PREFACE:
What if the confidence you’re waiting to feel can only be built by taking action before you feel ready?
The transformation that happens when women stop waiting for perfect timing, perfect circumstances, and perfect plans, can only take place when you action with intention.
In today’s episode, we will be sharing insights on how taking action builds confidence, resilience, and ultimately, a business that can generate real revenue even when life isn’t cooperating.
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TO LISTEN:
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Raj Girn: Hi Everyone! Welcome to the Transform Your Confidence With Raj Girn podcast. We’re here to talk about confidence in all its different forms, in all its different iterations, and in all the ways that perhaps we may not even have tapped into understanding why we may have components of it and why there may be components that just always elude us.
I want to talk about what it takes to build it. That’s the big one, I feel, especially when life is not cooperating, because here’s the truth. Confidence isn’t built when everything is calm.
I think that those of us who have grappled with this have learned that along our journeys and have had to relearn it. It’s built—and I think that you guys will agree with me in this regard as well. It’s built when everything is falling apart, or if you’re highly challenged with something, because that’s when it really shows up, the levels of confidence that you may have, the levels that may be missing.
But I’ve always found in my experience, and also in the experience of having talked to so many women and having walked the path with them, having worked with them for the last few decades, that the key goal is, in the face of it all, to just keep moving forward.
Today’s guest embodies that in every single possible way, and I cannot wait to introduce you to her. Her name is Kalen Cotto. She is a fractional CMO. She’s the author of ‘The Revenue Runway’. I can’t wait to talk about that. And she’s also the founder of KMC Digital, where she helps businesses generate real revenue, not just pretty branding, as she calls it.
What makes her story so powerful is that she didn’t build success from comfort. She built it while pregnant, and as women who have had pregnancies, you know that that in itself is a challenge, because it is a journey that is different for all of us. And she was also on active duty in the military at the same time.
And she rebuilt it after a divorce forced her to have to start again from ground zero. Kalen, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to learn from you and to glean from your story.
Kalen Cotto: Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, I think everyone can probably relate to a piece of it.
I really, really can’t wait to talk to everyone about it. So can we start, I want to kind of give some context to everyone. Can we start with your backstory? You know, before you wrote the book, ‘The Revenue Runway’, before you started your business, KMC Digital, who were you, so that we can catch everyone up on your life before you were forced to hit ground zero and have to start again? Who was that woman?
Oh, gosh, I would say that I wasn’t very confident. I definitely was the type of person that was not even setting out to start a business in the first place. I—honestly, my mother passed when I was very young. And I think that shaped my entire journey after that, just knowing life is very short, we don’t get to know how many days we’re here.
And so, I always felt like I wanted to focus a lot on my career. I got married very young, and it was my ticket out of my hometown, in a way. And I would say probably we were more best friends than marriage material but definitely was ready to hit the road.
I was just super young, didn’t know anything, and moved to a new state. I went from living growing up in Rhode Island, to moving to Tennessee, which was a very different culture, a very different place, in a military town, which has its own subculture as well. And that was—I was divorced after three years of that, and then remarried, I’ve actually been divorced twice.
And so, I just, for some reason, I just kept hitting this wall. And things just kept repeating in my life patterns, bad patterns. And I really didn’t take myself too seriously. I mean, there’s parts of me that still don’t, but I feel like I really didn’t. I would just volunteer to do everything, right? So, if they had a class I could take or an internship, I was always ready to learn stuff. And I’m still like that.
But I felt like when I was younger, I wanted to learn everything, do everything. You have those young person hormones and excitement about life. And I just, I literally didn’t think too far in advance in any way, it was probably the dumbest time of my life, but also, I learned so much.
So, I think really before even starting a business or having a baby or, or even thinking about getting out of the military, I really thought I was, once I did join up, I thought I was going to be in for 20 years. And I had to cut my time short to take care of my daughter. But yeah, I think I’m just not self-confident, but really kind of like a learner. I wanted to learn stuff.
You know, what I’m hearing you say there is that you didn’t allow your experiences or maybe, how you’re terming it, ‘the dumbness’, which we all experience.
I feel I’m still going through that in my life. Because there’s a different variation, a different definition of what that word means as you are progressing through life. And you only know that once you’ve come out of one version of ‘dumbness’. I really love that you use that.
I want to ask you, so you started your business while pregnant and on active duty. Like that just fascinates me because most people wait for the right time, right? Like, we’re always wondering what the right time is, but you didn’t have that luxury. I want to ask you, what mindset did you adopt to anchor yourself into being able to restart within the reality that you were then in?
Yeah, I think I realized probably when I was around six months pregnant, I had already been doing side jobs. So, I was on active duty for the reserve component of the Army. I was living in Southern California. We were based out of the L.A. area.
And so, I was pretty much there every single day, like a normal 9-to-5 job. And then obviously one weekend a month. I would just work through the weekend because it was a reserve headquarters.
But when I was thinking through, I’m like, gosh, like I have this Blackberry. And I remember even before I had the baby and before I was going into labour, I just knew that Blackberry was nonstop. And the news media is on a 24-7 news cycle.
My job was media relations at the time—public affairs officer is what the title is in the army— And so, yeah, I feel like I don’t know, it was like nothing was ever turning off and for an entrepreneur, it’s similar.
I was like, I don’t mind doing work and I don’t mind, you know, whatever. But if I’m going to spend 24-7 worrying about my job and stuff, why not do it for myself? But that came later after my daughter was born. So, I think at the moment I was just helping people with side projects.
There were a few. Most of the people I was working with were older and they were about to retire. I was the youngest one in my office on the officer side.
Confidence isn’t built when everything is calm. It’s built when everything is falling apart, or when you’re highly challenged with something.
There were enlisted soldiers that were younger, but I was definitely the youngest officer in the room everywhere I went because it was just a higher-level command. They put me in a lieutenant-colonel slot as a lieutenant, which is a very big jump because they didn’t have a person qualified for that position at the time. And so I filled that space for almost three years, I think.
But side thing, like people would say, come over on Saturday and have lunch with me. And like, I’m going to show you this website I want to build because when I retire, I want to start this business, or I want to do websites on the side? And I’m like, I really don’t. But I know how and I can.
So, it was sort of accidental. I ended up going back to school for graphic design and advertising. But at the time, I was just using the skills I had learned through college. I did communications with a concentration in print journalism. And we all know where print journalism ended up. So those skills help with writing, though.
So I wasn’t, I feel like it helped me a little bit. But I, and actually, a lot of marketers I’ve met went to journalism school, which is funny, because you realize where the money is after you get your degree. But that’s how it started, just side hustle, really.
And then I’m like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll stay in the reserve side, but I just won’t be full time every day in the office. Maybe I’ll ask them if I can take, take off or because my situation was really, really rare. Like they were just creating borders for me as they expired.
So, they would do a six-month commitment. And then after six months, do you want to renew it? We want you to stay on? Okay, great. And then they would renew that. It started out with me subbing in for someone that went on deployment overseas. And I was just taking over her spot while she was gone. And then she was going to come back to it.
But everything changed while she was deployed. So, I ended up they asked me to stay and then they reassigned her to a different place she wanted to go to a different spot. It was just a weird time.
It was during the reorganization of the army. So yeah, it was an accident.
Yeah, what’s coming to me with you sharing this story is I feel that asking you this next question is just really, really important for everyone that’s listening to this, watching this and reading it.
And I want to ask you, what would you say to someone who feels like their life is too messy, or not orchestrated or planned enough to restart, to hit that reset button, what would you say to them? Because you’ve experienced that on a number of occasions throughout your professional journey, right?
Yeah, I don’t think there’s a wrong time to start. I mean, I know, growing up, my parents, my mom was cleaning houses with her mom. And then that turned into office buildings, because my dad got involved.
And he said, ‘hey, if you’re getting all these jobs, and you’re getting all these referrals, because you do such a good job, what if we do commercial buildings’, and so they grew that. And I was a kid, when they started out, and I watched them grow. And I remember even calling businesses to see if they had janitorial services when I was a kid.
And you’ve always had the entrepreneurial spirit, right?
Yeah, I don’t know if my parents thought that through. My voice was very tiny, but I called anyway. But my mom, she’s like, just looks for businesses and makes a list and we can call them.
So that’s how I grew up. And then my parents mostly worked at night, because that’s when the offices were closed, they went in to clean them. So they had to be home during the day.
And then, after years of working in an office, and then getting pregnant, I thought it was nice to have my mom be able to be home with us every day. And then she would work at night, like they’d had to get babysitters every once in a while. But it was a different childhood, like a lot of kids grew up with their parents, both at work, and then they came home to an empty house until their parents got home.
The term latchkey kid, which, I think in high school, after my mom passed, obviously, in high school, that was, my dad was gone before I got home from school to go to work. But as a young kid, like we had them, for the most part. And I remember just going to do stuff during the day that other kids wouldn’t do, because they were just home, even on the weekends, we would always find stuff to do.
And I don’t know, I thought back to that, and I thought it would be really nice to not have people constantly relying on me for all these things, like in a 9-to-5 job, where I had, I was doing media relations, but also internal communications, tasks, and press releases, and all those things. And they’re always like, a quick fuse, like short turnarounds. And that’s fine when you are, we don’t have anything else to worry about.
And even at night, like, oh, are you going to write back and especially in the Army, like if a two star general emails you at night, and he wants an answer immediately, there’s no I’m going to sleep on that and answer in the morning, like he wants an answer immediately. And there’s a reason for it. Even if I don’t know what it is, at the time, usually he’s being asked by somebody up higher than him.
So, it was to me, it was not stressful, because I loved it. But it was stressful thinking about still trying to keep up with all of that. And as soon as she was born, I knew I was like, I really just want to be home with her and raise her.
And that was the driving force to get more clients and actually file for an LLC and do all the normal things. At the time, my company was called Stars and Stripes Marketing, I rebranded in 2016. But I was only working with military entrepreneurs, veterans, veteran military spouses, and helping them launch their small business or like updating their websites, just that kind of stuff.
