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“Magnetic brands are created from the inside out” — Kat

As business owners, we are the face of our business and in today’s episode we’re talking with Kat Elizabeth about how we can create an authentic brand strategy and track the metrics that matter to build a wildly successful brand.

This episode is for the business owner that is ready to build a brand that is magnetic to your ideal clients & that feels aligned with your goals.

Some of the key things we chat through today:

– Tracking your metrics (the right ones!) to help you see just how much you’ve achieved

– How, as business owners, we often track metrics in a backwards way

– Defining your inner & outer magnetism

– Getting comfortable and talking about your brand more confidently with others

and so much more!

Episode Outline:

Getting to Know Kat Elizabeth  03:30

Embracing the Tough Moments That Define Us  06:20

Kat’s Business Evolution  07:51

Understand That Nobody Has It All Figured Out  13:40

Why You Need to Stop Being Obsessed With Vanity Metrics  15:40

The Main Purpose of Having Business Metrics  19:08

The Benefits of Focusing on The Most Important Activities in Your Business  22:51

Stop Trying to Learn More, Implement More Instead  28:18

Why You Need to Be comfortable With Feeling Uncomfortable  31:50

Stop Over-strategizing and Take Action in Your Business  35:20

The Difference Between Inner and Outer Magnetism  38:36

Focus on Making an Impact, Not Chasing Vanity Metrics  45:10]

In Business, Every Relationship Counts  49:39

Kat’s Advice to Her Younger Self  53:56

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The She calls Her Shots Podcast. I am honored to have with me as a guest today Kat Elizabeth. And in this episode, Kat and I are talking through how you can create your own magnetic personal brand. And we’re chatting about some mindset tips that you can use to help you create more success inside of your business. But we’re also having a really honest conversation about how the magic behind your brand and your business is You! I absolutely loved this conversation. Kat’s energy itself is so magnetic. I know you’re going to love listening to this conversation. 

So to give you a little bit of background, Kat is an Australian actor, turned personal branding coach and strategist. She became an entrepreneur and started her business back in 2015, when she took that leap of faith to quit her job and to start a freelance copywriting business. We also talked through on the podcast how her business journey has taken her through many different seasons and many different types of work. She started as an actor, transitioned into copywriting and over time, eventually built a personal brand and strategy business, and she’s a coach to other business owners. Kat is very familiar with that feeling of overwhelm and the challenges of building a creative business and doing it from scratch. And her mission is to help entrepreneurs just like you with big hearts that are facing really big resistance to take that messy action required and to build a brand that gets you recognized and paid well, while still getting to do the things that you love. I really am so excited for you to dive into this episode today. And if you do love what you hear Kat also is the host of the popular Seen, Heard, Ppaid Podcast, which she’ll mention during our conversation as well. And she also has a self titled YouTube channel as well. So I’m so excited for us to dive into this conversation. We’re really going to talk through how you can create that magnetism within your brand to help you stand out and attract those dream clients. So all of that being said, let’s go ahead and dive into the conversation with Kat.

Krista Marie:

Hello Kat. Welcome to the podcast. 

Kat Elizabeth:

Hi, Krista. Thank you so much for having me.

Getting to Know Kat Elizabeth 

Krista Marie:

I’m so thrilled to get to chat with you today. And I think this topic is going to be so exciting. I’m also so thrilled to hear about your background selfishly, because when I got your bio, I was like, I can’t wait to dive more into that. So all of that said, feel free to take a couple minutes. Tell us a little bit more about you, help us get to know you a little bit better.

Kat Elizabeth:

Sure. So today, I’m a personal branding coach and brand strategist. But I certainly haven’t always been in this field. I’ve had a little bit of an interesting, windy road to get to this point. So I have been an entrepreneur officially for about seven years. When I first went into having my own business, I was a freelance copywriter, and that slowly evolved into what I do today. But before that I was actually a real estate agent, a personal trainer, makeup artist, trying all the things to find my thing. My main career choice and the thing that I was going to do for the rest of my life was being a professional actor. A musical theater performer, and it was going really well. I actually landed my first big commercial musical when I was in my early 20s. I thought I had made it. I was like, oh my gosh, like I’ve done it, all the work has paid off. And then very quickly realized that I did not enjoy the career, which was a little bit of a reality check. Because I had dedicated basically every year of my life since I was about five to pursuing this and this is not making me happy. So that led to a little bit of what I call my quarter life crisis where everything came crashing down around me, where everything I thought I knew no longer existed. I went through a really tough period, about a year where I quit my role in musical theater, my marriage broke up, I ended up with a life threatening illness in hospital. And following that a couple of months later, I ended up having to file for bankruptcy because I had credit card debt piling up. I wasn’t able to work because I’d been so sick. And I had gone from achieving all of the things and looking like I had the perfect life to having nothing. I was starting from scratch. And in the moment, obviously, that’s a proper dark night of the soul. You’re not sure how you’re going to navigate through that. But it was also honestly the best gift that I could have been given, or that I could have given myself because it made me realize just how much was out of alignment in my life. How much this life I was creating really didn’t come from my true desires and had nothing to do with who I really was. I didn’t know who I was. So that slow rebuilding and figuring out who I was, is what eventually led me to entrepreneurship and pursuing something that was just so much more fulfilling, rewarding, exciting, and something that I believe was better than I ever thought my acting career could have been. But I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t have that horrible life meltdown, temporarily.

Embracing the Tough Moments That Define Us

Krista Marie:

That’s so inspiring, though. I mean, being able to come from that, and perspective is always the thing, right? When we can think back to those moments because I have, not quite the same, but a lot of actually similar overlap, where in the moment you’re in your lowest of lows, how am I gonna bounce back from this. But I think back to those moments, and sometimes those are the moments I hold on to the most when I think back to them because I figured things out. I really had to be present, I really couldn’t just float through, you really had to take back control. So I think that’s just so inspiring.

