justin: [00:00:00] Live from Lafayette, Louisiana. we have a great guest today. It’s bon, bon strategic. If you’re not sure what that means, I’ll tell you. If you need an intrapreneur, it’s like an entrepreneur mindset working inside your company to grow it. We got business operations.
This is gonna be interview for you now, Kate, and go Gok. She even put this on her page, so I’ll let you know what she is. If you’re into this like I am, you’ll get it. I s fj Examiner Accumulator, she’s. Related restorative empathy, responsibility, discipline ak. She balances teams and demanding c e o energies.
Please welcome to the show, Kate.
kate: Hey Justin.
justin: Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I used to put this on my Dating profiles when I was in on online dating back in the day, I was like, oh yeah, I think this is gonna be a catch. You know what I mean? Too funny. I
kate: love that. I love that. Yeah.
justin: No, it’s important to know, know yourself, and then that way you can relate to people.
And if people know what this is and they’re like, oh, I can’t handle this type of person, and you’re like, all right, well, I will not be the business coach for you, . It’s true. Exactly. Do you recommend businesses actually, [00:01:00] take these kind of tests for their employees so that whenever they’re trying to hire, they’re hiring for what they actually need and not just their gut feeling.
kate: I personally have not recommended that to my clients. But I do know that some fractionals who specialize more in hr, like they work more on that workplace culture and they do focus on these kind of things. I actually did these personality tests when I started this business, when I was working with my business.
So it kind of helped me identify, , like you think you know what you’re good at, but sometimes you’re good at things that you take for granted, and that someone with an objective perspective, like a coach that you’re working with, can see based on your personality strengths and your work experience and your, your history, something, an opportunity that might be for you that maybe you’d never thought of.
And that’s kind of where, where I landed, I would say
justin: this happens a lot. We just, like I said, you take for granted like you can. , well, the next person next to you’s like, dude, how’d you do that? You’re like, I don’t know if that was easy. You’re like, no, that is not easy. That looks like a frog. And mine would never look like that
And you’re like, oh, so I have a [00:02:00] gift you’re telling me. But it goes in everything and spiritual gifts, business gifts, all these types of things. So what would you say your big why is start this business? How it’s turned into what it is today and the kind of, kind of the clients that you usually work with?
If you.
kate: Okay, sure. So honestly, my why started out pretty selfish. I wanted the freedom and flexibility to pursue my passions and spend time with my son, and travel and see friends and spend time with family. I went from being a stay-at-home mom for a couple years to working part-time to starting my first business.
and I realized that I didn’t wanna go back to working nine to five for somebody else. You know once you get out of that, that mindset and that mentality it’s really hard to go back to it. My part-time job after doing stay-at-home mom thing for a while was in an educational group for high school teens called Sangamon ceo.
and it [00:03:00] really kind of introduced me to entrepreneurship and the business behind being an entrepreneur. So I learned a lot just from being a program coordinator for that group. And I had also started acting at the time and realized that that acting is a business. I mean like besides the obvious business aspect of it, but marketing yourself as the brand, as the product.
So I was kind of just in this whole zone of learning about business from these different aspects and these different industries. And I, I wanted to start something for myself that would be, you know, working in, in my, in my strengths and fulfilling in that way and being self-sufficient because I’d never really been in that position.
I’d always worked for other people. I was married for a long time and my husband was the sole breadwinner, , so it was like, kind of, it was a, not just a career, it was a a little soul searching, you know what I’m saying? Sounds like you found it though. Yeah, definitely. I did. Luckily enough, I, when I started working with my business [00:04:00] coach I.
Been working on my first business, which was called Say What? Marketing. And it was a digital marketing agency . when I had a really great network of small businesses, but it was unfortunately right before Covid. So pretty much I lost my entire network of small businesses. And I was banging my head against the wall with that for like a year before I started working with my coach.