And never did any growth marketing or any of that it was more branding, I would say. And then it morphed, because marketing can be a million things.
I would have dealt with the emotions head-on instead of burying them. And I would also say forgive people quickly. Unforgiveness and holding grudges and holding anger against people that have done you wrong, it is like a recipe for self-destruction.
And it depends on many things. It’s interesting that you carved out a niche for yourself. You know, you understand who you want to serve, and you serve them. And it’s interesting, because you talk about starting a business, generating revenue as being far more important than the branding side of things.
Can you share that a little bit for us? Because the world that we live in today, which is all about the image of the show, because everyone has a camera, and everyone wants to be seen and heard and valued, right?
Can you share why you feel that people are putting words in your mouth, so you can correct me if I’m wrong. But, why is it that people are focusing more on the branding aspect and losing sight on why they’re actually even doing the branding in the first place, which hopefully, if you are a business, it’s to grow revenue, like share that piece for me a little bit.
I think it’s just from working with so many people over 15 years, I have met a ton of entrepreneurs who have no personal brand, and who have like the worst website that I’ve ever seen.
And they’re sharing their revenue numbers with me. And I’m like, how did you do that? But you got to remember, these guys were older. And they’re like, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have a personal brand.
Like, what’s a personal brand? I don’t know what influencer, what are you talking about? And these guys are like, I talk to humans, I go to events, I talk to humans. That’s what I do. Nobody cares. Like that’s and I, but I’m the same way. I like, honestly, one of the biggest criticisms I get is that I do not focus much on a personal brand as a marketing person, which I’m working on. Doing podcasting is part of it.
Yeah. But I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy being in front of the camera. I’m the one taking pictures. I’m the one doing the video. I’m the one editing video, like I don’t want to be in front of the camera ever.
I hate it. I’ve been on the news so many times, and I hate it every time I do it. But I understand the importance long term of a personal brand.
And in the world of AI, I think it’s non-negotiable. So especially in some places, but like the manufacturing industry, they don’t care about personal brand. They go directly to the humans at the place that they want to sell to. That’s not even a thing for them.
It’s interesting what you just said there, because you’ve just, you basically answered the question that I was trying to I was kind of grappling with and it’s simple.
If you are a B2B business, you don’t really need a public facing brand, you need, um, you know, case studies, you need to show that you’re capable, that you’re that you’re able to do the job. If you are a B2C brand. Again, I correct myself because we always talk about businesses as brands.
If you are a B2C business, that’s where I feel you need the brand. Tell me your thoughts on that.
No, I agree. And I think if you have a really excellent product, sometimes, if you’re lucky, it will sell itself because people will get excited and share your things organically. But a really good brand will sell a really crappy product.
So, there is an influencer out there on YouTube. He is a little bit older than the younger influencers coming in. He’s in the wrestling arena now. He does WWE stuff. But he sells an energy drink that is really gross. And he has, like, I know, I just might get I don’t really like the taste of it. And then he’s got he had children’s—almost like a Lunchable—but a different version of it, for kids.
And it turned out to have some not so good ingredients, and they had to recall it and pull it because of his brand. That’s where brand comes into play. When you announce a class or a product or service, and you already have, you don’t need a massive amount of followers, though, if you have the right followers, think about 1000 people showing up at your front door to buy something from you.
That’s a lot of people. So, we look at the numbers and go, oh, they have a million followers, and I have 500. It doesn’t matter. If they’re the right ones, then if 500 people bought your thing right now, could you even fulfil the thing, and that’s the like, once you do have volume, can you actually handle the volume. So I’ve run into both with clients where they’re like, we just need new clients.
And then I get like 40 new warm leads in a month, and they are freaking out because they did not have the infrastructure. And 40 is not a big number. For a small business that’s appointment based, and they have a limited staff.
You only realize how much you didn’t know once you’ve come out of one version of ‘dumbness.’ There’s a different variation, a different definition of what that word means as you are progressing through life.
And they already have a client roster, right? Adding 40 within 30 days is a lot for them. So thinking through her and they didn’t have like this particular client I’m thinking of did not have really much of a social media, they kind of let their channels die out. Like the owner kind of posted a little bit in the beginning, and then he didn’t see any money coming from it.
So, he’s like, I’m getting all of my business from referrals from other people in my industry, I specialize in this thing in my industry. So, they refer me to the generalists who give me the specialty cases. And so I thought, oh, well, you know, we’ll keep your socials warm, maybe post three times a week, I said, but you’ve never done paid advertising.
So, we did some of that. And then also the sales funnel. So, what we did is for that kind of a person who does not have a brand, we validate a sales funnel for them so that they can sell online.
And then that landing page will talk about them and their background and their credentials. And it’s industry dependent, because if you’re like a PhD or an MD, your credentials can carry you to and Oh, well, you’ve gone and done the work and all this. But if you don’t have that, I would say, YouTube is what I need to get on.
But YouTube is basically because Google now owns it and they are pushing traffic to YouTube channels. And I have never invested a ton of time in there. Because I’m not a YouTube person.
That’s weird. But everybody else goes, how do I do this? How do I do that? Some people don’t even search Google anymore, they just go to YouTube and search, how do I do XYZ, and they try to find a video on it. And so, what I’m hearing from people I know that invested the last two or three years in just YouTube, and then repurposing it for other channels, they are like, all my clients come from YouTube. And it’s interesting.
Well, I feel that YouTube is an incredible resource for the how-dos. Like, how do I do this? How do I do that? It’s far more powerful than Google or any other platform out there, just because there’s so many hacks and things. I feel that what you’re sharing here is really fundamental and important for people.
Because it’s the question I always get asked. And I’m sure that’s the question you also get asked. And that is, what platform should I be on for what I do. And I think that that is really, really important for you to nail down.
Because if you’re not a massive, global corporation, where you can be everywhere, and you can be optimal everywhere, and you can be consistent everywhere, you do need to find the place where your business is going to have the greatest advantage.
And like you just mentioned, YouTube is great for educational stuff in ‘how do I do this’ type of videos, right? With that in mind, I want to take you back to where you decided what it was that your business needed to be. Just because I feel this is a really important thing that people get really confused about when they’re starting their businesses.
Do I create business around the skill sets that I have? Do I create business around the needs that’s out there? I always say, I always say both. But you built your company very, very purposefully the second time round, because you had no choice, because your first business was based off of referrals, right? And now your second business now needs, coming out of a divorce, you need to figure it out.
A part of that figuring out is what are my skills, and who out there needs what I do? Or is it the other way around, Kalen? That’s the question I want to ask you, how do you do it? Did you look for the gaps in the marketplace and think, okay, what can I do to fill that to create a business? Or did you look at your skill set and say, okay, who needs this, and let me go there.
I would say it was a combination. I think that’s why I wrote this, the book is only three things. It’s literally: Who do you serve? What do you want to serve them? What do you want to do to serve them? And then what is your sales plan and sales strategy, and then the beginning is like all mindset. Yes, I think it’s mindset quizzes.
And then it just those three things because what I realized with my own family is I was like, well, what at the end of the day if I was gonna help people start a business and get them in quick action so that they’re not overthinking, because even the most brilliant people I’ve ever met who I’m like, Oh my gosh, you’re so genius, you could help so many people. They feel productive when they’re building things, but they don’t like launching things and I’m guilty of it.
So, I have a workshop that I’m working on that I want to sell like very soon and I even create an AI that will take everything I know about fractional CMO and marketing and everything and it’s all in it, and I can just hand it to someone and say put this in your cloud and then ask it to do anything marketing. So, I’ve been working on building that and I’m thinking to myself, but then the fear of putting it into the marketplace like do people want this, do they need this, whatever . . .
I’ve worked with people who have million dollar businesses and I’ve worked with people that are starting out and it’s no different in a way because the difference is we overcomplicate things as we grow and we overthink things so the trap that people have is I’m going to take my savings and I’m going to pay someone three to five thousand dollars for a brand new website for something that I haven’t even sold yet, why not go out and get the clients?
For my parents, all they bought was business cards they didn’t really care about, and obviously back then there was no website to make but they were like I have a business card, I can go to events or networking things, I can hand this out. Then they bought these door knockers that were really fancy and they went to office parks and they’re like here I’m gonna put one on every single door. That was more time consuming back then but in a way too, if they happen to bump into the owner of the business coming in and out, they could have a conversation, and it’s the same.
AI wants to do what you want. It’s like an eager little kid with the knowledge of a hundred-thousand-year-old person.
Now you’re doing these conversations online or on Zoom and a lot of people for digital are doing well with webinars because that person gets to know you. Someone that has just this totally irrational fear of video, I am one of those people and I like doing workshops because I’d like to show you how I do this, and if it’s helpful to you go ahead and run with it. I was doing workshops for a long time to bring in new clients. That’s how I did it on LinkedIn. I would invite people to free workshops and then I’d say if you want me to do this for your business personally, book a call and here’s the link.
This is my fee to sit down with you and then you grow your network as well so as you grow your LinkedIn because all the people that went to your workshop they’re now following you and you’ll be surprised like somebody may not financially be ready to work with you, but then years later they’ll shoot you a note and say ‘hey remember when we did that round table thing and you taught us this.’ I was literally just teaching people how to use podcasting to grow their brand and just how to repurpose the content on all different channels and just some of the hacks I had for it that was the whole workshop.
I mean, now it’s very common but you know 10 years ago it wasn’t as common so they were like podcasting, really no one listens to podcasts. I’m like no, everybody listens to podcasts and the niches are endless. You can have a love of goldfish, and you can find a podcast about raising goldfish and how to raise the water temperature and what food they like. And it’s unbelievable now you really and what I’m hearing from people that are heavy into YouTube.
I just went to an event here in Texas and it was about a high level the CRM that we use, we have a white label of it called KMC 360 and they were talking about how did they grow their awareness of the software and it was like, look I went on YouTube, I found the things I love to talk about and the top videos on that topic and I did the same frameworks as that person and wrote my script very similar, and then I just did my own version of it with my own experience weaved in and my own perspective on the same topic.
