We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cara Verwholt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cara below.

Cara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

In 2023, I decided to leave the corporate world after 15 years and found my marketing consulting practice, Cara Verwholt Consulting. As a strategic marketing consultant, my mission is to help founders and marketing leaders navigate transformational events in order to build sustainable, revenue-driving infrastructure.

I’m passionate about leading marketing transformations because I often found myself at the forefront of change throughout my corporate career. Somehow, I had a knack for joining teams just before major events. For example, I joined the Amazon Prime Now team a few months after the app launched and the business was on the verge of adding third-party retailers to its ecosystem. I joined the Disney Consumer Products team just as the company was closing the majority of its physical retail stores and pivoting to direct-to-consumer e-commerce. I joined the National Football League just in time to build the go-to-market strategy for their exclusive streaming service, NFL+. And the list goes on. Let’s just say I like a healthy mix of chaos and opportunity where I can build, own and ultimately deliver against revenue objectives.

As a consultant, I’m fueled by the opportunity to apply my extensive experience initiating and navigating change to a broader range of projects. My consulting practice’s purpose is to demystify marketing, analyzing complex growth opportunities and breaking them down into foundational steps to better align a company’s brand, channel strategy, and internal resources with its customers’ needs.

Cara, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I studied Corporate Communications at Elon University and landed a job upon graduation at a digital marketing agency. Marketing is a vast and varied field, and over the last 15+ years, I have touched on most aspects of it–from highly data-driven roles, to channel ownership, partner marketing, product marketing, and ultimately marketing strategy.

While my career started at smaller, early-stage companies, after earning a M.S. in Integrated Marketing from New York University, I had the opportunity to take roles with Amazon, Disney, and ultimately the National Football League (NFL). Transitioning from small, scrappy organizations to large, siloed environments taught me a lot about navigating change, building effective cross-functional relationships, earning trust with stakeholders, and leading teams.

The project that I am most proud of in my career is building the brand and go-to-market strategy for NFL+, the NFL’s exclusive streaming service. It was an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of the NFL’s direct-to-consumer distribution strategy evolution and build the positioning and fan journey for the service.

Now, as a Fractional CMO and marketing strategy consultant, I have the opportunity to bring my extensive experience across industries and company sizes to my clients’ projects. I am passionate about the field of marketing and aspire to be a leading source of clear and actionable marketing guidance, not only for the clients who work with me.

I am also a mom of two boys and am passionate about finding work-life balance and identifying sustainable strategies that enable working parents to thrive in both their careers and family lives.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Empower those that you lead to be owners. Define clear ownership “swim lanes” for your team members. Build a spreadsheet to clearly define who does what (from a strategy + task perspective), but also provide opportunities for collaboration, experimentation and stretch learning.

Also, celebrate collective wins! There isn’t enough of this in my experience. We’re humans and we all want to feel appreciated. If we celebrate how our team’s contributions resulted in a win for the customer or a win on a business goal, we’re more likely to remember that positive feeling of camaraderie the next time we need to collaborate on a new initiative.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I learned valuable lessons about the importance of collaboration and collective input to drive innovation from Ed Catmull’s book “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration”. Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar Studios, discusses the importance of access and input into the creative process. After working in organizations where there’s a lack of transparency and sharing of information, Catmull’s perspective on harnessing talent and creativity is an inspiration.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.caraverwholtconsulting.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caraverwholt/

Image Credits

Charisma Howard