Out of the Noise, Into Purpose: A Marketer’s Bold Break from Burnout

By Vicky Wu

CEO, Fractional CMO Unscrewed Marketing

Vicky Wu brings 30 years of marketing leadership experience, including CMO and CEO roles, an MBA in Marketing, and a track record with marketing Fortune 500s and multi-billion-dollar brands. Today, she helps small and mid-sized businesses grow with smart, scalable strategies once only available to those big guys with really deep pockets. She's also an author, publisher, ballroom dancer, and artist who enjoys working out in VR.

I was in Paris during the 2015 terrorist attacks. We were a block from the shooting at a café and could hear it. I remember thinking: if something happened to me tonight, what would I regret? Was my legacy really going to be “overworked”?

It wasn’t about missed vacations or awards or money. My gut-punch was this: I’d spent years climbing the corporate ladder, leading marketing for billion-dollar brands, pushing through 80-hour weeks… and missing years with my kids. This wasn’t chasing ambition; I was simply surviving.

That night rewired something in me. I realized I wasn’t meant to just do marketing for huge corporations; I was meant to change how entrepreneurs can access it. I wanted to make marketing finally make sense for entrepreneurs. No more cookie-cutter formulas. No more tactics built for big corporations being shoved onto solopreneurs. No more “just post every day” advice from people who’d never grown a business themselves.

I’d already worked with tens of thousands of business owners at that point, and I saw the pattern: 

they were exhausted, overwhelmed, and Googling their way into circles. 83 million search results and no way to know what advice is legit. Even now with AI, it’s just remixing the same old junk, so people still don’t know if what they’re doing is right or just what’s popular but maybe wrong.

That night in Paris made me stop tolerating seeing my entrepreneur friends get bad advice, and stop tolerating the corporate overwork. I left resigned soon after and started helping business owners cut through the noise. I had been helping some entrepreneurs that were associated with the corporation, and now I wanted to help them all. With the right advice. Real strategy. Real context. Real results. No fakexperts. I became obsessed with making marketing feel doable, not dreadful. Human, not hype.

I believe it shouldn’t be that hard; marketing should make you feel lighter, not heavier.

I believe busy entrepreneurs deserve better than another regurgitated tip list that may not quite be right for their business.

Today, everything I do is shaped by that moment, because when life gets real, I don’t want people to feel lost in the noise. I want them to feel like they finally heard something that actually clicked and that makes their business grow.

That’s what lit the fire. And it’s still burning.

Connect With Vicky

www.unscrewedmarketing.com

www.facebook.com/vickywu.us

www.linkedin.com/company/vickywuguru