And she helped me kind of let go of those costs and pivot into something that was more of my natural strengths, which was operations. . And I started out more in the online business management space doing a lot more implementation and more hands-on work for clients. But as I worked with more clients and for longer engagements, I began to see that a lot of them didn’t have good leadership, good direction.
If they weren’t working with a coach, they didn’t really. Peers, like a peer group that they could reference or anyone to mentor them. So I got into more of the higher level strategic planning and kind of helping them make decisions about their business and help them feel supported. [00:05:00] Like they’re not alone.
I’m here to help them problem solve and troubleshoot and put out fires. Because at that point, you know, I know their business almost as well as they. . So we are industry agnostic. All of our clients have been different so far. No, I was about to ask you about that. can give you, give you a few examples.
One of my longest clients is a sex and relationship therapist in Canada. Another one is a short-term rental Airbnb property management company in New Orleans. We’ve worked with a SQL developer, a startup consulting company, a business consulting. Another of my current clients is a small law firm in New York City.
justin: There’s a lot of small entrepreneurs who either, sometimes they’re, I gotta go on my own. Maybe they have experience, but they don’t have the experience on the back end of like, okay, how do I set up operations and. Get, pay what I’m worth and have contracts and how do you enforce you didn’t show up, you gotta pay for that.
Or retainer fees and just kinda like all the business aspect. Probably some marketing involved with that. And, . If you’re a one man show and you don’t really have, there’s a lot of industries where there’s no one to talk [00:06:00] to. Maybe if you’re like a tech person, you go to South by Southwest, but still those guys are there all about themselves.
You might be looking for partners in strategic planning, but again, no one’s gonna be over your shoulder like, Hey Bob, you know, this is the way you do this and this, and instead of just testing the water is, you can find out from other people that what’s actually. If you know where to go, what resources do you have to get this information?
And the coach, I would think, sometimes is one of the easiest and best options because coaches hang out with other coaches typically and share their knowledge Yeah. For, for most of the time.
kate: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, if you think about it, most people who start a business don’t start a business to run the business.
They start a business to sell something or to serve their clients in a certain way or. , whatever their mission is for their company, they are trying to bring value to other people’s lives while also, you know maintaining a certain lifestyle of their own. Have you done
justin: anything with like plumber , those kind of guys that are like, I’m tired of working 50 hours a week for somebody else, and then they realize, oh, snap,
It’s not as easy as just, I’m now I’m on my own. .
kate: Yeah, I definitely have worked with [00:07:00] some service providers like that. I worked with a general contractor for a little while. Mm-hmm. Who was, who was kind of like that, you know, he’s, he’s overwhelmed and trying to handle his current clients and manage the team on the ground and also get new work.
And he has no administrative staff, , he’s losing jobs because he can’t answer the phone. Mm-hmm. . So yeah, it’s definitely coming in and helping them build that infrastructure, whether. , team, do they need like a VA or an ea, like a virtual assistant? Mm-hmm. Or do they need software that would help them automate more of those processes?
Like having a virtual front desk person basically to answer the phone when they can’t take messages and send the emails, redirect clients to the website or to fill out a form or something like that. I mean, there’s so many options for that, that stuff too. Yeah. From, for the Philippines, but it’s kinda like you don.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Yeah. You know, so a lot of times people are like, I have this problem but I don’t know how to solve it. Cuz they don’t know that there are actually solutions out there. Yeah.
justin: Well, with all this chat G P T stuff, I know in the podcast in the past, if you’ve listened to it, you’ve heard me talk about it kind of a bit.
[00:08:00] I just saw something, I think this week it sets up a chat bot and I play with chatbots in the past and they were kind of clunky for what I do, you know, as a chiropractor, but they can actually now scan your entire website or different. And then create questions based on the content that you have that they think they would ask, and then they spit out, these are the questions that we’d probably ask, here’s the answers that I created.