Kate Elizabeth:

Oh, thank you. Yeah it’s not easy in the moment. Like you said, these are the moments that can actually help define us, and it’s just incredible what you can uncover if you’re prepared to just push through the discomfort for a while, however long it lasts. Honestly, I think it was my bootcamp to becoming an entrepreneur, because I was like,  if I can overcome that, then surely I can get through anything in business, because it really does put things in perspective. And let’s be honest, running a business is not easy. It demands a lot from you, a lot more mentally and emotionally than most of us realize when we first get started. So it’s important that that inner work that you have to do is everything, it’s the 80%. And then all of the strategy and the logistics, and the tech, and all of that is the 20%.

Kat’s Business Evolution

Krista Marie:

Yeah, absolutely. And I’d love to hear more about kind of when you started, you were more of the personal branding and coaching side of your business. I’d love to hear about the evolution of how that’s grown.

Kat Elizabeth

Yeah, sure. So once I was a freelance copywriter, the whole purpose of what I was doing was to help people communicate their value and get found by their dream clients. My purpose has always remained the same. But what I was finding, which was a little bit frustrating, is that a lot of these clients were coming to me, not really knowing what their brand strategy was. They’’re like, just give me nice words, just make me sound good, and I would. But I’d often go way above and beyond and try and help them build the strategy and also helping them with the mindset and help them niche down, all these things I hadn’t thought of. So I was like, this is crazy. I’m only charging for copywriting.

Kriata Marie: 

You’re helping them define their entire brand story. 

Kat Elizabeth:

Exactly, exactly. So even though there was a little bit of resentment there, on the other side, I loved the strategy piece, so much because connecting all the dots allowed me to really step into my zone of genius. So for a few years, I started just offering a few more services that were a little bit more intentional around that. My big moment was when I was reading Gary Vaynerchuk book, Crushing It. That’s his big book about personal branding, and he’s talking all about how he built his personal brand on YouTube, and how that is the key. Like you need to be the brand and you need to be known for this thing. Because before that all of my clients were more about business brands, and they were maybe the face of the company, but just sitting behind their branding. And once I read that book, suddenly it all fell into place. Everything made sense, because I saw how even in the acting world, it was the actors that were known for being them that were doing the biggest things. They had the most opportunities, they were getting paid the most. They had the most freedom to choose what they were going to do. And then I observed the same thing in the copywriting world. It wasn’t just about being the best copywriter because you were being lined up against all these other copywriters and if it was just about price or a giant portfolio, that wasn’t necessarily enough for people to decide, oh, yes, I want you. 

So when I had that penny drop moment, the first thing was understanding that I need to do this because. I don’t have a personal brand right now. I’m helping everyone else with theirs. But I’m just another number even though once people work with me, they know how much I help. So I decided to launch a YouTube channel because I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk said, okay, YouTube it is, it makes sense. And it wasn’t actually about personal branding, I did it for actors, teaching them about the mindset and the business side of acting, which, like with everything, there’s so much more to it than just being a good actor. That was kind of the evolution, where I started to realize the video piece and coaching people through YouTube. I was loving it so much, I was getting this incredible feedback. I got these messages from people saying, Oh, your video changed my life. My whole perspective has shifted. I was like, oh, my gosh, this feels so good, this is really cool. 

So the more my own brand built, and the more I naturally without meaning to became an expert, I always feel weird saying that. But became an expert in personal branding. The channel shifted into that and it reached this tipping point where I was trying to launch my first video course, which was actually about teaching people how to do makeup. It was a terrible launch, it was a disaster. Another one of those things that I learned from this absolute failure because it didn’t go the way I thought it would. But what was hilarious coming out of that is I’d already found that, yes, I was meant to be a coach. I wanted to be teaching people in this way. But I picked just the wrong thing. I didn’t want to talk about makeup all the time. But all of these people after the launch started asked me all these questions about branding. They were like you’ve done this amazing job with your brand, you clearly know what you’re talking about. They’re all coming to me for advice on building a personal brand, not about makeup. And so I just finally took that as a sign like, Okay, we need to make it official. So I launched the personal branding project, which is my first brand name, which recently changed about two and a half years ago. And just finally called myself a coach officially because there was a lot of impostor syndrome around finally doing that. And it started just like a podcast, I knew I needed a podcast, I had so many people saying, Oh, I love your content. But I really struggled to watch YouTube. If you had a podcast, I’d be able to listen to you when I was driving. And I was like, Okay, I’ll do a podcast, not really knowing what I was doing again. And that just built up like a pretty decent following and a lot of sort of brand loyalty. I honestly didn’t really know what I was doing with my coaching services, because I’d never done it formally before. I just put together a package that I thought was going to be helpful and thankfully, I was right. My first couple of clients really just worked. Everything fell into place, and they were getting these results. And I was feeling like I was even more helpful in that space than I was as a copywriter. And it’s just been a good two and a half years of just building momentum. Plenty of hiccups and obstacles and usual challenges, you know, like they always say like, new level new devil. You’ve overcome one thing and you think, Okay, I’ve got this down, and then you get ready for another uplevel. And suddenly more mindset stuff comes up and more technical challenges. So it’s not always smooth sailing. But I am really happy to say that my business is in a really good place, and I’m really excited about the future. But I also like to keep it real because it’s not always pretty on the outside.

Understand That Nobody Has It All Figured Out

Krista Marie:

It’s so interesting to me to hear, like, especially from someone who has built the brand that you have today, to still be reminded that the journey is never a clear journey where some people just have it figured out and they know what they’re supposed to do. You have to fumble through it. You try things and through those experiences you learn more about yourself, you learn more about your clients, you’re almost just grabbing at things as you go and you’re like, maybe this is it and then you’re like okay, no, that’s not it and then you try something else. But then, like you said when you find that thing though, it comes a little bit more naturally not that it comes easier because you still face all the challenges but it feels more comfortable to work through them because you’re actually feeling like you’re doing what it is that you’re meant to be doing.

