Kathryn Tague, Branding and Digital Communication Expert, founder of Influence Digital Media

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W four CY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helen n believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning. Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helen.

0:52 Thanks for joining in today, everybody. I am Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W four C dot com. We're streaming live on talkfour tv dot com in addition to at Winning Business Radio on Facebook, and of course we're available in podcasts after the live show on wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube, I Heeartradio, Spotify, Apple Again, everywhere you can find a podcast, you will find us. The mission of Winning Business Radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice, tell people avoid the mistakes of others, right to learn best practices, the how tos, the what to's, the what not tos, to be challenged and hopefully to be inspired as well by the successes of others who with those others. They're consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners and entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But you know, virtually every successful person I've ever had a chance to talk to has hed some form of failure in their lives and careers. So while we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I say it every week.

1:57 I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major, major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to small to medium sized businesses all the way up to the Fortune fifty. I've seen a lot of those companies win, and to varying degrees, i've seen some of them fail. I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the highest performing people around and with some who probably should have found other professions. In my own businesses, I've had lots of success, but some failures too, and I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences. So you'll hear from me my opinions and insights, but more importantly, you're going to hear from experts, those consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners and entrepreneurs because they have a lot to share.

2:43 And today my guest is Catherine Take. She's branding and digital meeting, a digital communication expert and founder of Influence Digital Media. Here's your Bile. Catherine was the senior executive editor of The Good Men Project, the world's leading progressive men's publication, for nine years, was the director of Media Partnerships and Social Media Branding, Strategy and Content for six years. She's been a writing coach, storytelling coach, and book development coach since twenty sixteen. Although with over one hundred titles in her editing and publishing portfolio, of those, over ninety nine percent have been listed on the Bestseller, Best New Release and top selling Books on Amazon. She works with high level influencers, entrepreneurs and coaches to bring their stories to life and and elevate them to the status they deserve.

3:30 Influence Digital Media provides comprehensive branding and digital media digital I said it again, sorry, Digital communication services. Katherine and her team specialized in growing personal and business brands for entrepreneurs, multi billion dollar companies, multimillion dollar companies. That was an M, not a B. Sorry, Offering full service social media content and branding, from strategy to implementing and analytics. Catherine, Welcome to Winning Business Radio. Thank you for having me my pleasure. I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're busy. I was like listeners and yours to get a census to where people came from, both personally as well as professionally. So let's start here. Where'd you grow up?

4:11 I grew up in the Midwest. Okay, more specifically. Michigan and Chicago. And so in those two areas in Michigan, what ages, what was it like to grow up there? And when did you get to Chicago? And what was elected to be there? I was born in Lansing, Michigan. My parents were both students at Michigan State University. That's where they met, got married, had me and my sister. They separated and got divorced before I was ten. My mother moved to Chicago and she and her new husband at the time had a house there. Yeah, so we traveled back and forth. Yep.

5:01 My dad stayed in the Lancing East Lansing Oakhamist area. His wife, who he married when I was in my early teens, was also a graduate of Michigan State University, go Green Ghost Spartans, So we used to travel back and forth. We would take Amtrak. Amtrak is still very popular in the Midwest, not just to move right products, but to actually move people. It's really common for people to grab the train in Kalamazoo, especially as where we used to grab it and take it down to Niles, down to where Notre Dame is, across to Chicago, Illinois, different places. So my sister and I used to my dad would put us on the train in Kalamazoo and we would ride the train back.

5:59 Rails. Yeah. Absolutely. We each had a little backpacks, obviously before cell phones or tablets, and so we have books and coloring stuff and card games and a little bit of money for the snack car, and the Amtrak station was in the basement of the building in downtown Chicago that our stepdad worked in, So when our train would get in, he would just come down from his office and grab us and we hop on the L which is the above ground sort of subway public transportation system that they have in Chicago, and we would take the L home and our mom would be there. So you had a lot of responsibility. Yes, also fun.

