Molly McClure Built the Growth Engine Herself
With more than 20 years moving the needle in fintech, financial services and enterprise technology, she turned a Gold Stevie Award and a string of record-breaking campaigns into something rarer still: a business she actually owns.
There is a version of the marketing executive the corporate world trained us to expect: someone who manages brand guidelines, approves creative briefs and reports to a function that is quietly treated as a cost center. Molly McClure arrived from a different direction entirely. She grew up working on her grandparents' cherry farm in northern Michigan, where the connection between effort and outcome was never abstract. She carried that sensibility through more than two decades of building marketing functions from scratch inside some of the most demanding organizations in financial services and fintech, and she has spent every chapter of that career insisting that marketing be held to the same standard of accountability as any other growth function in the business.
The record she assembled along the way is not decorative. At intelliflo, Invesco's fintech division, she built the entire U.S. marketing function and helped move the brand from 12th to 2nd in top-of-mind financial advisor awareness, while driving 25% year-over-year marketing-driven revenue growth and 67% marketing-sourced closed-won revenue. At USAA, she launched the company's first dedicated annuities marketing campaign - reporting a 35% increase in annuity calculator form fills - and led brand and go-to-market strategy for the company's first branded ETF launch, six funds listed on NYSE Arca. She holds an MBA from Michigan State University and a BA from Wake Forest University, and she has been recognized in 2025 with a Gold Stevie Award for Marketing Executive of the Year, among other honors.
Today, Molly is channeling that two-decade track record into something she has never had before: an ownership stake in the business she is helping build. As Fractional CMO and equity partner at DrugScreens.com, a national drug-testing supply company based in Boerne, TX, she is applying proven demand-generation and marketing-strategy principles to a company she is growing for herself as much as for anyone else. The transition was not inevitable - it was chosen, deliberately, after a corporate role ended sooner than expected and she decided that waiting for the next opportunity was less interesting than creating one.
A Stevie, a divestiture and a 200% lift in demo requests
The recognition that arrived in 2025 - a Gold Stevie for Marketing Executive of the Year, a Silver for Marketing Disruptor of the Year and a Bronze in the same category - reflects the full range of what McClure built at intelliflo. The Silver is associated with a 15-plus-channel omnichannel campaign that reportedly increased live demo requests by 200%. The Bronze recognizes her three-year presence program at the Future Proof festival, which drove an 81% year-over-year increase in opened opportunities and a 133% year-over-year increase in qualified opportunities, and which the submission credits with contributing to a major customer win within two months of the event.
The Future Proof work is a useful illustration of how she approaches a brief. Rather than treating conference presence as a visibility exercise, she built an experience - including a virtual surfboard simulator activation - that was engineered to generate measurable pipeline. The results she reports suggest the approach worked. That same instinct, connecting creative execution directly to commercial outcomes, runs through every chapter of her career.
Her time at intelliflo also included leading U.S. marketing through the company's divestiture from Invesco to Carlyle, a transaction described in her submission as being valued at up to $200 million. Navigating a brand through a corporate transaction of that scale, while simultaneously building pipeline and managing a multichannel campaign program, is the kind of complexity that does not show up cleanly on a resume but shapes how an executive thinks about risk, communication and organizational change.
The philosophy behind the results
McClure has a clear answer when asked what separates great leaders from average ones, and it does not center on speed or decisiveness. She has cited the example of Chipotle's CMO, who spent his first days on the job working restaurant shifts and reading every past campaign and award entry before changing a single thing - asking questions rather than arriving with a plan already formed, on the principle that the people who were there before you were not stupid. That is, she has said, exactly how she has always tried to lead: starting by listening to the people closest to the work before building anything.
Her argument is that average leaders move fast to prove themselves, while great leaders earn the right to change things by demonstrating genuine respect for what came before them. She extends that principle to the advice she would give her younger self: borrow the chair, don't assume you own it. Early in her career, she has acknowledged, she mistook speed for impact. Real credibility, she now argues, comes from small, visible wins and genuine respect for the team being inherited - not from moving fast enough to leave a mark before anyone notices.
That philosophy has practical implications for how she thinks about the current moment in marketing technology. She is paying close attention to AI transformation, but her framing is deliberate: AI is a people and workflow problem, not a tools problem. The goal is not to add a tool to an existing process but to redesign how people actually work. That is the approach she applied when she developed a custom GPT for DrugScreens.com - mapped to one real business problem rather than launched as a pilot that fades once people return to their day jobs. She also tracks what she describes as the need for brands to be legible to machines, not just to people, noting that nearly half of what AI platforms say about a company is generated independently, without anyone writing it.
Twenty years of building from the ground up
McClure's career has taken her through three distinct institutional environments, each of which added a different dimension to her understanding of how marketing creates business value. At USAA, she operated inside one of the most trusted financial services brands in the country, launching its first annuities marketing campaign and leading go-to-market strategy for its first branded ETF. She also led marketing through the sale of USAA's asset management business to Victory Capital - her second experience navigating a marketing function through a major corporate transaction.
At intelliflo, the environment was different: a fintech brand that needed to establish itself in the U.S. market from a position of near-invisibility among financial advisors. Building the marketing function from scratch, repositioning the brand from 12th to 2nd in advisor awareness and sustaining 25% year-over-year revenue growth required a different kind of discipline - one that combined creative ambition with rigorous measurement. At OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, she built the firm's first demand generation engine and secured thought leadership placement in Barron's before her time there ended earlier than anticipated.
She has also built a parallel presence as a published voice in her field. She is a contributor to Advisorpedia, has published in the Wealth Solutions Report and contributed to the anthology "She Rises: Stories of Strength and Becoming." She is a frequent podcast guest and maintains an active LinkedIn presence with a reported following of more than 8,500. In 2024, she received the ThinkAdvisor Luminaries Award for Excellence in Marketing/PR and was named a Top Female Business Leader of San Antonio - a recognition she has received in 2024, 2025 and 2026. She was also named to the 2025 Top 30 Most Influential FinTech Marketers list.
Ownership, mentorship and what comes next
The decision to become Fractional CMO and equity partner at DrugScreens.com was not a retreat from ambition. It was an expression of it. After more than two decades of driving growth for other organizations, McClure chose a path that gives her a direct ownership interest in the outcomes she is generating. Her submission is clear that this chapter does not represent a permanent departure from corporate leadership - she remains open to returning to an executive role with the right organization, particularly one that values transparency, accountability, strong culture and meaningful growth.
What the current role offers is something her corporate positions could not: the experience of building for herself. The marketing principles she is applying at DrugScreens.com are the same ones she developed across enterprise technology, financial services and fintech - demand generation, brand positioning, measurable pipeline growth - but the stakes are different when the business is partly yours.
Alongside that work, she mentors emerging women leaders through the Dashney Women's Leadership Accelerator and previously served on the board of a nonprofit equestrian therapy organization supporting veterans and first responders. The through-line connecting those commitments is the same one that connects the cherry farm in northern Michigan to the Stevie podium: a belief that showing up consistently, maintaining standards when circumstances are difficult and building something that outlasts the moment you are in is what real professional credibility looks like.
This profile is reported from publicly available information and materials provided by Molly McClure. Nothing in this article is presented as a quotation unless it appears in quotation marks with attribution.