Good Ideas + Bad Decisions

In this episode of 'Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,' hosts Kat and Ellen sit down with Emily Oberman, founder of The Content Atelier, a copywriter and content strategist who built a boutique agency around long-form content, newsletters (including Substack), and podcast support after recognizing a gap in the market for writers who actually understand the nuance of founder-led storytelling. The conversation spans remote work, packaging services as a generalist, navigating AI, a tough 2025 economy, and her advice to founders.

Emily Oberman is a copywriter, content strategist, and founder of The Content Atelier, a boutique content marketing agency that focuses on long-form content. She has over 10 years of experience in content and systems strategy and has ghostwritten for over 150 individuals and brands. Her clients consider her their digital Mary Poppins.

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

00:00 Podcast Welcome

00:47 Chaotic Catch Up

01:27 Meet Emily Oberman

03:11 Long Form Content Focus

04:24 Substack Versus Blogs

07:06 Podcast Strategy Work

07:42 From Corporate To Remote

08:27 Commuting And Childcare

11:02 Remote Agency To Solo

11:55 Imaginary Friends Origin

13:35 Digital Mary Poppins Brand

16:46 AI And Marketing Ops

19:40 Clients Using AI Drafts

22:27 Why And Who First

24:48 Values Driven Services

25:43 Pricing For Small Business

27:00 Choosing Tools By Values

28:59 Claude Versus ChatGPT

30:18 Generalist Boundaries

31:53 Intuition And Human Design

33:41 Remote Work Setup

37:19 Contractors And Volatility

41:34 Female Founder Stigma

43:50 Advice And Wrap Up

In this mini-episode of ‘Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,’ Kat and Ellen discuss Kat’s first hypnosis session with Kelly Chessen of Hope Rd. Hypnosis that focused on her relationship with money. Kat describes a guided visualization exercise involving inviting past influences on money to a mental table, confronting negative associations, inner-child emotions, and asking money what it needs. Kat feels empowered by her takeaway about using money for creativity, joy, and connection and notes new opportunities arising. They close by discussing how to talk with clients about money, pricing, and boundaries.

Don't forget to⁠ submit your business questions⁠ for future episodes! 

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

In this episode of 'Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,' hosts Kat and Ellen welcome Vicky Winkler, founder of Wildly Creative Wellness, an art journaling and creative wellness community. Vicky shares how art journaling helped her move from feeling "only okay" to finding real purpose and fulfillment. She describes art journaling as focused on process over outcome with no perfectionism required, and explains how that mindset can build confidence to experiment in other areas of life too. She outlines her Wildly Creative’s monthly themes, weekly prompts, live creation calls, and co-working sessions, and the group discusses why rigid routines like The Artist's Way can fall short and how to start simply instead.

Vicky Winkler is the founder of Wildly Creative Wellness, a space where everyday people discover that creativity has always lived inside them. Through art journaling workshops, online retreats, and one on one support, she helps people slow down, reconnect with themselves, and find fulfillment through self-expression. Her work is rooted in the belief that making art isn’t just for “artists.” It’s for anyone who wants to feel more alive.

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

00:00 Podcast Welcome

01:09 Meet Vicky Winkler

02:34 Why Art Journaling

04:59 Perfectionism Blocks

06:26 Journal Not Canvas

08:00 Creative Without Selling

10:36 Membership Breakdown

14:07 Calls And Sanctuary

15:20 Artists Way Debate

20:06 Five Minute Practice

21:17 Tools For Regulation

23:51 No Rules Mindset

25:30 Leap of Faith Art

25:49 Cortisol and Creativity

26:42 Blank Page Tricks

27:27 Five Minute Time Paradox

28:45 Timers Flow and Breaks

32:03 Finding Art Journaling

35:01 Creative Identity Blocks

36:35 Easy Supplies to Start

38:56 Healing Through Drawing

42:18 Try It and Connect

43:38 Episode Wrap Up

In this mini-episode of “Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,” Kat and Ellen dive into the topic of discovery calls and networking. Kat walks through her approach of offering a single free 30-minute call for prospective clients, collaborators, and general connections alike. Kat and Ellen address client fit, barters and trades, and keeping up a connection. The episode also explores the value of maintaining boundaries, being intentional about how time is given, and keeping follow-up communication clear and straightforward.