6:42 So fun, so fun. I think we weren't afraid of things back then the way we're afraid of things now. Yeah, I agree, good and bad, right, right, So what were your early interests? I was a voracious reader. I was. I was reading at a college level by the time I was eight years old. Our dad read to us every night. So when we were growing up, he worked nights and then he would sleep during the day. He worked for the American Red Cross at that time. He was in the lab. He was the supervisor in the lab, and so he would come home at night on his dinner break and he would put us to bed like that was our time with him, because obviously during the day when most dads are at work and then they get to come home and be with their family in the evening. That wasn't.

7:38 That wasn't how it worked in our home. And so he would read to us every night, and he read us the Tolkien series, He read us C. S. Lewis, he read us Anne of green Gables, the Laura Engels Wilder books. So from a very very young age, we were immersed in these stories, right. Story telling and words were just absolutely fascinating to me. And I started reading for myself at a very young age and just consumed everything that I could get my hands on.

8:18 And that speaks a lot to what you do today, right or what you have done as well. What's your educational background? I studied political science in college and psychology and sociology. Michigan State No. Southwestern in Georgetown, Texas. I gotcha, I gotcha. I moved to Texas in two thousand and one. Okay, And why did you choose those majors? Initially? I chose psychology and sociology because I wanted to understand why people did what they did. It's something that's always fascinated me, and understanding sort of how our experiences as children inform who we become as adults. I started reading about shadow work Carl Jung Jungian philosophy in high school and was just really fascinated by it and sort of got into the question of, you know, ethics and things like that, and so went into that in college with the plan of then going to law school. Two semesters in psychology kicked my butt. It was it was nothing like what I had thought it was going to be.

9:39 I wanted to understand people, and it was really clinically focused, and I noticed that it was heavily focused on treating sort of the symptoms and not the real cause. And I had always also been really fascinat ned by politics and the history of politics and the theory of politics. I love America and I love being an American, and I think the system that was created by the Founding fathers, it was one of a kind at the time, right, and the ideology that they were building off of, so you know, the theory of civil disobedience and what it can look like if you allow people to be in control of their own lives was always really fascinating to me.

10:44 And I had taken some really amazing political science classes as electives my freshmen and sophomore year in college, and halfway through my sophomore year, I was sitting with my advisor and I was like, I'm just not I am not loving this. I am not in love with my with my degree plan. Yeah yeah, I went to Southwestern is a small liberal arts college in Georgetown, Texas, but it is a Methodist college. It's the oldest university in Texas. It was actually originally the University of Texas, but because it's a private college, when they started u T and that was a public state college, they took the name away from us. So we feel have been a way about that still two hundred years later. But you know, we have this really beautiful conversation and she was like, you, every elective you take is either history, religion, or political science.

11:48 Why aren't you doing something in that field? And so I met with some of the professors in the you know department and in the political science department and was just swept away by it. It was almost like these doors open and it was just this bright, shining light and that's awesome. I don't regret that change at all. Again, it served you. Well, right, we'll get into that. So tell us about your your family. My childhood family, or the family I have now. Your current family. It's a blended family. It is a blended family, and is a blended family.

12:29 My significant other and I are both entrepreneurs, business owners. Thomas Keenan. I think you've had him on your show before as well. All the times I see him at conferences, the same one where you and I met. Yes, yes, yes, and the one will see you guys at the end of January. January three's correct, right. We have seven children between the. Two of us, just the seven, just the seven, just. The seven, two sets of twins. Wow, that's increased. They range in age from Our oldest will be fourteen in January and our youngest, two girl twins turned six in March, so they'll be seven in next March. And it is beautiful chaos. It is chaos, is I'm sure it is. I homeschool my four girls, So I came into the relationship with four daughters and he has two daughters and a son. One set of twins is mine, one set of twins is his, and they are all ours.

13:27 And yeah, so we are in north of Dallas and we are doing the thing with ye seven kids. That's outstanding. I've just one more question. This will help us transition between the commercial and our next segment. One more question before the commercial break, When did you know you wanted to be in branding and marketing. I didn't. It was something that really came across my space. My plan had always been to go to law school. I wanted to practice law for several years and then teach at a university level and do research. I wanted to go into constitutional law. I wanted to work with the Southern Poverty Law Center or the a c l U.

