Zak Sender is a marketing operator with ten years of experience across in-house and freelance roles. He focuses on three things for outdoor brands: marketing operations and internal tooling, AI and workflow automation, and lead generation, customer acquisition, and GTM strategy. Engagements are fractional, project-based, or one-off. Based in Los Angeles, California. Email [email protected].

Marketing operator · Los Angeles

Marketing operator for outdoor brands.

Growth, GTM, and the operations and automation underneath them. Ten years of doing the work that makes the rest of marketing actually function — mostly behind the scenes, where it matters.

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Mount Fitz Roy at first light, viewed from the Laguna de los Tres trail in Patagonia
From the field Mt. Fitz Roy, Patagonia
Working with

Apparel and gear brands. Outdoor hospitality. Small DTC and emerging labels. Mostly $1–10M, mostly drowning in manual ops.

What I actually do

Three lanes. Pick whichever one is on fire.

Available as a fractional retainer, a defined-scope project, or a one-off "fix this" engagement. The shape follows the problem, not the other way around.

operator note: most "marketing problems" are operations problems wearing a creative costume.

01

Marketing operations & internal tooling

The plumbing that makes a marketing team actually function. Process design, internal apps, dashboard builds, CRM hygiene, the connective tissue between sales and marketing.

If your team is held together with spreadsheets, half-finished automations, and "I'll just handle it manually" workarounds — this is the lane.

HubSpot Airtable Notion Social media ops Internal apps
02

AI & automation that earns its keep

Workflow automations and LLM-powered tools that take tedious work off people's plates. Lead enrichment, content workflows, data clean-up, customer intelligence.

Built to be maintained by your team, not held hostage by mine. No black-box magic, no vendor lock-in.

AI for back-office work, not the front door. Photography, original writing, and design stay human — that's not what AI is for. Models get right-sized to the job, because compute has a real footprint and pretending otherwise is the same greenwashing I won't help brands do.

Zapier n8n Make.com Claude Custom LLM workflows
03

Lead gen, acquisition & GTM

The full customer-getting stack: positioning, channel strategy, paid and organic acquisition, lifecycle, and the measurement layer that tells you what's actually working.

For founders launching something new, or established brands plateauing on the same three channels they've leaned on for five years.

GTM strategy Paid media SEO & content Lifecycle / CRM Attribution
How I work

A few things that don't change.

The work bends to the engagement. These don't.

01

Trust gets built first.

Before any deck, any dashboard, any roadmap — I want to know how your team actually works, where the friction lives, and what's been tried before. Then we ship.

02

Specifics over slides.

Generic strategy docs are how marketing dies. I work in the actual tools your team uses, against the actual problems on your roadmap, with output the team can use Monday morning.

03

Values line up, or we don't work together.

I work primarily with outdoor brands whose values around climate and sustainability line up with mine. Fewer clients, better fit. The greenwashing economy is loud enough already.

04

The team is sharper when I leave.

The goal of any engagement is that your team is more capable when I leave than when I arrived. Documentation, training, and "I could rebuild this myself" handoffs are non-negotiable.

Zak ice climbing in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska
About

I'm Zak. I run marketing ops for outdoor brands I'd actually buy from.

Ten years in marketing — assistant to director, agency-side and in-house, big brands and tiny ones. Now I run my own shop, focused on the outdoor industry because that's where my time goes when I'm off the clock anyway.

Climbing, hiking, camping, fishing, every national park I can get to. Time outdoors makes people healthier and happier. My professional life exists to back that up — for me, and for the brands I work with.

Based in Los Angeles. Available wherever the work is.

— Zak

if your marketing ops are held together with vibes and spreadsheets, this is the part where we talk.

Tell me about your marketing ops mess.

Fractional, project-based, or a one-off "fix this for me" call. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit. No pitch deck, no posturing.

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