The Commission Code for Success

Clarity Before Scale: Kathie Fenn

• The Commission Code For Success from Sims Training and Consulting, LLC • Season 2

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Growth rarely fails for lack of effort; it fails for lack of clarity. We sit down with growth architect Kathy Fenn, founder of Signal Growth, to unpack the simple but hard steps that turn momentum into market dominance: a sharp offer, pricing that reflects outcomes, and an audience definition that’s both specific and scalable. Kathy explains how fractional leadership gives small businesses senior-level strategy without the full-time cost, and why a disciplined 30-60-90 roadmap beats a year of spray-and-pray marketing.

From there we dig into Meta—the Facebook and Instagram ad ecosystem—and treat it like a lab, not a lottery. Kathy breaks down the two-second hook, the single-message rule for creative, and how to run 8–12 message variations to quickly find what resonates. A live case study shows how reframing a speaking coach’s ads from generic benefits to identity-driven storytelling lifted click-through rates from 2% to near 10% and generated hundreds of qualified leads in two weeks. We also tackle realistic timelines: why 90 days is a sensible window to see traction, and how compounding test-and-learn cycles drive durable results.

As companies grow, the bottleneck shifts. Kathy shows how a narrow audience can cap scale, and how to broaden reach without diluting brand by keeping a clear bullseye target and adding adjacent segments. We cover segmentation, lifetime value, and the balance between referral-driven revenue and paid media that widens the top of the funnel. You’ll leave with a focused checklist: define the offer in one plain sentence, price by outcomes, document the customer persona, ship multiple creatives with distinct hooks, and prune ruthlessly based on signal quality. Subscribe, share this with a founder who needs clarity, and drop a review telling us which lever—offer, pricing, or audience—you’ll fix first.

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Speaker:

Usually when I come in, the first thing first is to sit down with the founders and entrepreneurs to really discuss what is uh their biggest challenge, what keeps them up at night. And then um from there, usually we will have a couple conclusions. One is unclear product offering, two uh could be the pricing strategy, and three could be unclear audience segments. So from those three, we can typically easily diagnose what are the most lower-hanging fruit that we should be tackle, uh tackling here. So either from product perspective, pricing perspective, or audience perspective, we can build a framework as well as a plan of attack to really address um the things that they're currently lacking, and then building up the test and learn roadmap to continue to solidify either your offer, your pricing, as well as your audience.

Speaker 1:

Welcome again to the Commission Code Podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and join us here today. We're here to help you increase your business revenue and have time to enjoy it. I'm your host, Morris Sims, and I've been consulting and training business people for, well, let's just say over 40 years. We're focused on increasing revenue and having time to enjoy it. After years as a professional salesperson, I spent 32 years in the corporate world. I retired as vice president and chief learning officer of the sales department of a large insurance company where we designed and built and delivered training for over 12,000 professional salespeople. Now I get to consult one-on-one, helping people grow their business and organize themselves to make the most of the time they have. We also build online courses to support business owners in their work as they strive to build the business that they've always wanted. Our objective is really very simple. It's this we're here to help you get what you want from your business and your life. So, right now, let's get on with this episode. Today on the Commission Code for Your Success, we're very pleased to have Kathy Finn with us. Kathy is the founder and owner of Signal Growth, a marketing and uh business growth company, and has done some marvelous things over her time here in the United States. And uh Kathy, I'm not gonna try and uh go through your bio, but very briefly tell us a little bit about what you do.

Speaker:

Yeah, of course. Uh, first of all, thank you for having me and super excited to be here. Um, so I'm Kathy Fenn. I'm the founder and growth architect behind Signal Growth, where I help founders and SMB owners to turn momentum into market dominance. Um, so over the last decade, I've led some of the world's most recognized brands and most sexiest brands uh from FinTech to consumer AI to enterprise, and I've really helped founders to unlock six and seven digits in as little as 90 to 120 days. So essentially I build my career behind data, human behavior, and storytelling. And I'm super excited to be on this show to share more insights and discuss all the intricacies um between uh everything's happening nowadays.

Speaker 1:

Outstanding. Sounds like fun. Uh Kathy, our audience is mainly entrepreneurs and small business people, the folks that you work with. And a couple of things that that I think you do that are very interesting to our folks is uh well, one of those is fractional work and and being able to hire someone for a piece instead of having to hire an employee seems to be a really good idea to me. I don't know. Tell me about that. How does that work and and who does it work for? And is it really less expensive for the owner than it would be to go out and find somebody to do some work?