They said now because the algorithm has changed in a good way people who have never done video can start today, and in 90 days you can be getting a lot more eyeballs the algorithm used to favour creators who had a ton of content and even those people are saying things I made 15 years ago are popping up now in searches because the algorithm has opened up and letting everybody equally compete.
So it’s a fun time, I want to get my stuff more regularly scheduled too because why not I mean it’s free to it’s just going to cost you your time and energy and whoever connects with you, there’s a million but it’s your personality and if you’re like I really like that person I want to work with them it doesn’t matter if there’s 50 other marketers or 50 other publishers or whatever your job is that’s where the branding I think comes into play like a lot.
I completely agree with you Kalen, because at the end of the day there are so many people doing what you’re doing but why you know why do people resonate to one person versus the other it always comes down to personality, does the person connect with you does how you tell this thing that you’ve heard a million other people talk about, does the way you say it stick with them like shift something in them, do they like the way that you teach and it can even be—as I get this a lot—the tone of your voice.
People always say to me that ‘I like listening to you Raj’, and so it’s these types of things, like social media people like looking at things which is why there are so many influencers who focus on that don’t have a skill set but have the skill set of appearing, visually appealing which is still a skill set, someone’s buying it.
And if you say, “Hey here’s my affiliate link, this is the best soda that I ever had in my life and I’ll have a brand deal like go try it”, that’s a skill looking nice on camera, presenting yourself.
Let’s dive a little bit into your business now, Kalen. Now that we’ve got the back so— actually something’s coming to me that I feel I need to ask you before we go there. You mentioned off the top that when your mother passed away that it shifted something in you and then later in our conversation you mentioned that something shifted again in you when you became a mother to a daughter.
I feel there’s a connection there that we need to identify before we dive in. Talk to me about that, what was it, so let me be specific what was it that shifted with you the first time when your mother passed and what was it that shifted with you the second time when you became the mother to a daughter.
I think when my mom passed it was a few things that I realized, because when you’re a teenager you’re living in your parents’ house you don’t have any rent to pay not that it’s a carefree life because you’re under their rules, but in a way your teenage years should be you know kind of fun figuring out where you’re going to go to college or what you want to be when you grow up, and all those things.
And I thought to myself because after my mom passed, my mom and dad were very close and so he just did not understandably, he did not take it well and he was a mess. It took him a very long time to bounce back from that, and so I pretty much lost them both if anyway. What I felt was no one’s coming to rescue you, like I knew very young I was, I didn’t really have, we didn’t go to church, I didn’t have a faith-based thing to lean on.
Now I do, my life is so much different than it was but I felt like at the time, I just looked around me and I was just like there’s not really an adult in my life that can carry this or walk me through it or even relate to it. None of the people in my life had lost anyone that young, so and then some people were like ‘oh I’m just going to leave them be because they’re going through stuff and I have my own stuff and that’s just too much’, it’s one more you know.
Now that I’m older, I get that but at the time, I just thought where is everybody, why am I not in therapy right now, why did I have to go to school the day after the funeral, why couldn’t I take a break. There was no, I went to her wake on a Wednesday and the next day I was in class and my health teacher goes “Were you out yesterday, were you sick” and I was like “No, I was at my mom’s funeral” and her face went cringy and I was like, it’s okay, she’s like “Why are you here”, and I’m like “My dad said I have to go back to school”, so it was like.
As time went by, I thought I have to really take care of myself and I was only 14. But I knew that I had to grow up quick and I had to take care of myself and also my dad didn’t know how to use any of the appliances in our house, so I had to learn how to do the laundry, I had to show him the laundry and I had to, like he did the dishwasher and but cooking, cleaning, I immediately got a job.
I had working papers. I went and started working at 15 and I’ve been working ever since, and I used that money for whatever I needed for school and whatnot and he did pay for a trip for me to go to Italy and he helped out all the time, but like he just mentally was not. It was just a lot, all of a sudden, you have two little girls and a business to run and he was going to franchise his business and that all came to a grinding halt and then he lost a bunch of accounts because he just couldn’t do it.
After my second divorce I lost a bunch of my accounts as well and so that’s why I just thought it’s like the reinventing when I had my daughter then because when you’re young and you don’t have kids, people really don’t understand how much time you actually have on your hands that you can wait away.
You need a certain amount of knowledge in order to use AI. If you don’t have some level of experience or insight, you don’t know if what you’re getting back is going to be the right thing, and that’s when AI becomes dangerous.
Because life is relative right, life is relative so that’s the reason why.
Before I had my daughter and she’s only one kid, I didn’t have multiple kids that were not in the cards for me, but for me personally it was overwhelming. Just one child, and I know people have two, three, four kids, I could not figure out how to manage at all. When my second divorce happened, I was like, okay she’s not even in kindergarten yet and I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Because I’m taking her to the office with me and I was already fully into the business three years in and that’s how I know how long I’ve been in business because she’s 16 this year. So I’m like okay I’ve had 16 years of this crazy training, but I thought to myself that shift of like okay I have to be there for her no matter what and work is secondary. But also, I need to grow this thing because we need to eat and so it was just all the things and I had really good friends.
And again, I had moved to the west coast, the second night I got as far away from back home as I could and just was like I need to start fresh, I need to go and do my own thing, make my own way. Years later I would be brought back there but I feel like that was divine intervention for sure. I was brought back there for five years when I moved to Texas about three years ago and so yeah it’s been a journey and I think at 44-years-old I’m finally settled.
Wow, I’m listening to your story and not having that significant mentorship that parents or older generations bring with it when you’re challenged with something is a very difficult place to be and it does make for messiness in our lives, it does make for many lessons we have to learn through, making mistakes because then we only know that it’s right when we figure out what was wrong with what we just did. And you were doing this with having a divorce, having to restart the business, and having a young child.
Oh, and the failure, and the imposter syndrome was at an all-time high because my second divorce, the reasons for the second one were there, was no way we could stay together, but now years later it’s good and he’s in a good place. But I just, like I said, I would just do one foot in front of the other and I wouldn’t think.
That’s what I wanted to ask you, Kalen.
It was like survival mode. When am I going to be out of survival mode and I’m like why is this constantly happening and it was my so many of my own stupid choices and not thinking and not looking ahead and almost like because I feel like I lived in, it’s almost like I lived in the trauma of her death and never healed properly from that thing. And it was until years later when I got healing and I got closure on my own emotions and unforgiveness and bitterness that I had to let go of so much in here.
I was not the best business owner, I was definitely someone in the first five years of business that probably I wouldn’t have worked with me like I was very frustrated if something didn’t go my way and I was quick to voice my frustration and I always did things that I thought were like integrity and character and telling the truth and all of that being very transparent. That’s always been important, but I was quick to just be like “Oh I just don’t want to do this anymore, I’m going to pivot” like pivoting and restarting is my gift, because I feel that is what I know how to do.
Getting settled in for the long haul and grinding like I feel that has been one of the biggest—I don’t think I’ve lived anywhere more than five years in a row. I did the math and I was like I moved here and then I did that, so I don’t know what it is to just be from a small town grow up in a small town and stay in the small town like I have all these great contacts and relationships. I’ve kind of been a nomad for probably since I was 18 so, as soon as I left the house.
So, I’m so curious about what you just said—that almost feel like you were searching for something like what was it, what were you searching for or perhaps trying to get away from.
I think staying where I grew up meant that I had to deal with all the people that were there when all the bad things happened, so it wasn’t just her death. But then like more deaths like one of my only friends in high school got hit by a drunk driver and died like a year after she died and he was one of the only people that was nice to me at my new school.
Because I was in a school in my freshman year, I had grown up in the city and then moved to the country I guess and like those kids grew up together since kindergarten so I’m, well at least in my head, that’s how I felt. It wasn’t true that they all grew up there, but it felt like that they all knew each other, so it just took me a long time to make friends and when I did, he died.
And then just as my track coach, awesome guy committed suicide a year after that, so it was like death, like my entire high school was death. So that place became a place of death in my mind like I do not want to be here, everything dies here everything. And actually, when I go home to visit, I’m like you know it’s a really beautiful place, the beaches are beautiful, there’s islands, people are on boats.
The summer there is amazing, but I had to reframe it wasn’t the place, it was just the circumstances and why did God bring me through all those things. And now I even told my husband, I almost want to help business owners work through trauma, so they don’t derail their businesses and their business relationships and that’s been really exciting because I’ve been talking . . .
That’s an amazing niche, what an incredible niche, I don’t think I know anyone out there in all the people I’ve ever spoken to in my life that actually does that and you are so qualified you are so qualified.
I think that’s even more exciting than marketing, it’s fun when you make money obviously and when you’re marketing things and you’re launching things it’s like let’s see who bites but I know the business people that I have known, that have struggled just like me because there’s a couple of veterans that I know that have had the same, a lot of stuff and just constant barriers and they’re now finding breakthrough in their 40s and I just feel like 40s and 50s, if there’s people watching that are in that age group, it’s your time to start something in a business.
I would do it now because you have years behind you of experience that somebody who’s just 18 years old and has more courage because they’re young and spicy, they’re going to go out and do the videos, but like we have knowledge and that’s one thing I want to branch off into, and I want to do a retreat next year and just bring a handful of business owners to a farm, and a very fancy pretty farm that has a spa.
I love it.
But, to unwind, get off the phone and even bring your family and let’s if you have a business challenge let’s work on it but also let’s do some inner healing work and really walk through why you can’t—for me it was a financial ceiling. I would hit a certain revenue number and then everything would come crashing down or I’d have a certain number of employees and everything would crash down and I would have to restart.
And then I thought to myself, do I want to have an in-house team that’s like 20 people because most marketing agencies that’s where they lead to when you start to get more clients. So, at one time I had eight employees and then I’m like what am I doing, I don’t enjoy managing, I just want to do the work and so I pivoted to fractional CMO work.
