SPI 457: The Secret to Taking Risks & How to Make It Work – Behind the Scenes with Katie Kimball

SPI 457: The Secret to Taking Risks & How to Make It Work – Behind the Scenes with Katie Kimball

Pat Flynn:
Have you ever heard advice from somebody, and you listened to it and you’re just like, “Well, of course, that makes total sense, that’s kinda obvious.” And then you start thinking about it and you’re like, “Well, actually, I’m not even doing the obvious because I’m either trying to make it more complicated or, oh, nobody’s really ever put it that way.” And when I recorded this episode that you’re about to listen to with Katie Kimball, who was a student of mine in my Accelerator program. She actually started her journey around the same time that I did. And when I started to hear the kinds of things that she did to pivot, to make medium-slash-risky decisions in her business to move her business forward, I was just like, “Wow, this is going to be so helpful for so many people.”

So if you’re listening to this and you are somebody who has been looking for some tried and true advice that does work to help you grow your business, to expand your brand, especially here in the early parts of 2021, whether you’re just starting out or you are making a pivot in your brand, this is the episode for you. Katie Kimball from KidsCookRealFood.com and Kitchen Stewardship on with us today. Let’s cue the intro.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host — he gets his best ideas in the shower – Pat Flynn!

Pat:
What’s up, and welcome to session 457 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. My name is Pat Flynn, here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people too. And I’m so grateful that Katie was able to come on the podcast today because as a student of mine, I got to see her progress so, so much in 2020, make some very smart and a little bit risky business decisions that worked out really well. Plus, she’s an amazing storyteller too. So I’m really, really excited for you to hear Katie. So let’s not wait any further. Like I said in the beginning, some really good advice that may seem obvious on the outside, but then you start thinking about it and you’re like, “Wow, I should be doing more of that.” That’s what you’re about to hear.

So here she is, Katie Kimball.

Katie, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here.

Katie Kimball:
Hi Pat, it’s a pleasure. Always a pleasure to see you.

Pat:
You too. And I’m excited because we’re early here in 2021 now, by the time people are listening to this. Of course, we’re recording this before the New Year. A lot has happened within the last year for many people, and I know you especially have made a lot of big and small decisions with relation to your business and where you want to go, especially from this point forward. And I want to unpack all those things, a lot of those big decisions, which are often tough to make. But before that, I do want to uncover a little bit about your origin story. How did you get started with doing business?

Were you the type of child who was just always interested in entrepreneurship or when did it really pick up for you?

Katie:
That’s actually funny. And it’s funny we’re talking about decisions because I always say I’m a terrible decision maker, I hate making decisions more than anything. So that’s not actually a great trait for an entrepreneur, but I’ve taken that weakness and honed it into a strength. I was a bit entrepreneurial as a kid. I don’t have to think about that very often, but I used to sell painted rocks to everyone in the neighborhood. I used to sell bows that I had cut out of paper and meticulously colored. You should’ve seen them Pat, they were amazing for 25 cents, a bow made out of paper. Not folded, no, just two dimensional.

Pat:
I can imagine. Yeah, yeah.

Katie:
So I had a great entrepreneurial spirit but not a whole lot of talent behind it. My dad is actually an entrepreneur, he owned a car dealership, so I started working there in seventh grade. But, my whole life, I never thought of myself as a sales person or an entrepreneur, I always wanted to be a teacher from back in kindergarten. My poor brother’s three years younger than me and I would force him to play school. I was a super mean teacher. Luckily, I grew out of that. And I did, I did become a teacher. It was the path, never strayed from it. I only taught for two years though in a third grade classroom before I had my first child. And I knew that as a perfectionist, I couldn’t be a great teacher and great mom at the same time.

Pat:
So you chose to go the parent route and put aside your teacher hat for awhile?

But now – I know you because you’ve been a student of mine for a while, you are a teacher and you teach a lot of people a lot of things, especially kids now how to cook. How did you start getting online and start putting a lot of this information … kind of going back to teacher, but in a different way?

Katie:
Yeah. You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the heart of the teacher out of me at least. And so for me, my journey started with that first child, and there was a real wake up call for me on food and health. I completely did like Hamburger Helper, cereal, pasta-eating as a young wife. But having the baby was like, oh my gosh, every single bite counts so much more. His body’s so tiny. I need to apply my academic brain and learn more about nutrition. So I was spending a lot more time at the cutting board chopping and making mistakes and burning things and messing up the kitchen all the time, but my teacher brain was always going with all that time there.

And I was always thinking about how I could teach other people how to find the balance, because when I was talking with mom friends of mine, a lot of us had the same problems. We’re feeling like everything takes more time or everything takes more money or it’s harmful to the environment. How do we how do we balance all of those pieces? And so my brain was churning and finding those habits and techniques that fell in the middle, and a phrase came to mind, kitchen stewardship, how can we be stewards of our budgets, stewards of the earth, stewards of our time, and stewards of our family’s health all at the same time? And so I thought, “I’ll write a book. I’m an English major, this will be great. I’ll write a book and I’ll make a little extra money.”

