Today I’m sharing a little bit about my story and how I got here, specifically how I became an Integrator! Some of you may have been following along on my business journey for a while now and I love that you’ve been around for all the pivots that my brands have made in the last 11 years as an entrepreneur. But some of you guys are newer to who I am and my background. So I’m hoping that this is fun and helpful!

It’ll be heavy on the personal side but I want to share my story and a little bit behind the scenes of what entrepreneurship has looked like for me!

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: MY WEDDING PLANNER ERA

I’ve owned several different businesses over the last 11 years. That’s where you can see that even as an Integrator, I can swing to Visionary tendencies. I love being my own boss. I love owning my own company. 

So in that sense, like I’m very true to a Visionary! A lot of visionaries have that entrepreneurial spirit. You enjoy leading the charge, vision casting, and dreaming about what could be!

Growing up, I never knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. My mind changed probably every week, based on what I’ve watched on TV or that book that I had just read or what my friend said she wanted to do! I never really knew one thing that I was for sure going to “grow up” to be. 

So when I went to college, I majored in business management with a concentration in organizational management, which now is kind of ironic. Here I am as an Integrator doing business and project management and all things organizing. (I kind of love that a little bit!!)

When I graduated from college, I started working a traditional 9-5 and I quickly hated it. I hated feeling confined, I hated that I didn’t have any flexibility and I felt so burdened when I thought about waking up every day until I’m 60 doing that. It sounded terrible and I knew that there had to be more to life than that.

So that Visionary in me came out of a desire for more, but I didn’t know what that more was. I just knew I wanted more. 

Then Matt, my high school sweetheart and I got engaged and there was finally finally a ring on my hand. We were making moves, we were gonna get married, and I fell in love with wedding planning. I loved it. 

I loved everything about the wedding industry, I loved reading Style Me Pretty and Southern Weddings, and I loved digging into my vendors’ blogs and following them on Instagram. (This was pre Instagram Stories, pre Reels – none of that was a thing, just pretty posts and then going over to binge read blogs. Those were like the simple social media days!!) 

I started thinking that if I loved that so much, and I was really enjoying the craft of wedding planning, maybe I could be a wedding planner!!

So on our honeymoon, I told my husband, “I would like to start a business and I would like to be a wedding planner.” 

So I came home from our honeymoon and just started researching how to start a business, how to get an LLC, what that looks like in the state of Virginia.

I started thinking about all of those back end business things that I needed to do including all the marketing! So I decided on a name, I got an Instagram account, and I reached out to all of our previous wedding vendors. 

Thankfully, I had hired vendors who were phenomenal… like truly in a league of their own in the industry. I had also hired them because not only were they really, really good at what they did, but I had a personal connection with them. I genuinely liked them, I read their blogs, I was following them on social media, I wanted them to be on my wedding day, and I wanted them to be a part of it all. 

So I reached out to them, told them I was starting my own business, and said that I hoped we could work together one day. They added me to their vendor list and referral list and so within just a few months I was booking out with weddings, building a social media presence, and blogging every single day!

I dove in head first as a wedding planner and becoming an online creative business owner and I loved it.

NEXT UP… MY CONFERENCE HOSTING ERA

Within a couple of months of doing all of that, as much as I loved everything that I was doing, I realized I missed people.

I was still working my 9-5 but it wasn’t at all in the wedding industry and I don’t think anyone even knew I had my own business. I didn’t have friends at church I could talk about my wedding planning business with, and it really felt like I was in this little bubble. 

If you own your own business you know that it can feel like no one really understands what you do, what it looked like to have a website, and be blogging, and know which topics to blog. I felt like I had so many questions and I really missed being able to connect with others that had similar passions and interests as me. 

So about 6 months into owning my wedding planning company, I decided that I wanted to start a conference for business owners. 

As a frame of reference, 11 years ago, it was not cool to educate. This was pre online courses everywhere, there weren’t a lot of retreats, and there wasn’t a lot of give and take of information. Especially in my area in the wedding planning industry. Wedding planners were very tight lipped. They were a little bit cutthroat. 

So I thought… If I don’t really have any friends in the wedding planning industry, maybe other people in other parts of the country feel the same way I do. So if I create a space where people can come, they can learn from one another. And they can also maybe get to meet some industry leaders at the same time. How cool would that be? 

