Catherine Mak, Founder of Zilu Consultancy Joined The Portfolio Executive Community
Zilu Consultancy is pleased to announce that our founder, Catherine Mak, has officially joined the Portfolio Executive Community as a Fractional CMO and marketing transformation leader.
With more than 20 years of international marketing leadership experience across APAC, the UK and Europe, Catherine brings a unique combination of corporate leadership, commercial strategy and hands-on transformation experience across financial services, fintech, SaaS, B2B publishing, events and professional services.
Her earlier corporate career includes senior leadership roles at Citibank Hong Kong, where she led segment marketing and portfolio management strategies across multiple customer segments, and Bupa Global APAC, where she held regional marketing leadership responsibility with full P&L accountability.
In recent years, Catherine has focused on helping founder-led businesses, start-ups and scale-ups navigate the challenges of growth, transformation and commercial scaling through fractional and portfolio marketing leadership.
Catherine's recent achievements include:
→ Delivering the strongest revenue performance in 15 years for PEI Group’s Infrastructure Investor Network, while tripling social audience growth and doubling lead generation.
→ Building the marketing function for Live Group / Envoku from the ground up, leading go-to-market strategy across the UK, Europe and APAC, generating a £1M enterprise pipeline, and supporting ARR growth from £5M to £9M within 12 months.
Known for combining strategic clarity with operational execution, Catherine specialises in helping businesses align marketing with commercial outcomes — particularly during periods of rapid growth, organisational change or scaling pressure.
Reflecting on why she joined the Portfolio Executive Community, Catherine shared:
“Over the years, I kept seeing the same pattern in growing businesses. The ambition was there. The product was often strong. But marketing had become reactive, fragmented, or too dependent on the founder. Teams were busy executing, yet the business still lacked clarity, prioritisation and senior commercial direction.”
She added:
“Many companies assume they need more marketing activity, when in reality they need better marketing leadership. A lot of scaling businesses are not ready for a full-time CMO, but they do need experienced leadership to help connect strategy, operations, positioning and growth.”
Catherine’s approach combines corporate discipline with entrepreneurial agility. Her experience spans go-to-market strategy, proposition development, AI-enabled marketing transformation, CRM, demand generation, product marketing, sales alignment and marketing operations.
What sets her apart is her ability to quickly diagnose what is actually holding growth back — whether that is positioning, team structure, marketing operations, leadership alignment, or execution priorities — and translate founder ambition into scalable commercial action.
Speaking on the evolution of fractional leadership, Catherine commented:
“With AI accelerating execution, businesses no longer win simply by doing more. The advantage now comes from knowing what to prioritise, what to stop, and how to build a scalable growth engine. Fractional leadership gives growing businesses access to senior judgement and strategic clarity at the stage where it matters most.”
As Zilu Consultancy continues to support businesses through growth and transformation, Catherine’s participation in the Portfolio Executive Community further strengthens the firm’s commitment to providing commercially grounded, senior-level marketing leadership for scaling businesses.
#FractionalCMO #PortfolioExecutive #MarketingLeadership #GrowthStrategy #MarketingTransformation #ScaleUp #SaaS #Fintech #BusinessGrowth #FounderLedBusiness