14:15 I wanted to defend Americans' rights. That was something that since I was, you know, even before high school, like reading about the Civil rights movement, reading about you know, uh, the women's suffrage as suffrage suffragist movement. Words are hard today. The earlier. Being you know, understanding like at a core level the uniqueness of our country and our constitution, and and doing the research and reading the history and understanding what what sort of the intention the intentionality that the founding fathers put into place when they wrote this document that really, if you think about it, has evolved and adapted with our country as opposed to other countries where they have sort of these these rules and these laws that are set in stone and no way to change them or adapt them. And I was looking around, like as a high schooler and even as a college student, and realizing that a lot of things were happening. This was shortly after nine to eleven. People's rights were being violated simply because they didn't know they had them right, and so I had this passion to educate. Well. Shortly before I was going to take my l SAT and go off to law school, I found out I was pregnant with my oldest daughter. And that changed my life. It changed my life, and there was that part of me and even my dad was like, you know, you could still

15:45 go to law school, and I was like, I don't know if I want to do that with a brand new baby. You know, I had this sort of idea in my head of what it meant to be a mom and how important it was to me to be you. If I could, if I could enter. You weren't oh no, i'm pregnant. I can't go to law school. You were, oh wow, i'm pregnant. Now let me think about what I want to do? Yes, yes, yes. And what I wanted to do was homeschool my daughter. Yeah. I did not want her in the public education education system, my very little faith in the institutions like that, and I wanted to be home with her. I felt very strongly about a mother's role in the home, a mother's role with her children. I understood instinctively because I grew up in a broken home, a separate home, right, what it meant to not have a mom, especially for a daughter.

16:40 Because we lived with our dad full time, we saw our mom intermittently, and I didn't want to be that. You know, career had always been my first focus. And then I found out I was pregnant all of a sudden, like it was this huge identity shift for me, and so I was home with her for the first like eighty nine months. I'm so unhappy. I was so unhappy. It just did not feel fulfilling. And that's not to say that being a mom sure wasn't fulfilling, But I had this education, and I wanted to be having these conversations. And you know, it was twenty eleven, like politics were starting to fire up and all these things, and I really felt this need to be involved and to have a voice. And I was up late one night nursing her, and I was on Twitter which is now X But at the time I'm going to date myself, it was Twitter and I was reading these articles. I was seeing all these tweets coming through from this magazine, this online blog at the time called the Good Men Project, and they had posted that they were looking for a news editor, a news blog editor, and so I messaged them, and they're publisher at this woman Lisa Hickey, who is phenomenal and I am forever grateful for the space she gave me to learn message me and I just told her, I said, hey, I have no experience and online publishing.

18:03 I have no experience as a as a journalist, but this is my background and these are my experiences, and I would love to be a part of this. And I understand if I'm not a good fit to be an editor like I didn't. I'd never written a blog before, I didn't know how to use WordPress any of those things. But I would love even if it's just like helping to promote things. And this is way back before social media is what it is now, or was what it is now. And she and I got on a call on Google Meet it used to be called something else like Google Chat or something like that, and because it's before zoom, right back when we were still using Skype all the time. And she said, you know, it's me and our executive editor and another lead editor and like two writers and that's it. But if you want to give it a try, and I was off to the races.

18:58 All right, let's come back to that thought in just a minute. We'll be right back with Catherine Tag after this break. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin helenet on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now it's your chance. Be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes you heard it, free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com.

19:40 Call five six one five zero six four zero three one now to get booked on. One of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one. Get your free advertising now, and now back. To Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helenett. We're back with Catherine Tag of Influence Digital Media. Take us through that continue the story. So it's kind of serendipitous.