We can all offer a seat at that table and we can all be together in one room. So thankfully, some of the vendors that I had hired and worked with were industry leaders. They had influence. So when I pitched this idea to them, they were all about it.

I wish that I could show you guys a screenshot of some of the emails that I sent to some of these like industry leaders at the time! It’s like such a spammy, scammy looking email that I was sending them asking them to be my friends!!

But… we had eight educators agree to speak to be keynote speakers at our very first conference!! And that’s when we officially started Creative At Heart Conference!

After that initial launch I think we ended up with around 11 or 12 educators. 

I created a website. I had a friend of mine who was actually really good at Squarespace at the time so she created a website for us. We created a brand new Instagram account. We were like bootstrapping everything – website, Instagram account, some sort of checkout with Ticketmaster or something… Here we go! Let’s try!

Within TWO weeks, we had sold 40 seats, and that was our capacity! We were thrilled. We hosted the first conference. It was incredible, literally incredible – one of the most life changing experiences of my life. 

I’ve made friends at that conference that are still my friends to this day. It was such a life-changing experience. 

Right after the first conference, I was on a high and ready to do it again. So that first conference was in January, and we turned around and hosted our second conference in March, and we sold out again in 2 or 3 days. We had 60 attendees at that conference. 

In March, we launched the third event that we hosted later in the year in November and we sold out at 80 attendees. 

So within the first year of the conference, we had 3 conferences, and all of them sold out… really quickly. We started moving around the country, too, and hosting in different locations so we could get to know new educators and attendees in another geographical area in the industry. 

I LEFT MY 9-5 AND HAD A BIG HEART TO HEART…

It was growing quickly. The next year, we also hosted 3 conferences, and it continued to grow. I continue to love it at this point! I also left my 9-5 because now at this point, I’m doing 25-35 weddings a year and I also decided to be a florist too, because you know, I had *all* this time… 

So I was wedding planning, I was offering floral design to my wedding planning clients, and  was hosting the conference. I was now officially a full-time small business owner and doing alllll the things. It was just bananas!! 

When I look back at 2016 (pre-kids), it was such an exciting time and I was having so much fun but at the end of the year, I sat down with my husband Matt (who is my biggest supporter and always has been!) and we had a big heart to heart.

Matt basically said, “Hey, you’re doing a lot. You’ve got a lot of weddings, we’ve got floral design, and those things are really profitable. But this conference – yes, you’re selling out and yes, you’re having fun, but it’s more like a passion project right now and you haven’t figured out how to make it a profitable business. If we want to start a family, and if we want to keep on this road of small business, then your time is really precious. And yes, it’s good to have hobbies, of course, but this is an expensive hobby. We can’t just make this be a passion project. This needs to make us more than $2,000 or just barely break even. We need this to be profitable.” 

I was tired and feeling burned out. So we agreed that I would try one more year, one more conference in 2017, to see what would happen.

A PIVOTAL MOMENT

We offered one conference and we sold out in 48 hours. We sold 120 seats in 48 hours! It was truly bananas… and I share that because it was a pivotal moment for me as a business owner for a couple of different reasons. 

#1. This was a really cool God moment. I’m very spiritual, I love Jesus, and it was really cool to see him say this is where you’re supposed to be right now. It had been really hard, but he showed me the fruit. So on that personal side of things, it was really, really impactful. 

#2. On the business side of things it taught me so much! All of a sudden, I had created an offer and a service where I had built demand for 2 years, unintentionally. I wasn’t planning to offer a ton of conferences and then scale back. I thought that we would do 2-3 conferences every single year forever. I didn’t really have an end goal. 

But we did scale back, we built up demand, and then we dropped the availability of that demand. So supply and demand was in action right there. It was so cool to see that business model in practice and it was also really cool for me because I thrive on a challenge. I love to be able to tear something apart and figure out how to make it work even better. 

Up until that point, we had started to make a name for ourselves in the industry. People knew our conference. People knew that they could come and hear exceptional educators, hear real advice, and be invited with open arms. It was more boutique, a little bit smaller, and they could get to know other people, make some friends, and not feel alone. 

