VP · Marketing & Communications

Richard K.
Young

B2B revenue marketing and communications executive. 25+ years across brand, demand gen, content, PR, and operations. I build marketing functions to turn complex offerings into pipeline.

RY
Richard K. Young
01 — What I believe

Story = Revenue

I've believed it since my first job in a TV newsroom, where you get 30 seconds to make someone care about something complicated. Figure it out or lose the audience. Everything below comes from that.

Rich Young presenting on stage at the SIG Global Executive Summit, gesturing toward a screen showing his name and role at Fine Tune next to a co-presenter from ATI.
On stage at the SIG Global Executive Summit telling a client expansion story.
01

Marketing exists to create a customer

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We don't build the product. We build the reason people want it. Content that doesn't move someone toward buying is a hobby, and an expensive one.

02

Sales and marketing share one number

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Revenue. When the two teams fight over credit, the pipeline is what suffers. I run them as one group pointed at the same goal.

03

B2B buying is messy and unpredictable

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Committees, timing, peers, reputation, conversations that never touch your CRM. No attribution model captures that. The real drivers, brand, trust, community, are the hardest to measure and the reason buyers pick you before sales ever gets a call.

04

Your website is now the closer

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Buyers run their research inside AI assistants now, then land on your site ready to decide. Less traffic, much higher intent. The site has to close: conversational, tailored, built to convert the few who show up.

05

Be top of mind when they're ready to buy

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You can't predict the moment a prospect decides to act. So be everywhere that matters, in every format, and you're already there when the moment comes.

06

Speed is overrated

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In an age of AI sameness, more cadences and more videos just add noise. Judgment is what creates context, and context is what makes anything worth paying attention to.

07

Do your day job, and moonlight on AI

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The winning marketers are self-educating and applying that knowledge when no one is looking. Lead that shift instead of waiting for it, and you'll be just fine.

08

Experiential, done right, is a superpower

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Naisbitt called it in 1982: the more high-tech the world gets, the more people crave high-touch. As buyer journeys go AI-native, real connection (events, dinners, community) becomes the gap worth owning.

09

Marketing is no longer the arts-and-crafts dept. 😀

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Routing every small edit to a marketing resource is ending. Everyone should be able to prompt a bot to tailor a one-pager for a sales call or a PPT for a QBR. Marketing owns the system now, well beyond the visuals.

02 — Recent work

One story, told across every play.

Each row is a real play I ran to make a hard category land: the channel, the format, the campaign. Paid, organic, owned, earned. Click any screenshot to see the actual work. Every play serves the same goal at the top of this page.

Convenience Store News page hosting a Fine Tune interactive feature headlined Stop Overpaying for Your Complex Indirect Services. View →
Trade media · Interactive

Interactive content asset

An interactive piece placed in trade media to tell the Fine Tune brand story in a category nobody finds exciting.

See the piece →
Cover for the Buy: The Way podcast, episode one, an Art of Procurement and Fine Tune collaboration. Listen →
Owned · Podcast

26-episode podcast

A year-long series that walks listeners through an industry's hardest problems, one episode at a time.

Listen →
Fine Tune landing page headlined Do You Have a Uniform Rental Contract with Cintas or UniFirst, built around the merger. View →
Paid search

Google Ads campaign

Paid search built to catch buyers the moment a disruptive merger put their spend in play.

See the landing page →
LinkedIn post by Rich Young analyzing how often CEOs and CFOs mention cost savings on earnings calls. View →
Paid social

LinkedIn thought-leader ads

An engagement-first ad built to fuel retargeting and programmatic motions down the line.

See the post →
Fine Tune website in 2016.
2016 · inherited
Fine Tune website after the first rebrand in 2021.
2021 · first rebrand
Fine Tune website after the 2026 rebrand.
2026 · today
Brand

Corporate rebrand

Three brands in one tenure: the one I inherited, the first rebrand, and this year's. Same company, a sharper story each time.

Fine Tune and SupplyChainDive co-branded guide titled Your Guide to Taming Indirect Expenses and Protecting the Bottom Line.
Lead gen

Gated content asset

A co-branded guide sent to a media outlet's full subscriber base to pull in net-new leads.