20:29 She probably didn't expect they were going to reply, maybe even maybe they working. Maybe you're thinking they work and reply, or they going to reply with that kind of gusto, But not at all. I had no idea, like at other than being on Facebook in college and maybe some you know chat rooms when I was like eighteen nineteen twenty years old, Like, social media wasn't a thing when I was growing up, when we were growing up right the way that it is for our children. And I was on Facebook in college back before Facebook was something that anybody could be on. You had to actually have a an email dot edu email just to be on Facebook. And it wasn't somewhere to promote things like when I started with the Good Men Project at the end of you know, twenty eleven beginning of twenty twelve. It wasn't something that you know, ads were not something that most places were running. Print media was still really really powerful at the time, you know, magazines and newspapers getting a digital version of that was something that most people didn't do, and so being able to get in to the publishing space while they were making that transition. It was it Like all I can think about comparing it to is ad agencies in like

22:02 the sixties, the fifties and sixties, like when ad agencies were starting to really blow up. Right, vision of that, you know, I have a like Maden, like Madden exactly what I was going to say. Yes, yes, and obviously not that cool because we weren't in an office and we were all sitting on our couches at home in our sweatpants. But that was the other thing, right, Like all of a sudden, it was it was working from home, which up until that point was something that I'd always thought was kind of a scam, right, like, oh, yeah, you have a work from home job, is it really a work from home job? And along with doing the news blog and learning WordPress and learning HTML and learning how to edit, because editing and writing are two really different things. I was a prolific reader. I was a prolific writer. I'd been you know, writing short stories and poems and things like that since I was a small child, but I had never edited outside of school. You know what I mean, Like they teach you how to proof create, and they teach you how to but this was like, this was like real editing. These were articles that we were publishing on the Good Men Project and then they were getting pulled over to Men's Health and the Huffington Post and you know, all of these really really large publications, and we were just figuring out social media. We understood that social media would be a huge, huge boon to

23:33 us if we could figure it out. And at that time, because everybody else was figuring it out too, Like we were having conversations with the Huffington Post marketing team and with the Your Tango marketing team and the Cosmo marketing team and Mental Health and Esquire and all these different media publications right right. And we were never a print publication. The Good Men Project was never a print publication. We were strictly online. But these other magazines all had print, right, and what they were seeing is they were losing subscribers in the print media space, and so they were in like this mad dash to figure out online publication, and they were in a mad dash to figure out social media.

24:25 And so we had this really amazing opportunity at the time. It's probably not something anyone would do now, but back in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, we had this amazing opportunity to learn social media while social media was learning itself right, And we would get on calls with you know, Facebook's development team, and they were calls that if you were listed as a certain type of business where we had access to these calls. I don't think they do that anymore, you know, they maybe still do developer calls, but like we had contacts at Google, we had people who were like leading the charge to grow these platforms, who wanted us to utilize them, and we wanted to learn. And instead of going out and looking for like a marketing agency or people who knew what they were doing, Lisa was amazing and she was We were bootstrapping it. At that point. Ad spend is tiny, you know, we were getting paid, you know, sixty two cents per thousand clicks, So getting as much traffic in as possible was priority.

25:40 And we would literally talk every you know, every other day or even every day sometimes, and we were looking at analytics and we were figuring it out, and we were looking at Google analytics and comparing it to Facebook analytics, and we were all over Twitter and we were learning these things. And I would go to her and I would say, Hey, I think I have this idea. Can we try this? And She's like, yeah, let's try it. And then we would we would pick it apart together and we would make adjustments together. And so not only was I learning branding and social media in the branding and social media infancy, I had a leader and was in a position with this leader and our leadership team, and then as a leader myself to be given this time and space to try new things to strategize, it's a rare opportunity, really, really like I credit her and the Goodman Project with so much of my willingness to think outside the box to being a solution based leader versus someone I didn't come in and they said this is how we're doing it, and this is how we've always done it. They said, we don't know what we're doing either, let's figure it out together. And being in that environment, especially when we're talking about learning something like social media, which is constantly in flux. Yeah, analytics change, the algorithm is constantly changing, and not having to even figure it out by myself having this entire team of people both within the magazine and within other magazines that we could then connect to and reach out to and say, hey,

27:13 this is what we're seeing. Like we woke up to this and our views are through the roof. What did we do? We don't know, let's figure it out or wow, our views tanked, you know. I remember there was a point in twenty thirteen, late twenty thirteen, early twenty fourteen that they changed all of the algorithms and they were no longer they wanted everyone to go to pay to play, so they were no longer giving us views organically. And we literally we called it the cliff. And we were watching other magazines like The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan fall off this cliff, and we were just like, when's it gonna happen? When's it gonna I remember waking up one morning and going in and looking at our analytics because at that point I was running the social media.