So we built up a name for ourselves, which was great, and I also built up a name for being a very organized conference host. (And I wear that badge very proudly!!) I loved being so organized in the conference space. But what I hadn’t cracked the code on was how to make all of that profitable. 

So 2017 was where I realized I’d built up some great operations but needed to figure out how to funnel all of this into a great system for a profitable conference. So between offering one conference a year instead of three, and making some very, very strategic intentional decisions, in how we hosted the conference (the venues that we picked, the catering that we chose, etc.) all of a sudden, we were profiting over 6 figures.

That’s profiting… not just the revenue that came in! I learned so much about what it looks like to bootstrap a brand and to grow slow, to grow over two years of fine tuning and tweaking all of these things, and then funnel it all together into one incredible experience.

THE MOVE TOWARDS DIGITAL PRODUCTS

2017 was huge for our brand, for the growth of the conference, and for us personally. Matt left his 9-5 and joined the business full time which was not necessarily something we’d planned on. He didn’t have an entrepreneurial spirit like me. 

But we both valued the freedom of the lifestyle that we could cultivate as a family, even pre-kids. So he left, he started working on the back end of the conference even more fully and we started dabbling in digital products. 

So, for context, I know that there have been email lists prior to 2017 but in this time frame in our industry, that’s when people really started to talk about what an email list was, what a webinar was, and podcasts and YouTubes weren’t really big in our industry. 

People were blogging and posting really beautiful flatlays on Instagram but the world was changing, the social media industry was changing, and so 2017 is when we also started to think about our own digital products. 

I mentioned in the past that I made an awful mistake and I launched an online shop at one point where I had 19 products… that was in 2017. Don’t do that. That’s terrible. It was not a good idea. 

But we started dabbling. I started like throwing spaghetti on the wall and we ended up launching a membership site through the conference that did really well. So we started learning how to scale a membership and all the backend of Kajabi and ThriveCart and all of these things that felt like learning Greek before, but now were becoming fun. 

I was starting to see some strengths come out of myself that I didn’t really know I was good at! I enjoyed doing it all and Matt and I enjoyed learning those things together. So 2017 was pivotal and in 2018 we kind of rinsed and repeated. Same in 2019. I kept selling out of conferences in hours… and it was amazing. 

We were still dabbling in digital products and I hadn’t really found a sweet spot with digital products yet, but I was learning so many things that now I can put into practice!

MY IDENTITY CRISIS ERA

As much as I was loving everything we were doing, I can look back now and I can see the beginnings of an identity crisis. If you’ve been in business long enough, you know that those happen, and I can see now the signs that my business needed open heart surgery.

Things weren’t clicking between me and the business as much as they had been, and it wasn’t even because of revenue. There were some other tensions within my life and with burnout and how I was feeling about different things in the business. 

I had some personal struggles with the fact that my digital products weren’t clicking, and my impostor syndrome that was setting in with my email list size and growing social media. I was trying to find my place and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. 

I knew I was a conference host and did this really, really well. But I wondered… is this all? Is there something else? What else is out there?

I also had our first child at the time so I’m in mom mode… and brand new. I’d never been a mom before, I had no idea what I’m doing. I was learning our family and learning what it means to be a mom and how this affects the business. I had to know what I wanted my days and my nights to look like moving forward. 

We’re also thinking about adding more kids to the family, so there’s even more things to process in 2019. 

THE YEAR IT ALL CHANGED

So then 2020 hits. And like most of you, 2020 was a very difficult year. In 2020, we launched the conference, and it actually didn’t sell out right away. It was the first time since 2016 that we didn’t have something sell out within just a couple of days of launching.

So it launched in January, and in March of 2020, after two months, we still weren’t sold out. We’d sold a good bit, but it wasn’t doing exactly like it used to do. 

But in March of 2020 everything locked down and I was also one month away from the due date of our second child. So I was mentally not in business mode. Mentally I was about to have a second baby and then the world was shutting down. There were so many things circulating in my brain when it came to hospitals and giving birth but also we were faced with something that we hadn’t ever faced before. 

We were starting to think about how this was going to affect hosting a conference. 

So then, at the end of April, I’d had our second child. At three weeks postpartum we made the decision to cancel the conference. We were supposed to host the conference over the summer and based on everything that was happening in the world, and all of the lock downs, we made the decision to cancel. 

