239: Creating a Vision for Your Life and Business

Michele 00:00

Hello, my name is Michele, and you're listening to Profit is a Choice. With me, on the podcast today is Kathy Geffen of Kathy Geffen Designs and Fine Tune Coaching. Kathy has had an amazing 25-year career in corporate America doing all types of organizational management, started a drapery workroom in 2015, and has recently launched Fine Tune Coaching. We're going to have a great conversation about what it's like to overlap with different areas of business, what makes it so important to be connected to your goals, and to be able to organize them in a way that they can be achieved. There is really great information in this podcast, and I hope you enjoy it.

Michele 00:54

Every day, empowered entrepreneurs are taking ownership of their company financial health and enjoying the reward to reduce stress and more creativity. With my background as a financial software developer, owner of multiple businesses in the interior design, industry, educator, and speaker, I coach women in the interior design industry to increase their profits, regain ownership of their bottom line, and to have fun again in their business. Welcome to Profit is a Choice.

Michele 01:31

Hey, Kathy, welcome to the podcast.

Kathy 01:33

Hi, thanks, Michele. Thanks for having me.

Michele 01:35

My pleasure. We have known each other and have been friends for years. I was trying to think back the other day, about how long ago it was, but it was probably about maybe 2012 or 2013. Was it that early?

Kathy 01:52

No, I started my business in 2015.

Michele 01:55

All right. I think we did the pricing class at your house Pricing Without Emotion pretty early on after you had started.

Kathy 02:03

You're right. I think that was in 2016 that we did it. That was the first education class that I took.

Michele 02:09

It's crazy. Sometimes those years feel like they just happened and other times they seem so far away.

Kathy 02:16

I know. I understand that.

Michele 02:19

Because your children were small, they were young, and you now have a daughter who's in college and a son, I think he's high school age now.

Kathy 02:28

He's driving.

Michele 02:29

Yes, wow. And they were just small, little things, so, really interesting how life keeps moving. What I'd love to talk about as we get started, Kathy, is I want the listeners to know a little more about you. I'm going to give like a high level and then I'd love for you to kind of fill in all the gaps. I know like you said, you started your business in 2015 and that was a custom drapery workroom, and you were doing mostly retail a little bit of wholesale maybe. But you also had a full-time corporate job you still have had for quite a while.

Kathy 03:02

Yes.

Michele 03:03

So, tell us a little bit as I'm curious how it was starting a job because that's going to be part of our conversation, what led you to start such a creative job while you were working in such a technical field and then the choice for seven more years run your business parallel with working corporate. Fill us in on kind of what this journey has been like for you.

Kathy 03:28

Sure. I started my custom drapery workroom, Kathy Geffen Design. Similar story to yours. I had this idea in my head that I've always wanted to own a business and had been working in corporate for a long-time doing management consulting, which was nice, it's fine, but there was a piece of me that was missing. It was a piece of who I felt like I wanted to be in the world. I wasn't being creative. I couldn't step back from a day and say, wow, I made that, or I did that. It's all very much in your mind, on a piece of paper or a computer, and working with people, and I could see their results, but I wasn't getting an internal feeling. There was something missing. I've been talking with a friend who when she moved into a home said, Kathy, you made your draperies, why aren't you doing this? I was like, ah, what are you talking about, that's not a business. And she said, well, let me tell you what I paid for. You know those things in my family room that I had made, she had had top treatments up there, and she had something over her sink. It was in the 90s that she was talking about so, everything was like red and yellow, very warm colors. She told me what it was priced and how this lady came to her home and worked with her, and did it and I was like, really, you paid someone to do this. What? Because I had done it myself only because I couldn't find what I wanted in the store. My mom had made hers when we grew up and I knew what I wanted. I was looking at these magazines, I knew what I wanted, and I had made these things and my friend had seen me make them. She bought somebody from somebody, and I thought, well, yes, okay, well, maybe this is a thing.