27:57 I was doing our Facebook page, and I went in and I looked at our analytics and it was literally a cliff, like we went from here to here within a twelve hour period, and it was and then we but we figured it out you. Know, what are some of those key lessons I don't mean technically, what are some of those key lessons like how did you approach it? How did your problem solve? You know? I think one of the biggest ones is it's nobody's fault. I think, especially in the larger the larger companies, we become so disconnected. And I you know that a lot of the people I work with now in the leadership mindset space, were so disconnected from the people who are actually the ones pulling the levers and pushing the buttons.

28:49 And when something goes wrong, instead of coming at it from a problem solving perspective, quite often people want to come from it from a blame person it. Yes, they do, and. I'm sure you do, especially with the really large corporations, because people, I mean, when you've got eighty ninety one hundred, five hundred, fifteen hundred or more people working for you, you don't know all of them. You can't know all of them right, and you want to people want to find who's to blame instead of just figuring out why did it happen? You know, And so one of the things that I learned with Lisa and the Goodman project and the other people on the executive editor team is that it's not somebody's fault. You know, one of my best friends now built a nine figure e commerce business and she's phenomenal, and one of the things that she teaches when we do leadership trainings together is she teaches that it's not about blame. It's about working or not working, because what happens quite up. I mean, people make mistakes.

29:57 We're all human. But if you can't pinpoint what's working or not working, you can't replicate it. Or a lot of problems are system problems that people then stumble around. Right. It's yes, there can be people problems. Somebody can make a mistake, but many of those problems are system problems. Jim Collins in Good to Great says the same thing, which if you recall, I believe you've read that is he says commit can conduct autopsies without blame. It's the exact same thing you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, And I think for me, especially in that in that time frame, having a leader, having someone who was essentially teaching all of us how to be leaders as well, because I've taken so much of what I learned at the Command project, and not only applied it in my own businesses, but apply it as a coach and applying it as a book development coach, and you know, working with you know, vas and employees and even my children and in our home are these leadership lessons. And one of the things that I that I will always remember her for is she never pointed a finger. She never blamed. It was always really just let's figure out what's broken, Let's figure out why it's not working, and let's problem solve a solution. The other thing, too, is she there was never this authoritarian sort of like this is I'm the Boston I said. So, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, the buck stopped with her. Sure,

31:27 and so she did have to make the final decisions, but she walked into the experience or the meeting or whatever it was willing to hear what everyone had to say. And I have definitely taken that forward even into you know, the online the book publishing space, you know, because I've I've worked with companies and other editors and publishers who are like, no, this is just how it is, and this is just how it's going to be. The flip side of that is I've worked in some spaces where they're like, you know, the author is always right, And I think one of the things that I've learned is being able to have these sort of open conversations where everybody comes to the table, everyone voices their wants, their needs, their feelings, their opinions, and then we get to create a solution. There is not one size fits all to anything branding, marketing, social media, book publishing, book writing. There is no cookie cutter to any of it. And if we come into any situation, whether it's problem focused or you know, figuring out what's working what isn't working, and we're willing to look for a solution versus pointing a finger and blaming or laying down the hatchet and saying it's my way or the highway, we're going to move a lot faster and we're going to have a lot more success than if we're just you know, iron Cloud.

32:59 In our opinion, you took the words out of my mouth. You're spot on, all right. We're going to take our second break right here. We'll be back in about sixty seconds, Catherine. Everybody will see on the other side. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenet on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews. Or if your car breaks down, you can use the YP app to find the closest repair shop. Or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night.

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34:33 Yes, yes, so we're rolling along. I had my second daughter in twenty thirteen, and I had become the senior executive editor at that point, and we were doing, you know, booming on social media. We had all these amazing media partnerships, we had grown just unbelievably like what we were able to create. We were you know, at one point, we were getting ten million unique views a month. Wow. And I had an editor and a writer who had been with the magazine for quite a while who came to me and he was like, I wrote a book.