This book was really just me trying to get all the people in my life that are “how did you start, what did you do” and I’m like, I’m just going to write this book and put it all in there and then we’ll do classes and I’m shifting a little bit more to instead of fractional CMO. I’ve rewritten it for just a smaller business and trying to help people be free because we had just the internet and AI alone.
You have so many opportunities to make money and to help people, absolutely it’s not web-based. It doesn’t mean everyone thinks they have to do something like a web business. I saw this lady online she sells saffron bulbs and she’s like a saffron is an antidepressant, it’s naturally antidepressant qualities and I have a saffron farm and I sell to certain restaurants and it’s a very high expensive seasoning that people pay a lot of money for. And that’s all I do now and she makes YouTube videos about it and she sells the bulbs online and they come in the mail she only ships once a year but that’s her business and I—there’s not a limit to what you can do, and that’s why.
I’ve worked with people who have million-dollar businesses and I’ve worked with people that are starting out, and it’s no different in a way because we overcomplicate things as we grow and we overthink things.
Oh my gosh, yes and you know it’s so interesting what you’re sharing here, and I want to talk about your book, and I want to talk about your business but before I do, there’s one more question that’s just like, it’s itching at me.
I’ve got to ask you otherwise it’s always going to be there as a wonder for me. When you look back over your life, the personal life, the business life and all the changes that have happened, some of them have happened to you, others you’ve made happen, where have you gotten the resilience to keep going, because I feel that is a massive key in having the confidence to do you.
Yeah, I think I’m still working that out, I just did it out of pure necessity and financially now, I’m in a much better place where I don’t necessarily have to hustle and get a bunch more clients. I have a great client roster, and I have a really great partners that help me execute on work. I don’t have an in-house team; I use a white label partner to do all the nerdy ad things that I don’t want to know how to do.
And then I like Kron’s been with me for years he’s a such an amazing graphic designer and he builds brands that are just really elegant and so he helps me with that, and then I have a— my project manager, so really, it’s just the three of us working out like all the creatives.
We still do a lot of social media for people but on the advising and strategy side we know, it’s like non-negotiable, we’re going to do your strategy in the first month even though we’re going to start working on services right away. I used to wait a month, okay we’re going to do strategy then wait a month and then we’re going to do but it’s, I don’t want, it’s wasted time.
So, now we will build the strategy and get some of these things that need to be cleaned up or whatever I think currently it’s more about what to get rid of. Right now, we’re editing our tech stack because we have 52 apps and we’re paying monthly subscriptions on them all, and then we’re trying to build an AI agent, but we don’t have our processes documented. So that’s—you can’t just jump into AI and say, “Hey Claude build me an agent that posts to social media”, it’s going to say “Okay what’s your brand voice and what do you know”, all the things that you need to feed into it, which people don’t have documented.
So now, I’m trying to help people do that because then it later on it will be great but and there’s no miss like there’s a lot of mysticism around AI like “Oh it can do all”, like you’re looking at people saying that they’re doing all these things and I would be hard-pressed to find someone actually doing some of the things they say they’re doing.
Because I have tried and I’ve even asked Claude “Hey I saw this ad here’s a link to the ad, is this actually real or not real is this possible” so that’s the thing some people are selling smoke and mirrors with AI app and it’s a regurgitation of the same things over and over. It’s just how the people that I know who are really into tech and they’re amazing, they’re building things that are almost autonomous, but they are very advanced.
The average business owner does not need to know all of that and can still use AI in a really good way to help them but I would say don’t I would not replace all the humans I would say less humans can do more things but I don’t—even content creation I said “Claude how pick out all the best tools that you can think of for creating content” so that I can have a content creation agent or I don’t have to have my hands on it all the time.
How would I have to program it well, and it will tell you like you don’t have to pay somebody for an online course it will literally tell you what to do and it will tell you what’s the truth and what’s a lie and what AI is capable of and it said to be on and it even said to me, “honestly some of the promises being made online are not accurate,’ and you’re going like yeah . . .
Let me ask you this, now I want to dive into your business. I think that people have got a really good sense of who you are, your challenges. I do feel that even though you say that you’re still figuring out the resilience piece, I’m hearing you say that you know resilience for you has been continuously keeping in motion, like moving.
But I feel that’s your resilience superpower, I really do because when you stay there that’s when the trauma gets worse, when you stay there and when I say there, I’m saying, stay there in a physical place or stay there in an emotional place, like it could be either of the two or it could be a combination. You can throw in spirituality there as well you can throw in a lot of other things that affect life as we journey through it, but I really feel that your superpower is keeping moving, keeping the motion in place.
I really feel that’s a really big one so even though you say ‘that you’re figuring it out’ I feel that you’ve figured it out, I think you know when something isn’t serving you and you put a halt on it and you go in a different direction. So even though you said that you are like a master of pivoting, I feel that your life called for it, and you answered the right—with the right answer, any comment on that before we move into your business?
No, I agree with that. I think that also. I don’t even right now feel like I wrote this book, I was so excited to get in it and then the book launch went a little sideways and I am thinking, you know, what do I do, and do I focus on this or do I focus on—because in the midst of the book and working with an editor and all that, I really feel called to help people with healing these things that they’re dealing with from childhood.
It affects your business and your family and then when your marriage falls apart, your business is going to fall apart, your brain cannot do all the things and even though you think, I used to be “Oh yeah I’m going to have this baby, I’m just going to—and it’s going to be easy and I’m just going to pop back into work and I’ll get a babysitter”. When you have a baby, you’re full you don’t even really want to leave them and you’re—you just have no clue you know your little innocent mind thinks that you can juggle everything.
A child is not like anything else you’ll ever have to manage and so it’s just, yeah, I think constant motion but also I still have fears—like irrational fears, that I’m gonna launch this thing and nobody’s gonna buy it or need it or I’m gonna work on a project for months and it’s gonna fail. Like that stuff goes through my mind constantly, and it’s a big reason why I haven’t created a ton of content other than being on podcasts.
Because I naturally am an open book and I don’t mind sharing any part of my story but I definitely get like imposter syndrome brain even though I do a lot of the things for my clients, it’s like working with them one-on-one is so much easier and so much more natural for me than getting on and going “Hi I’m Kalen and I’m a fractional CMO and I want to help you grow your business” like, blah.
So, that’s not to me, I don’t like it even though there’s so many people who are great at that, and that is not my strength, but I guess why I really am excited about doing a retreat next year and doing one-on-one ‘workshoppey’ type things.
I love it because what you’re saying here is that you figured out what you want to do, what you don’t want to do, and most people go through life not having ever figured that out. I think that you are way ahead of the game. So, kudos to you on that. I think it’s great, like I don’t think that everybody’s made to be on camera. I think what happens on camera is never the magic anyway, it’s what happens when you work with someone where the magic truly shows up.
And it’s similar to the example that you gave of the guy that had this big following on camera but then his products were really not at par I prefer to be the other one which is the one that I like being is having enough people in my virtual universe, but having a really strong community of people that truly value what I bring to the table.
I mean that is what you’re saying here. I want to ask you what would you tell yourself when you went through the first trauma, the loss with your mother, what would you tell her about the rest of her life that perhaps may have made it easier for you to get to where you are today, which is a really good place that you’re in.
I would have dealt with the emotions head-on instead of burying them. I did pay for my own counselling when I was in high school and I went and found the social worker at my school and one of the kids in my school was really worried about me and my state of mind and she talked to the social worker and they brought me out of class and they referred me to a therapist and stuff.
But I don’t think—it needed to happen much quicker, it took a couple of years and then really the counsellors I had, really weren’t—they had their own agenda what they wanted to talk about with me—that’s how it felt and so, we never got to the root of the issues that I was dealing with. They—I don’t know that they were equipped with the people that I went to see. I don’t know what their training equipped them and they did not have the life experience.
And so, it’s like you must find someone that walked through it too so that they can ask you the right questions to get to that root of the thing, that’s like nagging you. And I would also say forgive people quickly. Unforgiveness and holding grudges and holding anger against people that have done you wrong, it is like a recipe for self-destruction, and I would say anything, I don’t even care if someone looked at you funny in the grocery store and you’re like “Oh what is that person’s problem”, just let it go, just forgive, release that tension out of your body, let it out, that bad energy will just fester in there and it’ll just, it’s just never good. So, I’ve had to do that. I had to write names on a piece of paper, people who didn’t even know that they really derailed me and really affected me in a bad way.
It was amazing, the names that I would just think through and it’s like I would give my put music on just sit close my eyes write names down, just trying to sift through all the years of my life of it I don’t care if you still remember some bully from first grade, if you hold a bitterness against some person that made you mad back then, you need to say it out loud I forgive this person and let it go.
I’ve been working with someone now who’s teaching me a really cool framework for that but it was probably praying for people that it hurt me and blessing them just saying I pray that this person is just blessed, they hurt me but I pray that they are going to have all the money that they ever could want, that their family’s going to be super healthy, that everything that happened between us is water under the bridge and they’re going to do well and I’m going to do well. Even though this thing happened, it didn’t, it’s really done, it’s put to bed and I could not do that for a long time. Probably many years, I was holding on to a lot of anger and a lot of things.
You don’t need perfect conditions. You need a decision to move, a decision to take action, a decision to back yourself.
But the reason for that Kalen, we know what it is right and you know it’s funny hindsight, right, we know that when we look back on our lives what the answer was, because we’ve gotten here.
What I’m hearing you say here that’s coming out really loud for me is that in the beginning of why you had all the trauma and why you sat in that place that didn’t serve you, was because you were giving your power up to all the external forces. It was, when you took ownership over your life and how you feel and what you want for you, is when things shifted and a part of that shift was the forgiveness project that you were on. So, what would you say to Kalen, from back in the day, that you really want anyone out there that’s going through this to know.