Now you just go through and you edit them. They put a call to action on ’em. And you know, I don’t know how often this stuff actually happens, but from what I’ve heard, people are trying to answer que ask questions all the time. And like if they don’t have to actually contact you on phone, especially these days send waiting for an email and they just gotta con immediate response.
That’s a huge thing it looks like. on the computer somehow just waiting for the next client. What do you think?
kate: For sure, yeah. I have seen, you know, a lot recently about the chat G P T thing and it seems like every day someone’s coming up with another, , ingenious way to use it. To either make their business more efficient.
justin: , right? If I could create a, if I could create a website and just however, you know, I feel like there’s probably just like some code. [00:09:00] This is how you integrate chat G P T, and then you just integrate it to whatever you want and you probably have to like put some special prompts in the background so it works for whatever niche you’re trying to sell it to.
And then they charge 9 99 or 19 point 99 a month. It’s like, man, these are like push button money makers if you know what you’re doing. .
kate: Yeah. I have seen people talking about using chat g p T to make landing pages and lead magnets and all this stuff, you know, but I think at some point, like, I think it’s, it’s good to make templates, so something to start with, but you gotta have that human element, otherwise everything’s gonna start looking the same.
And if, and if people think that you’re using ai. to build all your stuff, they’re gonna be like, this is really dumb, and this person doesn’t actually care about me as a client so there’s like a line between using that as a resource and really being offputting to other
justin: people. You gotta, if you, if you know you’re someone who can’t put words on a page, it’s at least a starting spot.
And then, like you said, then you can hire someone else to actually flush it out. Yeah. So how are you finding [00:10:00] your own clients? Like what kind of marketing? A coach do to, I guess, prove themselves that they should be hired. Like, that seems daunting a little bit.
kate: So what I do, , it’s, it’s a multi-faceted approach, I have my website, which has a lot of copy and pain points that are supposed to be, directly related to what the client, potential client is looking for.
Mm-hmm. or how they’re feeling about their. . And that’s kind of passive, , it sits there, people stumble on it, people find it from my LinkedIn page or whatever. And then I also have a third party company that does cold outreach on LinkedIn for me. Cuz my target market is all over LinkedIn.
Like, I don’t mess with Instagram and Facebook. I have placeholders there. But the, the level of business owner that I’m looking for is not general. active on those platforms for their business. They might be personally active, but not for their business. Do you use them?
justin: So what’s the professional LinkedIn thing?
Is it called Sales Navigator?
kate: Oh, sales Navigator, yeah. Yes. Okay. Yeah. I use Sales Navigator because my team uses it to research potential clients. And they [00:11:00] go down different industry verticals like manufacturing, construction law, like whatever. we think will be a good option for me because I’m industry agnostic, it does make marketing a little more difficult.
But I tend to target businesses in the two to 10 million range who have team team less than 50 and have like a certain set of pain points that I could help them. . So it’s really just being clear on your messaging. And then that lead gen team sends templated messages that I wrote mm-hmm. out to cold potential clients.
And, it’s, it’s a numbers game and. . Most people say no, but it’s all directed towards scheduling a call with me and I can get a couple calls a week, so it adds up after a while. It’s kind of like yeah. Yeah. And it’s just, it’s a long game, , it takes a couple of months to build it up and get it going and start getting responses.
justin: Isn’t LinkedIn pretty serious about not using like scrapers? You know what I’m talking about. You could automatically follow people and then they follow you back and if they don’t follow you, you can delete it.
But link, I mean I think they [00:12:00] all didn’t like that, but I think LinkedIn was especially hard to do that with because of the, the business contacts. Cuz if you’re able to scrape 300 people in a day, then you can , auto send a whole bunch of emails at the same time. , but you definitely lose a lot of that personal touch.
So I think like you said, it’s more labor intensive and costly, but at the same time, you just need that one client sometimes and they’re with you for two year, three years, and you’re like, oh, see, it’s numbers game.
kate: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you definitely have to be careful.
