How I Got Here
Early in my career, I led communications for a large nonprofit, including managing crisis communications during a significant national incident. That experience, more than almost anything else, taught me how to stay clear-headed under pressure, communicate with precision when the stakes are high, and build trust quickly in difficult circumstances. Those skills show up in every client engagement. My career started in communications and public relations — institutional storytelling for organizations that had to earn trust before they could ask for anything.
That foundation shaped how I think about growth.
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Start with the business goal.
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Audit what's working and what isn't.
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Identify the right audience, the right message, and the right metrics.
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Then build backward from there.
Regulated Marketing Environments
From there I moved into healthcare market research, where I led marketing and communications for a multi-million-dollar firm. That's where I learned what it means to operate in a complex, regulated marketing environment — C-suite and physician audiences, HIPAA compliance, government requirements, RFPs, events, video production, and the full weight of marketing to people who are deeply skeptical of anything that isn't precise and substantiated.
Growth Operations
The work that defined my operating experience was leading sales and marketing at a fintech SaaS company serving independent financial advisors and institutions. I joined as Director of Sales and Marketing and grew into the VP role, eventually owning the full revenue function — marketing, sales, and customer success — through multiple product launches and a sustained period of company growth. I built demand generation programs, go-to-market strategy, and sales processes from the ground up, and served as a public-facing thought leader in the financial advisor ecosystem, including contributing to industry publications and presenting at trade events.
That chapter taught me what it actually takes to grow a B2B company in a regulated, trust-based industry — not in theory, but in the day-to-day work of building pipeline, closing deals, enabling a sales team, and keeping customers.
I also spent time leading the delivery team at a specialized marketing platform — managing website builds, content, graphics, and SEO and AEO at scale. In seven months, we doubled delivery capacity.
Going Fractional
Somewhere in the middle of that run, people started asking for help outside of my day job. Strategy questions, positioning problems, marketing systems that weren't working. I started saying yes — and Katie Godbout, LLC was born. What started as a side business to keep my thinking sharp became, over time, the work I was built for: going deep with a small number of companies at a time, solving the problems that were actually in the way of growth, and moving on once the system was in place.
That fractional work has spanned financial services, fintech, SaaS, and B2C — including DTC health and wellness brands, where I led marketing through product launches, content strategy, email, and community growth. Working across industries and business models sharpened something important: the ability to separate what's specific to a category from what's universal about how growth actually works. The underlying system is almost always the same. The application is what changes.
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.png?width=500&height=333&name=Katie%20Client%20Meeting%20(1).png "Katie Client Meeting (1)")
