Every business starts as an idea. It’s a little thought that you can’t shake. You think about it when you’re in the car, walking to pick up your kids from school, or laying down to sleep at night.

A lot of people think about starting businesses. Some of them even start taking baby steps in that direction. But it’s a minority of people that actually start the businesses they dream about. But then what’s the difference between the person that just dreams of starting a business and the person who actually starts one?

That difference is action. In order to start the business of your dreams, you have to turn that dream into action steps. And in this week’s episode, Nikita Montgomery is joining me for today’s conversation about how to translate your big vision into something smaller and more tangible that you can start now.

Niki has started several businesses here in the DC area, but her latest venture is that she is the co-founder of Hazel O Salon, a luxury hair salon in Old Town Alexandria. In today’s show, she’s going into how to start a business small but set yourself up for growth. Specifically, talking about:

• How to overcome the fear of embarrassment when you’re just getting started.
• What to focus on when you’re starting from scratch.
• Simple and free strategies to research your competitors and ideal client.
• How to translate your big vision into a Minimum Viable Product.

Links

Download the Service Business Startup Checklist

Download the Year-End Review & Reflection Guide

Follow Katie on Instagram 

Visit Katie’s website 

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

What would you do if you weren’t afraid? For me, the answer to that question was to start this podcast. I had been wanting to start a podcast for over a year, but I hadn’t made any progress. If I’m being honest, what was really holding me back was fear. Fear of looking silly. Fear that no one would listen. Fear of not being able to figure it out and make it work.

My guess is that you have something in your life and your business that you’ve always dreamed of doing but you’re afraid that it won’t work. Afraid of failing. Afraid of looking silly to people you respect.

Overcoming fear is just one of the things we are talking about today on this podcast. To celebrate my 100th episode, my client and fellow podcast host Merritt Onsa is interviewing me today and asking all of your burning questions about life and business.

We gathered a lot of these questions in advance from you guys on social media and via email, so much fun to be on the other side of the microphone for a change.

• How and why I started my business
• The scrappy and no-frills strategy I used to get my first clients in the door
• How I decided to focus on working with creatives
• Advice I would give to my younger self

From the bottom of my heart, thanks for listening. Thanks for being here.

Links

Follow Katie on Instagram 

Follow Merritt on Instagram

Check out Merritt’s podcast, Devoted Dreamers

Get the 90-day planning template

Episode 20 with Lauren Ramirez

Episode 93 with Jena Viviano Dunay (Katie’s favorite episode)

Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what we’re good at. If I asked you -- “what are you great at?” you might struggle to come up with an answer. Or if you could, you would probably rattle off a list of your weaknesses without batting an eye. 

The biggest asset that you can use to grow your business is probably something that’s so easy, so effortless, and second nature for you that you aren’t even aware that you’re doing it. If we are blind to our strengths, we are blind to the most powerful tool that we have to grow our business.

To help us understand our strengths and find an appreciation and gratitude for them is Anna Nelson. Anna is a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach, particularly in the strength's finder assessment, which helps you understand your strengths and how to leverage them for your career. 

In this episode, she’s going to break down for us: 

• What is a strength? How is it different from a skill or our personality? 
• How can we begin to recognize our natural strengths? 
• What’s the key paradigm shift we need to make to go from hiding our strengths and FULLY owning them? 

Links

Learn more about Anna Nelson at her website and follow her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram: @annaynelson

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work. 

I’ve heard it 1000 times, “My market is so saturated”. What that means, however, is that there are a lot of other people who do what you do. Think of it like a sponge: when it’s full, it can’t take on any more water. When a market is fully saturated, it means that all of the customers are being served. In order to get customers, you have to take them away from the competition or increase the demand for your product.  

So why should your ideal client work with you instead of someone else? It’s not just having better skills than the competition. You have to understand what the competitive landscape in your market looks like and figure out how you’re going to stand out in the eyes of your ideal client. Standing out requires articulating your differentiators – the things that make you different from the competition. Defining what makes you different is one of the hardest things to figure out. To help you lean into it, I’ll be sharing 10 ways you can stand out from the competition: 

1. Branding 
2. Customer service 
3. Experience/expertise 
4. Systems 
5. Aesthetic/Style 
6. Values 
7. Personality 
8. Approach 
9. Pricing 
10. Business model  

Links 
 

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work. 

Sales don’t have to make you uncomfortable. In fact, even if you are a total introvert, you can craft a sales process that feels authentic to you and plays to your strengths. But how can you sell your services in a way that feels comfortable and authentic to who you are instead of like you’re imitating a sleazy, pushy salesperson? 

Leah Neaderthal is a sales coach for women and the founder of Smart Gets Paid, and the host of The Smart Gets Paid podcast. A three-time business owner who started her career in corporate marketing, Leah didn’t learn to sell by being a commissioned salesperson. She taught herself everything she could about selling, overcame “selling shyness,” and created a sales approach that feels comfortable, builds strong client relationships, and gets results.   