Speaker:

Yeah, that sounds great. That's a great question. Um so Signal Growth is a fractional CXO collective where uh we collab with all the senior leaderships from CMOs, CTOs, CEOs, um, to help business owners and startups to drive their hypergrowth based on their customized needs. So the idea of fractional is given um the nature of startup or small business, you're constantly facing all the different pivots. You probably will change directions in two, two months and you don't know where you're going. So in order to really meet that constantly changing needs, having a fractional executive coming in as a senior leadership without taking a full-time capital from the business is essentially the idea of how we help startup founders as well as SMB owners grow. Um, so it's uh essentially imagine a new concept or the new ways of thinking about how to tap into senior leadership without your full-time capital. Um, we come in and then sit down with you to really discuss your goals, your challenges, and your bottleneck, as well as where do you want to be. And then we really help you kind of shape your um other brand identities, uh customer personas from the beginning stage to really help you understand what your offers discuss uh pricing strategies, as well as making sure that we set your 30, 60, and 90-day success. And then for my firm, I have two offers. One is um down with you. Offers is for the team, uh, for the founders that already have their internal teams, whether it's more kind of like um potential contractors or interns that you're currently hiring. Um, myself and my team in coming to really help you reorganize and really leading and give clear directions in terms of from execution or excellence perspective, as well as how do you take your plans into execution. Um, and then we also have the down with you, uh down for you offer where I have my own teams that can help founders that don't even have their own teams and don't know where to start from a marketing perspective. We can help you set up your AI automated systems from the ground up and from scratch to get you started. So there are those are two different ways I help uh founders and owners to really drive their marketing excellence, um, whether from zero to one, one to ten, and potentially even scale up offers. So that's a concept of uh leverage refractional given the budget is constrained, as well as uh the resource constraints. Um, we are uh focusing on founders that either at the pre-C stage or anywhere between 3 to 20 mil ARR where they have established um offers, established potential product market fit that we can come in and then really take them scale from 10 to 100.

Speaker 1:

So in your work, you're working with people that are already in an established business. Uh do you take on clients that are startups and just getting started, don't have anywhere, any idea where to begin?

Speaker:

Um so so like we don't really take people that just have an idea and doesn't know what to do, uh, because I think it takes a lot of pivots in terms of what your core offer is as well as what your pricing and a little bit of the testing, like a market test to get it begin with. But um, I offer like strategy sessions and workshops to really help founders solidify what their offer is. So it's more kind of like an initial stage of the strategy session. So those are the customized services I can potentially offer. But the core offer is essentially helping the team reorganize and getting more structured and really taking things into market dominance.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So where do you begin with a client? If you get a client that is on the low end of that annual revenue bracket that you described a moment ago, because that's where most of our audience, I think, is. Uh, we're not we're not necessarily um expecting that that our audience is in that bracket that you mentioned, but rather below that. Where where do you begin with a client?

Speaker:

Yeah. So for SMBs, um, I work with most of my clients are sitting around 100K or 200K or above monthly revenue. Um for startups, we are working with startups that has a little bit more capital around three mil to um 20 mil AR. So um for the business that's sitting within within that range, um, you'll be surprised a lot of them are not yet have a clear product offering or product market fit. So usually when I come in, the first thing first is to sit down with the founders and entrepreneurs to really discuss what is uh their biggest challenge, what keeps them up at night. And then from there, usually we will have a couple conclusions. One is unclear product offering, two uh could be the pricing strategy, and three could be unclear audience segments. So from those three, we can typically easily diagnose what are the most lower-hanging fruit that we should be tackle, uh tackling here. So either from product perspective, pricing perspective, or audience perspective, we can build a framework as well as a plan of attack to really address um the things that they're currently lacking, and then building up the test and learn roadmap to continue to solidify either your offer, your pricing, as well as your audience. And then once if we we do have an audience in market fit, meaning that you know who are your core audiences that will actually purchase your product, and then you have the right pricing strategies through all the different tests and learns that we work with. And that's where you can continue to scale from omni-channel perspectives. Um, so most of the small business owners are scaling products on like either through DTC or e-commerce perspectives, through meta ads or Facebook ads. So those are the easiest lower-hanging fruit to get you to six-digit or seven digits per month revenue. Um, because uh the platform is super powerful and it has a lot of coverage in terms of the audiences we want to target. But um, kind of like one of the blind spots for a lot of small business owners is they they feel meta is eating up as a lot of uh meta ads, but not really getting what I want, and they don't know why. So that's the the easiest and most common kind of like a blind spots for a small business owner that are facing is they currently lacking a strategic um way of driving meta as success. Um, in terms of how do you Cathy, pardon me, I hate to interrupt.