Because when I left teaching I was only 25. That wasn’t very good for our very, very small bottom line, it actually turned us into the red. And so I thought, “Well, I’ll write a book to make money,” which was really funny because I had no idea that writing a book was a really slow, terrible, poor way to make money. Luckily, I implemented one of my strengths. Weakness is decision making, but one of my strengths is just asking questions. I ask questions all the time, I’m never afraid to ask someone a question, even if I probably shouldn’t and it’s totally not my place.

So I emailed the editor of a magazine I read, I said, “Hey, I’m thinking about writing a book, what do you think I should do?” Why would I do that? That makes no sense. He had no time for me, but he took a little bit of time and he just said, “Oh you might want to think about starting a blog to see if there’s any sort of audience for your idea.” This is fall 2008 and I had no clue what a blog was, had never heard of one in my life. And thinking back, it’s amazing because I’ve never had contact with that man again, nor before. And what a trajectory change that has caused in my life, because now this blog that I started three months later has become our family’s primary income and this passion and mission in my life to teach people, adults to cook and connect families around healthy food. And now teaching kids to cook is a whole new thing. So I don’t want to-

Pat:
That’s incredible. Big thanks to that person who had taken just a little bit of time to respond and give you some really sound advice at the time. And obviously, it was validated and it’s provided so much for you and your family and your future, but it was also because you stepped up and were able to ask a question. And I think that is going to likely be a running theme here in today’s conversation, just you not really knowing exactly what to do, but doing what you could do to figure it out and asking questions. And that’s such good advice. I mean, I think that a lot of us are just so afraid to ask questions. What advice might you give somebody who’s just like, “Oh, I don’t want to be perceived as somebody who maybe doesn’t know as much as I should, or I don’t want to bother anybody?” How might you respond to somebody who’s perhaps thinking that way?

Katie:
Yeah. I’m all about balance, that’s what I’m known for at Kitchen Stewardship. And I think there’s balance here too. And I would say ask all the questions of all the people, but at the same time, be generous. You’re not wearing the Serve First shirt today, Pat, but I’ve seen it before and I know that you like to talk about being generous. And so I’m always generous with my own advice in a mastermind or if someone approaches me politely in the right way, so I just feel like there’s no reason not to ask, the worst thing that can happen is someone says no. I mean, we teach our kids to advocate, we say advocate for yourself. We tell our five-year-old, “Use a big old word, advocate.” And if you need something or if you can clarify something, I think that’s another point where I like to ask questions, especially with that making decisions weakness.

When I have a decision to make, I’m like, “Well, I’m not sure what to do. I’ll ask some more questions and just try to define what the best answer is going to be.”

Pat:
I love that. Thank you for that advice, I think that’s going to help a lot of people. On Kitchen Stewardship, tell us a little bit about how the blog started out and what that was like and what was going through your head. What was your daily routine at that point?

Katie:
Routine, that’s a funny word. I didn’t have a routine at all, so we won’t talk about that. That was not a story.

Pat:
What did you do?

Katie:
One thing I did is I just came out of the gates running for sure. And I think unlike most bloggers at the time, people were very happy blogging or talking about their life. And I definitely did that, but I also ironically had a structure, even though I’m not a real structured person. Every Monday, I had a Monday mission, which was one small step you could take to improve your health and nutrition or care for the environment. Every Wednesday, I posted a mental mission, and this was just me, again, understanding one of my weaknesses is that if I read something for the first time, I don’t jump in right away. I’m not a quick mover, I’m a medium speed mover, which will be another theme of our conversation here.

Moving at medium speed just sometimes prevents you crashing into a wall at high speed, so I like being a medium speed mover. But for me, the mental mission was, “I’m going to tell you a little bit about the next Monday mission, maybe I’ll tell you something to put on your grocery list, something you should collect, and just start thinking about how this might integrate into your life, how this new habit or technique might integrate in.” And so, I was just assuming that other people were just like me. Not everyone is, but a lot of people were, so I became really well known for grace in the baby steps and this idea of like just making one simple change per week and forgiving yourself when you mess up.

Pat:
I love that. How soon did the blog grow or how quickly did it grow? Tell us a little bit about the numbers to give us some perspective on how soon it started to take off and to what degree.

Katie:
Sure. So this is 2009, to give perspective for those who are blogging. Totally different blog landscape than it is now. And I can remember two milestones from that year. One was somewhere mid summer, July … I started in February, so about at the six-month mark. I installed a plugin that showed what my real feed burner readers were. Remember feed burner? That’s a thing, right?

Pat:
Yeah. It had a counter, so you installed the counter that showed you how many subs do you had?

Katie:
Well, I had a counter, but it wasn’t collecting everyone, so I thought I had like 100 readers and I actually had in the neighborhood of 500. It was almost midnight, and I installed it and like, “Oh my goodness,” and I came bounding into the bedroom and yelled to my husband like, “Chris, I have over 500 people reading me. Can you imagine a room with 500 people listening to your wife talk? This is amazing.” And that’s so funny now because now I’m like, “Oh, only 500 people signed up for my webinar,” or whatever. That’s not as humbling anymore, but at the time that felt humongous. And then in the fall of that same year, I actually guest posted at Pro Blogger, which was another random Twitter conversation, reaching out, telling him what I was doing. And I had hit my 1,000 readers at that point.