Fast forward a couple of years, I moved to a new location, we moved our family. I finally have a place where I can have a Bunco group and I'm thinking, okay, if there's any level of people that are interested it is these Bunco ladies. I started having a conversation with one of the Bunco ladies and she says, Kathy, I have the fabric. I've had the fabric for years; I know exactly what I want. I just need someone to make it. So I go, oh, okay, let's give this a try and they were London shades. She knew exactly what she wanted, London shades. The Internet was what it is, and I could research to figure out how to make it. I went ahead and made these shades for her. My husband helped me install them. We got them beautiful in the end. She paid me for it, and she loved it. And I thought, wow, hmm, this could be a thing. Then I started trying to understand what does a business look like, I did enjoy that process. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy the process, but I did. I loved stepping back and making her happy. And then I found WCAA, and I said I'm going to do it. I remember talking to my husband about it and was like, I'm thinking of doing this thing. He's like, okay, yes, whatever. Then I said, okay, cool, I'm going to do it and I'm going to make this a business. And I immediately got my state corporation commission, got my name, got a domain, and figured out how to do all of that, and then joined the WCAA. I remember one of them looking at me and I was overwhelmed because she looked at me and said, well, what are you, are you retail or wholesale? I was like what are you talking about, I make window treatments for people. I didn't know what it was. And so, at that point anyway, you start learning when to start engaging with those folks and figuring out what it is and realizing your business. I really cannot tell you how much when you don't know what you're doing that reaching out to those people who have already been there and done this and are working in this industry, and learning from their experience has really boosted my confidence, helped me have resources that are local, and friends that I can reach out to and ask for help. And I did and over the years, it would be like, hey, I think I have this whatever to create, I'm thinking of going through this, this, and this, what would you do? And I realized when they started telling me the stuff I'd already done, I knew what I was doing. But I think I needed that competence of that time, really, from learning from them to do it. So that's kind of how it started, and it has blossomed, and I have just babied it and nurtured it and, you know, dreamed and visioned, about the time when I could just do that and leave the corporate world. And I'm here and I'm so excited. I mean, I'm so excited, Michele, I cannot tell you.

Michele 07:54

I can see it; I can see it. You know, a couple of things that strike me and you're right, there are some similarities to our story where our neighbors are like, yes, we'd pay you to do that, or I've got the fabric, or let's get going. I didn't even know I was a workroom either, I think it was three years before I knew that that was supposed to be the title of what I was because I wasn't connected to anybody for the first three years. And that made it really hard because I was just here, myself, doing it. You know how you had talked about your corporate path and there was still something missing with that creation of an end-product that was tangible, that you could hold in your hands, not that it's not creative in business consulting, not that it's not creative in writing processes, there are so many ways to be creative, but it is very different. It is in some ways very separate from us, and we are delivering it in a technological form, not in a physical form other than a printed manual or something. But there's something about making beautiful window treatment with beautiful fabrics and touching it and feeling it and the texture and it hits the senses differently. Did you find that fulfillment or a part of that fulfillment in that full process not only of making it but even the making in the starting of the business?

Kathy 09:18

I felt like for the first time in my life, I had been trained and educated at my corporation to provide our clients value, provide the value, provide the value, it was this word of value, and I didn't know what value was. The other thing I didn't know how to do was my corporation was going through this idea of goal setting, setting goals, and setting a SMART goal. When you're in management consulting, you can set a goal and try to do something and it's a very project-related goal. We have this objective, we want to get here, but they kept saying set goals about what you want to do, but I didn't feel like I had any control over those goals. I'll be honest, I'd get staffed onto a project and maybe this is the kind of thing I want to do, and I tried to manipulate the system to get staffed onto a project doing something that I wanted to do. But it was the first time in my life, I could say that I have a goal that I want, and I understand how I have control to get to that goal. And I know what value I'm providing to that client because I could see it in their face, I could see it in the feeling, I could see it in understanding. I understand how to manage the process from the beginning to the end so that all they have to do is say, oh, I picked out this pretty thing and Kathy helped me design it. And then Kathy implemented it, and oh, my God, I love it. So, I set goals, I worked through those goals, I provided value to the client, and they loved it, they were happy in the end.