Kat Elizabeth

Exactly it’s like just being able to at least not have the question in your mind of, should I be doing this right now? Am I cut out for this? No, I am gonna get through it somehow because I am supposed to be doing this. I think that’s a really powerful thing. And if you can just lock that in, know that your confidence levels will technically go up and down every day and the other thing that people forget is it’s a moving target. There is no final destination. You are going to hit and probably already have hit some of the goals that you set for yourself ages ago, but you don’t even acknowledge that because you’ve already replaced them with bigger goals and it’s just never enough. So, that’s why I love that we’re gonna be talking about metrics and things because it’s so easy to not look at the progress that you’ve made, and to just be so consumed with what you haven’t achieved yet, and where you’re supposedly failing, where you’re not doing good enough. And then that is what starts to eat away at your confidence and can impact your ability to be showing up consistently and doing the things that are going to lead to success because your head has to be in the game. That is a non negotiable. 

Why You Need to Stop Being Obsessed With Vanity Metrics

Krista Marie:

I’m excited that we’re coming at it from a different angle. Because before we started recording, you and I were talking about how I had for a while tried to track metrics. But what I found was that I was so consumed in the numbers that I would then get in my own way in my head, because if I wasn’t getting X amount of Instagram followers each month, if I wasn’t hitting these goals, then my mindset would start eating into my mindset. And then I stopped tracking so it’s interesting to see this evolution of focusing a little bit less and acknowledging the growth, but not focusing so much on these numbers, where it’s like this is the success of my business. So I’m excited that we’re not just focusing on just a number. So all of that said, I’d love to dive into that a little bit.

Kat Elizabeth

Yeah, sure. So I’ll set the scene by explaining that with my approach to things, I have a framework, and one of the big pieces is that I talk about magnetism in your brand. And there’s inner magnetism, and outer magnetism. So the inner magnetism is actually what’s going on inside. It’s your mindset, it’s your energy. It’s how you’re feeling about what you’re doing, your clarity around your vision, and how connected you feel to your purpose. And that is really important. The outer magnetism is all the stuff people naturally think about when building a brand. It’s my visuals, my brand photography, my logo, my Instagram feed, my copywriting, all of the things that other people see all of you. And often with the missing pieces, we forget that that should just be a reflection of what’s going on inside. If you just kind of try and build your brand from the outside in and just make everything look perfect on the outside but there’s no connection to the real you on the inside, then it’s going to fall flat, and you’re still going to be invisible even if you spend all of this money getting the perfect brand identity together. So my approach to metrics is really making sure that we’re taking care of both sides of things. Because mostly, we’re often thinking metrics are superficial things like follower growth and subscriber growth and all of those kinds of things. But, the fact is, you are growing constantly on the inside, way faster than you realize, and in really incredible ways that you’re not going to usually give yourself credit for if you’re not also tracking that. So my big thing is we’re going to talk about tangible metrics that we’re going to be tracking. The things that you can almost see or touch, that they feel real. Even though it’s still just a concept. And most of what we’re doing is online, so it’s funny to even say tangible. But the intangible ones are really paying attention to like, what is the inner growth that I care about? And how can I find a way of tracking that, so that when maybe the tangible metrics aren’t reflecting the numbers that you would like just yet, especially early on, sometimes your growth can be a little bit inconsistent, especially with subscribers or sales, I don’t want you beating yourself up because the numbers aren’t what you think you should be achieving right now. Or they don’t look like the person next to you who’s in a similar space to you. So we need to anchor in to some other ways of tracking and celebrating our growth, so that we can go okay, like, I’m doing the right thing, if I keep just showing up this way, then I am gonna get the tangible metrics to match. So that’s my big picture thing of let’s make sure we’re taking care of both kinds of growth.

The Main Purpose of Having Business Metrics 

Krista Marie: 

Yeah, and I love that so much. Because I found that when I got so focused on the metrics, and I already kind of mentioned that I would get so frustrated when I wasn’t hitting what I was hitting. And then I would almost get into this mode of needing to work harder in order to hit these metrics. But then all of my inner self, talk about burnout, frustration, overwhelm, all these things. And then I found myself chasing things and I wasn’t living anything close to the day to day life that I wanted to live. I’ve recently realized, pulling back that curtain and realizing, you know what, actually, if I just show up every day as the person that I want to be, everything follows suit, and then you can still track things as you go, but things will get done. So instead of focusing on how many things can I get done this month, it’s more like how can I show up and do the things that I know I need to do and just trust that the more I show up, the more I put in the work and do this, I will see growth. But it’s such a shift. It’s completely flipping the way that we think about work.

Kat Elizabeth 

Totally. And it perfectly connects to my next point, which is, what is the point of metrics in the first place? The whole point is it’s meant to give you a way of tracking your progress towards achieving your goals. So we’ve got to be really careful. We have to start by going, what are those goals, and how am I going to know if I’m getting closer to them before just picking some random numbers to track because, yes, follower growth can feel really great. They call it a vanity metric and yes, it might be a sign that you’re doing something right. It could be. But are they the right kind of followers? Are they actually leading to sales? Is this getting closer to what you want to have? Like what you were saying, working harder, and then more hours, and then the burnout, and everything. But hold on, did you go into business because you wanted to be working around the clock and experiencing burnout? Or are you trying to create time freedom and create more energy and space for yourself to be creative? Okay, so if that’s the case, then what are the metrics we need to be tracking? How many hours am I actually working in a day? How am I feeling when I’m doing the work that I’m doing? How many sales do I actually need to be getting each month in order to hit the goals that allow me to then take my foot off the pedal and not be just constantly pushing, pushing, pushing? Because often, sales doesn’t necessarily correlate to how many followers you have, because there’s so many other factors involved. And not everyone needs the same number of sales every month, it depends on the pricing of your packages, and what your own personal goals are. So even these 10k months and six-figure years and everything, that is just some arbitrary number that someone picked. And then we think, Oh, well, that’s a sign of success. But it’s not if that’s not what you’re looking for. It really comes down to how you want to feel in your business, and what is going to allow you to feel that way. And that helps us strip it all back, stop worrying about all the numbers and really get clear on what are the numbers or the other things that you can track that are important to you that are going to keep you on track, and also tell you when you’re not. 