So I wrote a terrible guest post with some pictures that were illegal to use-

Pat:
Oh no.

Katie:
… and Darren Rowse had to tell me about that.

Pat:
Copyright images. Yeah.

Katie:
Yes. But I just jumped in, I didn’t care. I was willing to mess up, I was willing to write all through Thanksgiving weekend, which was probably not the best advice to give because that’s burnout waiting to happen. But I thought, “I can do this. Of course I can do this. I’m a writer.”

Pat:
Big shout out to Darren Rowse who was very influential to me as well. He invited me on his podcast when it was brand new, kind of around the same time, actually. A lot of your timeline matches my timeline. I know you weren’t laid off, you had a child, but life changes for sure around the same time. And then with Darren in there as well, he was a big influence on me. He taught me a lot about blogging. I may have read your guest post. I don’t know if I would have remembered it, but maybe not because you said it was terrible.

Anyway, let’s keep the story going. So Kitchen Stewardship, it’s starting to gain some ground and you’re starting to get a lot of readers. Had you started making money yet at this point? It’s one thing to have readers in a blog and have traffic, but it’s another to obviously start generating an income from something like this.

Katie:
Yes. I had a lot of happy feelings but not a lot of dollars in the bank at that point. I was grateful for every AdSense dollar that I got. But really, again, the first eye-opening moment on that journey was right about my year anniversary. I was very much networked in this real food and natural living niche. There were lots of us bloggers talking about the same thing, and we connected a lot, which was awesome. And one of my new blogging friends, who’s still a dear friend, I’ve never met her in real life, which I love, this world we live in, decided to launch an ecourse, 2010. So this is very, very early. She was avant garde at the time. And I thought, “Why would anyone seriously pay for information about cooking online? There’s so much information online.”

Again, irony, because that was 2010. Here we are 10, 11 years later and there’s, oh my gosh, so much information, millions-

Pat:
Online courses are everywhere plus YouTube. Yeah, you’re right.

Katie:
Yeah. Paid and free. But at that time I thought, “No one is going to pay for this. This is ridiculous.” I think the price point was probably $120 for a year of her classes, which of course she had an affiliate program. I thought, “Oh, she’s my friend. I’ll share this with my audience in a blog post because who had an email list at that time, you just blogged. And I sold 10 of them. So 10 times 60 is $600. That was as much as I made in a month teaching. Between my first and second child, I just taught six hours a week. And that was more than I had made in a month of teaching. And the light bulbs were starting to go off and I could not believe that there was actual potential to make money.

And then I think a month later, I believe it was Darren Rowse again, he had a post about why everyone should have a product. And I think he told the story of like listening to two street performers, one of whom had CDs for 10 bucks and one of whom had an open guitar case. And the open guitar case guy made a dollar and the guy selling CDs made $10. He said, “Sell the CD. If you have an audience, sell them something.” So I thought, “Great.” So I published my first ebook two months later. And then that year, I actually made, well, I made $20,000 and my first teaching job, Pat, was $24,000 salary. And my husband had lost his job. That was all we had trying to be real adults. I’ll never forget.

I mean, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. I wanted to be an adult and I was 12. And here I am trying to get my first apartment sitting in the office, looking at the apartment manager saying, “Would you accept a parent co-sign?” Oh, I’ve never felt so humble and awful and little in my life because neither of us had a job, even though my husband had, as part of his engagement proposal, had said, “I got my first job. I’m going to take care of you.” And six months later, his boss was arrested by the FBI for white collar crime and the whole company fell apart in one day.

Pat:
Jeez.

Katie:
You can’t make that up, right?

Pat:
It just sounds like straight out of a movie or something, but that’s kind of insane. And it just shows you, you can have what you think is a secure job, and I thought I had one as well. And of course, with the economy and the recession in 2008, I got let go with your husband. FBI got involved with the boss and his job was lost. Thank everybody and all the things that have happened to have you have something that could at least keep you afloat for awhile. And then of course, and I know your story a bit, but continues to grow. You start to get more and more ground. You start to release more products and whatnot. And then there’s another brand that comes into play, Kids Cook Real Food.

I want to know, where did that idea come from? Why did that start? Oftentimes, we have ideas to start something new and we either just keep it under the same brand or like you, you separate it out, or never act on it at all because we’re already so busy. When did Kids Cook Real Food come about and why?

Katie:
Yeah. I’d say three events collided to create that possibility. First, my income had surpassed my husband’s. So when we hit that point – he’s a computer engineer, a software developer and he worked for a banking software company, but that doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning.

Pat:
This is after the FBI situation, right? This is the next job?

Katie:
Yes, he did get a new job. I told him we couldn’t get internet until he got a job, so he hit the trails. You would like him, he’s a big World of Warcraft guy back then.

Pat:
I’m sure we could hang out and cave out for a little bit and play games for sure.