Michele 10:47

You know, what's interesting about that, it's the culmination of your values and their values colliding. Like that is the beauty of sales. Sales aren't trying to convince somebody. I remember when I read, I think it was Michael Port's Booked Solid, and one of the things that he said in there, this was years ago, was sales is not coercion. We're not coercing someone to work with us. What we're doing is saying you have a problem; I have a solution, how can these two mix? I think your example that you used with value and being able to really control not only the setting of the goal but the reaching of the goal. I think it makes me think of another thing that we talk about in my coaching practice all the time, which is we're not just setting goals to set goals. And sometimes in a performative environment, which corporate can be sometimes it's about setting it just to set it, we did the thing, check. It's like when people say to me, I'll ask did you analyze your financials? I printed them and I looked at them, and check. But did you analyze it? Did you take the information? Did you do anything with it is a different conversation. The beauty of owning our own company, which I think is what you saw was, yes, there is great value in goal setting, but when that goal is intimately tied to the desires of the corporation, or of the person setting them individually, it changes the relationship with the goal. Then what's so interesting, I've found in my own journey, is because I had to do the same thing in corporate for 10 years, you're having to set goals for them. The setting for myself was different. I had to really sit and think what do I want? What do I want this to look like? There's an ownership that is so different, where the others can somehow sometimes feel disembodied if that makes sense. Having a goal-setting process where I'm really saying, Michele, what do you want, Kathy, what do you want, let's name that. Let's name it, and let's see where we are compared to where we're going to be. But then what it does is it has allowed me my way of doing it to be as enthralled with the process of attaining it as I would be with just the I've attained it. In other words, the goal is not just the end result, it's the process of growing and taking baby steps to get there so that if I'm thrown off a little here a little there, say I fall a little short of the goal, I'm not like beating myself up that I didn't meet the goal. I'm going, oh, but gosh, look what I've learned, and look how much closer I am to where I wanted to be. So, it changes my interaction involvement with that entire goal-setting process. Did you find the same to be true in your experience?

Kathy 13:49

Yes, I think what I found was I love learning about business. What I found was interesting. I thought before I started going down this journey, I thought, I don't know work, you know, it's great, it's fine. It's whatever, it's a paycheck, it's a paycheck. It's a means to an end, a way for me to support my family going through it. But what I found through this process is that I actually liked business. I'm really interested in the intricacies of why we're doing something and how we do it, what is the end goal of what we're trying to get there, and did we learn anything throughout the process. Sometimes the definition of your goal changes during the process of getting there. However, the desired outcome of what you want, you probably got there, but just the definition of that goal is that you're learning it, you're unpeeling that onion as you go, and learning as you go in defining different things.

Michele 14:47

Let's stop right there one second and I say that only because I think it is so important that somebody needs to really hear what you just said. We talk about having fluidity of goals. In other words, it can grow and change, and we need to allow for that. I think it's that performative, rigid structure of building goals that don't allow for a change, even if the values and the inputs around us are changing that will not even allow for that goal to come to fruition yet holding to that goal, because we, by gosh, set that goal that leads to such destruction. And I'm not saying that goals should be so willy-nilly that every week we change it, that's not the intent either. But that freedom and fluidity to unpeel the onion of goal setting to really say what is it that we want is good. Sometimes I think, to your point, we think we want something, but we don't understand the underlying idea of what we really want and as we get closer to it, it gets closer to us. That's why we even talked about our vision. The closer you get to the vision, you have to set another one, because you're now so close that it's becoming part of your mission and part of your task, and part of your goals, since you're close to it, you see it differently. But just giving ourselves as business owners the ability to embrace that process, it's actually beautiful when you can embrace it, it doesn't feel like another thing to do, it feels like a learning and an uncovering process.

Kathy 16:16

As long as you're coming back and realizing well, yes, maybe I didn't hit it that time and I've come back. But I've learned this, I started here and now I'm here. And now because of this journey, this tiny, little, short journey from the start to where I am right now, I've learned something, I can adjust to get to where I'm going, and I think that vision is important. One thing I've just learned over the years of working I tried to incorporate into my children is thinking about what is the vision of what you want your life to be not so much of what do you want to do. My daughter, for example, is in school right now and she's thinking she wants to be a nurse. Great. Why? Why do you think you want to be a nurse? What do you want your life to be like? How does that incorporate into what kind of work you do want to do? What kind of hours do you want to work? How do you want to spend time with your future family? So really just thinking through that future life and how do you build something to get to that future life, that future. You know, she's got this future goal where she wants to live independently and do all this stuff. Great. What do you want that to look like when you're there? And then let's work through the steps to get there. And I think you have to do that in everything. I'm doing that now. Right? What do I want this next phase of my life to be? So excited to have that fluidity and the freedom to go through it.