So for instance, if you’ve said, okay, a sign of success for me is not working any more than five hours a day. And if you’re starting to notice that you’re creeping up on seven or eight hours a day, it’s like, okay, how did this happen? What do I need to tweak? And again, that is the purpose of tracking metrics is to just give us little signs that we might need to know, either we’re doing a great job, or we can double down on something or somehow it’s out of alignment, and we need to give it a tune up.

The Benefits of Focusing on The Most Important Activities in Your Business

Krista Marie:

Yeah, and I think that’s so important. And I know that for a lot of my listeners that are early on in their business, and some of them might still be working full time jobs, or maybe just recently transitioned into going full time and working full time jobs. For a lot of us, we get this feeling, I know I felt like this as I was growing my business and working full time. But then especially when I made that transition, I felt like I had to be working a lot. In my head, I had this drive of well, if I was working eight plus hours a day, now I have to go all in on this business, I need to make money, I need to do all this stuff. So in my head, I just thought that I needed to be working that long. And it really does take a long time to understand that working more hours does not correlate to the success you’re gonna have in your business. And often when I was working a lot of hours, in those times I was like, Oh, I’m gonna buy this course. I’m gonna buy this course. And I’m going to do this, I’m gonna do this. And I found myself working on so many things that no one part really saw a lot of progress because I was spreading myself so thin. And I realized, I mean, if I could work on my business for a good, focused five hours a day, that’s huge to have that consistency. You’re gonna see so much more growth when you can zero in on that, than feel like you need to be working on all of the things in eight plus hours.

Kat Elizabeth:

Oh, yeah. There’s probably very few people on the planet who don’t fall into that when you’re first getting started or even sometimes circle back because we can fall back into old habits. It’s just that classic thing because it’s conditioned so deeply in our brains, we grow up being told you have to work hard and you have to work long hours. And that is how you get ahead. The person who works the hardest is going to succeed. And yes, the work can be hard, let’s be real. There are going to be times when you are working your butt off especially early on. And that’s totally fine. But we need to, again, it takes so long to do this but really disconnect this idea that the hours that we work and the amount we’re hustling is just naturally going to lead to those results. Because not all ours are made equal. Not all tasks are made equal. And if you can think of what you’re doing, attaching metrics to the different tasks that you’re doing, some of them are more like $10 an hour tasks, and some of them are going to be 100 or $1,000 hour tasks, depending on, is this just busy work that anyone could do if they are trained up? Or is this something that only you can do? Is this something that is growing your business? For example, bringing in more sales or bringing in qualified leads. So, just because you’re working 40 or even 60 hours a week, if they’re low value tasks that aren’t actually going to do much for your bottom line or make a really big difference to your bank account and to your lifestyle, well, then those are not great 40 hours spent. And so we need to really understand what are the things that are going to make the biggest difference to you? And then how can we track whether they’re working or not, and what is maybe just busy work. 

I love to be my own guinea pig. I’m the person who will do every single course, because I like to be able to then condense everything I’ve learned and then turn it into something that people can understand. So my whole thing is I take the courses, so you don’t have to. So that’s one thing. But a lot of us will go, Oh, I just need this. And I just need this and maybe if I just also learnt this, and I’ll just add this, and I’ll buy this toolkit, and we start stacking up all the things because we think if we have all of these things, we’re going to have a successful business. But really, when it comes down to it, marketing and sales is a lot simpler than people want you to think because obviously they want to sell you the next course that is going to solve everything. But really we need to just make sure that people understand what your value is, do you have a way of attracting new people into your audience and how you’re going to nurture them and invite them to work with you. And that doesn’t require being on seven different social media platforms and having five different sales funnels, and all of these fancy technologies. Really, it could be as simple as having one platform, and one simple little email list, or not even an email list, just a system for personalized follow up where you really focus on just building one relationship at a time. And that is always going to be so much more powerful, especially early on in the business because that snowballs very quickly. One person, building that relationship, whether or not they work with you, as long as they are really clear on what it is you do, what makes you different, why you’re valuable, they know people. They can start telling other people about you, and then they start telling people about you, it really does start to take off. But if we’re so busy consuming information and trying to be on every platform and achieve every single metric, and just juggling 12 different plates, we’re not actually out there doing the things that really lead to those metrics that we’re chasing, which is about people. It’s about building relationships with people who will either work with you, or help support you in some way and vice versa.

Stop Trying to Learn More, Implement More Instead  

Krista Marie:

It’s so funny, I feel like you’re literally describing me in my first two years of business. And what’s really interesting for me, reflecting on those first couple of years when I went full time is that I did find myself in the consumer mode, because I felt like the more prepared I was, the more I could do more things or handle more things. But when I think about it, it’s almost because I was putting off the work that was actually harder. Because the reason I was consuming all these things was because I did feel some imposter syndrome. Regardless of how long I had been doing the work for, I wasn’t mentally prepared to be able to tell someone that I am great at this, this is why you should work with me. All of that felt so uncomfortable, and so I spent all of my time consuming things so that maybe I could fill that “void”. But what ended up happening is that then I became so overwhelmed because then I felt like I was an expert of nothing because I was trying to consume all this stuff. And then it circled all the way back around to me realizing like wait, why don’t I just get really comfortable with who I am, what I provide, the knowledge I actually get. It all kind of circled back around and this would have been so much easier if I would have just done that from the beginning than try and spend all this money, all this time doing all this stuff, but it really does circle back to our mindset because no matter how long you’ve been doing what it is you’re doing, if you haven’t really sat down to realize this is what I provide, this is I am confident in saying, you know, we feel uncomfortable talking about ourselves but until you can get comfortable, that’s going to be the thing that’s really going to set you apart.