I would tell them to never let your mind go deep into a dark place and forgive people. I think exercising keeps moving, even if you’re not physically moving where you live, if you can just actually join the track and field team was probably one of the things that saved me because I was exercising every day two and a half hours a day after school, and that—I wasn’t even good at track. I was the worst probably they had on the whole team, but I needed to go there and do the warm-ups.
She used to do a three-mile warm-up run before we did actual practice and I needed it. Those endorphins and that thing that got me out of my house, had I gone home and laid down in my bed and thought about all the things that have been happening around me, because I did survive one attempt at my life when I was 16 and I let it get too deep and I sat in my own crap. I think when you’re that young you don’t have the ability to manage those emotions correctly anyway even if you have a great upbringing, it’s just such a shock to the system.
It’s like where do you put it all, you have all this stuff, where do you put it? This is where when you talk about the reframing like you had to go through reframing and the fact that—even consistently through your life you realize that you needed someone to help you when you couldn’t help yourself.
Because here you’re working with someone now, you paid money to work with someone when you were going through school even though that didn’t help you, but you knew that you needed someone to help you with the stuff. I feel that’s a really big one, Kalen.
Yeah, I would say to you, when you get isolated and you get in your own head, I would tell my younger self to just stay, moving yes maybe not in such a big way that I did, but in like— don’t stay fixated. I feel so many and—there’s been bad therapy out there that says relive your trauma and expose your mind and keep replaying it so that you can let it go and I’m like no you’re actually training your mind to dwell on the thing that brings depression to you.
I would say, I’m not a licensed counsellor obviously, but I would for my own self I had to really choose to not focus on—at first, I compartmentalized it—so I would tell my younger self, deal with these emotions head-on but also don’t sit in them and cause them to put you in a deeper dark hole than you’re in.
So, find a place to put it basically while you’re still dealing with it, because it’s not gone anywhere but you still need to live life in as healthy a way as you can. That’s such a great thing to share with people.
Yeah, and if you don’t eventually deal with those emotions, they will creep up in your physical body they’ll creep up in the way you think, in the way you treat people. I had no idea until I walked through healing that I had abandonment issues. I was ‘I was abandoned? Nobody abandoned me, I had my family,’ and they’re like no, you were. So, I had to forgive my mother for dying, I know that sounds insane.
No, it doesn’t.
It did, I was like or and—like for her not even and she, I know, looking back she tried to prepare me, because she knew she was really sick so I think when I was eight is when she got diagnosed with lupus and then she just was sick until I was 14. She trained me how to use all the stuff in the house so that if she died like I could do it, but I feel like it didn’t connect to me that I was abandoned, you know what I mean.
You think of orphans that you have to go—and foster kids—or I’ve met so many people in my life now that are like legitimately it were in foster care and their parents could not do it and that’s what I thought abandonment meant, or like you have all these friends and then they all turn on you and it’s like a high school abandonment of friends or I don’t know, stuff like that.
So, what is abandonment to you, what did you learn abandonment is? Because this is a real big one, it’s a big one especially for us women, because we’re innately nurturers and we are conditioned also to be nurturers and what that means is we internalize a lot of stuff. I want to know, tell me.
What I figured out is, it’s really just you not having or not feeling that you have that support system that even though it was. I would say, I never thought of it that way because it wasn’t her fault, because you want to blame whenever when anything goes wrong you want to blame someone, blame God even, like why did you take her away, why did she have to die, why did she have to be so young, she was only 33 years old, what is going on, why is this all happening and I think that’s where I wrestled with spirituality. I wrestled with depression, I wrestled with and I thought it was all of those things but then I realized after really feeling like I’m at peace for the first time, a situation popped up and my response was really harsh, it triggered me, I guess and I went, I need to really think about why did I just say that and forgive myself for being nasty.
It affected, I think just the tumultuous nature of my business also leads to not having clients right because people are like, don’t work with her she’s nuts or whatever. I am sure that has been said about me over the years because I was not in the right frame of mind at all. Me starting a business to me currently is different, it’s just night and day. So, I feel like I don’t know if I can even answer what abandonment is.
It’s just not feeling like you have anyone but yourself to rely on and then a side effect was blaming the circumstances and situations and people for things that really weren’t even in their own control either. All of us were dealing with this situation at the same time we were all abandoned by her, but it was not her fault, there was no one to blame. He’s onto this anger right and so you’re like now I need to forgive my mom for something she didn’t even do wrong. That’s weird but also—
It’s cathartic. It’s cathartic you needed it for you. It wasn’t that she did anything to you, you needed it for you.
Correct, and we all do and we get it wrong, we think yes that person needs to apologize to me and then I’ll be done with it. Even if they do apologize to you if you feel like you didn’t get the last word on it, you’re still going to be mad, so it is.
So right!
You know, you’re still going to go okay, they apologize but that was fake like just saying that, so that they don’t have to hear me anymore. What I learned is like it’s not even, I don’t even have to get the last word anymore I don’t even have to say my case anymore. I used to have to try and stick up for myself like no they, because like it happened to me in business.
I was working with someone who lied and said I stole money from their bank account, and I never had access to any of their accounts, I never even had logins and passwords to their accounts, I don’t even know how to hack things. Okay I was helping her with website design, and I was setting up her emails. I was literally creating an email for her.
She’s like, well it shows on my thing that you logged in, and you did. I said ‘yes, to your google admin account to create an email for you that you told me to do and then I logged out., Well, it says you logged in 32 times. I said that the internet refreshes like I was continuously logged in working on it but it’s logging the time. Anyway, it was a whole crazy thing. She starts calling all my clients that she was friends with, that she knew in the same circle and one by one all of my business dried up. That’s why I rebranded and I could not defend myself.
No, you can’t defend yourself against that, no. But because I mean that sounds like a great story, her version of the story sounds so good.
Well, they called me right, it does now. Go ahead.
If I was thinking about starting something, I would do it now because you have years behind you of experience that somebody who’s just 18 years old and has more courage because they’re young and spicy, they’re going to go out and do the videos, but we have knowledge.
So here you are sister, KMC Digital. Can you describe what your business is and how you got the idea for it, from what you saw was missing perhaps, or again I feel like I’m coming back round to when I first asked you this, was it something that you felt was missing that you filled or was it something that you offered that you knew that you could do it.
It was something I found was missing, so people initially come to me for one thing or maybe two things, right? Normally for local small businesses, right now, I’m working with a local security company. I don’t know how to do my Google place listing, I don’t know if like somebody set up for me, I don’t even know if it’s working, we’re getting phone calls but a lot of them are spam, can you help me update my website, I need to get, you know, very simple easy stuff and then you realize there was never a strategy.
So, when someone says to me oh, well I just need to sell this thing so I need an ad or I need somebody online that they saw a video of said that they need to do Google ads, because for whatever reason that’s what their niche is saying to do. Which could be totally valid but they’re not understanding that to just click go on a Google ad, there is a thought process behind that and if you have not sat down and really mapped out who you’re targeting— people think they know who they’re targeting but they’re very generic, in the way that they speak to their audience.
Even I had to correct myself because I realized people would come to me and go “I saw you on this podcast and when you said this is when I knew I needed to work with you” and it was a very specific thing that I said. So, with these small businesses well a lot of them think they don’t really need to really put themselves out there they just think if I’m listed in Google, they’ll find me and they’ll call my number, so now with so much competition and it’s so easy to go throw up a business online. It’s you’re competing now with people out there . . .
No, but you’re right, finish that thought you’re competing with people out there, finish that thought.
Maybe it started yesterday, even if you have more experience than them, they might have a better Google page and they might just beg everyone for a review or they might even pay their friends to write one, and that’s why I don’t judge people by their followings. Because just because you suck at putting a Google page together doesn’t mean you suck at what you do right, like people really judge the wrong things in business and I suck at asking people to give me reviews.
Just recently I’ve been working with one of my clients for six years, I’m like “Hey I’ve never asked you to do a testimonial for me would you mind doing a quick video” and she said it to me like two days later she’s like “Oh yeah let me do a video”. So, I had it but it’s like it doesn’t dawn on me to ask for that and that’s dumb because I’m in marketing.
But when I go to do a landing page I’m like “oh the testimonials should go here” and I don’t have any like written down, I have some written from emails that I’ll just say “Hey can I use the email that you sent me” but I think that’s where I realized like there’s such a huge gap between what it is that you actually want to go and do and launch and then what has to be built first.
Now if you are doing something really simple like cleaning houses, you just need to go buy the equipment and the chemicals and you know go get your cleaning stuff together for less than 100 bucks and go clean a house because it’s your labour. But then you get a referral saying hey I have a referral program I’ll give you 10 per cent off your next cleaning if you tell a friend and they tell me that you sent whatever.
And then, but even then, when you start to grow, look in five years, if I had 20 of these houses what would that look like and do I want to have 20 of these houses and do I want to have other employees, or do I just want to charge a little bit more and do like a little extra for people.
So, I think that’s where things shift like a larger company, the clients that I’ve worked with that have 15-20 employees, this is where it gets really bad and you will be shocked and they don’t have marketing strategy, they don’t. They say they do it because they hired some vendor to run some numbers, and usually what they show me is a bunch of metrics that somebody pulled from the internet that they could do right now in five minutes, and that’s not a strategy, it isn’t.
Nobody interviewed their staff, nobody interviewed their clients, nobody asked, “Hey, when you were working with them what was great and what wasn’t so great,” and when you don’t you want to, there’s people secretly doing marketing in every company and the owner has no idea. So when we do these audits and we do like the deep dive strategy we’re interviewing their team and there’s always some little Jessica in the corner somewhere who’s like “Oh I have been writing these blogs for the past two years” and I’m like do you even know this girl’s writing all these blogs and she does not know SEO keyword strategy, she’s just writing stuff and doing stuff, and the accidental marketers in every company.
So, we look at all of that and we go okay how is the customer journey affected by everything that people are doing in your company and that’s why I say marketing is not really an department it’s your entire business touches customers, unless you’re doing like CFO where you’re just crunching numbers all day but a lot of the bigger ones. Without that strategy document everyone, it’s a free-for-all so you have.