Michele 17:32

Yes, we just talked about it on our coaching call yesterday, we're working on the Align Your Team section of my Aim with Intent, so we're really talking about team, team, team, and are the right butts in the right seats, doing the right job and looking at a team being us and our clients. Do we have the right clients? Us and our employees, do we have the right people, subcontractors, our support team? Do we have the right accountant? Do we have the right bookkeeper? Who were the people that we were working with? Are we working with the right vendors, I put right in air quotes because it's whatever's right for them at that moment for what they're trying to attain and the value they're looking to give and all the things but one of the big things that I asked them to do was to write their current job description. Write down everything you do, not the fluffy job description, literally, write down what you do. What's everything that seems to be sitting on your plate? Now in one year, I want you to tell me what you want your job to look like. It's kind of like the same thing in your life. Tell me what you want your job to look like in one year. Okay, now what we're going to do is we're going to make the plan to get onto your list of the things that aren't on there and get off of your list of things that aren't on the next one. Because that's the delta, that's the difference. This is what my life within my company currently looks like. This is what I desire life within my company to look like. But that doesn't mean that that work difference just doesn't get done. It means it needs to be done differently, by technology or by a person or something. But we've got to figure that out. It's also an interesting exercise when I have my clients do something like before you tell me what you want your company goals to be, I want you to write down all the weeks she wanted to take a vacation. I want you to write down what nights you want to go home early to have dinner with the kids. I want you to put these things on your calendar, that's pre-calendar life. Okay, now here's what you have left open for work. Now what do we want to do and accomplish in that space? And it's a different way of coming at it. It is the same kind of idea as what you're saying to your daughter. We should never be building businesses. I say we should never I hate to be that direct. I don't think it's the best of healthy ideas to build a business that is all consuming of our entire life. Or that is our only version of our identity. It just is not healthy. When we fall into these moments of that it can feel very much untethering. It can feel like I'm ungrounded, it can feel like without balance, like all the things that we hear. So really trying to say what do I want my life to look like? What do I want my relationships to look like? What do I want my community involvement to look like? All the things, now, how do I build a business that allows me to do that? Yes. And you're in a place now where you get to do more of that? Because you have more control over your time. Right? Right. You have said sayonara to the corporate world at the time this podcast will be coming out.

Kathy 20:32

Yes, and I'm at the beginning of that. I'm in the 'understanding the vision' of 'what is the future of this business' looks like. I know what I look like currently. What I look like, currently, what this business or these businesses look like, is not what I expect them to look like over the next year. And honestly, I think both will change. But I think it will be to the point that I control it that I'm feeling like I'm making that impact, because that's really what it's about, it is making an impact to either the homeowner or designer or the business owner of whatever change we've implemented because it's an impact. And it's an impact, that's a personal impact to them. If it's on the coaching side, they're reducing their overwhelm. They're reducing the amount of work that they're doing, how they're doing their work. If it's on the design fabrication side, they have a softer, much more comfortable space to spend with their family and friends. I've helped manage that from both sides and that makes me feel incredibly excited.

Michele 21:35

You're at the beginning, the precipice of the new Kathy Geffen which is kind of like Kathy 2.0. Oh, I love it. I love it to death. Oh, I'm glad that I was here for Kathy 1.0 and I'm excited for your Kathy 2.0. I told you that at IWCE, I'm really excited because I remember when I stayed in your home when I taught that class and I remember you saying to me, I so want to take the step out of corporate and I know that I need to be there for some amount of time. At the time, I think you were looking at thinking that it was going to have to be around 10 years and you were really hoping that you could get out faster than that, just to have a different life. And I just remember sitting and talking to you about all the different ways that this industry could be put together. You were doing some work with a builder at that time and what relationships could we build here? And what relationships can be built there? And I mean, what I loved about the meeting of our minds all the way back in, I guess 2016 that we've established, I see the businesswoman in you, I don't mean just as if it's a diminutive term, meaning I see that love of business even before you had it. We connected on that you really wanted to understand the intricacies of pricing when I taught pricing. Sometimes there were people that were just getting out the calculator and just following it, you asked questions because you really wanted to understand what are the inputs to this. How does this work? You ask questions from a business position that many people did not ask me. So, I knew that was something because you worked in it all day, and let's be honest, it is very different. This was my big aha, 20 years ago, it was very different to take all of these business principles that were taught in school and apply them to a corporation or apply them to something that is not me and mine. But when I moved into owning my own business, it took intention for me to take those business principles and dial back to a micro-business. And sometimes I didn't even realize I needed them until I went, oh, good grief, what's happening over here? Oh, it's because I didn't do that and I know better. Like even when my financials got to be a mess within the first year or two. It was because I started off as a hobby. I didn't even know it was an industry kind of like you.