Matt and I also made the decision to refund everybody in full. Even though, contractually, that was not an obligation, we couldn’t sleep at night if we kept any of it. We decided we were not hosting it and even thought that meant that we were going to lose money, because we already had our own contracts and things that we needed to fulfill, and even though that meant that that was a huge revenue stream that we were going to lose, we couldn’t sleep at night keeping it.

So we canceled the entire conference, and I literally had a panic. I never ever, ever want to feel those 2020 feelings around my business ever again. I never wish that on anyone. As a woman who had just had her second baby, I’m navigating nursing and postpartum in a COVID world. I’m also navigating now being a mom of two. There’s so many emotions and I’m the sole income provider, so…. where’s the money coming from? 

WHAT WILL I DO NEXT?

I cried out, literally, to Jesus, I cannot tell you how many times in those first couple of months. We were navigating all the emotions and pressure I was feeling and wondering what I was supposed to do. Thankfully, my husband is a great saver. We were not prepared for an entire year of no new revenue coming in, but he knew what to do if something drastic happened. 

But as an Enneagram 3, high achiever, new mom, it didn’t take away a lot of the pressure that I had placed on myself wondering what I was supposed to do next!

So I spent those first couple of months crying a lot and trying to figure out what to do. So I kind of went back to my roots a little bit. 

I went back to the educators that we’d worked with for the conference, who I knew and I loved, and I respected and I sent them emails asking if I could work for them. 

At the time I didn’t even know how to articulate what I was good at. I didn’t know to call myself an Integrator. I didn’t know how to call myself an online business manager. I didn’t know to call myself a project manager. 

I was honestly just throwing my hands up saying would somebody hire me? I would rather work for one of them than go apply at Starbucks. 

I BECAME AN INTEGRATOR WITHOUT KNOWING IT

Thankfully, a friend of mine had just launched a membership site that took off despite 2020 setbacks. She had an incredible product and an audience that was so hungry for this product, but she was very Type B and not the type of business owner that would potentially thrive in a membership environment. 

If you have a membership you know what I’m talking about. There’s ongoing support, there’s a lot of back end work with cancellation workflows, new member workflows, bringing out new content and streamlining that process. So many things go into a membership.

So she hired me, and I was her Integrator, but at the time I said this was again, 2020. I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing. So I started working with her, I built out all of her systems in Trello, I met with her weekly and essentially gave her a punch list of to do’s (this is what you need to do every single week in order to do xyz, this is when we’re going to bring in the guest expert, this is when you’ll do this Facebook Live, etc.)

It was phenomenal. It was so much fun!! I was getting to stretch a muscle that I didn’t really know I had. I was also getting to learn even more about digital products, which again, I’d been dabbling in on my own and hadn’t really found like I felt the right fit yet. 

(Now I know that I just hadn’t found the right message for my audience!!)

So I was working now with this friend and having so much fun loving working with her because we were friends and it flowed so seamlessly – our communication and everything that we were doing. 

I started to find my groove. I started to see the open heart surgery that my business needed and realized maybe I was not meant to just be a conference host. Maybe there was more out there for me. What else could I do? 

Plus I was seeing this through my working relationship with her. Things that came so naturally to me didn’t come naturally to her and I started to have my eyes opened to what an Integrator was. 

MY AHA! MOMENT

I reread Traction. I then read Rocket Fuel and I took the free quiz that Rocket Fuel has that helps you discover if you’re an Integrator or a Visionary. I got Integrator, and it was this aha moment!

I realized I had been sitting in the wrong seat for the entire time that I had been an entrepreneur. I have enough Visionary in me to get the job done but I could never scale as a Visionary because I’m actually an Integrator. 

I enjoy being an Integrator way, way, WAY more than I enjoy being a Visionary. It was mind-blowing to me!!

So then in 2021, another friend of mine, a past student in a Mastermind that I had hosted, reached out to me. She basically said, “I need an Integrator, do we even have them in our industry? How do I hire one? Do you know of anyone?” 

You’re going to laugh at this. But I literally… in a text message… said, “You should hire me. I could totally do this for you. Let’s talk more.”

So thankfully, we moved the conversation to a more professional means. We started emailing back and forth a little bit more about it, I sent her a pitch, and did some research on LinkedIn, just trying to figure out what Integrators charge and what I would do.

