Leah Smith

CMO

Partners with CEOs and owners of multi-location restaurant, healthcare, and consumer brands to turn customer data into repeat business, sharpen brand positioning, and drive measurable revenue growth.

Learn How Leah Can Help Your Business

About Leah Smith

Leah Smith is a Chief Marketing Officer with 20+ years of experience helping multi-location, consumer-facing companies grow. She partners with CEOs and owners to turn customer data into repeat business, sharpen brands that have outgrown their founder or their category, and build marketing engines that tie every dollar to revenue. Her work spans fast-casual and full-service restaurants, urgent care and health services, and hospitality, from a 35-unit restaurant chain to a celebrity-chef portfolio, often at moments of disruption: a platform switch, a new market, a pandemic. Leah is hands-on and data-driven, and she leaves teams stronger than she found them, with the programs, measurement, and playbooks to keep growing on their own.

How Leah has Helped Businesses Grow

Drove 42% top-line sales growth over three years and 39% average unit volume growth at Veggie Grill, a 35-location fast-casual chain, scaling the marketing function from VP to CMO while leading its digital transformation.
Built Veggie Grill's loyalty program from the ground up, defining the pricing, reward structure, and guest segments, and paired it with a customer data platform to run segmented lifecycle campaigns. In month one: 43% more transacting guests, 228x more onboarding redemptions than the prior app, and 61% of online orders placed in-app.
Grew off-premise into Veggie Grill's largest channel. Delivery nearly doubled as a share of sales (10.5% to 20%), and by 2019 off-premise outsold dine-in company-wide.
As Chief Brand Officer of Exer Urgent Care, built a healthcare brand mid-pandemic and moved acquisition beyond a single channel. Conversion rose from 2% to 15% at flat spend, branded search outperformed generic 15x, and a return-on-ad-spend model proved a 16.4x return (about $8.1M in patient value on $495K).
Negotiated the exclusive launch of the Beyond Meat burger ahead of national chains. It hit #1 in product mix within weeks and helped deliver +8.3% comps against a +2.8% plan.
At MINA Group, built a brand architecture that stands on its own apart from its celebrity-chef founder, guiding four concept launches at once, and turned around an underperforming Miami restaurant with an 87% drop in cost per click and 15% database growth.

How Leah Leverages AI for Business Impact

Uses Claude and other AI tools to synthesize real estate, demographic, psychographic, and customer data, helping identify the strongest new markets and locations before capital is committed.
Applies AI to accelerate consumer and market research, quickly surfacing patterns across category, competitive, and customer data to sharpen positioning and strategy.
Pressure-tests growth strategies and go-to-market plans with AI, widening the range of scenarios considered before a recommendation is final.
Integrates AI into content and campaign development, moving ideas from concept to execution faster while protecting brand voice and creative quality.
Champions practical AI adoption inside client organizations, helping teams build AI into everyday marketing and strategic workflows.

Executive Experience

Chief Marketing Officer, MINA Group
Chief Brand Officer, Exer Urgent Care
Chief Marketing Officer, Veggie Grill
Vice President of Marketing, West Coast, Patina Restaurant Group
Regional Director of Marketing, Joie de Vivre Hospitality
Global Brand Marketing Manager, Waldorf Astoria, Hilton Hotels Corp.

Education

BS, Marketing Management, Virginia Tech, Pamplin College of Business

Download Leah's Resume Here

Expertise

Industry Experience

Health & Wellness Services
Multi-Location Consumer Brands

Specialties

Loyalty Marketing
Brand Strategy/Refresh
Digital Marketing
Growth Strategy

Performance Marketing
Go-to-Market Strategy
New Revenue Channels (off-premise, delivery, partnerships)
Product Launch & Innovation
Marketing ROI & Measurement
Marketing Team & Agency Leadership

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