Katie:
You totally would. Yes. New job. He’s a computer programmer, but he always had a little bit of the entrepreneurial, like, “I wish I could not have a boss and stuff.” So once my income surpassed his, that was one of our medium speed decisions, was to have a really big parachute for him to be able to leave and start his own business. We had a baby at the end of 2014 and two months later, he left the corporate world. I swear we are risk averse people, but the story sounds really exciting, there’s so much boring stuff in between. I had time and space to do something new and big because Chris was home.

And we actually started off saying, “Well, if Katie has six months to work 40-hour weeks, focused in the office, she will get through every to-do list items she has, be completely caught up, and then Chris can start working on his business.” That was a bad plan, we realized that about six weeks in because he’s not made to be Mr. Dad 24 hours a day, nor am I getting through my to-do list well anyway. But at that time, my oldest, Paul, was in fourth grade, 10 years old, and he had to do a how-to speech at the end of the year. I nudged him into doing food, mom does food. So he taught his class homemade guacamole, and famous moment I talk about all the time was when he took that chef’s knife and thwacked the pit out of the avocado.

All the adults in the room were like, “He’s going to die.”

Pat:
So your son brought a knife to school, basically?

Katie:
Yeah, he brought a knife to school.

Pat:
A chef’s knife with supervision?

Katie:
Totally. Yeah. I love when my kids raise the bar on other people’s patience.

Pat:
But 10?

Katie:
10 years old.

Pat:
10, wow.

Katie:
I was proud, and then I had a moment in my head where I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is the only recipe he can make.” As wonderful as guacamole is, probably not going to sustain him off into college. So I had a little time and space to start something new, had a little realization that maybe I’m missing teaching the most important people in my life, as in teaching all these other people to cook real food. To me it was so important that they continue that habit into college. And stories started to pile up from my readers, from community conversations. People would say, “Katie, I really want to get healthy, but this is so hard because I was never taught to cook, and so I don’t even know where to start in the kitchen.”

I was mulling about all that, and thought, “Well, if we’re not comfortable as a generation, we’re not teaching our kids, not inviting them in, 20 years from now the kids are going to be saying, “Oh, I really wish I could get healthy now, but I was never taught to cook.” It’ll never end. So out of my own wish for my kids to have healthier life, a little bit of desperation because we now had four kids and I was running out of time to cook, I needed help. I needed to hire some sous chefs. And just knowing that other people really needed this too, that other moms out there really needed their kids to be able to cook for the good of their health, for the good of their family, we spent that summer putting together Kids Cook Real Food.

Each of my kids invited a friend over and we co-collaborated it in a way. Some of the members’ favorite parts of our class actually came out of ideas from the kids, which is really cool.

Pat:
That’s so cool. How long has Kids Cook Real Food been around now?

Katie:
It’s just about to turn five years old.

Pat:
Five years old. And how many kids do you think have been affected by the work that you do there?

Katie:
Well, we have 16,000 member families. Most of our families have more than two kids, because we tend to attract the big families because it’s made for families to use together. And then we give away our knives skills class all the time, so we’ve given that away to at least 20 to 30,000 more kids. Plus, we’ve got teachers using it in schools with hundreds of kids coming through their classrooms. So at least 50,000 kids, hopefully more.

Pat:
That is so cool. That is so cool. And now I also know that your son, now a little bit older, is now a published author. He has a recipe or two in a cookbook that just came out. What’s the name of that book, by the way, in case anybody’s interested in that?

Katie:
His book is Chef Junior. He and four other friends collaborated to write that. There’s over 100 recipes in the book, so he actually has like 15 or 20. But yeah, he’s a coauthor. He spent quarantine time in 2020 doing podcast interviews and TV spots. That’s another beautiful collaboration actually. I don’t know if you know this, but the reason he knows those other kids and was able to write that book is because we were part of a family’s mastermind for a number of years.

Pat:
Tell me more about that. What is that exactly?

Katie:
Well, you know what a mastermind is: people get together and work on each other’s businesses. And we were fortunate enough to be invited to be part of a family’s mastermind where both husband wife worked online, either in separate businesses or together. And we would get together twice a year in like the biggest Airbnbs in the country with our kids for a week at a time and just mastermind and network and talk and learn. There were like 24 kids in one house, no kidding. And that’s how those kids bonded and were able to write this book. But it just comes back to theme too, of you never know which decision is the right one to say yes to, because we weren’t sure if we should do that and it turned out to be really pivotal I think for both Chris’s and my business, and obviously Paul writing a book, but also the idea of human capital.

That wasn’t a paid mastermind. we just collaborated with like-minded people who wanted their families to be involved, they wanted their kids to see entrepreneurs in action and know that that’s normal. You want your kids to see where you want them to be as possible, doable, and completely normal. So all our kids are like, “Oh, I want to be an entrepreneur now.”

Pat:
Yeah. That’s so cool. Wow. That is an amazing story. You had mentioned this phrase human capital a few times here, and I know this has continued to be something that’s been really important to you. How has human capital played a role in this past year, obviously with COVID and a lot of other things having an impact on businesses? I know that now this is far beyond the 2008, 2010 era of blogging. The online environment, the business environment has changed a little bit. How has your business had to change as a result?