Don't forget to⁠ submit your business questions⁠ for future episodes! 

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

In this episode of ‘Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,’ Kat and Ellen talk with Natasha Golinsky, who built a web development agency by hiring a developer despite having no web experience herself. After a stage two breast cancer diagnosis in 2024, she onboarded a trusted former client as project manager, freeing her to focus on business development. Natasha now pursues thought leadership around trauma-informed leadership for female founders, using nervous-system work to overcome personal blocks. She offers her wisdom on entrepreneurship and healing as well as specific advice on how and why to delegate. 

Natasha Golinsky has spent over a decade as CEO of On Purpose Projects, a full-stack web development agency. When she returned after chemo, her team was thriving without her, and she finally stepped into what she'd been doing behind the scenes for years. Natasha spent years learning somatic healing and nervous system regulation, tools she'd shared with peers for years before cancer gave her the space to do it professionally. Through her company Never Launch on a Friday, she works with female agency owners and service-based founders on the inner work that strategy alone can't fix. She used to support the web project. Now she supports the woman behind the business.

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

00:00 Podcast Welcome

01:15 Meet The Guest

01:56 Coffee And Anxiety

02:40 First Espresso Story

04:52 Agency Origin Story

06:51 Cancer Diagnosis Shock

07:58 Emergency Team Handoff

09:56 Returning To Work

11:18 New Path After Ops

13:47 Trauma Informed Leadership

15:44 Content Creation Breakthrough

20:51 Human Design And Community

24:18 Human Design Validation

24:34 Weekly Structure Planning

25:51 Hunter vs Farmer Marketing

28:18 Delegation and Team Fit

31:16 Simple Systems That Stick

34:23 Vision Board and Next Moves

37:03 Selling the Agency Soon

39:00 Planning in Uncertain Times

42:58 Final Wisdom on Healing

In this mini-episode of 'Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,' Kat and Ellen catch up on Ellen’s recent London trip, where she visited a friend who works at the British Museum, and Kat shares she’s heading to a women’s business retreat in Point Reyes where she’ll lead a workshop on flexible business systems. They then discuss how they handle being out of office: evolving boundaries over time, communicating availability case by case with clients, relying on standard boundaries (like not replying on certain days), remembering most issues aren’t true emergencies, and taking real breaks to avoid burnout.

Don't forget to⁠ submit your business questions⁠ for future episodes! 

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

In this episode of ‘Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,’ Kat and Ellen talk with Lauren Most, founder of Mirror Mirror and former Chief People Officer and Fortune 10 Executive, holding HR leadership positions at GE and Walmart. She shares how imposter syndrome and emotional self-abandonment led her to leave corporate leadership and build a coaching practice for high achievers. Lauren explores “invisible rules,” unconscious beliefs, and why traditional therapy often falls short, outlining her somatic and narrative-based approach to helping clients shift patterns and expand capacity. The episode closes with a reminder that we have more agency than we think and growth starts by looking forward, not back.

Lauren Most is an executive advisor and founder of Mirror Mirror, an advisory practice focused on helping senior leaders improve decision-making, performance, and leadership under complexity. With over 15 years of experience in high-growth and Fortune 10 environments, she has served as a Chief People Officer and held leadership roles at companies including GE, Walmart, and Roivant Sciences. Lauren specializes in helping high-achieving leaders build sustainable, capacity-driven performance through systems-level thinking and behavioral science.