Kat Elizabeth:

And also getting used to this idea that business is uncomfortable, building a brand is uncomfortable. We think that the next course that we take or the next toolkit or whatever it is that we do is going to finally make us stop feeling uncomfortable and magically remove imposter syndrome completely. Well, the fact is, imposter syndrome exists in some of the most successful, famous people in the world. Because let’s be real, our brains are not always our best friends. Sometimes we have an inner mean girl. And as long as we understand that this isn’t a sign that I suck, and that I shouldn’t be doing this and I shouldn’t be charging these prices. This is a sign that I am getting out of my comfort zone, and I’m stepping into this bigger version of myself that I’m supposed to become. And the discomfort is confirming that I’m actually moving in the right direction, not the wrong direction. That can change everything because then you start looking for something to solve the problem and to make you feel magically better and chase the discomfort. For instance, charging a premium can be really scary. When people say, how can I work with you? What do you charge? And if you think you need to take the next course to be more qualified, no, you’ll never feel that way. All you can do is set a price that feels okay, a little bit uncomfortable, but you’re not going to self sabotage with that price. And then tell it to people, tell people your pricing, and then have another conversation and tell them your pricing, and then work with some people at that pricing. And then you’ll reach a point where it’s now feeling a little too easy. Maybe it’s time to increase my prices. But there is no skipping these

steps. 

Why You Need to Be comfortable With Feeling Uncomfortable

Krista Marie:

There’s no skipping uncomfortable conversations, you’re gonna feel uncomfortable a lot in the beginning. So be comfortable with that fact. And I think it’s so important too, having that open mindset of, some of your biggest business success might come in ways that you would never expect. For a long time I chased these ideas of things that I wanted to have my business, having a podcast was never, ever, ever on my radar. Ever. I felt so uncomfortable telling people my opinions, I felt like an impostor, who am I to give someone advice on something, but it was just one of those things that fell into my radar. And at the time, I don’t know why, but this feels like something I should be doing. And I’m just gonna follow it. But at the beginning, it was just a fun thing, and then I’ll focus on everything else. And now I’ve actually realized I’m actually putting 70% of my efforts into the podcast and growing it and almost what you were saying with your YouTube channel. You get this amazing feedback from people that you’ve never even met before and you realize, oh, this is actually what I’m supposed to be doing. But sometimes we feel like we need to have this concrete plan of what our business is going to look like. But if you feel that little nudge that feels crazy, I’m gonna try it and see where it goes. It’s so important to follow that. 

Kat Elizabeth:

Oh, yeah. And that’s another example of that backwards thinking that we have where everything should be a smart decision. And we should just be looking at what everyone else has done before us and make sure we just reverse engineer exactly what they have done. Because that is proven, that is safe. The fact is, though, that you are not anybody like anybody else, you are completely unique. You have these gifts and these strengths, and this perspective and a background, all these different things that make you who you are. You have so much more wisdom and insight and just brilliance inside you that you’re not tapping into if you’re constantly worrying about all of that external stuff. 

If you’re constantly in consumption mode, for instance, or if you’re constantly comparing yourself to other people, or you’re so caught up in your Instagram follower growth, you’re not really sort of able to stop for long enough to go hang on. I have this weird idea, and maybe I should just explore it, and then just go for it. Because we think there’s a rulebook and there are these invisible rules that everyone knows, and you either get business right or you get business wrong. And then some of these gurus out there, they know, they have this secret that we need. So we have to be really careful not to screw up in case we get it wrong. Everyone is making it up. The rules were invented one day and then people changed them. And you know, one person is over here saying this is the only way to do business and this other person, equally successful is saying the complete opposite. This is where it’s just so important for us to get really comfortable with drowning out some of that noise and checking back in and going, how am I actually feeling right now? What do I want to be doing? How do I want to show up? How do I want to run my business because where we are in flow and we are experiencing joy and fulfillment and excitement, that is actually also where you’re going to make the most money. Like they say, chase your joy, chase your bliss. But no one teaches you that early on, it’s all just, follow my rule book like, here’s my play-by-play on exactly how to market yourself in the DMS or whatever and then you never even get to figure out what your best way of communicating is.

Stop Over-strategizing and Take Action in Your Business 35:20

Krista Marie:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s so hard, especially in the beginning, you’re chasing all the things that make money. Podcasting is a perfect example of this, because my podcast is free. Anyone can listen in. And there are ways to monetize a podcast, but that’s not currently on my radar for things that I want to do. But it’s so interesting, because you might have some people be like, why are you going to put so much time and energy into something that’s not actively making money. But the funny thing is all of the soft skills, content creation became so much easier for me, once I had to be consistent with a podcast, I now realized it’s actually not that difficult to make content. Because I was way over strategizing it before. But with all these things, I’m just becoming a better business owner over something that is free. And I’m not technically making any money on it. But it’s still a way to grow my audience, to grow a community, to connect with my listeners, all these things. But I think we sometimes put that off, especially in the beginning, because we’re like, it’s not going to make me money. So, why should I focus on this? 