The Internet wasn't a big deal back then in 2000, we didn't know a lot about that. That wasn't something we were finding out and all the information wasn't there. I don't even know where I thought window treatments came from, like, I guess there was a Cabbage Patch somewhere for window treatments. I just didn't know, it never crossed my mind because I grew up in a family in a mill town where everybody made everything. So, I just didn't even understand it as an industry. And I say that because you have taken your love of business and not only looked at how can I continue this work room and design of window treatments and grow it, that you built all the way that started in 2015. But you've also stepped back and said how can I take this skill set in this love of business and not just hold it for myself? But how can I share and impart this other 20 years of hard-earned business understanding and education to other small business owners who were looking to implement the same things? But maybe they didn't have the benefit of a business degree, or they didn't have the benefit of working in a corporation where they were allowed to put those things in place. I hear all the time I don't know how to do these things because I don't have a business degree. I was never taught business. I have a design degree. I was never taught business. I don't know business. And I get that, I hear you. But there are people who can help you do that. Tell us a little bit about your kind of awakening to Hmm, what if Kathy 2.0 was allowed to spread her wings even wider now to be able to keep that business piece along with some of the creativity piece?

Kathy 25:47

I guess it was a couple of years into owning Kathy Geffen Design and being involved in WCAA's local chapter. I was seeing the questions that those folks had, I guess my first aha moment was someone asking, oh, my gosh, I have so many orders I don't know how to manage it. I was like, just a Kanban. Board. I mean, you have three statuses or four, what are the phases of the work that your stuff is in, and just put stickies on a poster board and here you go and just start managing through it. And then two months later, she came back, she snapped me, and she showed me a picture of her board with her stickies in different colors, and then how she moved the sticky to a calendar, so she knew it was in fabrications. I said to her, oh, that's cool, that's a really neat process, I like that. Where'd you get that? She goes, well, Kathy, you introduced me to a Kanban board concept. And now this is what I'm doing. Like, wait a second, what? You're doing something because I told you something and you've been in business for how long? That was my first aha moment that, oh, I have something here. There's something here and I helped her and she's now less overwhelmed by that.

Michele 26:57

It's funny because mine was with CHF Academy. But it was with the forum, the old CHF Forum, which is now the Curtains and Soft Furnishings Library. But back in the day, when I found it in my quest to figure out if I was going to go back to corporate and make six figures or continue to lose money in my own personal venture, like, which way am I going here? I got in there and started realizing that I had answers to questions that I assumed everybody else knew. I assumed it to be common knowledge. I even remember in 2008, I was standing at the table in my workroom, and I was president of WCAA Atlanta. The vice president of the WCAA. Atlanta was at my house, and we had traded out services. She was getting on the other side of the table helping me do a whole house of Roman shades. And I was helping her recover a bunch of barstools for a country club. So, we were trading because it was monotonous work, and we didn't want to do it alone. And I remember us standing at the table and I literally said, now I look back at myself and I'm like, sweet girl, you had no idea, but I said to her, I want to teach at CHF Academy, but I don't even know what I know that anybody else doesn't know. I just made the assumption that my knowledge base was the same as everybody else's.

Now, that seems silly, if I see it that way. If that were the case, everybody would be in the same place that I am and that's not what the deal is. But I didn't yet recognize that I had a way of seeing things, I had prior work, I had education in specialties or in specifics, and these were things that had become my every day, but that was not somebody else's everyday. It was so interesting, and I put it out into the world. I even called a couple of people in our industry, that if I called them by name, you would know who they are, and I said to them, you know me, you've met me, what do I have to offer the world that you think that I might not see? They gave me answers. But I started answering on the forums and saying things to people like your Kanban concept. Just general types of things that to me, were no-brainers. They didn't know it. And that was when I started recognizing kind of the divide of oh wait, I do have something here that's worth offering in a different way. So many parallels, but I do love hearing that. That fills that need, doesn't it, the need that you're talking about in corporate, that you get filled if you will. What it is, I think is the need to serve. I think there is something in us where we want to serve and create that impact for someone else. So, when you first found it by really creating that personal impact with window coverings for someone's home now you've started to find it through this process by providing knowledge around business and organizational management that you have something to offer that they don't have, that Michael Port, you have something they don't have that makes it easier.

Kathy 30:07

Right. And I'd like to help them with them and it's 25 years of experience managing projects from beginning to end and implementing change. I mean, that's a lot. And when you look at working for corporate America and implementing change with employees, the intrinsic value that you get after helping an employee, or this massive organization that spent millions of dollars to implement this change versus helping a small business owner free up their day, so that they could focus on a strategic concept or a strategic project that they want to get to the difference in the thinking and the feeling and the impact that you feel you've made is leaps and bounds of difference by the latter by helping that business owner make that change and implement that change and go through that process. I have freed up their world in order for them to seek something that they truly want to seek that they haven't been able to seek, versus helping an employee do something in their jobs so they can get a paycheck and they don't really care because they're continuously having change thrown at them. Even though it's leaps and bounds of a world difference, I want to help the business owner understand how to make their day and their business achieve their goals. I love your phrase with ease because it's achieving your goals by really small changes, minute small changes, but really stepping back and looking at those to get that change. That's where I want to be.