Katie:
My team is definitely a lot bigger, which is good because I can write, but I can’t take pictures very well. And everything’s so visual. That was hard for me when the food had to have pretty pictures.

Pat:
Especially with Instagram coming and all these really cool cameras that everybody else was using, and just to try and keep up sometimes it’s hard.

Katie:
It is. I’m still not that good at it. So I’ve learned really to rest on my team, and so for me, a big takeaway to share with other entrepreneurs is to hire mission-minded people before professionals. And that’s just what worked for me, but I learned through experience and through failure that I really wanted to work with mostly women – it doesn’t matter, it could be men, but mostly women who are moms who have the same mission as me and I can train the skills. So we start with the passion, and I can teach people what to do. And I have an amazing team that I’m so grateful for. And they all love working for me, and I don’t say that to have any lack of humility, but we truly have a well-bonded team and I love them so much.

So that’s for sure human capital that I’m standing on their shoulders, any success that I have. But also, one of my favorite things is just to connect people together. When I meet someone I’m like, “Oh, you know who you need to meet? You need to meet so-and-so. And I’m going to facilitate an e-introduction.” I don’t think that’s a waste of time at all, even though my time is now much more limited because you just never know which connection, which, yes will be the right one. I love getting people on my show to interview, I’m constantly looking for brilliant minds and looking for people who have something to say to my audience.

Well, and then the big story for me of 2020 is I landed a TEDx Talk, which is super cool. And I was really grateful, it was in North Dakota, a sleepy state where no one lives, and it was actually going to happen in person in August 2020, and nine days before the event when I was completely prepared and the talk was written in practice and I’d put hours and months of work into it, it was postponed until 2021.

Pat:
Heartbreaking because I know you were like, “Nothing else matters right now because I need to nail this because this is a message that needs to be heard.” And your message was about kids and cooking and how important that was and mental health related, all these issues. And I was so sad too with you. And then what happened?

Katie:
Well, I had a few days of devastation and was coming to terms with the fact that, like you said, I basically sacrificed six weeks of work and had made decisions to forego other opportunities because this was the one thing, the most important thing I was working on. And then I finally remembered to let my speaking coach know what had happened. She immediately replies, this was a Friday night, she replied and said, “I think you should still do it. My gut is saying that this talk was written for now and that parents need this message and that you should just record it yourself.”

Pat:
Outside of the TED event?

Katie:
Right. And I thought, “What? This is an unimaginable idea.” I couldn’t even wrap my brain around it at first and it took me a couple of weeks to think about it. And so instead of making the decision, I just started asking questions. “Well, logistically is this possible?” And the very day that I should have been standing on stage, I was standing on a dock, videotaping my kids playing in a lake and I got a call from our local beautiful auditorium that yes, they would love to rent out a whole auditorium out to me for very inexpensive COVID pricing because nothing’s going on. I thought, “Okay, check one. I still don’t know what to do with this decision because it’s a huge risk, to try to put a 15-minute stage talk out there outside of the TED platform. I couldn’t have wasted all that time.”

And maybe I still will, I don’t know what’s going to happen, the story’s not over yet, but I needed to make sure that … I needed to mitigate that risk for myself. I am not a big risk taker, I’m a medium risk taker. And so for me, the more questions I could ask and the more blocks I could get in place, the lower I could get that risk. And so then I had to find a camera crew and ended up figuring out that the local TV station who films in that auditorium all the time was willing to do it, again for extremely inexpensive pricing. So the financial risk is gone, now it’s just the risk of, well, do I have to rewrite an entire talk next year? So then I started asking all the questions of the TEDx crew in Bismarck, North Dakota. And they said, “No, you don’t have to have a completely different talk, just tweak a few parts.” I thought, “Really? That’s incredible.”

Pat:
Oh, that’s surprising actually.

Katie:
I know. And I thought so too. And that’s the value of asking questions, right?

Pat:
Right. I would have just assumed and then go, “Okay, well, I have to create something completely new for this one.” Or just not do it at all.

Katie:
And I did too. And this was like the third or fourth email exchange in that I finally thought to really clarify that down.

So for me, I had mitigated the risk down enough that the last question was, have I built up enough human capital over the years that I could possibly get people to share this outside of the TED platform? I hope so. I’m literally going to be emailing the people from whom I bought the natural makeup that I wore on stage and say, “You’re a part of this story, let’s get on board.” And just make everyone the hero in the story and be part of it as a community, starting a kids’ meal revolution to change the health of the young generation. It will happen because I’m just going to keep pushing and asking questions.

Pat:
I think it will too. It’s almost like … it would have been cool to have the TEDx station, you still will. This story of, “Hey, I didn’t have this opportunity anymore, I’m going to take it instead, I’m going to do it on my own,” almost makes it seem even that much more important. And perhaps it becomes a story that then comes onto the TEDx stage next year, and you have like part two. I don’t know, and it might make it even more popular.