Kat Elizabeth: 

That’s it, yeah. We just want to skip ahead to the steps that are really important. But the process is the destination. Just realizing that every single day that you get to show up and do your thing, you might not be able to necessarily say, Oh, this activity is then leading to this return on investment or whatever, but it comes back in its own way. And you know, every single time you show up and do that one thing, whether it’s having a conversation with someone that feels like a little bit uncomfortable, whether it’s showing up on a podcast, or even launching something of your own, it is like Bootcamp for you. You’re getting to, not just develop the obvious skills, but you’re also really committing to showing up for yourself, and you’re developing a different level of self awareness and self belief, and all of those things, that is that inner magnetism that I was talking about, as well. Oh, I’ve done this thing, I’m showing up, my YouTube channel, I created 100 videos for actors and I didn’t make any money off actors. I never built a business off that and part of me, the logical side is like, are you stupid girl? You could have made so much money. But that wasn’t the thing that I wanted. But I trusted my instincts, I knew I was supposed to be there for some reason. And sure enough, eventually, it became clear. So this is also the danger of getting too caught up in all of the metrics, and all of the step by step planning, the logical stuff that everyone’s trying to teach you. Occasionally, you just need to trust that if you feel like doing something, do it. Why did you get into business? Are you trying to become more creative and have the freedom to just trust your instincts and do the things you want to do? Well, then why are you thinking that, Oh, that doesn’t apply in business. It should apply even more in business. But it can be a really scary thing to do. Because again, it’s the opposite of what we’re taught when we’re growing up.

The Difference Between Inner and Outer Magnetism

Krista Marie:

Definitely. And I love that so much. And we’ve already been talking about a lot of the inner magnetism and outer magnetism. But I’d love to have you just run through quickly some ways that we can gauge, okay, how am I doing inner magnetism-wise and like outer magnetism? Some ways that we can think about that in our business?

Kat Elizabeth:

Yeah, sure. So with the inner magnetism, one of the areas that you can be looking at is just your level of confidence to actually do the thing, to actually just show up and not self sabotage. So for instance, you could track it based on you holding yourself to the plans that you set for yourself. If you say that every day, you’re going to get up and you’re going to do this one particular activity because you know, it’s going to be good for you, even if it feels uncomfortable, then like that’s already a sign that you’re heading in the right direction. If you can give yourself maybe a score from one to 10 of how confident you feel right now recording video reels or showing up on stories and actually showing your face, and right now it’s a three, keep tracking. Every week give yourself a number and go, how am I feeling now? If you’ve been consistently doing those things, before you know it you’ll be a seven or an eight. One day, you’ll just be like, Oh, hold on. This used to bother me but it’s so easy now. I don’t know what I was so worried about. So with that inner magnetism, it could be the actions that you’re actually taking, knowing that you’re just holding yourself to these plans that you make because that’s just so important. It’s funny how often we’ll make an appointment with a client, we’ll show up and we’ll bend over backwards to do things for other people. But the thing is that we set for ourselves, it’s like,we don’t have enough self trust to just see it through.

Krista Marie:

Trust the process. It might feel really uncomfortable today. But I know that if I keep showing up to this, that it’s gonna get easier.

Kat Elizabeth:

Yes, exactly. I have a thing I call your daily and weekly non negotiables and it’s a really good idea sometimes because we get caught up in the perfect marketing plan, like you said, over strategizing the content and having all these elaborate things that we want to do. But really what it comes down to is just showing up and doing that one tiny thing, the 1% of work daily. So it’s a really good idea to go like, what is that one thing? What’s my fallback, even if everything else is falling apart around me, and I’m really stressed, and I’m busy, what’s that one tiny thing, even if it’s a 10 minute activity that I can do every single day, that’s going to number one, it’s going to mean I’m showing up for myself no matter what. And that really just shows that I value myself and what I’m doing. But also, it’s the thing that you could wake up in six months time and the snowball effect, the compound interest that’s built as a result of you just doing that one tiny thing every day, could be leading to some huge results. So that’s also a really good idea is just to give yourself something small, it doesn’t really matter what it is. Because it’s just the same thing as going for a walk every day, or making sure that every single day you drink a certain amount of water. It doesn’t feel like a big deal in the moment, but in the long run, your body will thank you for it.

Krista Marie:

And you just build that trust with yourself. Like you said, it doesn’t really matter what it is, but when you continue to show up for yourself every day, you’re reinforcing the belief that what I do matters, I matter. And it’s those small things that we feel like don’t make a difference. But if you do that every single day, and you start believing that in yourself, you’re going to see so many more in all aspects of your life, you’re going to show up differently. 

Kat Elizabeth:

Yeah, exactly. And so on the flip side with the outer magnetism, because we can get very caught up in every single metric, because it’s like, oh my gosh, how many people saved this and shared this and liked it and commented and really first figure out what are you trying to achieve in your business? What is it really that you’re aiming for? Usually it’s more to do with how many clients and how much money you want to make every year and how many hours you want to be working? Versus how big is my following, especially early on? Yes, you might have big dreams to be a thought leader. And that’s amazing because the 1% work will get you there. But right now, how can we track whether this stuff is paying off and helping you get you to where you want to go? So narrow it down and go, okay, what are the signs that things are moving in the right direction, and I highly recommend that you have one that is to do more about relationships and conversations versus just sales, because relationships and conversations lead to sales. And you’ll probably have more of them in the beginning and less sales and then you’ll start to see the two really correlate. So how many conversations am I having, one on one conversations every single week? How many new people am I meeting every single week? It can be as simple as that, because then it becomes just a fun challenge. How bad is it? It’s not like, oh, no, I have to put myself out there. Have a conversation with another human being, even if you’re introverted, it doesn’t have to be scary, it can be online, you could ask a friend to introduce you to someone new this week. You might just connect with a fellow business owner, it’s not like you always have to be pitching for clients. And this is not about tricking people into working with you, it’s literally just relationships because that is how we get ahead, by surrounding ourselves with people who are positive, like minded, driven, you really just want to be surrounded by that right energy, because we’re all going to lift each other up. So that’s a really good one to have. 