Speaker 1:

I'm sorry. You you say meta a couple of times here. Define out what you're talking about there. What exactly is Meta? Is that just the Google stuff? Or what yeah, great question.

Speaker:

Yeah, meta ads is the Instagram and Facebook ads. So the platform is meta.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Gotcha. And uh what what do you do with that? I mean, I'm a small business owner out there all by myself. How how do I best attack Meta Instagram and Facebook? How do I best attack that? What should I do?

Speaker:

Yeah, you need to work with me.

Speaker 1:

I understand that part. But let's see if we can't give our audience something practical here.

Speaker:

Yeah. So first of all, uh you have a clear um product offering. And then second of all, your product offering is tailored towards your audiences. So for example, I have um a couple coaching clients. Um one of them is um a speaking coach. So she targets women probably 30 plus, um, age 30 plus, and then want to be a public speaker or just want to tell their stories and want to, you know, um, driving personal brand and then um driving more success or driving more clients through personal brand development. So she's targeting women like that. So it's very clear. She has a very clear um kind of like a product position in terms of who her product is selling to as well as her audience. But the blind spot of her is the storytelling part of it. It's like when you identify you want to target women 30 years in plus and who want to speak on stage, what are the messages that will, you know, trigger their actions? So what I did was I came in and then I um using her um previous footage and then really test all the different types of messages on the meta platform. So essentially I create at least like 10 different iterations based on her product offering as well as her message uh audience, and then really push out in the meta campaign and then um test whichever message that resonates with her audience the most. And the meta is a very immediate platform. So within two days, we can already know how the response rate was within each of the messages. So um, a successful messenger, I would say I can drive you up to 10 uh percent click-through rate. So who every 10 people who see the ads, one person will at least click through. That's uh the click-through rate I will be able to drive for my customers compared to before I joined her, meta-ads was driving around 2% of the click-through rate. So from 2% to 10%, you're already seeing some of the attractions in terms of the message success towards your audience. So once we define what are the successful messages are like driving your audience success, we continue to iterate based on the success message to different um creative iterations, message iterations, making sure that you align the best practices of the meta platform, um, and then continue to scale. So um, because that's just a one example of how to really scale your success from message perspective and driving leads through the meta platform. So that's top of the funnel. Um, just step number one, how do you drive customer attention as well as attraction from meta platform?

Speaker 1:

So, how do you do that? What what what is a what makes a good successful message on Meta?

Speaker:

Yeah, that's um that's a little bit combination of the art and science, but definitely based on a lot of experience that I've been in consumer brand for over 13 years. Um basically um like we are all the same consumers, just consuming different products, right? So um I've been in alcohol and beverage category, CPG category, consumer fintech, AI. Um, we are all the same customers, but just consuming different products. So you can kind of anticipate what the consumer behavior and what do they like and what do they not like. And then plus, specific platform will also have nuances. So take meta for examples, you essentially need to have a very strong hook coming in within the first two to three seconds. So to catch people's attention, because if you consider um scrolling behaviors on Instagram or Facebook, people are scrolling millions or like hundreds of the different reels or ads, um, potentially ads in the feed a day. So um the average view time on each feed or each reel is essentially one to two seconds. So, how do you really capture that attention within the first two seconds of your consumers is essentially the key. So using very strong hooks, uh representing your brands or representing your core product offering, just thinking about one thing, just only one thing you want to tell your consumer in this message what it is. And then you need to represent that within the first two seconds. That's essentially uh the number one success factor within your creative component. And number two, it's definitely very engaging visuals or sometimes sounds to really continuously engage your users, continuously retain that attention throughout your 30-second ads or even your real organic content. So sorry. Oops, sorry. I like that. Yeah, so number two is essentially um engaging sound or engaging storylines that continues to drive or retain attention of your customers.

Speaker 1:

Um, what is that though, Kathy? I mean, tell me what is a a good hook? What give me give me something that that I can use today?