I know you can get like flagged by them if you are. Even if you
justin: send out too many requests in a day, I. Yeah, I
kate: know there’s a, there’s a limit. Yeah. But they, they cap, like I, my, my team reaches my cap every week. So I think it’s okay to get to your cap, but it’s, if you’re like cheating and like trying to go around the system somehow, like I know there’s people who can code and do it.
Yeah. And reach like thousands of people in a week instead of, you know, 500 or whatever the hell it is. But that’s what they get in trouble. And even. . Yeah. Like if you get caught doing that, like they will ban your account and , you won’t be able to use it anymore. So then it’s, [00:13:00] you know,
justin: I, it’s not a LinkedIn strategy session, but do you end up having to always really alter what you’re sending?
If only like 10 words are different in each email, does that flag a spam?
kate: Not so far. Okay. No. I do try to kind of cater my messaging to the industry though. Yeah. Just to or like the size of the business, just because I find that like solopreneurs and smaller businesses have different pain points than more established businesses.
Mm-hmm. Just, you know, it’s the same amount
justin: of work as a, to get a $200,000 business as it is a 2 million business for me to
kate: get
justin: them as a client. Yeah. Or they just have different pain points where you like, I don’t wanna deal with those. that size is just not working for you?
kate: Yeah, I guess it kind of depends.
I feel like the the acquisition process is longer for the larger companies. Mm-hmm. , because they have team in place. They’re not quite as desperate for solutions as the micro businesses and solopreneurs. Mm-hmm. who are more likely to pull the trigger after, one meeting and me talking to them about how I can help.
whereas the larger [00:14:00] companies have more options. They have revenue, so they could hire a full-time employee instead of hiring a fractional like me. You know? So it’s kind
justin: of you ever a one-off purchase in a way? I’m gonna help you do this project, and then they’re like, okay, now we’re done.
kate: I have had clients like that in the past, but I try not to do that. And most of the time, . I’ll start on one project and then it’ll just roll into something else. Cause very rarely is it like they have this one thing that is a problem and that’s all they need fixed.
Usually it’s, they think this is what’s wrong, but actually it’s these 27 other things that are wrong.
justin: Yeah. You just prove your words pretty quick. . Yeah.
We all have issues with our clients, or put it another way. They have issues with you. . At some point you’re gonna have ’em . So you have any tips or tricks, whether they’re small business, a micro business on how we can handle customer complaints, how to resolve them. So maybe they don’t leave a one-star review, or potentially you can convert ’em back to at least.
Hate on you to all the people around them.
kate: Gotcha. So one thing that I’ve learned from my [00:15:00] Airbnb property management client, like they have obviously a lot of guest interactions and getting five star reviews is very important to them. So they really focus on how can we give the guest what they, what they.
and go over and above what they’re asking for so that they will leave us a good review. Yeah. It’s not just like, okay, they had a minor complaint tell them we’re sorry, you know, blah, blah, blah. We’ll fix this. But how can you go to the next level to really make them feel like you care about them as a customer and you want them to come back and you want them to be happy.
Mm-hmm. . So I think it’s sometimes we get. in the day-to-day, and we do the, the bare minimum, you know? And it’s really, we forget sometimes that all of our clients are people. They’re not just numbers on our p and l No. Or appointments. Or schedules, ? So how can we make them feel like we really see them as a person?
And we understand that, there was a miscommunication. An accident or whatever happened and how can we address it in a way that they’ll feel satisfied? So if you get [00:16:00] approached
justin: Be willing to apologize, be willing to do something to make it right. . That doesn’t mean a 50% refund, but Yeah.
kate: I mean, even if it’s not your fault. Yeah, no. Like you gotta, you gotta protect your best interest. But sometimes it’s not about money, you know, it’s about their perception of what happened or their perception of you as a service provider, ? So it’s correcting that and making sure that they know that you really do care.