In this episode, Leah teaches us how to: 

• How to educate your potential customers about the value you provide before they ever reach out to you.  
• Why introverts have an advantage in consultative selling (aka selling that involves talking on the phone with your customers before they buy).  
• Practical ways that you can make it easy for your clients to say yes.  
• How to minimize ghosting (and respond correctly when it happens). 

Links

Connect with Leah on LinkedIn or Facebook. To see more of her work, check out her website and podcast, The Smart Gets Paid. 

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work. 

Are you busy updating your website for the nth time, taking up a lot of time creating a reel, or posting a testimonial on social media? Or are you spending your time reaching out to a prospect, or sending a DM to a new follower, or asking a former client to introduce you to new prospects? These might all seem like things that we do in our business that keep us busy, but do they help us make a sale? As business owners, we need to determine if what we’re doing is just busy work or revenue-generating activities.

Busy work is easy because it makes you feel like you’re doing something without actually risking anything. There’s no possibility of rejection. But if you continue to hide behind it, you will most likely continue to struggle to make the money you want to make.

For this week’s episode, I’m going to walk you through how to figure out what your revenue-generating activities are so you can learn where to focus your limited time and resources to give you the best bang for your buck. Because all businesses are unique, I will be providing broad principles to help you figure out what’s going to work for you. 

• Understand how marketing works 
• The different phases of marketing
• The marketing phase “asks”
• Ideas for revenue-generating activities

Links

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

Knoxy Knox has had an incredible 14-year career as a food and beverage as well as lifestyle photographer whose work is primarily featured in advertising. She’s been in Super Bowl commercials, billboards, magazines, and worked with household names like Vital Farms, Chameleon Cold Brew, Whole Foods, Shake Shack, and Tito’s Vodka. Knoxy has the type of business that so many of us creative entrepreneurs dream about.

This week, Knoxy is coming on the show today to talk about how she creates boundaries with her clients. As her business and expertise as a photographer grow, setting and managing client expectations is even more important. We’re discussing:

• How she went from Jane-of-all-trades to being an expert in her field.
• What you’re giving up when you refuse to niche down.
• How to listen to your gut and walk away from clients that you know will be a nightmare.
• Practical ways to set boundaries and manage expectations with clients from the very beginning.

Links

See Knoxy Knox’s work on Instagram and her website. Check out her course, Set for Success.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

In the entrepreneurship space, we don’t often talk about what we’re struggling with. This results in everyone thinking that everyone else is crushing it. But every business owner experiences feeling frustrated and discouraged with their business. You might be thinking that you’re not cut out for it. You could have jumped into your business early because you thought it was easy but you didn’t have the necessary skills to build on it successfully.

We need to take a step back from these thoughts and recognize that building a business is really, really hard, even when you’re successful. Whenever we experience this frustration, we need to learn how not to internalize it and instead respond in a way that helps us emotionally and practically. 

Uplifting yourself when you’re feeling discouraged is not as simple as reciting the right affirmations or changing your mindset. In today’s episode, I’ll be breaking down the ways on how to respond when you’re discouraged, as well as share my own stories of discouragement because you’re not alone. To deal with these feelings of discouragement, you should:

• Be honest about how you feel
• Be specific about what isn’t going well
• Acknowledge your progress
• Focus on people

Links

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

Do you know how you want your business to come to an end? If you've never thought about your exit strategy, then you need to listen in to this conversation with former career coach and entrepreneur Jena Viviano Dunay.

Jena is an ex-Wall Streeter who built a successful career coaching business around her signature program and framework called Recruit the Employer. She had a growing audience, consistent revenue,  coaches working under her, and most importantly, she was getting consistent results for her clients. She had made it. But on this episode she's telling us why she decided to walk away from entrepreneurship and go back to traditional employment. 

Tune in to hear about.

• How her business was giving her financial success but not emotional peace or a healthy lifestyle.
• The physical and emotional signs of burnout, and how to respond when you are experiencing them.
• How to wait and trust instead of strive and strain when you're feeling stuck.
• The biggest thing she would have done differently from the very beginning if she knew her business would end this way.

Links

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

We are ending the Fall Focus with a very special guest, my husband Travis! Travis is a lawyer and policy professional in D.C. and he's joining us for this episode to talk about our experience adopting the weekly review as a family.

We’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how embracing this discipline has impacted us as a couple – our marriage, family life, and individual professional lives.

Tune in to hear about:

• How the weekly review can help you stay organized and calm even when the crap hits the fan in your life.
• Three weekly journaling questions to focus on what’s most important.
• How a weekly planning time gives you confidence to pursue big goals
• What embracing the weekly review as a couple has made possible for our marriage, family, and professional lives.

Links

Take the 90-day planning workshop!
Day One, journaling app
Evernote, note-taking app
YNAB, budgeting app
Getting Things Done by David Allen
The Importance of the Weekly Review by Michael Hyatt
How to Be More Consistent in Your Journaling by Michael Hyatt

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.