And for instance, if your number one goal with your marketing is to build an email list, because you know that that is where you want to be doing most of your marketing, you don’t want to be relying on social media, then a great one to be tracking would be those email subscribers. Or it might be how many views on your YouTube videos, because that might be like an impact metric for you. I was introduced to that concept and I really love it. So your impact metric is how many lives am I potentially impacting, and how can I track that? And so we often think, Oh, how many clients? I’ve only ever had one client, so I’m not making an impact. But hold on, if you put something valuable out there for other people to consume, even just starting out, okay. 15 people saw your reel. That was 15 people whose lives got to be impacted by you today from that one reel. So figure out what kind of impact you want to be making and how you track that and celebrate those because those numbers do grow. But those early subscribers are really important ones as well. It’s very significant and you’ll never have this moment again, you know what I mean? There’s beauty in this early struggle, even though you don’t always feel it in the time.

Focus on Making an Impact, Not Chasing Vanity Metrics [45:10]

Krista Marie:

I know. Spoiler alert, you’re always going to feel a little bit like a hot mess. But it’s so fun in the beginning when you have to be a little bit more scrappy. And even thinking back to the challenges and things that you’ve overcome in life, you have to in that moment, choose to continue showing up and be scrappy. As your team grows, as your company grows, it’s a different type of feeling. But you’ll never be able to come back to this like, Man, I really stuck to it, I kept showing up, I didn’t have the fame and the name and the authority. I didn’t have any of that and yet, I still continue to show up. It’s such a magical time. And I love that you started with the metric that you can track on the outside, which is how much you’re interacting with people. Because I think that also makes such a big difference. When you can show up in someone’s life, connect with them, get to know them. If you want to build an email list and you’re like, you know what, I have this amazing freebie, I think this would be really helpful for you. That is such an organic way of growing your list, but you have to be comfortable having conversations with people. So it all really ties back to just starting to talk to people, you’ll clarify your message, you’ll clarify what it is you do, you’ll clarify your ideal client, all of this stuff. 

Kat Elizabeth:

Oh my gosh, it’s so powerful. We just don’t even realize how powerful that is.

Krista Marie:

Yeah, because we want to skip past that. We’re like, how do I just market to all these people? And actually, if you just really hone in to having conversations with less people, you’re gonna end up with so much more growth.

Kat Elizabeth:

Yeah, that’s it. And honestly, it is priceless. This is me putting my brand strategist hat on, especially as a copywriter, and a messaging strategist, your ability to communicate your value and really use language that your ideal client understands that they are really using so that they start to see your content and feel like you get them. The way that you get that language is not by hiring some incredible copywriter to write pretty words for you and to make you sound so good. It’s by having enough conversations with your potential ideal clients to really understand what makes them tick, what is it? Why do they actually want or need photography in their life? How is it going to impact their lives? Not just right at this moment, but what could the ripple effect be and really start to understand the inner workings of their minds and understanding what’s going on in their life? And what are the potential obstacles that could be getting in the way of them being ready to even book you. And once you start to understand that, content creation and copywriting gets so much easier, it’s not nearly as complicated as we make it out to be. They say that copy isn’t written, it’s assembled, you’re just gathering quotes of what all of your ideal clients are saying and then you’re putting it in a certain order on the page and then connecting it with a few extra little bits and bolts. Copywriting is way more scientific, it’s actually not creative. But if you’re making a cute tagline and advertising campaigns, but the copy that just connects with your audiences about that. So there is just so much value to be had in those conversations, just do not write it off. And just remember, no matter how big you are, you’re still growing your audience one follower at a time. And it’s only once you’re basically at celebrity status, that you’re not able to maintain these unscalable conversations, is a term that I was introduced to, by the guys at Wake Up to Freedom. So I’ll make sure I give you the link so people know what I’m talking about. But they say that you can literally still have a giant audience and still be able to have those unscalable one-on-one conversations, and then they’re the ones that usually lead to the biggest growth in their business. Because when you have a very impactful conversation with another human being, especially when a brand or a business person genuinely connects with a potential customer or client, that leaves such an impact. People do not forget those positives and they don’t forget the negative. So, that is something to keep in mind too. Don’t discount it because it was just one person, it doesn’t really make a difference. Yeah, the ripple effect is huge.

In Business, Every Relationship Counts

Krista Marie:

It is, and sometimes it’s those relationships that you would have never even guessed would have brought anything, sometimes those are the ones that end up really scaling that you would have had no way of knowing. It’s not the biggest brand, it’s not the biggest whatever, it’s just one person who is obsessed with what you do and it just takes off from there. 

Kat Elizabeth:

Yeah, because sometimes it’s the people you don’t even realize because sometimes we also discount people because they haven’t paid to work with us. And then you find out behind the scenes that they’re a super fan and they’ve referred everybody. Exactly. 

Krista Marie:

I’ve had that in my business, I’m like, Oh, they must not like me. They must not want to work for me. And actually, it’s the opposite of that. They just literally aren’t ready yet. But they’re telling everybody else about you.

Kat Elizabeth

Yeah. Every single relationship counts. And then really the final metric, which I do, and I’m not going to tell you to skip this because it is important. I actually had one of my favorite coaching clients who’s actually a wedding photographer turned brand new photographer, which was already a cool story. Because she became a personal branding photographer because of my podcast. She didn’t realize what it really was, she was like oh, this sounds amazing. And now she’s just killing it. So cool. But she was scared, she was avoiding the money metrics. She knew she needed more clients, because that’s what we often have in our heads like, I just need more clients, I just need more money. But okay, can we define that a little bit? And then how are we going to get there? So, when I forced her kindly to sit down and get really clear on what are your actual goals? What are you making so far? What packages are getting you the best return? What is your actual hourly rate, and really got clear on all those different metrics? Suddenly, it became very doable. What she realized she was trying to achieve wasn’t as far off as she thought, because it was tangible and it was finite. It was like, I only need like three more clients to get to this. And then it’s this. And then before, you know, like she’s raising her prices, and she’s introducing new services, and I think within 12 months she’d increased 30% on the year before, which does make a big difference. She was like, Oh my gosh, I don’t know why I was so scared before. We’re very scared of the unknown. And it just feels like this thing like, who am I to be crunching the numbers? Like, that’s what business people do? And it’s just as simple as, knowing what do I need to live off? What’s the extra that I want to be able to save? How much does it cost me to run my business? And how many clients is that going to require? And then you can make a game of it. Okay, cool. So how many conversations am I going to have this month to try and get me closer to that goal. And we can take a lot of the pressure off, but also start to see some actual growth, some meaningful growth.