Speaker:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So um taking the same um coach as an example, because it just recently I just originated those, so uh the memory is still pretty fresh, top up mind. So um she's a speaker coach, and then um she has this basically a program called Speak Your Soul. And then she's um basically target women 30 years and plus who want to speak their personal brands. And then a lot of women, we understand. So first that we dive in their customers, understand what their customer pain points and what drives them, want to speak their stories. So some of them is because potential inner healing part of it, they've going through some sort of trauma, they want to share their stories, and that's some sort of inner hearing component of it. And then the second part is they need to attract business, attract clients, so they need to build their personal brand. So a lot of women who come came to her program will also they don't know they have a story to tell, or they want to tell a story but don't know where to start. So we essentially using those um, you know, kind of consumer insights to develop what the strong hook will be. So one of her ads is essentially um a doctor who's behind the scene curing patients for over 30, 30 years, but she doesn't know her true identity outside of the doctor. So we use her as one other testimonial, and her her hook is I didn't know I have her story to tell until I start telling it. I feel healed. So that's some sort of very consumer-driven, insight-driven ads structure to really um, you know, attract consumer attention and also attract people who resonate to messages like this. So we were successful um driving over hundreds of leads within the first 14 days just because of that message. And then we really realized there is a massive market. A lot of women feel the same way outside of their identity, or that was given by the society or given by their family. They don't know what else they can do. But then they deserve to tell their story. Everybody has a story to tell. So we dive into a lot of consumer insights like this and develop a different variation of the creatives as well as the ads to really find that message market fit, find the message that's fitting their um audiences that drive continues to drive the success for the business.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So it it um it sounds like a very involved process.

Speaker:

Yeah. Yeah, so it's definitely nothing is easy, right? All the different um functions of the business is not gonna achieve by one day or two. It's definitely accumulated by years of experience as well as um different type of rigorous test and learn to really understand the business intricacies. So even when I work with my clients, a lot of people will ask me, oh, can you deliver results within the first seven days or 14 days? But if the people actually tell you they can, they're probably lying because nothing can be achieved within a short amount of time. A lot of things need to be accumulated and see the results as well as a test and learn to understand, oh, um, you know, like one success leading to the other. So um so for me, I'm confident to drive results within 90 days to really build uh a customized framework as well as customized best practices for my clients, which a lot of marketers or a lot of times, if they work with other marketers, they probably won't see results until six months and a year. And your marketing agency will probably say, Oh, it's it's natural because a lot of things take time to build, uh, which is partially correct, but what I'm confident is I can drive results faster than anybody else can because uh because the more strategic visions as well as accuracy in um kind of like a laying out test and learn and be able to use early signs of the business or early signs of the test and learn results to continue um driving future success and future test and learn strategies. So overall learning curve has been shortened, and then I will I'm able to develop a very good business practice uh customized to a specific client just waiting 90 days.

Speaker 1:

So it's still it does take time, it's not an overnight solution in any case by anybody. And if they tell you it's an overnight solution, they're probably uh wrong, right?

Speaker:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

So it's it's something that doesn't uh you know grow up overnight, but yet it's worth the investment, would you say?

Speaker:

Um yes. So for me, because um that's a really great question. I have to answer this carefully. Um I would say it depends on the belief, because uh I'm a marketer at heart, so I've seen all the different types of marketing execution that drive America's number one brand or Fortune 500 company success. For example, when I was at Constellation Brands, our pay media budget is 95% of the total um media budget. So we don't do a lot of organic because the companies at some sort of scale, that organic doesn't work as fast as we want. So it really depends on the stage of the game where you are um in the growth trajectory to decide what is the best um attribution or best omni-channel activation, which channel will be the best at the different stage of the game. So there's a different nuance to that. Um, but because I'm a marketer, I truly believe marketing is a very, very big component of driving business success, whether it's organic content or even paid media influencer or even B2B account-based marketing. Compared to some people might say, Oh, I also have a client that's um coming from the different kind of like nuances. Um maybe, for example, one of the potential clients I'm currently talking to is an MA firm where the founders driving all the millions of the revenue based on purely referral market, right? So it's the same instances to a lot of law law firms or professional services where they rely on a lot of referrals for their business revenue. Um, so they might believe maybe I'll just you know go to conferences, building more referral network and then asking people to refer me business, I will it will be sustainable. So that's a different type of belief systems. But what I can say is if you do a hybrid approach, you it's impressive of founders that can drive revenue millions of the revenue based on the referral. But if this founder also taps into marketing where you're tapping the 220 billion of the audience out there, it's going to be, you know, like quadruple, triple, like exponential success from there because you're tapping into the territory. So that's what I would suggest founders that if you never explore or never tap into marketing, that would be one of the most powerful channels to help you drive your growth, tapping into all the audiences out.

Speaker 1:

That makes sense. That makes sense. The more people you can become visible to, the better off you're gonna be with results, wouldn't you agree?

Speaker:

Yeah, that's exactly the kind the concept.

