Founder of Kailos Marketing Lab
Meet Kris Lenz: Fractional CMO for
Professional Services Firms
I run marketing and growth strategy for firms that sell trust
I'm Kris Lenz, the founder of Kailos Marketing Lab.
I work with advisory firms, wealth managers, accounting firms, and boutique law practices in the $2M to $50M range that have outgrown what their referral networks can produce. I build and run the entire growth function: positioning, the content engine, the go-to-market and outbound infrastructure that generates demand, and the AI systems that let optimize CRM and sales processes.
Fifteen years in B2B marketing taught me that most professional services firms wait to be found. I build the opposite motion with research that identifies the firms entering a buying window, outreach that reaches the decision makers while the choice is still open, and credibility work holds up when they check who you are.
Why I started Kailos Marketing Lab
Before founding Kailos Marketing Lab, I sat on the client side in marketing leadership roles and bought the work. I hired agencies, SEO firms, PR teams, and design studios, and the pattern was consistent enough to be predictable:
Senior strategists who dropped a deck off before walking
Templated deliverables presented as custom
Retainers with no connection to work done or measurable results
Senior leaders selling work, junior team members doing the work
Vanity metrics framed as growth
I always wished I could hire a firm I could trust, that would directly connect with the work, and deliver real results. After years of failing to find this unicorn of an agency, I founded my own.
The change that empowered me to go out on my own was the rise of AI. When I was in-house, I was so busy keeping the operation running that I had limited bandwidth to test and explore emerging AI tools. While out on parental leave I took some time to up-skill myself and caught a glimpse of the future. It was immediately clear to me that a senior operator, backed by AI agents trained on that operator’s expertise, could deliver the output of a full department.
And so, armed with 15 years of experience across brand, content, and growth marketing, I set out to build a marketing practice that clients could rely on to actually deliver.
Who does the work
I do. After years of working with advisors who delivered decks and nothing more, I knew I had to work differently. Today, I set the strategy and then build the engine that runs it.
When a project needs specialized execution I pull from a small network of vetted specialists I have worked with for years, and I direct that work rather than subcontracting it out of sight. You are never handed to a junior team, and the person who scopes your engagement is the person who runs it.
You will always know what you are paying for. I scope engagements to defined work with a fixed price or a stated monthly range, and I tell you what I am doing and why before I do it. Every system I build runs on platforms your firm owns, with documented processes, so you can hand the work to someone else or take it in-house without starting over.
How I got here
I started my career at downtown Chicago agency New Control during the first commercial wave of digital marketing, working on global consumer and financial brands. That is where I learned positioning, message architecture, and how a story holds up when it has to scale across channels.
I left to earn a master's in journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where the publication I ran won the Pacemaker Award. Arts journalism was not a career, but the training in research, interviewing, and narrative structure turned out to be a valuable skill I use to this day.
After graduate school, I joined Grant Thornton and spent the next several years learning how partner-led organizations grow. I worked in pursuit development, learning the strategic planning, sales enablement, and internal mechanics that make complex firms move. I moved to Los Angeles and joined top 50 firm MGO. There I had leadership positions across content marketing, creative direction, and growth marketing. I helped build the firm’s cannabis practice, scaling to $25M in three years, while also supporting other service lines and industry groups as the firm grew from $75M to $150M+. I left to serve as the Chief Marketing Officer of GreenGrowth CPAs, where I built the demand generation engine and go-to-market strategy as the firm doubled in size.
The through-line is curiosity about what technology changes and what it does not. I have watched attribution go from asking the sales team to instrumented pipeline reporting, and I have watched every wave of new tooling get oversold. AI is the largest of these shifts and the one most likely to be mis-used, because the firms adopting it are often automating a process that was already the problem.
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