Michele 31:41

Yes, I think what's so interesting too is recognizing that when we help an individual business owner, this is why I have so much joy in it as well, it changes everything. Because now we have changed the life of the business owner, it's changed the life of the employees, it's changed their home life. I can remember even just teaching Pricing Without Emotion, I got an email one time, I don't know if I've ever told the story, it's actually quite emotional, but I'm going to tell it. So I was in Pennsylvania teaching my Pricing Without Emotion and there was another woman in the soft furnishings industry who felt like, for whatever reason, that she had the right to speak into my life what she thought she liked or didn't like, or what I was or wasn't doing that felt appropriate to her. Okay, this was not like a trusted advisor of mine is not a trusted friend of mine this was just another businessperson. She was older than me probably about 10 years. I get it while I'm there and I think we had Facebook at the time, and somebody must have posted something that I was there teaching Pricing Without Emotion. She sent me an email, Kathy, that goes on to say, along the lines of you shouldn't be there, you have young children at home, you need to be at home with your family, and trust me, I'm ahead of you and my daughter sits at a table and complains that I wasn't in there for her. She does not know my life. She does not know what's happening with me. She does not know that I'm surrounded by 20 women who are trying to build a life for their families and so by me taking a step out of mine for three short days to come in to give that life-giving information to these 20 other women, she has no idea. But she just decided that for whatever reason she needs to let me know what I'm doing. I got the email, not expecting it to be that. So of course, I'm already reading it before I know that this probably isn't the time to read it because I'm here having to teach, and I am literally shaking like I don't even know how to tell you.

That's the worst feedback I've ever gotten in my life and especially since it was unsolicited. So long story short, I don't tell who the person is, but I did share with one or two people that were there who had taken the class before so they're taking it for the second time. One of those business owners wrote an email to my husband and my children, I can't even hardly say it, and she thank them for being willing to allow their mom and wife to get up and take a trip for three days to pour into 20 women whose entire lives and families are going to be just exploded because of that knowledge. My bucket was filled just by being there and giving it to them. I still have that email. When things get hard, I sometimes think is what we're doing making a difference. I've been doing this since 2007 on stages, I've been a long time trying to do this, and yes, there is a cost, there was a cost to you working corporate, there will be a cost to you. There's a cost to everybody listening to this podcast today for doing their jobs. So anything that we have that can make it easier or better, just the idea of a Kanban, just the idea of understanding pricing, just the idea of how to set a goal does really stinking care about versus a performative goal. The impact is more than just a business impact. It is impacting their lives. So, we're going to have naysayers. Everybody's going to have naysayers. I got my naysayer out there telling me I should be home with my children. Whatever, whatever, as my kids would say, Go on with your bad self. I don't need to listen to that. But I'm going to focus on the 20 women that were in front of me that day. And I have taught 1000s of people how to price their work over how many years I don't even know how to do the math, like a lot of years, 17 years, something like that a long time.

Kathy 36:07

A long time. It's a lot of lives that you've impacted, and I bet your children and husband are proud of you for it.

Michele 36:15

They are they are and yes, they sacrificed too, and I think that's what we're also recognizing. When you help that business owner, even create a Kanban Board, and understand the concept behind it, yes, it took some of your time, even if it was 10 minutes, and you didn't even recognize the impact, sometimes those are the biggest impacts when we don't even recognize it. We're making one. But I want you to look at the impact that it made on her and then made on her family. Like you probably gave her family time back.

Kathy 36:43

Yes, I think I did.

Michele 36:45

That's why I think these things matter so much more than just doing it for the employee at corporate. That needs to still be done, but it definitely doesn't feed the same way, the heart, and the soul, as it does for you, I bet, where you see the change, and you see the transformation much more closely and clearly.

Kathy 37:06

Right, and I think you're not held back. You know, for the past eight years, I have held back. There have been things that I've thought about doing that I'm saying, oh, no, I shouldn't do that right now, that's not a good look, what if this causes conflict, it could appear to conflict, even though it's not conflicting, right? It's just the appearance of perception, the ability to not have restrictions. It's almost like I'm thinking of dams. The water is flowing, and then here's the dam, and then until that gets to this place, that dam is going to control that water to a certain level. That dam is gone. It's whatever I want it to be, I need to set those own locks in place. And so, what are those locks and where do I want to be at a certain time, it is now up to me and it is now 100% up to me and my creativity and what I want to do, and yes, those naysayers are out there. There's nothing worse than your own head. Right?