03 — Experience
Fine Tune
VP, Marketing & Communications
Remote · 2019 – Present
revenue growth over 7 years
  • Hired as Fine Tune's first full-time marketing leader. Built the function from scratch across strategy, brand, team, and systems, supporting 3x revenue growth and earning President's Club three times, rare for a marketing role.
  • Built an earned-media engine from zero, landing national and trade coverage (USA Today, Future of Sourcing, CFO, Spend Matters, SupplyChainDive) plus podcasts and conference stages, and coached 5+ executive spokespeople to carry it.
  • Ran a full rebrand and website relaunch, then built demand generation across SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn, events, and nurture, now producing hundreds of qualified leads per quarter on a $250K–$300K annual paid budget.
  • Led go-to-market for new service launches and built the AI-driven marketing stack (Dynamics 365, Power BI, Apollo.io, custom automation) behind research, prospecting, and reporting.
Student Transportation of America
VP, Marketing & Communications
Charleston, SC · Dec 2016 – 2019
$3.9M
new business, FY2019
  • Hired as STA's first marketing and communications executive; built the function from scratch, including first budget and first team, across brand, demand gen, content, PR, and digital for a $22M unit spanning six business units.
  • Drove FY2019 campaigns that generated $3.9M in new business (17.7% revenue increase), plus $18M in pipeline over the following 15 months.
  • Positioned School Bus Safety Co. as category leader on the Map-21 regulation through a multichannel program (900-registrant webinar, trade PR, paid search, nurture) that sold 17 net-new courses in three months.
mindSHIFT Technologies
Director of Marketing · a Ricoh USA subsidiary
Charleston, SC · Nov 2014 – Dec 2016
+$13M
revenue growth
  • Owned marketing, demand generation, and communications for the 4th-largest global MSP; managed a team of 10 plus external agencies.
  • Grew annual revenue from $147M to $160M (8.8%); built a $1.05M MRR pipeline and closed $207K in MRR worth $7.5M over contract life.
  • Rebuilt reporting and a $1.2M digital advertising program around marketing ROI; launched a cold-to-warm nurture strategy with Inside Sales.
eGroup, Inc.
Marketing & Corporate Communications Manager
Charleston, SC · Jul 2012 – Nov 2014
$1.4M
revenue in first 15 months
  • Led marketing and corporate communications for a $27M IT solutions provider; built brand recognition in new markets with partners including EMC, VMware, Cisco, and Citrix.
  • Generated $1.4M in revenue ($366K gross margin) in the first 15 months; implemented Pardot marketing automation.
  • Relaunched the website to a 134% increase in new visits and 120% increase in organic Google traffic within five months; earned the EMC Partner Services Quality Award three years running (2012–2014).
LEWIS Global Communications
VP & Partner
Boston, MA · Sep 2004 – Jul 2012
117%
average retainer growth
  • Promoted from Account Director to Managing Director of the Boston office in three years, then to Partner (2007) and VP (2009); ran the firm's 2nd-largest US office.
  • Managed a 10-person PR team and $1.3M in annual client retainers; grew average Boston retainer 117% over five years.
  • Secured coverage in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, AP, Fox Business, and eWEEK for clients including Unisys, Progress Software, and Lexmark.
04 — What I do

Full-stack marketing leadership.

B2B Marketing Strategy Demand Generation Brand & Positioning Public Relations Media & Analyst Relations Content & Thought Leadership Go-to-Market & Product Launch Account Growth / Land-and-Expand Marketing Operations Marketing Automation (Pardot, ClickDimensions) CRM (Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Salesforce) Power BI / Analytics AI-Driven Marketing Team Leadership & Budget Ownership

Earlier experience

Senior Account Representative, Lois Paul & Partners (2002–2004) · Analyst, The Yankee Group (2000–2001) · Account Executive, Sterling Hager / Shift Communications (1998–2000).

Education

B.A., Communications — Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA · Dean's List.

05 — The napkin test

This is Fine Tune, drawn on a napkin.

Someone asked me what we do. I grabbed a napkin and drew this (sorry, design team). If an idea can't survive a napkin, the message isn't finished.

Let's talk about your next marketing hire.

Open to VP-level marketing and communications roles. Fastest way to reach me is email.