I have a very different post and episode for you today, and some big news that I want to share with you in regards to Kate’s Take.
So what’s that big news?
Well, I’ll just come out with it right away: this is the last episode that you’ll be hearing on Kate’s Take for the rest of 2018.
This was a really tough decision for me to make, and I put a lot of time into this and my decision to go ahead and close down the podcast for this year.
I’ll be back in 2019, but I wanted to create this post episode to walk through what my mindset was around this, the questions that I asked myself, and how I came to the decision to close down Kate’s Take for the rest of 2018.
How I came to this decision
So first up, as you’ve been hearing on the last several episodes of Kate’s Take – probably starting around the time that I did my Trip Prep Series, which was a four part series all about how John and I prepare for the trips that we take – I’ve been really focused on several major projects.
The productivity and progress that I’ve made since being intentional about my focus on just a few BIG projects has caused me to take a step back and evaluate where my time and my energy are going.
In doing so, I’ve realized, wow – we’ve really gone through quite the progression with our business!
Starting back in 2013 when I was just starting out, joining the team, to us really expanding our products, our services, and what it was we had to offer.
We started creating a ton of content, being way more consistent with our email newsletters and our email campaigns… Everything just got really big.
So we started hiring team members and gosh, I think at one point our team was up to seven, and that’s not to mention the contractors we’ve had on board.
Our entire team – everyone who has contributed over the past six years, has been critical to our success.
Remembering your goals
But maybe you remember me talking about one of our big goals for 2018: to start to unwind.
Not unwind in the sense of ‘not do the business’ and everything that we love doing, but being more intentional and focused on what activities we were doing and how those activities were helping us actually accomplish the business goals that we had set.
So if one of our big goals is to sort of unwind, which really just meant “how can we simplify this; how can we still get the results we want without feeling like we’re always doing so many different things?” then how were we actually following through with that?
For a while, we weren’t. We were working on multiple things, projects that really had nothing to do with helping us reach out big goals, and it was time to step back and just stop.
I started thinking about the 80/20 rule: how 80 percent of your results can come from 20 percent of the work that you do.
So how can we really figure out what that 20 percent is, and how can we focus more on that 20 percent instead of feeling like we’re working constantly and not seeing the results we want?
In doing that, we actually scaled back on a lot of things.
That’s when we did the switch on Entrepreneurs On Fire from the daily podcast to twice per week.
It’s when I decided to phase out of doing a seasons on Kate’s Take and I started doing weekly episodes.
And there were a couple of projects that we had been working on that we completely dropped – we stopped working on them because in the big scheme of things they weren’t activities and projects that we’re going to help us reach our goal of unwinding – or any of the other goals we had set.
So in dropping a lot of those projects, we actually ended up scaling back our team. And in scaling back our team, we not only said goodbye to one of our virtual team members who was full-time with us, but we also said goodbye to several of our contractors.
Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t still work with contractors. We do, but we had several who were on a monthly retainer who are no longer on that retainer.
How scaling back can be a good thing
So if you listened to the August 2018 Income Report, even just looking at the numbers you don’t even have to dig too deep… You can see that our expenses were way down from what they normally would have been in the past.
And so we’ve been being very conscious of scaling back. We’ve decreased the number of team members we have, we’ve decreased the expenses we have, and we’ve decreased the number of projects that we’re working on.
All of this to say, the projects and the things that we are working on now seem that much more intense and purposeful.
And I think it’s because they’re that important to us. We finally see so clearly how these projects are helping us accomplish the goals that we’ve set for the business.
One example of this was creating our free course, Your Big Idea, and taking the time to put it into a completely new format and delivery system on Thinkific.
And now we’re in the process of migrating all of our free courses over to this new format, which is requiring a ton of work. In fact, we just finished re-doing and moving Free Podcast Course over, too.
Again, these are both free courses, but they’re taking a lot of time to put together and do right, and the reason we’re investing so much time in this project is because these courses are a part of our funnels.
They’re essentially the entry point into a funnel that will introduce the individual who’s going through them to one of our paid courses.
Feeling great about the work you’re doing
So the different projects that we’ve been working on, along with the campaigns that go into them, the emails, the testimonials – there are just so many moving pieces to all of these projects! And when I get into them, and I’m putting it all together and trying to see how it all fits to make this beautifully crafted thing, I just love doing that.
So, in order to put 100 percent of my focus into helping our business, helping myself and John achieve the goals that we’ve set for this year – that’s why this will be the last episode for 2018.
Again, I’m not saying that I’m stopping the podcast; I’m not saying that you’ll never hear from me again, but this will be the last episode for 2018.
I’ll be doing a lot of thinking over the holidays and as we approach 2019 about what Kate’s Take might look like next year.
If you want to have a hand in that, I would absolutely love to hear from you. Reach out to me any time: kate@eofire.com.
Thank you so much for your support with this podcast. Thank you so much for spending so much time with me.
And never fear!… because you’ve got a whole lot of episodes and content here in this podcast and on the blog that will help you on your journey!
Again, thank you so much for your support and much love!
p.s. I’ll still be publishing content here on the blog, it just won’t have a podcast episode that accompanies it :)