Katie:
I know. That’s my hope, that it goes so well, but it’s been fraught with problems.

Pat:
In what way?

Katie:
Oh my gosh. I actually had two other speakers join me who also wanted to do a TEDx or had already done a TEDx, but wanted to own their content, and we had an amazing shoot with three cameras, beautiful stage, and I get a call the next day that one of the cameras did not record.

Pat:
Are you serious?

Katie:
It recorded audio.

Pat:
What? You can make a podcast now but ….

Katie:
Yeah. On stage. But it didn’t record video for any of us for three hours.

Pat:
How does that even happen?

Katie:
That’s what I wanted to know.

Pat:
Okay. So what do you do next?

Katie:
Of course, I ask questions: “Can we do it again?” They said, “Sure, if you want to.” So we did it again. One person wasn’t able to come back, that’s very sad, she has nothing. But the other guy and I came back, we did another amazing evening, and luckily, the camera that didn’t work again, Pat, after they tested it in between, it did not record again. But luckily it was moved to the very, very, very wide shot, only needed when we’re showing like a teeny tiny person with slides. Right now when we’re recording, we’re in the middle of this story as I’m trying to figure out, do I go record one more time and just do the really wide shots?

Pat:
Right. It’s like, “Hmm, is this a sign that I shouldn’t be doing this? Or is this a test that it’ll be worth it on the other end?” How do we know?

Katie:
It’s a really good story. If I’m a story collector, I’m A-plus right now because I’ve got a couple zingers.

Pat:
And you are a great storyteller, so you’re collecting. I like that thought. Of course, the world of entrepreneurship as we’ve heard in these stories here, Katie, and as we all know as listeners, it’s just never going to be going according to plan. And of course, I know with the dual businesses that you have, things often don’t go according to plan too, but part of what makes us unique as entrepreneurs and part of what helps us succeed is the pivoting that we do. And I know that you are looking at different avenues and ways to expand your business.

Can you go into some of what you might be thinking about for the future in terms of how to expand Kids Cook Real Food and Kitchen Stewardship, and revenue generation, and all these sorts of things that you’re thinking about in today’s environment.

Katie:
It’s been a huge blessing to serve so many families throughout this year and throughout the pandemic. Hopefully we’ll come back to summer camp real quick after I answer this question because that was a big deal. But now that I’ve been doing this 11 years, and I’m not selling painted rocks or colorful paper bows anymore, I realize I actually do know a thing or two about entrepreneurship, I do know a thing or or two about online marketing. And so my teacher heart is starting to swell again with wanting to teach in a different way. I’m ready to teach what I’ve learned the last 11 years.

I’ve been in probably five or six different masterminds, from ones that are just online and I’ve never met half the women in it but we’ve been together eight years, to big paid masterminds. And so I feel like I’ve gained enough experience at this point, enough stories, enough things that I’ve tried. When I asked the women in my mastermind, “What do you, like if you say, ‘Well, this is what Katie is good at,'” they all said something different, actually. A little bit similar ideas, but none of them said the same thing. And I thought, well, maybe that’s good, maybe that means I have enough random breadth of experience in all areas from PR to copywriting, to marketing and sales that I can actually help other people do this.

So I’m looking to do a little bit of coaching, I’m looking to start teaching people how to run masterminds really well so that they too can take advantage of human capital, because there’s so much wisdom out there for people to just help one another out, and I want to be able to facilitate that.

Pat:
For sure. I love what you said earlier about this idea of being a connector, and I think that’s a very powerful, unique selling proposition for sure, especially for people who feel so disconnected. And I love the idea of you coming into the space to help people get connected, to help people unlock their best potential through the togetherness and the communities that you are helping to put together, which I think is really cool. And I know that you’re still in creation, brainstorming mode right now, but by the time people listen to this, there’s likely stuff that people may be able to see that you have going on and perhaps work with you with.

So where might people go who might be interested in learning, because of course we have a lot of entrepreneurs here. I’ve talked loads about mastermind groups, I noticed this what you want to focus on, it’s becoming a specialty of yours. Where should people go to maybe get redirected to whatever it is that you have available?

Katie:
Sure. For now, we’ll say KidsCookRealFood.com/spi, and I’ll promise that anything related to what we’re talking about today is there for you, but it’ll be a secret until you get there.

Pat:
Cool. And I’m really excited about that too, Katie, thank you so much for that. There’s value that comes with, if somebody were to connect me with somebody who had some information that I needed, who had some motivation that I needed, who had some answers for questions that I had, I would thank that person so much. It is valuable to make connections, and I think that we all have the ability to … even just listening right now likely, you could probably think of a couple people that would probably benefit from a relationship together. And guess what, you’re the connector, you’re just not acting on that yet. And I think that it would behoove you to send an email to them, to have them at least speak to each other.

And it just makes me think recently, I have been getting really into gardening as you know because of the pandemic and the kids, now actually, eating more real food because we’re actually growing it in the backyard, which is really cool. And I’ve been following a YouTube channel called Epic Gardening, and there’s a guy named Kevin Espiritu. He actually does live in San Diego, not super close to me, but he does live nearby. And I just had a random idea because I know he’s into helping small businesses around here, he’s also into fresh food and coffee and those sorts of things. There’s a coffee shop that I live close to that I’m an investor in and they just love meeting cool people.