Michele 38:02

You're absolutely right because the woman that wrote that, she had no idea. I know exactly what you're talking about. The word that I like to use is unbridled. That's what mine felt like. Because I even kept my business growth bridled until my kids went to college. They got up into those late high school years where they were not as dependent on me all the way through high school. One of my things was, I will be home on Friday nights so that I can be at the football game to watch my kids march out on that field, they were in drumline, and I'm going to be there to watch them. So, whatever I did, I tried to be in by midday or late afternoon on Friday so that I could get to the ballfield, that was important to me. So, what that naysayer did not realize is my husband and I had already sat down and talked about boundaries, or where the dam was where the locks were on my business and his business and our life together back to your vision, your life. We'd already had those conversations. I was already working within the framework of what our family had agreed worked for us. Then when the kids were older, I remember when I said to Joel, I said I feel like I've been holding back a team of running horses for years to stay within what we had agreed our family was going to look like and I am getting ready to let these horses run. I am going to let go. And I'm just going to go because I know that in a few short years, I'm going to bridle again, you know why? Because I'm probably going to have grandchildren and I promise you I'm going to want to go be some type of a sassy grandma and hang out with them. Don't call me grandma when it gets here.

Kathy 39:48

You're going to have one of those special names.

Michele 39:49

I'm going to be one of those like Sugar or Honey. I'm going to dam it up because I want to dam it up not because someone wanted to impart that upon me, and that's where you probably are is you get to now set the locks where you want the locks. It doesn't mean we don't have locks, doesn't mean we don't have a dam. But you get to decide where you let the water flow and where you don't.

Kathy 40:14

Absolutely, and it's about to go.

Michele 40:19

I love it! I'm so happy for you. I want to ask you this, Kathy, when you work with other business owners, so yes, we're going to keep Kathy Geffen Design going, yes, you're going to continue to make beautiful window treatments, but you also have already started doing some coaching and working with business owners, not even just within the interiors industry, but across industries, small businesses. What is it that you love to do with them? Like if you could just say like, here's one thing that I think if every business did this one thing, what is the thing that is just it? Like, for me, it's all about the financials. If I can just help them understand those numbers, if I can help them understand how to price, if I can help them understand how to manage that money, how to save that money, how to spin that money, how to analyze that money, mine is just financials because that affects everything. That is just my massive heartbeat. What would you say your massive heartbeat is? Or do you have one yet?

Kathy 41:18

I think I'm still trying to figure out what that one thing is. Having been held back and seeing what it is, where is it that I want that one thing to be? I can tell you some things that I am passionate about and what I'm excited about.

Michele 41:31

Yes, then tell us two or three things you're passionate about while you're peeling this onion.

Kathy 41:35

Yes, I'm unpeeling it right to see where it is. One is really trying to understand what is the major process change that you need to make. The question isn't quite what's the processing, but what is your pain point? What is your current pain point? Where do you want to be? And why are you not there? What is causing your struggle? What is keeping you from getting there at this point? Really trying to unbreak that and what is that thing going to look like? And then let's put this into actionable work to get there. And these things don't have to be big. I mean, there's just an example of a small thing, business owner, hey, Kathy, I'm overwhelmed, I hate going to work, I'm too tired to go to work. Every time we go to work and this person has staff, every time we go to work, I run around like a chicken with my head cut off. I can't get the work done. What work are you trying to get done? What is the problem that you're trying to get done? I need to get their payroll ready and every week, every two weeks, I need to get their information into this thing so I can get it over to the payroll person to do this. I am then saying well, okay, hang on, you're the business owner, why are you struggling with the data collection? That is the smallest piece. You've already got the payroll setup, you've already got visioning, and you know where you want to go. Why are you the person collecting all that payroll data? Let's talk about how you are doing that now, how are you doing it? Do you have someone else who could do this for you? Do you have someone else who has these skills? Here's a simple skill of what you can do. You know what, two weeks later, that business owner had found an intern that they had that was going in and understood how to use Excel, understand how to collect the data, and now that business owner is no longer running around trying to get worrying about getting the payroll data because they built a process to collect that and so that he could focus on something else.