35:14 And I was like, that's amazing. And he was like, I want you to edit it. And I was like, I don't know how to do that, and he was like, cool, I don't either, I've never done this before. Let's figure it out together. And again that goes back to my whole life. Really, this amazing opportunity to have people in my space who were like, hey, we're going to figure it out. Hey, let's figure it out. Let's trust Yeah, I was. Going to say, and they're looking at me like, hey, you're a really good problem solver. Let's will you help me figure this out. At the time, Amazon KDP, which is print on demand, and their katib their Kindle direct platform was called create Space, so Kindle was separate. Kindle wasn't really a thing. Ebooks were just becoming a thing at that point, and they had create Space. And so this author had created his own publishing company because back then self publishing was something you could do, but there was a long process to it. So it was actually easier at the time for him to create a publishing company.

36:20 We had a cover maid and we learned create Space. At the same time, another woman who had written for me for a long time at the magazine came to me and she said, I wrote a children's book and I was like, that's amazing, and she was like, will you help me get it published? And I was like sure, but this is becoming a theme. Shortly thereafter, I had several of my editors in even one of our executive editors, who were already published authors, were like, you know, the publishing game is changing. Publishers, even large publishers, aren't really doing any marketing for you unless you are a big name, and we need to promote these things ourselves, and we don't know how to Can you help us with our social media? And I was like, I don't know. They were like, we'll pay you I was like, oh, you can get paid doing this, and you know, all of a sudden, in you know, late twenty fifteen or early twenty sixteen, influenced digital media was born. I was editing books, I was helping people publish books. I was running social media.

37:30 I was teaching people social media. I was going into mid to large businesses that were like, oh my gosh, we have to learn social media. And I was training their in house marketing teams because they had marketing teams in place, but nobody we just didn't know what social media was capable of at that point, right, we were learning. We were learning through the elections in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, we were, you know, for the first time, really we were starting to see the power that social media had. And because we had been so early in the game, I had this amazing opportunity to build a business around what the Good Men Project and Lisa especially had given me the space to learn. Like people were paying thousands of dollars for me to come in and spend a day with their marketing team and teach them the things that Lisa had literally said, let's learn this together. And it's like, oh, how like talk about I don't even know what the word would be, like blessing is being given this opportunity as this stay at home mom. Granted, yes, with a college education, but when I found out I was pregnant with em I really thought that was it for me. And not in a bad way, right, but like not going to law school, which is all I never wanted to do, has turned into this business where

39:00 I have I am yeah, and I have been on stages, and I have met people from all over the world, and I have helped creators and entrepreneurs and leaders and you know, disruptors and thought leaders bring their stories and their words, whether it's in the online space or through books or through podcasts to the world and they are making ripples and they are changing people's lives. And maybe it's an eco thing, but I get to look back over the last decade and say wow, and a hand in that, and even further than that to twenty eleven twenty twelve when I started at the Good Men Project and the stories we were bringing to life there of fatherhood and husbands and divorced fathers and single fathers and you know, military personnel and vets and first responders and like wow, or I could have gone to law school and just been a lawyer. You know.

40:04 Uh So, I don't think it's an ego thing is a bad thing. It just makes you feel good. I mean, I love the comments that I get from clients similar right, different work we do, but you know, we help them become more successful, to the sales, to increase sales efforts, sales effectiveness, blah blah blah, all that, but I get the same type of comments. I don't think it's wrong to feel good about that. I think it's great. It's empowering, it gives us more feeling. I want to keep doing it right, and we're doing it for others. But it also you know, we get we get the feedback and the the well being. I mean to me, it's well being. I love what I do. Yes, yes, and you do too.

40:44 I do, I do, and and the lives that we're changing, you know, I there. You know, we all have these moments I think as business owners, where we go why am I even doing this right now? Yeah, there are days. And whenever I reach a point, because it certainly happens, you know, where things get hard or they're really chaotic, or you know, you just being a business owner is hard, and you know where we have those moments where we're like, I don't want to do this anymore? Why am I even doing this? Does this even matter? And every single time, every single time, I will hear from a past client, you know, one of my authors. You know, it'll be a quick text, or it'll be a Facebook DM, or they'll tag me in a post and it's like, I can't believe it's been five years since I published my best selling book and you know this, that and the other thing. And I couldn't have done it without you.