I started working for her in March of 2021 and it was hands down the best decision. Between working for Megan at first and then jumping in with Rebecca, it had given me so much confidence in my ability as an Integrator. 

It also made me excited about this new aspect of the industry. I loved hosting the conference and I felt like I started to crack the code with how the operations worked. I learned how to market a conference, how to work with educators, how to market to attendees. I learned how to make it profitable – very profitable, like 6-figure profitable – so I cracked the code on so much of being a conference host in our industry. 

And now this felt like this fun new code to crack asking what is an Integrator? How could this fit into our industry? And it was also really humbling for me, because I wasn’t my own boss. I was, but for them, I was a subcontractor. 

I had my services, I was sending them a package and a contract in Dubsado, I was sending them an invoice every month, and all of that. But at the same time, as those in the service industry know, I was working for somebody else while I was my own boss, I still had somebody else kind of calling the shots. 

There were deadlines and pushback and I didn’t fully know if I would love that. But it was really cool and really humbling to see how much I enjoyed that partnership. I enjoyed working alongside a Visionary and I think that’s because there’s a huge difference between an Integrator and a VA.

VAs are phenomenal and you might need both an Integrator and a VA in your brand. For me, as an Integrator, I wanted to set myself up as a strategic partner. This way I had a little more skin in the game, a little more pushback that I could give, and more challenging conversation to offer so that her business felt like my business.

It wasn’t like I was working for her but we were working together for this greater good, this greater brand and growth, than she was seeing. 

AND THE KS AGENCY WAS BORN

It was so, so cool to kick off 2021 by jumping in working with them. I also started to realize very quickly that they were kind of the exception to the rule. Specifically Rebecca. Rebecca had a brand that was built for full time employees and she wanted full-time employees. She loved hiring full-time employees. 

That’s awesome, if that’s you, but I’m willing to bet that most of us do not want full-time employees. There’s a stigma around full-time employees and maybe you’re afraid of the whole employee versus subcontractor situation. 

Maybe that just feels scary to you. You have no idea how to go about doing that. Maybe you’re nervous financially, for what that would look like. Maybe you’re nervous to manage and have that much say in that employee to boss relationship versus subcontractor relationship there. 

Quickly I realized, like within six weeks, that I could stay in this lane and only work with Rebecca, and I would have so much fun. I still work with her to this day. I love her team. I love her brand. I love our Visionary/Integrator dynamic. 

So on one hand, I could stay in this lane and I could just work with her for 20 hours a week with her and have another 20 hours to do whatever I wanted. But on the other hand, what if I tried to scale this thing? What if I built a brand that could then relate to those that weren’t like Rebecca? 

What if I filled a need where I came alongside other Visionaries that didn’t have a team and needed more humans to do the job? Maybe they also needed that Integrator who was training and mobilizing a team so that that Visionary didn’t have to deal with that headache.

They don’t have to hire, they don’t have to fire, they don’t have to figure out the deadlines and due dates and who’s going to do what and strengths and weaknesses of everything related to the project. 

They can work with me and I could have a team. 

So in May of 2021, I hired my first two employees. I also brought on my first 3 Agency clients and we did 20 hours/month for all 3 of them. So we were doing 60 hours a month. And I had the two employees underneath me and that’s what jump started the Agency. 

Working with those clients, we were working on their digital products. So we were helping them with everything from launching courses and building out evergreen funnels to launching a membership site and launching an online shop. Slowly we built up a name for ourselves! 

At this point, there was nothing on my website pointing to what I was doing. My website was very business coach focused and all about Kat. (That’s why I am LOVING our new website… it’s been a need since 2021!) 

WHERE THE KS AGENCY IS NOW

It’s not just about me anymore. Yes, I love working with our Visionaries, but now we have Project Managers, Project Assistants, Ad Specialists, Copywriters, and Creative Designers. We have a true team of dynamic, incredible employees that are fully trained in the tech, tools and strategies of digital products. 

In 2021 we started this Agency and hit 6 figures. We doubled in 2022. We doubled again in 2023. It worked!!

It was SO fun for me to crack the code of what it looks like to scale a service in our industry, and to not only learn how to scale a service, but knowing that MY expertise is digital products.