Yeah,
justin: I know in our field, sometimes you feel weird like, all right, I can’t help you anymore. You gotta go and you can handle it different ways. But if you do handle it, I think we’ve reached the end of what I can do for you. Here’s a referral to another person, another provider. Most people, they don’t get upset about it.
They appreciate that you didn’t just have ’em keep coming and keep coming and keep coming when it’s obviously not working. And then it builds your reputation at the end of the same time too because you’ll get a review and it’ll say that and you’re like, it seems counter to what I would want as a business.
But it actually is really helpful. Cause it shows that you care. Cause most, most of us do. Yeah. Whatever business we got. Yeah, it could be about money, but [00:17:00] there’s a lot of ways to make money. You might as well do something that you enjoy and you’re passionate about and good at, you know? For sure. Yeah.
Okay. So it’s not just a female question, it’s a, I think it’s an everybody question. You got a kid, you got a business, you are trying to prioritize family and other stuff besides just business. So any tips or tricks for some of us other people to acquire that same level of balance?
kate: So I would say that it varies wildly as to whether or not I am actually balanced.
Sometimes I’m completely losing my mind and I really need a break, you know, but you can’t always take a break when you want one. So for me, meditating is really important because it really helps me to be less volatile. Like when my kid’s driving me. , if I’m gonna f am I gonna freak out on him if I’ve been meditating?
Probably not. And if I’ve been, you know, exercising and making time for myself, it’s really just like creating those boundaries. Yeah, they’re your kid and sometimes they’re all up in your business and won’t give you some space. Like, especially like I work from home. Oh. [00:18:00] So sometimes , if my kid’s home too, if he has a day off and I don’t have a day.
then it’s, , balancing his needs with my client’s needs. And it’s just creating those boundaries and then helping them to follow them, like to be respectful, teaching them that, , you have obligations and responsibilities and this is how we take care of our family and.
justin: You’re home. I’m home. I got this call at this time sometimes we can just get away with less work that day, but sometimes you can’t. So you have to structure the kid. This is the time you’re doing this, then you do this, then you do this. I can’t be here to monish you with this.
Here’s some water, here’s a snack. , I need you to do your thing for like three hours . And at a certain age, that’s a lot harder to do than others. But Corona, I was lucky enough the wife was able to stay home with the kid during that timeframe, but I don’t know how people do it. When, , you got two people that work normally outside the home and both have important jobs.
They can’t quit. They can’t alter what they do. I don’t even know how y’all do that. That was astonishing to me. .
kate: Yeah. I don’t know. I feel bad for a lot of people who have to try to juggle childcare and working and [00:19:00] everything’s so expensive. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. I don’t know. I just try to, my kid does really well.
Like if he’s home on a day, I have to work, I’ll set like, okay, I’m gonna work for an hour and then I’m gonna give you an hour or 30 minutes. Mm-hmm. , or 20 minutes, like whatever, whatever kind of cadence I can handle based on my workload for that day and my meeting. And that really helps with him, like when he gets that one-on-one attention where I’m not distracted.
Yeah. And then he’ll usually leave me alone for a good chunk of time after that. So it’s like making sure his needs are met first, and then it gives me the freedom to do some work. Yeah. You
justin: know, the reason why I asked these questions is when I was doing the long form ones, that was always what people really liked.
The, the family questions, the favorite books part. And I was like, that’s what you like the most? They’re like, yeah, that was pretty good. Like it’s, I’m not alone in this situation. It’s, oh good. You too. Whew
we’re gonna wrap up here in a, in, in a couple minutes. We’re gonna definitely find out how everybody can contact you and, and get in touch.
I’m always excited to find out what advice we would give an aspiring entrepreneur, [00:20:00] but if that’s too broad, it might just be you’re in the thick of it. You have a business, you’re, you’re going at it. Is there a top one or two things that most people are having struggles with that you help with that they don’t even realize they’re struggling with?
kate: I would say for that last part I, I do work directly with, the founder, ceo, CX O whatever you wanna call ’em. And a lot of times they’re still wearing too many hats in the business. If they have some team in place, they’ve been able to delegate or outsource some responsibilities to other roles.