41:40 You know, I still have I'm still connected to people who wrote for me at the magazine ten years ago, eleven years ago, twelve years ago. Just a couple of weeks ago, a woman reached out to me and she said, you know when I when you messaged me because she had a little blog, and she said, you asked if you could publish my blogs at the Good Men Pride. She was like, it blew me away. I never thought of myself as a writer until you told me I was a writer. And now she is a world renowned coach and she speaks on stages and she is changing women's lives and she told me she was like, I never I never would have believed in myself and it's like I could get emotional right now and that for me, like, that's not that ooh look what I did. It's a oh my gosh. This woman has stepped into her purpose and I truly believe she would have no matter what.

42:32 But if I could take part in that, if I could have a hand in encouraging her to bring her gifts to the world all day long. And you actually do you do some women's coaching, right? I do. I. I started working with women in the women's coaching space about seven years ago. It was something that I had needed. It was something a healing process that I went through a lot of inner child work. There was you know, some pain and abandonment stuff, trauma from growing up the way my sister and I did, with our parents separated so far apart and our mom being absent as much as she was, And it was life changing for me. And I started doing it because I was having daughters and I did not want my daughters to move forward with the same wounding that I had experienced. Not that the homes were the same, but generational trauma is real and we respond to things certain ways because of the programming we receive as small children.

43:43 And it was life changing for me. And it was one of those things where sort of with the editing and the branding and social media, it didn't start out as something where I was like, oh, I can monetize this, Oh I could turn this into a business. It was something that was powerful for me, and I started talking about it on social media. I had women messaging me and saying, you know, this is kind of what I'm facing, this is what I'm experiencing. You know, can you walk with me, can you sit with me? Can you talk to me? And I you know, these women just needed to be heard and they needed to be seen and I did that. I did that at the magazine. You know. It was something I didn't even understand what coaching was at the time. And I had one of my lead editors write a testimonial for me and he was like, she's an executive coach. And I was like, what is an executive coach? He was like, Catherine, you coach all of us all the time. He's like, we message you, you talk us through things with our writing, with our partners, with our kids, and it just turned into something where more and more women were coming into my space, and again it was like, wow, I think this might be part of my purpose to walk with these women, to speak to these women. There's a lot of of women's empowerment in the online space, and I tend to have a little bit of a different view when it comes to that. The way that I feel about being a

45:13 mother and you know, being a provider. I was a single mom for four and a half years to the you know, all four of my daughters, so I had to step into that provider role and so that's given me a really unique perspective. And then moving into the healthiest relationship I've ever had with someone who is also a provider and a protector and kind of having to navigate what does it look like to have to really driven successful entrepreneurs in one home, you know. And these are all things that as I walk through this process, I learn and I grow, and then I can take that back to my communities and I can take that back to my clients and hold space. And it's not again, it's not something where it's like me coming in and saying this is how it has to be and this is the way it's me saying, hey, this is this is how I navigated it. Right, take the pieces that work for you, and let's put your puzzle together, because your puzzle is going to look different than my puzzle.

46:18 But I am an expert puzzle maker. Yeah. We always say nobody can argue with our experiences, right, yeah, right, So if people go to influencedigitalmedia dot com, they can get to socials from there, but on the services tab there you'll they'll find connection to soul. Yes, that's what you were just referring to in terms of coaching for women. Let's get back to influence digital media. Talk about your team, the work that you do, who your clients are. You generalized and be a little more specific. Excuse me, so I generalized because we have done all of it. I have several authors who are phenomenal fiction writers.

47:00 That has been some of the most some of the most difficult editing I've done is fiction. What's different. You really you really have to understand the story arc, and you have to understand the charactersiod, the period, yes, definitely the period. And the end goal is different with fiction, right, the end goal really is book sales, whereas when we're working with small business owners and entrepreneurs. The goal is it is one piece of the marketing funnel. Right. The book is one piece. And one of the things we tell people all the time, and I'm very upfront about which makes me kind of unique in the industry, is there is no ROI on book sales. So you are not going to make back your investment simply from selling books.