So I’m scaling a service that’s helping Visionaries scale digital products. 

My brain thinks about scaling all the time and all the different ways to do that. It’s been a really cool journey for me because while, yes, I love working with our Visionaries and I love the kickoff calls and the vision where we get to dig into 30 or 60 or 90 day goals, what I really I love is to implement that plan. 

So we’re going to break it down into a Trello board. We’re going to break it down into due dates and deadlines and exactly who needs to do what at any given point in the project. I love all of that so much!!

WHY I LOVE THE KS TEAM

I also love our team. Right now we’re sitting at 13 employees!! When we started hiring, I had a big heart for mamas. Obviously, I’m a mama. So at that point I’d had our third – she’s about to turn 2 so I was very much in “mama” season.

I loved being a business owner and the pivot and all of these fun epiphanies that I was personally having. But I also love being a mom. So first, when I knew that I wanted to start hiring employees, I thought well, why don’t I hire people where I can train them from the ground up. 

I knew I could take somebody who has the personality and shows some strengths that I wanted even if she’s never been inside of Kajabi. I knew I could teach her everything she needs to know about ConvertKit and how we’re going to set up this funnel between Showit and ConvertKit and Kajabi. And so that’s what I did. 

The majority of our team has been trained from the ground up! It has been years of working with these women and, for me, building really solid SOPs for training, because I care about training. I don’t want any Visionary’s business to suffer because I’ve hired somebody that wasn’t up to par. 

But I also knew there were so many moms that want to be able to work 15 or 20 hours a week from home, around their kids’ schedules, around preschool drop off and tummy time and naptime and nursing and all the things that mamas need to do, but they still want something else. They still want a job and they want to do it from home. So let me find those women. Let me hire those women, train them from the ground up and really cultivate this awesome team community. 

So as much as I love our whole brand, as much as I’m so excited for the new website, and so excited to even use this podcast to reflect back on my entire journey as an entrepreneur, I’m the most proud I think of our team right now. I’m the most proud of these women who give so much to the Visionaries that we work for. 

They’re so excited and so willing to learn, troubleshoot, figure it out and jump into all sorts of different businesses that we work for and help these businesses scale and help these visionaries actually reach their dreams. 

CONCLUSION

So that’s my story in a nutshell right now as an entrepreneur from 11 years ago to where we are right now. 

You’ve heard:

• How I started on my entrepreneurial journey
• What led me from wedding planning to conference host to florist to floundering in digital products to discovering my true love as an Integrator
• How the KS Agency was born & why I have 2020 to thank for that (even though it’s something I’d never want anyone to go through like I did!)
• What I love most about the KS Agency now

And now, who knows what’s gonna happen next? 

I’ve been blown away by the growth of the KS Agency in the last couple of years with little to no marketing. It shows the power of a referral. And now we’re getting this new website, new services, and new podcast up and running – all things that we’ve never done before. 

For me, it feels kind of like the sky’s the limit right now. 

For the last couple of years, I had my head down growing the brand because again, I wasn’t focused on marketing, I wasn’t focused on being a Visionary, I was focused on growing our team. We kept getting referrals and then I knew I would need to focus on team management, solid SOPs, growing a team from the ground up, and all the things that are needed there. 

So this year, in 2024, I am thinking more like a Visionary. I am practicing what I preach. I preach to visionaries, hire an Integrator (or learn to think like an Integrator!!) 

This year, I’m doing that as a Visionary. It’s the first year in an embarrassingly long time that I’ve actually put goals on my quarterly calendar, that I’ve hired my Marketing Director (who is basically my Visionary!) and she’s coming in with new ideas and fresh air and helping me see the potential. 

I didn’t feel like the business was dying in any way. I just needed somebody to partner with me and see what I’m doing, see potential, and help me grow this.

There’s so much potential and it’ll be really cool, I think, in a year from now, to look back at our story so far and also to think about where it is headed. 

So I want to end by encouraging all of you. Don’t be afraid of all of the pivots that your brand might take. 

For me, it has been such a journey and I want to encourage all of you that are in that right now to just keep moving. Keep moving forward because you have no idea all of the stepping stones that are being put in front of you right now that you’re gonna look back, and you’re gonna see how everything led to the next and it all worked together.