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