47:52 You're just not unless you've got a half a million followers and you're pushing it really hard, or you're. A big name that's already you know, right. I do have authors who have that level of following who do make an ROI in the book sales, But the majority of people, a book for an entrepreneur or small business owner is to position you as an authority in your industry. It is to give you street cred. It's also to drive people into your network. Right. It's one piece of the no like trust formula that we follow for social media and branding. It's how you get on stages, it's how you get on two podcasts. It is one more piece of a larger web of networking and marketing. With fiction, though, you're telling a story, and now we're telling stories in the non fiction, personal development, business type books. But it's really just focused around the author, and so it's very easy to kind of keep track of who the character is, right because they are the main character, Whereas when you're talking about fiction sometimes you'll have three or four main characters and then a whole host of characters underneath. So it's much more involved and it's a lot of fun. I've done some children's books.

49:24 I enjoy children's books because of the art involved in it and. Because of the big pictures. And I'm just kidding, no, the big pictures are fun. They're very labor intensive. People don't understand how labor intensive children's books are. There is a much larger team that has to be involved when we're talking about children's books or graphic novels, because the layout has to be so particular, and especially when you're talking about, you know, the digital version, you have to bring in someone who isn't just a graphic designer. They actually have to know how to code, and so that I don't do children's books anymore. Well, it's very labor intensive. The majority of the people I work with are small business owners and entrepreneurs. I have the network in place for that so as we get closer to the book publication, we have someone to help with the podcast tour. We have people in network who if they want to order books in bulk, you know, if they don't want to go through KDP and they want to do it on their own website, we know people who can build the website, build the landing pages, help them with their CRM. There's a lot of moving parts when it comes to that. And because I've been in the space as long as I have, thankfully I have the network in place that if it's not something we do in house, it's something that we can certainly bolt on to our services.

50:57 Listen, we are almost out time. This has been really good. I've enjoyed this. I've learned a lot here and you can tell your passion, tell us who in the listening and viewing audiences should reach out to you and why. Small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to position themselves as an authority and an expert in their space. I also love working with people who have an amazing course or they have an amazing offering and they just can't get eyes on it right. And that's more from the branding and social media perspective. We don't do social media management in house anymore. But Caitlin Young, who I think was on your show, she was as well as social media doctor. We work very closely with her. She does all of our social media, she does all Thomas' social media, and we have multiple clients. She comes onto projects with me.

51:51 I go onto projects with her. You know, anyone who really wants to not even wants to, fields is like burning passion, desire need to make ripples in the world nice, right, And one of the things I tell people all the time because they come to me and they're like, I don't feel like my story really matters, And I'm like, you know that starfish story where it's like, if you can save just one, just one, the ripples from that. The tiniest pebble dropped in a pond creates ripples that reach all the way to the other side. So now if we're all just one little pezzle, the ripples the ripples, and then they start overlapping, and all of a sudden you realize that you've published over one hundred books, but those hundred books have influenced how many thousands of people?

52:47 And you start doing the math on that, and it's like, Wow, I have had a hand in touching millions of people's lives. That's awesome and that's a good place to end right there. That was like a mic drop moment right there. I think where it came from. That's really good. Thank you for being here, Catherine. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me anytime, and thanks everybody for watching and listening. This is a show about business and business challenges. If you've got concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company, whether your sales team is you or very large, or some between, feel free to reach out to me Facebook or LinkedIn at Winning Business Radio. You can drop me a note Kevin at Winning Businessradio dot com. Our company is Winning Incorporated. We're part of Sandler Training. We develop sales teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Hey, we're not right for everybody, but maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you to one producer and engineer for another job well done. Be sure to join us again next Monday at four pm Eastern. We'll do it all again.

53:51 Until then, this is Kevin Helen. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host Kevin Helen. If you missed any part of this episode, The podcast is available on Talk for Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio w four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Helenan and Winning Business Radio