Then I’ll even like non-profits too, especially when they get really big they have a hybrid they have—you know, I’ve worked with associations and multiple and they have a hybrid of volunteers and full-time staff. They’ll get a volunteer that is owning this one thing because they have a lot of time on their hands but then that person’s life changes and they can’t volunteer anymore so now the full-time staff is trying to absorb almost a 20 hour a week position that this person’s been.
Some of these volunteers were dedicated, they’re retired, they love it, they’re doing 20 hours a week just helping out and they have their retirement, so they don’t worry about money they’re just happy to do it. But then if they can’t do it anymore because life changes for them, it leaves.
So not having a document like a source of truth for marketing and how you’re going to handle things. Now with AI it makes it way worse because you’ve never created this source document and so every single person is programming their own AI with their own vantage point and it skews the output.
Dilutes it, dilutes the brand, it dilutes the mission, it dilutes the purpose. You’re completely right, I didn’t even think about that.
And because someone goes “Oh I just made this in Chat isn’t it great” I said I don’t know what does your marketing document say, like what is that, where’s your like strategy document and your brand voice, does it sound like your brand voice or does it sound like Claude, does it sound like AI wrote this and do you even have your own voice documented right, even doing a recording talking about different topics and the way that you speak and the way that you put things together have it train on that.
So right now that’s what I’ve been working through, so now I’ve taken our strategy put it into an AI so that I can give it to someone and say answer all of these questions, fill in the blanks on this, on these prompts and then put it into your AI and train it when you feel like it’s outputting things that make that are good ask it to export all of that stuff and then make every person on your team either connect to the same shared folder in Google or a SharePoint folder on your internal hard drive, make that AI connect to that always and always tell it do not stray from this documentation.
This is such valuable information that I don’t think anyone out there is talking about. Is that what we talk about, okay make sure that you understand AI is a tool and it’s not a person and that you’re the person that needs to control the AI and not the other way around. So, this we have out there right but do people actually understand what that means, I don’t think so because what you just said there is a clear example of how you should be utilizing AI.
I think that’s what no one’s talking about and mainly because it’s the marketing industry’s fault in my opinion, because they’re trying to sell you AI agents. An AI agent is literally just a library of skills in document form, it’s not any more complicated than that. The only thing that complicates your life is when, even Beverely, she’s amazing on my team. I said can you paste in the prompt that you use to get this result? Because it was off, it just didn’t. That’s why you have to have a human read it and you need the marketing brain that checks it.
She sends it to me and I was like, I’m like how did you get, what did you use to put this together and then I saw how she prompted the AI and it made sense what it put out because she told the AI to be this, she said you are acting now as a marketing assistant and I’m like why would it be a marketing assistant, why would it be like a low level everybody that you every time you ask about anything.
We share the same knowledge base but if she even prompts it differently it affects, so even if you do have that folder everyone on your team needs to come into agreement on how we are prompting the AI what are what do we want it to act like. So, she said marketing assistant, I said why didn’t you tell it to be a CMO or like a or a senior level copywriter, for this particular project, tell it to be the skill level that you would want it to be first and it’ll pull from that knowledge base and even if it scrapes the internet to figure that out.
It’s okay, it can do that but because even press releases, I have to tell it rewrite this in associated press style, make sure that all these and just little things that are just industry specific, but if you don’t know to prompt it, you know the great thing is you can build this library once and just add to it or delete from it over time. But if you don’t have it two people you can tell three different people to do the same task, write a blog about SEO for me and use Claude to write the blog and reference our website, just put, have it reference our business website and then write a blog about how to do SEO in 2026.
Each person is going to ask it to do that task differently based on their own way of delegating and so when there’s no source of truth document—and I was telling someone the other day I said it’s like religion right like there’s a Book of Mormon, there’s a Bible, there’s a Quran, there’s a source of truth for that thought process or that belief system, so when you’re training your AI, you need to think I’m going to make AI a KMC digital bible that it has to reference whenever it’s working with clients and on a client project and then I use our framework to build out the strategy for the client that should client strategy and the frameworks go into the AI that we use for our client so that that account has, and I take their podcast that they’ve been on or things that they’ve written and I program it use this to sound like this person.
If I ever ask you to write like this person this is what they sound like here’s a link to their podcasts that always write like them and so those little extras are what makes it not sound like AI slop and I feel like that’s just not happening. I know it isn’t and even lawyers are using it and they’re getting in trouble because the AI will hallucinate a fake court case so that it can do what you want it to do, so you must tell it.
There is no such precedent for this, do not make one up, you have to tell it not to make things up because AI wants to do what you, it’s like an eager little kid with the knowledge of a hundred-thousand-year-old person, so I had to think like oh I’m like talking to a two-year-old who wants to do everything because they want to make me happy.
But when they come back with answers that I never asked for or they make stuff up that’s totally untrue just to give me what I’m asking for we don’t want to do that so the guardrails you put in place are important so . . .
It was when you took ownership over your life and how you feel and what you want for you, that things shifted.
So how do you know if something isn’t real you have to cross reference for references and yes tell me what you do.
I ask it to cite the sources, that it’s getting it from okay and I prompt when I write the prompt, I say to it do not make up fake sources and put the links to the sources after. Because even the strategy is good and I would caution people too that say well I’m not going to hire a marketing person, I’m just going to tell AI to do a marketing thing and there is a skill in Claude for that.
It’s a marketing like a skill but I have questioned it and it has come back and go oh you’re right that’s why people need to check our work because we’re wrong sometimes, like it gave me a really bad advice for a client and I was like no, that would be if I listened to the AI. Just spit out the first thing I would have derailed this client’s campaign because it was giving me really bad information and it’s just because I have an experience that I knew it was bad but if you don’t have any background in marketing at all or in what you’re trying to do, talk to a human also don’t just go with the AI answer.
Yes, you’re absolutely right, you need a certain amount of knowledge in order. The thing is it keeps coming back to the same thing, it’s a tool, you need to know how to talk to it and if you don’t have some level of experience or insight you don’t know what you’re getting back is going to be the right thing and that can be bit that’s when AI becomes dangerous. I want to ask you, your clients are seeing double industry standard conversions and thousands of sales calls, and I know that people are going to want to know what do most entrepreneurs still get wrong about what actually drives revenue?
I think it always goes back to messaging and then whether they need the thing, so what we got really good at is just validating the sales funnel and we do even with ads we do it I actually learned the method that I use from this company called Mint CRO. If anybody wants to go and take their class, I don’t work for them, I don’t get any commission from them but it’s a smart way and they even have an AI now that only is like $47 a month. I use it and you can basically, let’s say that you want to teach people how to start their own podcast for example, and you want to sell a course on it to validate the idea.
Before you go and build something out you can ask Claude to do research on that type of a class is this something people are searching for and all that, but then when you run the ad itself you want to know is the message resonating with people. And so, it will test it will make squares with just what they call it. I think Mint CRO calls it first date, first date concepts, so a bit you just put in there like true or false.
AI is a good thing for podcasting or like for your situation, for me it would be AI questions for marketing, but for you I would just put true or false starting a podcast is scary, true or false, I feel confident using podcasting equipment. If true or false I think a podcast would help grow my business, and you put all these little weird thoughts in there to see the reaction that you’re going to get.
But they are micro tested against $25 ad spend so you can test like 50 or 60 which we usually recommend at least 20 and but it’s a blank square with no artwork it’s run right on your page, but the audience is so micro that really no one sees it, but when people resonate with the message good or bad they always comment on it, or they share it or I’ve gotten really nasty—what are you an idiot like why would you write this, but it resonates right it turned off this guy he was so upset and I was like actually let’s put that on the green because we don’t want bad clients who hate us, right?
So, we want to make sure okay good that’s going to repel guys like that, so we test—then there’s the second phase where we go a little bit deeper, but we phase test. And then the landing page, we just put messaging on there, now—when I first learned this is a while ago so I like to use it to test concepts and then and message and then because even with AI like until you run the ad and human beings look at it, the AI can tell you all your ideas are amazing and then you put it in the market and you’re like but AI said that would work so that’s what people are experiencing.
Trying to figure it out sometimes AI is right on the money and the ads work and people are like whoa look at that it’s so awesome but this test will help you avoid having a, because you want to figure out what is not working, I remember landing page we did an AB test it was my photo and then a little paragraph “about the”—it was a free lead magnet and then like a little video and then clicked to download the lead magnet. We all, we did on the second one was we switched the order of that paragraph in the video and like the conversions were way better on one than the other just from switching the location of the paragraph it was something I don’t know why it’s just like . . .
And how would you know that, right?
So, if you go one at a time you can go “oh I see” but if you don’t and you’re trying to test multiple graphics and multiple videos and multiple looks and feel it was the design was exactly the same it just the uh. And then the different headlines, so we bounced the headlines around and then once we knew that okay this headline is resonating no matter where it is on the page, then we can go that’s going to be our main one and then, so that process helps you filter through the good ideas and what is going to resonate with somebody.
That’s why I’ve been so slow to launch classes because I want to—once I put on the real ad spend, I want it to not have to be like redoing it and so with that one, that example came from someone that was selling, he had freedom in his name and we didn’t work with him for that long, maybe three months. The first month was helping with his website helping with his newsletters. Then he goes like, we keep building out these amazing assets but we’re not doing anything with them, so I said why don’t we do the sales funnel thing and so we charge a flat rate of 10 grand, and then we’ll go in and we will validate the funnel in the ads and all the things.
He said okay let’s do it and we even tracked like he had a sequence of three landing pages with different video and it was a free, it was like a free mini master class he did but it had multiple pages to it so we were tracking where are they sitting, are they clicking through to all three videos, are they dropping off at a certain page, and so for him we did skip some of the steps because he already built it.