But if you’re still feeling overwhelmed and you work on the weekends and you wake. one day, work through your to-do list, get to the end, and then wake up and do the same thing the next day. Like if it’s just this endless to-do list for you, then you need team, you need someone to come in and help you decide what you can delegate and outsource to either a low level administrative person, like an administrative assistant or virtual assistant, executive assistant, someone like that.
but like, you’re not supposed to be doing everything yourself and you really [00:21:00] can’t. When you’re doing all of those low level administrative tasks, like back office stuff, bookkeeping marketing, like if you’re, if your hands are in there and you’re not focusing on bis dev and sales, then you’re losing opportunities.
You’re dropping balls and missing customers. You need to be able to have time to focus on the work that really matters to you and the work that makes the. difference in your business. So if you don’t feel like you’re able to do that, if you don’t have chunks of time where you can get deeply involved in the aspects of your business that matter to you, then you need more support.
You need to hire someone either part-time in person, you know, or virtual to kind of take some of that work burden off of your plate to free up that not only your schedule, like your time. , but it frees up your mental energy. So you can refocus on things that actually matter. I talk a lot about using an Eisenhower matrix Yeah.
Which is like the, the urgent important kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Like I have a post on my LinkedIn actually about using that to evaluate your day-to-day [00:22:00] activities , if you find yourself too much in the wrong quadrants, you. Hiring someone at a low level like that will vastly increase your efficiency and your day-to-day operations and free up a lot of time and energy.
Like I think people are surprised. by how much that can help. Like you don’t really think just ranking
justin: the stuff that you do in that quadrant system. Oh my gosh, how much am I wasting ? Yeah, exactly. I should be building out $200 an hour and I’m doing $10 an hour jobs half the day. Like this isn’t gonna work.
Yeah. So this is the stuff that you could coach somebody with. So they don’t have to do it alone, like, just pay me and we can get this done a lot faster, a lot smoother, something more concrete and something that you could probably just like, look, now we got like somewhat of a manual. . So when this person moves on, you can just copy and paste and move on to the next
kate: person.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we we usually come in and start with like an assessment of how the operations are functioning and all these different variables. We look at projects, teams, software systems and processes. The [00:23:00] founders plate, , what are they doing on a day-to-day basis.
kind of just look for lowest hanging fruit, , what would bring you the most relief? What is the easiest thing to solve for right now? And we kind of, we create a report of all the things we find so that you know all of your next best steps, but then we prioritize that based on your goals for the business and what your personal needs are.
What do you need to get back into flow so that you feel good about working in your business.
justin: Sounds good to me. The. I’m creating it right now, one of those daily journals that people like mm-hmm. . And that’s part of, it’s gonna have the Eisenhower stuff, the Podo technique, some mindfulness stuff in there.
So hopefully it’ll, it’ll be out, I don’t know, some point in this year, but it’s in the beginning stages, but Nice. I think it’s needed and. I’ll just, I’ll send you a copy or something. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Or at least a trial. That way you can be like, Hey, this sucks , I would change this, this, and this.
before you push publish . Yeah, I would fix this area. I’ve tried it. That’s not working good. So that’s the goal. That’s my marketing part. Like test it before you hits in. So how can anybody find you the [00:24:00] website best contact?
kate: Yeah, you can reach me on the website. I am very active on LinkedIn, so you can find me.
It’s just my name, Kate Lingoni. I also have a business page on there. Yeah, I post frequently. Feel free to DM me, make a connection. I’m happy to happy to chat.
justin: Bonbonstrategic.com. Yes. There we go. Kate, thank you so much for stopping by on a doctor’s perspective and, and answering some questions, and I do hope that some people will give you , some contacts.
kate: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.