Meet Jen
Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple. And it’s that hard.
— Danny Meyer, CEO, Union Square Hospitality Group
GROWTH MARKETING EXECUTIVE | PURPOSE-DRIVEN LEADER
Jen Gulvik is a compassionate and influential marketing leader with a record of crafting vision, engaging stakeholders & fostering community around a brand with a sense of purpose. By aligning business strategy, employer branding, product & marketing, Jen is known for creating modern brands people want to work for, do business with & tell others about.
Career highlights:
Jen was SVP Marketing + Creative Director for Houlihan’s Restaurants, Inc. where she led the brand turnaround for three casual and fine dining concepts from 2002 through the recession of ’08 and later expansion, growing average unit volumes and EBITDA significantly. Jen touched every aspect of the customer experience - from the weight of a fork to the music strategy; the menu design to the culinary and beverage development and experiences. Early adoption of technology was Houlihan’s secret weapon to steal market share, and adoption of trends its special sauce for staying culturally relevant ahead of its peers.
For the fine dining concepts, creating tailor-made events and thoughtful, memorable details down to the minutiae built a loyal following and landed the restaurants on the ‘top’ and ‘best of’ lists that mattered. Wine menus presented in vintage French artifacts won ‘Most Innovative Menu’ industry awards; and wine & cocktail lists were often ‘bests’ in WineMetrics reports.
Jen and other leaders took the company through a successful sale to new PE owners in 2016.
After Houlihan’s exit, Jen became Chief Marketing Officer, EVP of nbkc bank, brought on to lead its digital transformation from a small, branch-based community bank in Kansas City to a nationwide digital bank, building deposits at scale.
Jen built a performance marketing team from scratch & guided the infrastructure needed for online customer acquisition - doubling deposits in just 20 months.
Jen was then recruited in 2020 to serve as interim president for the launch of a new National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team in Kansas City under an extremely aggressive timeframe, developing the initial brand identity and establishing the office with key hires and infrastructure prior to launch.
Today Jen works as a fractional CMO, driving growth strategy, customer experience and brand evolution for consumer-facing brands.
Her early career included marketing roles with Oscar Mayer/Kraft Foods, Birch Telecom and work as a trend reporter for iconoculture, a boutique trends agency for Fortune 500 marketers.
Jen’s leadership roles have extended well beyond the borders of marketing, with deep involvement in business strategy, product development, employer branding and total customer experience leading to significant impact on company culture and overall financial performance.
First-to-market products & experiences:
Jen has a knack for seeing trends before they reach critical mass, tapping art, science and gut . Her work has forged many industry firsts and innovation within organizations.
She envisioned an engaged online community of 10,000 loyal customers for Houlihan’s restaurants upon seeing the mainstreaming of facebook - prior to facebook for brands. The site was recognized in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies issue.
Seeing the emergence of wellness-oriented food and beverage trends, Jen led menu development of spiralized-vegetable dishes, antibiotic-free chicken and organic greens for Houlihan’s restaurants, marking the first casual dining chain in America to do so with each initiative.
The spiralized menu, created in partnership with the main influencer of the trend, led to a 9% increase in new guest counts.
She also envisioned and piloted a data-driven CRM platform that combined POS transaction/item detail with tokenized credit card data and unique email IDs to deliver extremely powerful business insights at the enterprise level.
Board service & personal passions:
Jen passionately supports women entrepreneurs and those seeking a brighter future for themselves in the name of financial literacy and independence. She served as Membership Chair for the Women’s Capital Connection, an angel group that invests in early stage, women-led businesses, and previously was Board Chair for the Women’s Employment Network in Kansas City where she resides.
Jen is a Director for FairWave Coffee Collective; and an avid supporter of music education in schools, having partnered with Vh1 Save the Music foundation to reinstate music programming in public elementary schools that lost funding.
Jen is a proud dog mom, a beer-wine-and-spirits ‘collector,’ a lover of the great outdoors and an ever-curious follower of tastemakers. She’s a graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison with executive-level education at both Harvard and Columbia Universities, and named one of Kansas City’s 40 under 40 and KC’s Most Influential Women in Business .