Speaker 1:

So if if we do that I'm just trying to think here. When you when you do that Well, let me put it, let me ask this question. You mentioned that that clarifying the product offer and and having a clear vision of the product is uh number one concern that you find. What are some of the other challenges that you run into with you know business owners that need uh some direction? What sort of problems do they have that that you can give us some ideas about?

Speaker:

Yeah. So that's a great question. And I want to break it down into different stages of uh different growth stages. Um so when a business as is at the pre-C or early stages, that's what we mentioned about unclear product offering pricing strategies or unclear target audience segments. So you don't know who you're targeting, you're kind of like shooting in the dark, just target everybody and see whatever works. Um, so that's usually blind spots in the growth uh bottleneck in the earlier stage. And then when it's going to um the growth stage, um, usually the challenge is just the scalability. So there are you you saw you have a clear product offering pricing strategy as well as an audience setup, but uh, once you pass certain stage, the growth still feels stuck. You feel you're hitting a ceiling, the audience is no longer growing. You're not getting more lifetime value from the audiences and the audience term is big. So those are different challenges at the growth stage when once your business has scale. Um, and then the way I help founders in that stage is really, again, going back to the core, right? Sometimes you think you are hitting some sort of product market fit, but then when it's not able to scale, then that's not a true product market fit. You're probably only tapping to one of the target audience segments as opposed to your core audience segment that's scalable. So um, for example, when I was at Constellation Brands, one of my portfolio brands is Pacifical, uh, which is the beer. Um, that's um so essentially it's uh it's one of my favorite beer brands at Constellation Brands, and we were targeting um Gen Z as well LDA compliant Gen Z back then because um the Gen Z lifestyle and you know the curiosity and the venture adventures mindset really aligns with the brand story. So we wanted to target Gen Z because it aligns with what our brand strategy is. Um, however, um because the alcohol and beverage is a highly um regulated industry, we can only target people 21 plus. So essentially we're targeting LDA Gen Z. So we're targeting people from 21 to 25 or 27, which is a very, very small bracket compared to the overall age demo we can target. And that really limits the scale of where the brand can grow. So that's the typical blind spot number one is people target certain audiences and think that's your cool audiences. And then that essentially limited the scale, uh scalability of the business, and we wouldn't be able to drive more growth because uh that will be outside of what we wanted to target. So um what we found out is essentially we would need to expand the target audiences to overall build beer drinker, but using Gen Z as our ball's eye target because that targeting is aligning with our brand story more, and then it's it's the segment that the brands want to target. But in order to sustain the business growth, we still need to have a broader, kind of like broader target to really drive the overall revenues or I and stuff. So there's a lot of blind spot. Uh, I've seen a lot of businesses do very similar things as if we want to target one segment and then that essentially limit your business growth as well as your revenue generation. So for the business at the biggest scale, usually you will have a different audience segment to really go into very deep, intricacy, understand audience performance by segment. So which audience segment is driving the biggest revenue growth of your business, and which audience segment represents your brands the most, as well as what audience segment drives the longest lifetime value or the most scalable um scope for your business. So for each audience segment, we would develop different personas, understand their audience, you know, consumer decision-making journey. So we will map out all the different activation plans based on specific audience growth. So that's essentially you opened up new doors for your brand and your business growth. So that's at the usually one of the most common blind spots for the business at the bigger state, like a hypergrowth stage. So that's just examples, but there are you know hundreds of the different challenges a business can experience. So that's one.

Speaker 1:

But I can see where that that same thing, even if you're not scaled yet, being able to extend your audience to other people is going to help you scale that thing and get it bigger from the from the get-go. Yeah. That makes good sense to me. So if I if I hear you correctly, the two things that we need to do as business owners is to have clarity, be really clear about what it is that we're selling, what our product is, and what benefits it provides to our audience. And then, secondly, define that audience very clearly, and then extend that audience to to more than a fractional uh smaller group of people, but extend it bigger to improve our visibility. Did I get it right?

Speaker:

Yeah, 100%. You got it right. That is great. You're a marketer now.

Speaker 1:

No, no, no, not even a little bit. I'm I'm terrible at it. Kathy, thank you so much for being with us today on the Commission Code. I really appreciate you being here.

Speaker:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Well, that does it for this episode of the Commission Code Podcast. This is the place where we want to help you find the Commission Code to success in your business. Remember, go to Morris Sims.com for more information. And in the meantime, hey, have a great week. Get out there and meet somebody new, and we'll see you again next time right here on the Commission Code. Best wishes, I'm Morris Sims.