Consulting for in-house marketing and creative operations
Boutique attention.
Enterprise-level expertise.
BizLift is a partner-led consulting firm advising companies on the design, transformation, and operation of in-house marketing and creative capabilities. The practice includes the design of in-house video, audio, podcast, and photography studios, the design and staffing of in-house creative and social media teams, and the integration of artificial intelligence into marketing and production workflows.
The firm also offers fractional Chief Marketing Officer and fractional Executive Producer services for organizations that require senior leadership without a full-time executive commitment.
Led directly by the partners
BizLift is led directly by its two partners, Elena Gonzalez and Francisco Vargas. Every engagement is led by a partner. There are no intermediating teams, junior consultants, or delegated work. The partners have built and operated the capabilities they now advise clients to build, and they perform the work themselves.
Both partners bring more than twenty years of senior leadership experience — Elena in marketing strategy and organizational transformation, Francisco in production for global consumer brands. Their full biographies appear below.
Where clients begin
-
Establishing new in-house agency, production, or creative capability where none exists today.
-
Improving the performance of existing in-house teams, studios, or agencies that are not delivering what the business requires.
-
Fundamentally redesigning the marketing organization for a changing competitive environment.
The firm's engagements fall into three categories, each addressing a distinct stage in the development of in-house marketing and creative capability.
Within each engagement type, the specialty work spans three practice areas: the design of in-house studios, the design and staffing of creative and social media teams, and the integration of artificial intelligence into marketing and production workflows.
Fractional leadership
For organizations that need senior executive direction without a full-time hire, Elena leads fractional Chief Marketing Officer engagements and Francisco leads fractional Executive Producer engagements. These engagements frequently precede or accompany Build, Optimize, or Transform work.
The partners
-
Elena Gonzalez is a senior marketing executive with more than two decades of experience leading marketing strategy, brand management, and large-scale transformation programs across global technology and growth-stage services companies.
Her career includes thirteen years at Hewlett-Packard and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she led integrated marketing campaigns and product positioning for the Business PCs portfolio, executed the global digital content rebranding following the company's split, and led change management for HP's largest organization through its digital transformation. She also led annual C-suite events and partnered with Human Resources to drive employee engagement programs across a sizable global workforce. Notable work includes developing the "world's most secure PCs" positioning still in use today, delivering three million dollars in cost savings through an offshore digital publishing model, and leading a global training program that reached 3,800 employees across 39 locations.
As Director of Marketing and Customer Engagement at Ambassador Services USA, Elena led the company's marketing strategy, brand revamp, and external communications across vertical segments. Her work drove thirty-one percent revenue growth and helped position the company among the top five percent of fastest-growing businesses nationwide.
Elena currently serves as fractional CMO for uSource, a marketplace platform connecting homeowners with local service professionals, and advises other companies on marketing strategy and execution. She holds a Master of Business Administration from Our Lady of the Lake University and a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is fully bilingual in English and Spanish.
-
Francisco Vargas is a senior production executive with more than twenty years leading video, audio, and photography production for global consumer brands. He brings a strong creative point of view paired with operational rigor, translating business objectives — such as thought leadership, industry influence, creator engagement, and internal culture — into world-class visual storytelling and experiences.
His work spans operational ownership of production at Fortune 500 scale, including seven-figure budgets, multi-country campaigns, and high-volume concurrent workloads. He has designed and implemented in-house creative studios that deliver more than 1,000 assets annually, materially reducing client dependency on external agencies. Francisco is known for building scalable production systems, mentoring high-performing teams, and partnering closely with senior executives, creatives, and external production partners to deliver work that is culturally relevant, strategically aligned, and rigorously executed.
Francisco has produced work for Adidas, Bank of America, Budweiser, Chevron, Foot Locker, Gatorade, GEICO, Honda, Hyundai, Microsoft, the NBA, Reebok, SAP, Shell, Stellantis, Visa, and Walmart, among others. His campaign and music video productions have featured Travis Scott, Drake, One Direction, J.J. Watt, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Yao Ming, Maxo Kream, and Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge.
Fully bilingual in English and Spanish, Francisco has extensive international production experience across Latin America. He serves as the USA Hispanic Representative to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and as Executive Director of CÃrculo Creativo USA, where he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Filmmaking Program at Houston City College.
How the partners work together
Elena leads engagements primarily focused on marketing strategy, organizational design, and creative team structure. Francisco leads engagements primarily focused on production operations, studio design, and executive producer advisory. Many engagements involve both partners because in-house marketing and creative capability often spans both areas.
Where an engagement clearly falls in one partner's specialty, that partner leads the work directly. Where an engagement spans both, one partner leads while the other contributes on specific dimensions. In either case, the client works directly with the named partner throughout the engagement.
How the firm operates
Independence
BizLift does not sell talent, technology, equipment, or vendor services, and does not accept referral fees or maintain financial relationships with vendors it may recommend, including providers of AI platforms, camera and audio equipment, systems integration, staffing and recruiting firms, or any of the other specialist providers involved in building in-house capability. When an engagement identifies the need for new partners, systems, staff, or vendors, recommendations are made independently, based on what serves the client's business. Compensation derives from the advisory fee alone.
Confidentiality
All engagements are conducted under strict confidentiality. Client relationships, work product, and commercial terms are never disclosed. The firm does not publish case studies, share client work, or reference engagements in social media or business development materials. Work is referenced externally only when it is already in the public domain and the client has provided written permission.
Non-exclusivity
The firm serves multiple clients concurrently, with confidentiality obligations that govern all engagements regardless of industry overlap.
Who the firm works with
The firm advises founders, chief executives, and executive leadership teams at brands, agencies, and production companies. Clients range from well-funded start-ups establishing their marketing and creative foundation, to growth-stage organizations building marketing operations for the first time, to mid-market companies restructuring how marketing and creative work happens, to established enterprises transforming in-house capabilities for a new competitive environment.
The firm works with organizations that regard creativity as a primary lever of business performance. These are companies for which how the brand thinks, presents itself, and appears in market constitutes strategy rather than decoration. The common characteristic across clients is the recognition that senior strategic judgment, applied at the right moments, changes how a business performs.
Get in touch
BizLift accepts a limited number of new engagements each year. Elena and Francisco respond to inquiries personally within two business days.