So I said, “You know what, I’m just going to send an email introduction out of the blue, I think it would be a good match, if not, no worries.” Again, what do we have to lose? And they’re now partnering together. They’re doing this really cool partnership that I can’t reveal right now, but that wouldn’t have happened. And now they’re both reaching out to me and saying, “Hey, thank you so much for the introduction. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.” So it’s almost like you said, serving first by connecting others, and I now have the ability to, if I ever needed some help, to reach out to each of them. And that’s just so cool, so I love that.

So KidsCookRealFood.com/spi will redirect you to whatever amazing things Katie has available there for you. To finish up, let’s talk about summer school and summer camp. During the summer, I know, is an interesting opportunity for your business, with kids at home and all these kinds of things, plus in the middle of a pandemic, kids are at home anyway. Tell us what you did in the summer of 2020 to really take advantage of this opportunity and show up for people?

Katie:
Yeah. I took what I feel is a pretty big risk, at least for me as being like a little medium speed risk taker. Pat, I heard a stat maybe last month, someone said two groups of CEOs run a research study and one group made twice as many decisions and half of them were wrong. And the other group is really careful about their decisions, but they made half as many decisions. And the group that made twice as many but broke more stuff was more successful. And I thought, “I don’t care. I don’t want to be that group. That’s not me. I would rather be a little more cautious, because I’m sure there’s a third group of people who made twice as many decisions, lots of them were wrong and they’re burned out and they’re being corrupt.” And so my little personality can’t quite handle that.

This was something I’d thought about for a while, is doing a summit style release. Summits have all these interviews and they release them for 24 hours and then they go away and they try to get you to buy the interviews. And I thought, “What if I actually did that with my flagship course, with my bread and butter, my $150 course, what if I gave it away for free, would this work?” And it’s something I had toyed with for awhile, and when we were in lockdown and we realized that summer camps were not opening, parents were starting to freak out, they did not know what to do with their kids anymore.

And I thought, I’m just going to do it. I don’t have time to do it perfectly because we were just brainstorming in May thinking, this has to be June or else, because we were hoping the world would get put back together by July or August optimistically. And so I did it without the backing of most of my affiliates, did it without most of my normal human capital because I didn’t have time to set that up. But because it was a big risk because it was … And so again, we have 40 video classes professionally filmed, and we did five a day in 24-hour cycles, and then they would flip and they would disappear. But if you were diligent and you kept up with that breakneck speed, eight day pace, you could literally consume a $150 class completely free.

That was a risk on me losing potential customers, but because it was such a big gift, people were willing to share that. We incorporated viral sharing, so after you signed up, you were asked to share on Facebook with a friend or with your Facebook community to win like a $50 grocery gift card. We had over 1,000 shares on that post, which in this Facebook landscape with my Facebook page is amazing, it’s unheard of. We ended up with over 10,000 families signed up for our free summer camp all around the world, and it felt really good, it was so exciting. We did live sessions every single day. And I know that some people actually did consume $150 course in eight days because I talked to some of them.

Michelle in Panama … they were locked, the kids could not leave their house except to go for a half mile walk or bike ride with an adult the entire month. So they were stuck with each other. They could have been sick of each other, but I really respect that they shifted that paradigm and they were really grateful to have cooking together, something to do. Similarly in Hawaii, a military family who had to move to Hawaii, and in June if you went to Hawaii you had to get a one-time use key and go into your hotel room and you couldn’t leave for two weeks or you weren’t able to get back in. You can’t even go to the hotel pool, you can’t do anything.

So this family of four is stuck in quarantine in a hotel room for 14 days and was able to get groceries delivered and still do our class and have this productive, quality family time. So I felt so good about being able to serve them. I don’t care, take my $150 class, you are the people who need it. I felt really good that we could serve generously during that time where people really did need something to do, but also it was good … It was good, ended up being a good business decision. Obviously, 10,000 people added to one’s list is nothing to sneeze at. And we were able to get enough paid members onboard that it was a very good promotion business-wise but a huge risk, huge risk of my team’s time of giving away my product, but a fun one

I think that’s, again, my takeaway for entrepreneurs is if you’re going to innovate, innovate creatively, do something other people aren’t doing and mitigate those risks, but figure out ways to innovate really authentically. You can do it all, you can serve and profit at the same time.

Pat:
What a wonderful lesson to end on here, Katie. And it’s so cool, especially having it both serve more people and bring you more money in because honestly, the more you serve, the more you get back. And I love how you framed that. So people did end up buying it later because they weren’t able to keep up kind of thing? What was the purchase offer or purchase opportunity there?

Katie:
Sure. We had two different coupons. And so the early bird special ended the midnight of day one of the eight-day camp. So people had … and you can get a taste for a bigger coupon and then if you purchase by three days after camp closed, there was a smaller coupon. And interestingly enough, I actually thought we would get more at the very end, of people who couldn’t keep up, but enough people were just ready to jump in, we actually brought on more paid members with the early bird, but both were good.

