Frank Soukup III spent 14 years selling lakeside cabins and desert ranch getaways. Now he is the first Chief Marketing Officer of Just For Kix, a 40-year-old dance company with 23,000 kids on its rosters. Same job, very different audience.
For most of his working life, Frank Soukup III sold the feeling of arriving somewhere. A dock on a Minnesota lake. A horse and a mountain in the Arizona desert. The quiet promise that you had booked the right getaway. Then, in the fall of 2025, he took a job selling something with a lot more glitter: sequins, teamwear, dance camps, and the confidence of a nine-year-old walking onto a competition floor for the first time.
In November 2025, Just For Kix and its custom-apparel division, The TeeHive, named Soukup their first-ever Chief Marketing Officer. It is a newly created seat. For a company that has been teaching kids to dance for roughly four decades, that timing says something on its own - the brand decided it needed a full-time storyteller-in-chief, and it went looking outside the dance world to find one.
Soukup did not grow up in the dance-apparel business. He grew up, professionally, in hospitality. He spent 14 years marketing destinations, a run that included Grand View Lodge in the Brainerd Lakes area and the Tanque Verde Ranch in Arizona. Along the way he served as Corporate Director of Marketing for the Cote Family Companies and Director of Marketing for Grand View Lodge, and at one point he owned and ran his own marketing agency.
Most recently he had landed at WhiteBox Marketing, a St. Cloud agency, as a senior strategist, where he was tasked with growing the firm's presence in the Brainerd market. On paper, resorts and youth dance have almost nothing in common. But look at what the job actually is - convince a family that this experience is worth their time, their money, and their loyalty - and the two start to rhyme.
That single sentence is basically the whole strategy. Two words are doing the heavy lifting: heritage and innovation. A 40-year-old brand has both an asset and a trap baked into its age. The asset is trust - moms who danced at Just For Kix as kids now sign up their own daughters. The trap is feeling dated to a generation that discovers everything through a phone. Soukup's stated job is to keep the first without triggering the second.
Honor the heritage first. Then earn the right to change how the brand talks.
The neat version of a marketing career is: pick an industry, climb it, stay. Soukup's map does not look like that. It hops from resort to ranch to agency ownership to in-house corporate marketing to a strategist chair and, finally, into a C-suite role in an entirely different category. The throughline was never the industry. It was the craft of telling a place, or a brand, why it matters.
There is a quiet lesson in that map for anyone who thinks a career has to be a straight line. Soukup treated his as a story he kept editing - each chapter carrying forward the same skill, applied to a new audience.
The CMO role covers two brands. Just For Kix is the dance program - classes, camps, competitions, and the dancewear that goes with them. The TeeHive is the custom-apparel and teamwear side, the business of putting a team's name on a shirt for schools, sports teams, and retail channels. Soukup's mandate is to make both feel like one coherent story across every touchpoint a customer hits.
And notice the three audiences he named: dancers, directors, and families. That is not a throwaway line. It is a genuinely hard marketing problem, because those three groups want different things from the same brand.
One brand, three very different jobs to be done - the balancing act at the center of the role.
A kid wants to feel like she belongs to something. A studio director wants tools, reliability, and a partner who makes her program look good. A parent wants to trust that the money and the miles are worth it. Speak only to the kid and you lose the parent. Speak only to the parent and the brand feels like a chore. Getting all three in one voice is the actual work - and it is exactly the kind of multi-audience puzzle Soukup spent 14 years solving in hospitality, where you are simultaneously selling to the traveler, the planner, and the person paying the bill.
Plenty of ambitious marketers treat a small town as a launch pad to somewhere bigger. Soukup did the opposite. Even while working for a St. Cloud agency, he kept his focus on the Brainerd market and stayed rooted in local institutions. He serves on the boards of the Brainerd Lakes Area Chamber, Hospitality Minnesota, the Hospitality Minnesota Education Foundation, and the Explore Minnesota Tourism Advisory Council.
Those seats are not decoration. They are how a regional economy actually markets itself - and they gave Soukup a working understanding of destination branding at the state level. Just For Kix, headquartered in nearby Baxter, Minnesota, is hiring someone who already knows how to sell Minnesota to the rest of the country. For a brand trying to grow its national footprint from a lake town, that local fluency is a feature.
Soukup signs off as Frank Soukup III, CHDM. The suffix marks a third-generation Frank Soukup. The initials stand for Certified Hospitality Digital Marketer - a professional credential he earned during his hospitality years, and a signal that his marketing instincts are backed by formal training in analytics and digital strategy, not just gut feel. His LinkedIn headline adds one more word to the picture: award-winning.
Put it together and you get a fairly precise portrait: a data-literate, community-anchored brand builder who has spent his whole career translating one audience to another. The industries changed - lakes, deserts, dance floors - but the assignment never did. Find what a brand actually stands for, then say it in a way the right people can hear.
The most interesting thing about Soukup's move is not that a marketer changed jobs. It is what the hire says about Just For Kix. A 40-year-old company looked at the next decade, decided its biggest challenge was a storytelling problem, and went and found a storyteller from an entirely different industry to solve it. The bet is that great brand-building travels - that whatever makes someone book a cabin can also make a family fall in love with a dance program. Soukup has spent his career proving that bet right. Now he gets to make it on the biggest stage he has had yet.