But in that case, we just, we just created like AB test, we duplicated this into a different system so that we could play around with our version of it and then we live tested this but when we got it figured out the order and where people were getting stuck and—you can also—there’s a tool called ‘Mouse Flow’. People tend to put their mouse, when they’re reading, where they’re and you can see where they stop the mouse and they pause or like, it’ll track what they’re doing. So, we look at the heat maps and it’s nerdy and I don’t even do it. I have Kevin do it, but I know his process because I just learned it and I did a little bit for myself, but when we do client work, I source it out but it’s pretty interesting. You really don’t know if someone’s going to think something there’s some stuff you think is really going to resonate because you relate to it but other people who haven’t don’t have that experience they don’t resonate at all and they’re like oh I thought it was going to be really good.
You know you’re so right, you just said something I think is really important because it hits home for you and perhaps your team and maybe you’re a certain type of person and you feel that well I want to attract people like me, so this is probably going to work but then it bombs, how do you know where to go from that?
Because it logically makes sense that if you’re looking for people like you that if it hits home for you that it hits home for them. I’m asking you this because in your business this is the stuff you do, right? You talk about building a bulletproof business and this is one of the many things that you need to know how to do which is why people hire you.
They all, it all works together and that’s why that process is important and the messaging is one of the pieces that we spend the most time with because once you have your core message and it actually resonates with most people, because you are solving their problem but you’re saying in a way that they all go yeah that’s me, I need to buy this.
That’s when you know you can start to put it on every single thing and even in pivoting and doing ‘The Revenue Runway’ I’m like okay I don’t really work with startups, I have to so I’m still mid-process and because all the things that I planned for the book launch they just didn’t happen right and there’s a bunch of reasons why, but I know now okay I need to, I need to go back and how do I add this.
So, the answer was personal brand, so that’s for me because I’ve already been around for 15 years, if like I redid the wording on my website for the fractional stuff but then I need a page that says resources and that resource—those resources can branch out to something for startups or whatever, so because right now nothing that I have on my website screams like startup.
So that so that is so interesting because you—oh my god this is gold, so you wrote a book called ‘The Revenue Runway’ which—who is it that is the ideal client?
Yeah, or someone’s starting out and they’re struggling.
Yes, exactly right so when they land on your website they’re not seeing that referenced
No, it’s at the revenuerunway.com
I would argue the market’s never too crowded, because you’re your own person, and you are the one that’s going to be different than the other people.
Okay, so it’s a different website but then your website and this is interesting because I’ve had this problem because I have these two a couple of very different brands but and then there’s me that I do all of them, so whatever we’re sharing with or with all these other brands that I’m involved with I’m also sharing on my personal page and then when you come to my personal page you see this hosh posh of all of these different brands, but you don’t really see me so putting those brands that I own or co-own or partnered with on my page isn’t benefiting those brands, so you’re talking about a similar situation as well in your world so how are you fixing that?
I, like what we talked about, got some help, I actually went to a really cool event in Costa Rica this year and it was actually meant for the CRM system users. That’s how I met the people that hosted it and Ruheen was there. She has an AI called brand pod and I want to say the name correctly because it’s a really cool tool. Yeah brandpod.ai, okay and so her whole world is a personal brand, and she even tells the story.
When I first created this AI with my husband, I was telling everyone about it and no one got it. They didn’t get what I was trying to say, and they didn’t really buy it and I was charging like dirt cheap $25 a month. And then I realized I made something no one else has ever made this is a brand new thing so now I got to get people excited about it and I, and she if you look at pictures of her, she was not like overly done up and she didn’t, she was just like in the grind like working on the computer behind the scenes and you know hair like up in a bun and just trying to get everything done.
She went—but when she presents now, she dresses very differently, she has her hair and then she has her signature glasses that have a thick frame and they’re like just she has a very specific look and she changes up colours and stuff but very same. Every time I see her speak she always, you know it’s her and even when she’s on podcasts online, she wears the glasses and the suit and the way that she puts herself together it’s always consistent.
And she said and that’s one big area that I’m very weak on, and so she said to me why don’t you set up your profile in this thing and let it and just and she has a ChatGPT and you answer all these questions, it’ll ask you about yourself and it puts together your profile and it puts it into this ai and then that ai will go and pitch podcasts on your behalf based on what your background is what your story is what you want to sell and what it says like is your strengths and weaknesses and stuff and it’ll pitch news media, it’ll pitch podcasters, it’ll pitch whatever you it gives you options.
She’s very passionate about podcasting being a way to grow a personal brand and I agree like it’s been the best and you get to meet such great people and so for her she just got me thinking about it and I said well, do you think I should have two separate brands with this here and this here and she’s like no like you’re doing too much so like therevenuerunway.com was already built when I met her, so I’m using it right now but eventually that domain name will probably just forward to the KMC digital side but it’ll be segmented out.
So like KMC did even for the software, it’s a, it’s KMC digital but it’s a separate domain so it’s like sas.kmc.digital and then that’s where the plans are that you can buy so she said like try to integrate everything into KMC digital since that’s your main company name but then your personal brand you can talk about your framework and your book based on the first three things in the framework is ‘The Revenue Runway’.
That’s, it’s really ‘The Revenue Runway’ is the book title and the name of the framework that we use when we do fractional CMO but I’ve made it focus on only three parts of that framework for a very small business or a startup because I just saw the freedom it gave my parents they were like you know in their 20s early 20s when they started out and they didn’t intend to own a business and then I started doing like websites on the side.
I didn’t intend to own a business but being able to travel, take my daughter to the beach in the middle of a work week while everyone’s at the office and you get the whole beach to yourself like those little things it’s we got to do stuff even when we didn’t even have a lot of money coming in we were able to just oh it’s a Tuesday we want to go to the beach okay let’s pack the car and I don’t have any client calls today or whatever and just make space where you can make it. And I want that for people because we are so bombarded with crazy all the time and then to have to sit in someone else’s business and build it for them, like build it for yourself.
Oh my god I love this. ‘The Revenue Runway’, your book, why is this a book that every business needs?
I think it if you’re already been in business and you’re stuck this thing will kind of tear down all the chaos and it just focuses on three things so even if you want to launch a new product this walks you through and there’s chat and there’s a workbook and there’s AI prompts that you can just don’t overthink anything, just go in there, dump your idea in there, figure out what you want to call your new thing whether it’s a product or a course.
I mainly deal with service businesses not product businesses so, to in I really wrote this in that way so if you do sell products I’m probably not the one but this will help if you’re going to do a service of any kind it doesn’t matter if you’re like HVAC or you know an attorney it’ll force you to think about what are you selling and how are you packaging it and who are you selling it to and really drill down on those three things.
And then that way, when you—ideally by the time someone even books a phone call with you, they already know who you are by seeing what you have online. That’s been my weakness not building a personal brand the sales call has to do with heavy lifting, they don’t know you but if they already know you and you have videos about your business and what you do and who you are like they just want to call you to go hey I want to hire you can you help me with this
So, your book, correct me if I’m wrong, talks about your three pillars, irresistible offer, ideal client, and sales strategy, correct?
Yep, that’s the, yeah anytime you’re stuck go back to that.
Okay perfect now where can people pick up this book you have a dedicated website is it you it’s the name of the book, I love it!
Yes, therevenuerunway.com is the website.
How do you know which pillar is broken?
I think it’s—well if you are putting—that’s the thing when you go through these it’ll walk you through, so if you start to launch and you haven’t done like your due diligence on whether the market needs something that you have it’s easier to sell something that you know that people already buy, um, but if you’re trying to teach them.
I just met with someone last week and he just has this whole new concept or way of approaching a common term that we use to describe something but he wants to change the narrative around that topic that is a much harder thing to do because you’re having to battle people’s minds and reframe their minds before they ever give you a dollar.
So, with this you’re just focusing on, okay is this something validated in the market I would argue the market’s never too crowded, because you’re your own person, and you are the one that’s going to be different than the other people.
Yes, there’s 52 attorneys that do divorce in your town but maybe you’re the friendliest one, or you know it’s people who have to stop thinking things are oversaturated and just go back to the basics and launch when you start to launch and you start to sell. That’s when you find out what might be broken either nobody’s buying at all or I would say when you’re building your offer out like either nobody wants or needs that thing or you’re not targeting the right people and then if you have your targeting because you know a lot of people are clicking on it and looking at it but they’re not buying, then it’s probably your messaging so it’s it just depends on where the fail happens.
The other thing I want to ask you now based on what you just said there and the conversation we’ve had so far is you’ve said building a fancy website first is one of the fastest ways to sabotage your business. Tell me why?
And maybe that’s a little harsh, but I don’t think it’s horrible and actually now I may have to rethink that statement.
I love it!
If you’re not a massive global corporation where you can be everywhere, optimal everywhere and consistent everywhere, you need to find the place where your business is going to have the greatest advantage.
AI will build your website in two minutes and it looks decent enough to where I’m saying don’t be the person that spends—I met a woman who built six websites and never sold anything, but she felt so good she got that dopamine out of finishing the website and having it look pretty and look at me I have this and I have this and I said, so where is your revenue coming from, because each of these websites is a full-time business in and of itself like one was a full it advertised a full blown production company like video production and then another website was like a full-blown like business coaching company and then another one and it was almost like you can tell she wasn’t making any money because she kept making new things and she never stayed in it long enough to get one thing to grow.
So I could see in her mind she was like what do you mean I’m like if these are each businesses what how much money is each one bringing in and she couldn’t—I she—I don’t think she wanted to answer me I think she knew the answer but she was just like but I don’t really want you to figure that out for me like I just want you to fix this part of my website.
I said, oh you were talking to me about not having money coming in and you were trying to spend more time with your grandkids, and you wanted to ask, why don’t we talk about what the real problem is. How are you advertising this? How are you? She would go to networking events with six different business cards well with her name on it but with different logos and different brands.
And I said do you know how confusing that is no one and everyone’s scared to hire you because you look like you’re spread thin if you’re legitimately running these six different businesses by yourself and people believe that you have money coming into each one, there’s work connected to that business that you have to be doing and managing and you don’t have a team, it—there comes a point where people can sniff it out and go I don’t think she can take me on as a client because she’s got all this stuff going on.