Pat:
Wow. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. Sometimes we have these courses and we just need to give people like a Costco sized sample first to get experience and then they go, “Okay, now I’m in, I want the whole thing.” And then you drop them with the opportunity to save. Man, that makes perfect sense. So wow, Katie, wonderful job and way to pivot. And it sounds like you’re going to do something perhaps similar or try to maybe incorporate that same strategy down the road, or is this going to be now maybe an annual thing, you think?

Katie:
Here’s the thing, you can’t do that every year or else people will follow you and be like, “Well, I’ll just do the free summer camp next year.” So when we did a retrospective with my team, I thought, I said, “This went so well, but we literally can’t possibly do it again until at least 2022 or it will become an expected habit.” So we have to try to take little pieces out of what worked. So we’re trying to suss out, what was it that made that viral sharing go so well and how can we incorporate that element into our other promotions? Because I’ve never done anything like that, I’ve never given people full access. So that’s our next little experiment, is at the end of a webinar, we’re just going to give people full access for a couple days.

With my product, it’s so different because you have to do it with your kids. So if I gave you some videos that you needed to watch by yourself, sitting at your computer, Pat, you could do that at midnight, and I know you would, at midnight, but with your kids in the kitchen, you can’t, you have to have the food, you have to have the children. And so it’s really, really difficult sometimes for people to coordinate logistically. So I’ve learned, don’t give people the free sample and say, “Here, try this with your kids.” But we’re going to let this – we haven’t even done it yet, next week we will actually, but we’re going to let people in completely to see the entire course, so they could teach it with their kids if they wanted.

But the goal is going to be, “Hey, look around, get a feel, look at the recipes, see if you think they’d work, check out the quality of what we do and just window shopping.” So hopefully, fingers crossed, I don’t know if that will work, but that’s our next little experiment to try to take an element of what was successful about summer camp and apply it elsewhere.

Pat:
I love it. I like the experimentation, the trial, the errors that may happen, and then the learnings that can come with that. I think if it was some sort of event, reason to then get with your kids, to get the groceries and to sit down and do it, that’s what would motivate me as a parent in the summer camp session, and then here you’re potentially targeting a whole new audience who wants to get the window shopping in first too. So both could work and I love how you’re diversifying your approach, so that’s really great. We’ll have to bring you back on at some point to check in on you and see how things are going, or at least have people follow you to see what’s going on. Where can people go and follow your journey and check out what you have going on?

Katie:
Sure. KidsCookRealFood.com is the home of the cooking classes. If you actually want to learn more about health and nutrition for yourself and your family, that’s KitchenStewardship.com. Instagram is probably where I’m most personal as far as social media channels @KidsCookRealFood. And we’ll have that KidsCookRealFood.com/spi. Certainly, something fun there for you, but time will see what it is. I’ve got two first clients for coaching, so now I have to dial in on what my masterful, genius place is.

Pat:
Well, you have some time to even validate and test things and then come up with something great, but at the time people, go to, again, KidsCookRealFood.com/spi, and of course, we’ll have all the links on the show notes and such. Katie, thank you so much for coming on today, the beautiful storytelling, the inspiration, and the ideas for how we can make our future better as well. We appreciate you so much.

Katie:
You too, Pat. Thanks for sharing all the medium speed decisions with the risk averse entrepreneurs out there.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation and interview with Katie Kimball. Again, you can find her at KidsCookRealFood.com/spi to check out what she has going on, some stuff related to what we talked about today, perhaps even her TED video once it comes out and finally, the recording is done the way it was supposed to – isn’t that crazy? Sometimes just the world, it seems like everything’s working against you, and you can just tell that Katie really wants this to happen and it’s going to work, and a lot of people are going to see it and need to see it. So again, KidsCookRealFood.com/spi, and of course, KitchenStewardship.com as well.

Thank you, Katie, for coming on today, and thank you for listening all the way through, I appreciate you. Big thanks to all of you who have left some reviews for the Smart Passive Income Podcast on Apple Podcasts here early on in the year. And hey, we’re just getting started, 2021 is going to be amazing, and we already have some interviews lined up for you and some solo shows. So please, if you haven’t done so already, wherever you’re listening to this, hit that subscribe button so you can get more of these episodes directly your way as soon as they come out, so you don’t miss anything and you can get the best advice here to help you move forward and sell and serve at the same time. So cheers.

Be sure to catch next week’s episode, 458, because we’re inviting a special guest on, this is the first time we’ve ever done this. After 450 some odd episodes, we’ve awarded a spot on the Smart Passive Income Podcast to a special member in SPI Pro, our premium community, you can check it out at SmartPassiveIncome.com/pro. This member won a pitch contest, and she’s going to come on, pitch us her business, and we’re going to talk all about her business and she’s amazing. You’re going to love her, and I cannot wait for you to listen in.

So, hit that subscribe button, I’ll see you next week. Cheers. And as always, Team Flynn for the win. Peace out.

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