About Jason Zaczyk

Twenty-six years turning technical ideas into revenue. Now in your corner.

Before advising founders, Jason spent a career doing the thing itself: taking products from concept to production, growing multimillion-dollar territories, and sitting in the CFO chair of an award-winning startup he helped launch in the middle of a pandemic.

(It's pronounced "ZAZ-ik.")

Work with Jason
$30M+annual territory, grown from $12M
26 yrstechnical sales & product marketing
Start-Up of the YearSBDC award — as co-founder & CFO
Penn StateBSEE '99 · MBA, Entrepreneurship '10
Jason Zaczyk, founder of Jay-Z Marketing, LLC

The story

A career spent where ideas meet markets

Jason's career started in the deep end of technical business: product marketing at Motorola's semiconductor division in Austin, where he owned a processor family from concept to production — verifying specs with customers, translating their needs to design teams, training sales forces, and building the launch plan, forecast, and pricing strategy that took it to market. That's not adjacent to strategy work. That is strategy work, with a nine-figure company's money on the line.

Then came more than two decades as a technical sales engineer — at Freescale and later for one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies — serving industrial, medical, automotive, and defense accounts. He grew one territory from roughly $8–10 million to over $18 million in eight years, and his current one from $12 million past $30 million. Along the way he sat across the table from both Fortune 500 giants and scrappy startups racing a market window — and it was the startups that got under his skin.

"I've watched great ideas go down the drain because of mistakes in go-to-market, strategy, or just plain ego — and I've watched ideas I doubted become wildly successful. The difference is almost never the idea."

That pull toward founders sent him back to Penn State for an MBA focused on entrepreneurship, and into the trenches himself: patents filed and investor conversations for a product venture that failed honestly in testing, informal advising for friends' businesses from a daycare to an app concept — and then the big one. In 2020, in the teeth of the pandemic, he co-founded a boutique fitness studio, wrote its business plans, found its funding, and took the CFO seat. The company won its regional SBDC Start-Up of the Year award, has grown at over 15% annually for five straight years, and is preparing to expand.

JZ Strategy exists because of a simple realization: the judgment Jason built across 26 years and a half-dozen ventures is exactly what most founders are missing — and almost none of them can access it at a price that makes sense. So he built a practice designed to change that.

The record

Judgment you can verify, not adjectives

2000–2004 · MOTOROLA SEMICONDUCTOR

Concept to production, cradle to grave

Owned the PowerQUICC II processor family end-to-end: customer spec validation, design-team communication, sales training, launch planning, long-range forecasting, and pricing strategy. Product strategy practiced at industrial scale.

2004 ONWARD · TWO DECADES IN TECHNICAL SALES

$8M → $18M. Then $12M → $30M.

Two decades growing technical territories by helping companies — from Fortune 500s to pre-revenue startups — pick the right solution and hit their market window. Revenue growth as a repeatable discipline, not a lucky year.

2020–TODAY · CO-FOUNDER & CFO, FIT PLUS

SBDC Start-Up of the Year — launched mid-pandemic

Wrote the business plans, secured funding, ran the books, taxes, and financial strategy for a boutique fitness studio opened in 2020's headwinds. Five years later: 15%+ annual growth and an expansion on the horizon. This is the playbook JZ Strategy clients get.

THE ONE THAT DIDN'T WORK

Comfy Collars — failed in product testing

A pet-product venture that earned its patents and investor meetings, then failed where products actually get tested: reality. The tuition from that failure — on IP, on investors, on founder blind spots — is built into every plan Jason reviews. Advisors who've never lost tend to give advice that's never been tested.

Point of view

What Jason believes — and most advice gets wrong

Your customers love you — but they love their wallet more. Friends and early customers will tell you your idea is great right up until it costs them something. Validation that doesn't involve money isn't validation. Real strategy starts with understanding what your market will actually pay for, not what it applauds.

"If you build it, they will come" is how good businesses die quietly. Most founders under-plan the path between building the thing and anyone knowing it exists. The go-to-market plan isn't a chapter in the business plan — it's the half that usually decides the outcome.

Most owners misprice their own time and effort. The real cost of a business isn't in the spreadsheet's expense column — it's in the hours, the attention, and the opportunities forgone. A plan that ignores that cost isn't conservative; it's fiction.

Bad advice usually comes from asking the wrong people. The right advisor has seen your mistake before — in other markets, other industries, other founders. That pattern library is the entire value of experience, and it's what you're actually buying here.

Who this is for

Jason does his best work with…

  • People with a real dream of working for themselves — even if the goal is simply building a great job of your own
  • Main Street businesses that need focused, professional help to reach the next level
  • Founders who've struggled, know the product and market are right, and need experienced guidance to make it take hold
  • Owners who want a plan they'll actually execute — with the numbers behind it

And honestly, wrong for

You should look elsewhere if…

  • You want someone to tell you the idea is great no matter what — Jason will tell you the truth, including when a smaller package (or no package) is the right call
  • You're looking for a document to check a box rather than a plan you intend to run
  • You need a big-firm nameplate more than you need the work itself

How the work gets done

Big-firm depth. One accountable person.

JZ Strategy is built differently from both the big consulting shops and the one-person freelancers. Jason has invested in a professional research and analysis platform — systems he designed and built himself — that do the heavy lifting a boutique firm would staff a team of analysts to produce: market research, competitive analysis, three-year financial modeling, and scenario planning, all tailored to your business rather than pulled from a template.

Then comes the part no system can do. Every deliverable is personally reviewed, refined, and approved by Jason before you ever see it — the judgment of 26 years applied to your specific situation, your market, your numbers. Nothing generic survives that review. It's how a focused practice delivers the depth of a $15,000 engagement at a fraction of the price, without the quality roulette of the cheap end of the market.

And the commitment that runs through everything: you see your full Statement of Work — scope, deliverables, price — before you pay a dollar, and Jason tells you plainly if you don't need what you're asking for.

Next step

Put 26 years of pattern recognition on your side.

Ten minutes of intake. A straight answer about fit. A full Statement of Work before any commitment. That's how every engagement starts.

Start your intake