Michele 43:23

You're absolutely right. Sometimes it's those very small things that we just do, just out of rote memory or whatever. We're just doing it because we've always had to do it. We don't even see it as a challenge. I know Kelcee, on my team, I've shared this on a couple of other podcasts, we talked about if we could offload something that was 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day for an entire year for like 2000 hours and it is literally a 40-hour work week. We've given ourselves a week's vacation with a 10-minute offload every day. But those 10 minutes, we tend to think well, I'll just keep them they're so easy, so little, they make no impact and they really do make an impact over the grand scheme.

Kathy 44:03

And let me add to that. So how do I offload? Yes, there are different ways to offload. You can delegate you can remove, maybe you don't need to do that process, maybe it's not important. I think what a lot of folks do is look at oh, gosh, I should have this system. Here's an example. I should have this cool thing and it is going to show me how to do something. Here's a demo. Well, let me go ahead and try this free trial and start clicking around with it. A software piece that maybe is like a CRM for example, and you want to implement it. Great. Go ahead and play with it. But do you really know what you want to do with it? Well, what is your current process? It all comes back to the business process. What is the process that you're doing? How do we make that process repeatable? How is that process supporting your future goals? Define what you want that process to look like. And then let's implement the systems and operations in order to meet that process. People skip that all the time they go right into, oh, I can't get this thing to work. Well, are you making your business process work according to the way this software needs to work? Or are you making the software work to support your business process, which one? I'll tell you, it's better to have an end goal and an outcome in mind and build the software and processes in place to meet where you want your business to go.

Michele 45:20

That's exactly right. We used to always talk about, I mean, having written software now, but even back in my software days with corporate, when we were analyzing other software to use, we always went in with a list of specifications of here's what we're doing, here's what we need it to do, here's how we need it to work, then we evaluated based on that. I coached somebody one time, and bless her heart, she had a lot of input from a lot of different resources that said, you need, let's say, Asana, you need Hive, you need Clickup, you need Trello, you need Monday, you need Motion, you need blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it just kept going at every new piece of software. So, she was constantly jumping from software platform to software platform and then kept saying how none of them worked. And really what it was is that she had not built that process, she would not be willing to say here's what we do and how we do it, and how we want to show up now evaluate under some of this. And then just stick to it, and make it support you if it's the right one, it's going to be pretty close. And instead, it was always this next shiny object of software or technology that they had to jump to that I see that happening in project management within interior design. I see people jumping from Ivy or House to my DOMA to Design Files to Studio Design Manager, they're just hopping all over the place. And I'll tell you you can screw up a process, screw up your records, and by the time you're done, you don't even know what your process was or what you're doing anymore. So, it's definitely dangerous, very dangerous. That's really good information. As we wrap up, Kathy, how is the best way for people to find you, both your window treatment side if they're listening, and then also your coaching opportunity?

Kathy 47:11

Sure. Well, window treatment. It's Kathy with the K, Kathy Geffen Design, and that's my website through there, you can reach out to contact me if you need something. I'm happy to help interior designers and homeowners, and business owners work through that. From a business coaching perspective, that is Fine Tune Coaching, website FineTuneCoaching.com. I've got a place where you can come out and reach out to me and we can see if there's something I can help you work through. We can do a discovery call to really understand what are the pain points that you're trying to solve and let's talk through what are the options for you to move forward. I'm happy to do one on one coaching and I'll be building out some group coaching programs as well over the next year so we can work that way as well. So, there's more to come. I'm going to be the next Michele Williams.

Michele 48:04

Is that right? Come on. Come on. Yes, I would love to. I would love that. That would be amazing to me.

You know, I think, Kathy, that I said this to you, there's room, there is room. But I think the room needs to be reserved for people that are really great at what they do. And you're really great at what you do. so, you have my support to grow into whatever version of Kathy 2.0 is the best version for you. So don't hold back and you do your thing. Okay.

Kathy 48:33

Thanks, Michele.

Michele 48:34

All right. Thanks for being with us today. Kathy, thank you so much. Once again, for coming on the podcast. I'm excited to be working with you and to be sharing your information with others and I just want to encourage all of you to go check it out. Also, if you want help building a strategy and really making a difference in your company, building a company for impact and for legacy I would love to help you over here at Scarlet Thread Consulting, you can go to ScarletThreadConsulting.com Go to the Work with Me page and sign up for a discovery call. In addition, I would love to help you manage your money and you can go to Metrique Solutions, sign up for a demo, and check out some of our blogs and content over there. But really being intentional about profitability is going to help you build the company that you can't build without it because profit doesn't happen by accident.

Michele 49:36

Profit is a Choice is proud to be part of the designnetwork.org where you can discover more design media reaching creative listeners. Thanks for listening and stay creative and business minded.