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

00:00 Check-in & guest introduction

02:00 Lauren's background and what Mirror Mirror coaching does

06:00 Shared experiences: intuition, social-emotional learning, imposter syndrome

09:26 Self-sacrifice, self-abandonment & what therapy couldn't fix

13:00 Invisible rules, culture & looking outside ourselves

18:33 Human Design, Reflectors & the name "Mirror Mirror"

24:38 The leap: leaving corporate & founding the business

29:22 Coaching methodology: the 99%, beliefs as roots & modalities

37:45 Stories, states, burnout & growing capacity

51:56 Parting wisdom & where to find Lauren

In this mini-episode of “Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,” Ellen and Kat catch up on personal updates and discuss tips for hosting effective workshops or classes online or in person. They note many service-based businesses feel pressure to create workshops or “evergreen” courses as alternative income, but underestimate the time and energy required and the challenge of filling the room. They emphasize building workshops around genuine expertise, clear value, and real audience demand, and suggest partnering with existing communities or events to reduce risk. Kat shares she’s preparing to lead an in-person workshop at a Point Reyes retreat and is adapting her creative operations content for broader business owners. 

Don't forget to⁠ submit your business questions⁠ for future episodes! 

Kat is the Founder of  kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

Kat and Ellen kick off season two of ‘Good Ideas + Bad Decisions’ with PR strategist KJ Blattenbauer, founder of Hearsay PR, who makes a bold case that real PR should cost you nothing because earned media means borrowing audiences, not buying them. KJ breaks down how to spot red flags when vetting PR help (run from anyone promising guaranteed placements) and why a business without clarity or operational readiness isn't PR-ready yet. Drawing from an accidental start in crisis communications, she shares the winding path that led her to entrepreneurship and building her own agency. KJ closes with advice to get clear on what you want to be known for and where your audience is, and protect your mornings from tech.

KJ Blattenbauer is a publicist and brand strategist with nearly three decades of experience helping founders, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders move from respected to widely recognized. As the founder of Hearsay PR, she specializes in shaping clear narratives the media actually wants to tell, with a track record spanning consumer brands, sports, and crisis communications, placing clients in Forbes, Architectural Digest, Inc., Fast Company, and beyond. She is the two-time bestselling author of Pitchworthy and Pitchworthy: The Workbook, and her own insights have been featured across business, lifestyle, and design media.

Kat is the Founder of kat&co, a Creative Operations Consultant, and the Co-Owner and Director of Operations at Benchwork Fabrication. She helps interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, ⁠The Quiet Wins⁠.

00:00 Podcast Welcome

00:47 Season Two Kickoff

01:53 Meet KJ Blattenbauer

02:40 PR For Anyone

03:48 Astronaut PR Explained

04:57 Pay To Play Exposed

07:18 Free PR Channels

10:18 Choosing A Publicist

12:29 PR Myths And Red Flags

16:42 When PR Makes Sense

20:09 KJ Origin Story

21:36 Clarity Drives Recognition

22:07 Small Town Reputation Lessons

23:17 Why Some Stars Stick

23:49 Breaking Into PR

25:12 Crisis to Wellness Pivot

26:02 Leaping Into Entrepreneurship

27:01 Mob Wife Loyalty Mindset

28:01 Fear, Regret, and Taking Risks

30:18 Doing It for Younger You

33:42 Two Books and Daily Routine

39:31 Protect Your First Hour

42:45 Parting PR Advice and Wrap

In this mini-episode of “Good Ideas + Bad Decisions,” Ellen and Kat share business updates, including their Thursday recording rhythm and a shout-out to Cereal Dreams ahead of market season. Ellen also books a library room to catch up after a hectic few weeks. Kat announces a new venture, Benchwork Fabrication, a custom furniture and millwork company she’s co-founding, and walks through early steps like securing shop space, building a website, creating sales materials, and setting up the business structure and partnership agreement.

Don't forget to submit your business questions for future episodes! 

Kat is the Founder of kat&co and a Creative Operations Consultant, helping interior designers and creatives turn ideas into streamlined, sustainable businesses. With a background in psychology and deep experience in creative business operations, she’s known for navigating the intersection of creativity and systems with both strategy and empathy. Join her newsletter, The kat&co Download.

Ellen Hockley is a three-time entrepreneur, small business consultant, community builder, and the founder of Ellen Hockley Consulting and SAGE Women. She guides female founders to build intuitive, values-driven businesses aligned with the life they want for themselves and their families. Join her Substack newsletter, The Quiet Wins.