Krista Marie:

I think that process makes so much sense because it’s like, figure out your goals and get really clear on what they are, what are the numbers? And then going back to what are the things that I can do internally, and then also how many conversations do I need? It’s really not that complicated. It’s just having the confidence and the trust in yourself, like we’ve been talking about this whole episode I feel like, to just keep showing up, keep doing it.

Kat Elizabeth

Yeah, exactly. Which is, it’s, it’s tough. There are days and weeks, maybe even there might be a month where you’re just not feeling it. But I started taking this course called the 90 day year, which is created by Todd Herman, who’s this high performance coach, and he’s like, your results today are basically a result of the work you were doing 90 days ago. So things aren’t going well today, look at what you were doing 90 days ago, and figure out what was missing, what was off. And if you’re killing it right now and have got all these things happening, people are reaching out to me. Cool, what were you doing 90 days ago, because we’re always just planting seeds. And so that’s why it’s extra important in those months when you’re not feeling it to show up for your future self, because it’s actually your future self in like 90 days time, as well as years into the future who’s going to benefit from you showing up in this moment when it doesn’t feel very good to be doing it? 

Kat’s Advice to Her Younger Self

Krista Marie:

Yes. I love that so much. Okay, all of this has been so amazing. So thank you so much for all of that. The last thing that I always like to ask and I feel like we’ve already had so many tangible things for someone who’s starting their business, but if there was one final nugget that you can share for someone who’s in their first couple of years, anything that you wish you would have known or you feel like would be really impactful?

Kat Elizabeth:

Oh yeah, there’s so many but I think probably the most underrated one that just took me way too long to figure out is really around developing self awareness around where do I shine the most? Where am I having the most fun? What is my best style of communication? How do I work best? For instance, do I work best first thing in the morning? Am I best doing short sprints or do I need to block out half a day and do all of my deep work? Am I better with lots of variety in my day, or do I need to be really, really consistent? All of those things, they seem so small, but every single time you go Oh, hang on. I can’t do more than three calls in a day, or I’m just too burnt out. Or if I schedule a call in the middle of my deep work block, where I’m trying to create content, I lose my focus, and I can’t get back on track again. It took me until very recently, like it was actually connected to an ADHD diagnosis last year, that I realized just how much my lack of self awareness around some of those things was holding me back. So it’s one of those things that I think, for a lot of people, once they’re very established, they finally do this work that if I had just figured out a few of those things early on, even down to what do I want to include in my service offering? How do I want to support my clients? Do I enjoy supporting them through Voxer or slack? Do I want to provide aftercare? Do I like doing all the planning for them? Or do I want to just show up and just be creative and just improvise on the day, all that you’re allowed to decide what you enjoy, what you don’t enjoy, and then build your business around that. Stop stressing so much about what Sally next door is doing. Because their brain works differently, they’ve got different clients, they’ve got different experiences and a different brain to you. So just because it works perfectly for them does not mean it works for you. And doing things differently, is not failing. It’s actually the most badass thing you can do, take ownership of this is how I’m going to best show up. And this is how I want my business to run and to feel and then make decisions in your business to make sure that you’re building it that way.

Krista Marie:

Yes. And that’s gonna be the most sustainable way that you can grow a business because you’re actually really only working on yourself.

Kat Elizabeth:

It’s the only way. If you want to avoid burnout, stick with this long enough that you see those really big results, because they do not happen overnight. Well, you need to be able to play the long game. And how are you going to do that if you’re miserable and exhausted and stressed out and not even being able to deliver your best work to your clients? Because you’re not in an optimal environment to even be doing that. So I would say if you could take that on now in your first one or two years, you’d be miles ahead of where you are now.

Krista Marie:

Honestly, I feel like this entire episode, if you just listen to this, when you feel burned out, I feel like I’m chasing all the things, I feel like I’m doing all the things, come back to these basics, listen to this episode. Yeah. And then just remember that we’re probably making this a lot harder than we need to. And it is a long term thing. This is not an overnight game.

Kat Elizabeth:

Exactly. And, honestly, because I do this, I see all these new concepts like when you take a new course you think you have to implement the entire course for it to change your business and you don’t. If one thing stood out to you from this episode, just grab that, don’t worry about the rest, you can come and re-listen to this later on. Implement one change, because again, the compound interest, you in 90 days time or 12 months time, it could have completely changed your trajectory just from implementing one change. And you don’t have to do all the things, do one thing really well.

Krista Marie:

That’s why I love podcasts so much because you can listen to it and then walk away with one thing, and then just go and do that one thing. Kat, this was so great. I’m so thrilled that you’re here today. So let us know how we can connect with you? Where can we find you all of the things? 

Kat Elizabeth:

Yeah, sure. So my website is magneticbrand.co. And there’s links there to absolutely everything, including my magnetic brand quiz, which might be helpful because it can just really help you understand where in the journey of brand building you are and what to be focusing on in that particular time because we don’t, like I said, you don’t have to do all the things at once. And the main place I hang out online is Instagram. So at @IamKatElizabeth. Kat with K. And if you listen to this and you enjoyed it, just say hi, because I like having conversations as well. And I’m a real person on the other end of my DMs. 

Krista Marie:

I love that so much. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. It’s just such a joy. And I’m just so grateful that you were on the show. 

Kat Elizabeth: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.