Yes, you’re so right. If a person shouldn’t be focusing so much on websites because that’s what I’m getting from your conversation, but focus more on avenues to reach the right people with whatever it is you’re selling one thing to sell and this is what your company specializes in, figuring out all of that as well as building the mechanism to be able to bring in clients which is like the funnel and it’s not a funnel like it used to be back in the day, this you I mean just listening to what you do.
Just listening to what you’re saying, the amount of work behind the scenes that you and your team do knowing how to use the tools out there prompting the correct prompts, it’s a lot bigger now in order to be able to make money online, like it’s there’s so much more you have to think about.
So, I need to ask you this because that’s what I’m hearing you say, what should people actually be doing in order to make revenue quickly? Now I’m not saying the quick fix here I’m saying you know like okay like my company’s bleeding, I just I need to figure out through what, I do how do I make revenue fast well, what would you say someone already in business, you think like, are you saying I would say the person’s already in business, not someone that’s coming in brand new, because they don’t have the fear mechanisms associated with the person that’s already failed a thousand times.
Yeah that’s true then I would say probably I would say past client reactivation campaign people who already know you have worked with you before, but maybe you added a service or you change something about the way you do things and like it is so much quicker and easier to sell somebody on “hey when we worked together before I wasn’t really doing this but I think based on our past interactions it would be really helpful for you, do you want to hop on a call and take a look at it”.
I always get a yes from those because a lot of times why I stopped working with someone is the project ended or they just weren’t really sure about it. There are a lot of clients who stop services right before we’re going to validate their phone and they go this is too much. People think you just build it and they will come and they want to blame the web developer, they want to blame this, blame that.
You must drive traffic to your thing, that’s saying I want to sell my car, I’m just going to park it in my driveway and hopefully everyone in my neighbourhood knows that it’s for sale. There’s no for sale sign on it, I didn’t tell anyone I’m selling it, but I’m parked in the driveway, didn’t people know that I’m going to sell this, no nobody knows because you didn’t tell them.
I think someone clipped me on another podcast recently saying like I had a client that said I just don’t get why people aren’t signing up for my membership, I said I’m on your email list you don’t tell them to sign up for anything, she goes but I feel, if I’m inspiring people they’re going to naturally want to know. I’m like no, no you’re going to offer them the thing that you want them to buy.
That’s like me just wearing clothes all day and going why isn’t anyone asking if they can buy my shirt I sell these shirts, you didn’t tell anyone you’re selling these shirts, no one someone say, ‘oh where’d you get that,’ then you might tell them but why wait for someone to ask you what it seems so simple but that’s what we do with the physical products it’s easy to demonstrate but online it’s very weird, you know?
Is this what you mean when you say that one simple step can unlock 80 of business results, is this one example of that?
Yeah, I think it’s a mess adjusting your messaging and asking for things like someone said the more offers that you make the more clients you get because you can position them differently like offer your same thing but in different ways. Because the work that I do with people results in a bunch of different positive outcomes, which one am I going to pitch, which one am I going to sell, which is this ad going to sell strategy, nobody wants to pay for strategy it’s boring it’s snoozy it sounds like a big, long horrible process.
When we can really do it in less than 30 days and we can even start working on your actual business right away but people think when you say the strategy word it’s a swear word and they don’t want to pay for it and I get that because I was the same way like oh I don’t need strategy I’m just going to run some ads and I’m going to like people will buy it, not so not always sometimes yes.
I mean I’ve run an ad once for $40 and 2500 people showed up to my event and like it was a freaky thing because wow ready for that particular event there was nothing like it in the area and that was event driven not a service but I had 140,000 people saw that ad because they just kept it went viral they shared it so I paid $40 and it was a farmer’s market actually in Arizona indoors. One ad I ran for three weeks, I think, and it got shared so much that we had people emailing us about when’s the next one when’s the next one.
You guys sold out a product in two hours, and I said well I didn’t know that we were going to have 2500 people come and I had a clicker I was standing at the door clicking every time someone walked in. And so that’s how I knew I needed to count because this is insane like no one could even park. That’s normal like that’s a fluky thing but if your product hits the people at the right time with the right message it’s not that freaky. You must remember a thousand people buying your thing is a lot of people. It’s hard for some people to even get 10 clients or 100 clients, especially the higher amount of money you’re charging for that thing the less people are going to get it.
It’s harder to sell obviously a more expensive thing especially if you’re not positioned for it. I’ll I have not ever offered a low ticket item for myself but I have done it for clients and again I’m in groups with all different marketing people that do all different levels and niches and the one thing I’m hearing is if you’re good on webinars selling one to many people and you can get that webinar language down and you can really resonate with the people on the call that is working very well.
Right now in the world of AI where everything seems fake they actually are live with you not an evergreen one, a live one where you show up and they can ask questions because no one’s taking the time to do that so anyone who is making sales and then another option if you do not if that sounds mortifying because you have to be on camera with strangers you can do low ticket offer and say listen I like for me I want to sell my little fractional CMO process thing for Claude I was thinking either $97 or $197 but that’s an introductory thing so they can play with it, learn what it is, if they hate it I’ll give them a refund.
But I think that I’ve never launched my own low-ticket offer. I’ve done free lead magnets for the most part and then, but I will tell you those round tables that I was doing on LinkedIn I got clients from that because they got to learn a little one thing that I know how to do, I just taught one thing “oh can you help me do that, can you help me get on podcasts, can you do my marketing” and they, a lot of them booked follow-up calls to talk about services after. But if I was smarter, I would have had a $500 offer right there on their thing and I would have had a link to buy it right in the chat and I wouldn’t have made them do a second call because people when they’re excited they just want to lock it in because they’re going to go do 55,000 things after that call and they’re going to forget about you.
Yeah absolutely. So, I know that there’s going to be people that are intrigued to be able to figure out how you can help them make money, where are we sending them?
The best place would be kmc.digital if they want to book an appointment, there is a clarity call on there and there’s even a quiz if you want to gauge where your marketing is at, and it’ll give you a score. It’s like a scorecard based on the systems that I use.
Kalen, where are we sending them to hang out with you, like social media, LinkedIn where are we, where are we sending people?
If they want to hang out, we just opened up a free membership where anyone can pop in and I’m going to be doing trainings in there we haven’t officially launched it but it is functional so if they want to go to member.kmc.digital and just there’s a little sign up button in there to create a free account and there’s like a Revenue Runway box in there and that’s where I’m loading in the workbook and all the chat prompts and so they can even play with that.
I am joining that’s all I have to say Kalen, you totally have sold me. I love who you are as a person, I love who you are as a professional and you don’t always get the two-in-one person, so I really thank you for coming on my show. and I want to close off by asking you to maybe end these sentences for me. Are you game?
Okay.
The more offers that you make, the more clients you get, because you can position them differently.
Okay so, confidence is built by . . .
Struggle.
The biggest waste of time in business is . . .
Overthinking.
Messy action beats . . .
Building 17 different websites.
Your business will grow when . . .
You stop procrastinating.
If you’re stuck right now, it’s because perhaps . . .
You really need to believe in yourself in the work that you’re doing.
Kalen, what haven’t we talked about that you’d like to leave everyone watching, listening and reading this today?
All the things in your head that tell you can’t do your own business or build something, stop thinking about I want to be a millionaire tomorrow and think about who’s one person that I want to help with what I’m really good at help maybe five of those people for free, get their testimonials and then start selling that thing. That’s—don’t think too much and if you think too much go to member.kmc.digital and find the chat prompts you can go step by step.
They all feed into each other and I’ll be in the group once a week starting in July there’s a calendar in there it’ll tell you when I have to load it up today but we will be in there so if you need any help just pop in my dream is that everyone helps each other out in the group with what they’re stuck on.
You know here’s what I want everyone to really take in before we close off which I know Kalen will agree with me, there is no perfect time that there is no perfect plan, there is no moment where fear will disappear, trust me on that and I know Kalen, you agree with me.
Confidence is built from that place where all of this is going on but you move forward in action anyway and you know what Kalen has shown us today is that you don’t need perfect conditions, you need a decision to move, a decision to take action, a decision to back yourself the big one even when life is messy even when you’re not there mentally just motion, physical act, it will change things.
Kalen shared that a little bit here as well in regard to when she was a teenager, she just needed motion to get through the trauma of losing her mom, so she went out there and she did the track, she did the physical exercises so the energy of the angst and the trauma and the anguish that she was going through had kind of this physical place that it could remove itself until the mental was able to deal even when you’re not there mentally. Just think about that guys and Kalen, any final words sweetheart please share them here: am I on the money or am I missing anything?
Oh, you’re good I had a lot of fun, this is great and yeah this is one of your giftings for sure.
Thank you, Kalen, thank you so much. If this episode hit you guys, if you feel that you’ve been waiting or you’ve been hesitating or you’re overthinking as we do right we do this we do it times 10, if we’re a woman because that’s how we’ve been trained to be, send this to yourself, hit the notification button on this show wherever it is that you are consuming it and maybe take one action today like do a motion, do something physical that will get you out of a stuck rut if that happens to be where you are.
Go join Kalen at the membership site, glean some of that information network with other like-minded people that are there and I always say this because this is how I’ve learned network with people, that aren’t like-minded because trust me you’re going to learn something from them that you won’t learn from the tribe that is drinking the Kool-Aid that you’re drinking.
And please don’t forget to subscribe to Transform Your Confidence With Raj Girn. This is a place where we turn insight into execution and execution hopefully into transformation and transformation into the kind of confidence no one can ever take away from you, no one.
I want to leave you with that, go back over the episodes from before, share this with someone that you feel needs to watch it, encourage them as I am encouraging you to give us a five-star rating because if you do the algorithms will allow other people that need to see this, to see this.
Until next time please take care of yourself whatever that may mean and take care of your loved ones because you know that’s important too. Thank you for your time. I’ll see you next time.
