Kaitlyn Cook Business Consultant and Growth Strategist Transcript

Royce Hall

Hi, I'm Royce Hall, your host of the Coffee Dreaming Podcast, Salesforce consultant by day, podcaster by night, and I'm joined by Caitlin Cook. Caitlin is a business consultant and growth strategist. Thank you for joining us today.

Kaitlyn Cook

You are so welcome, Royce, happy to be here. Well, it's fantastic to have you. And we were talking a bit ago about how you help CEOs scale their business and help entrepreneurs, you know, build around themselves and scale up.

Royce Hall

So I'd love to get into that. Typically, before I do that, I want to get into a little bit about, you know, what got you into this role? Like, you know, why are you doing what you're doing? You obviously have personal passion around this. So tell me, you know, tell me a little bit about what you're doing.

And then tell me a little bit about why you're doing it, if you don't mind. No worries at all. I love that question.

Kaitlyn Cook

So what I'm doing is I fundamentally help service-based entrepreneurs let go and simplify to grow. So something I've been doing this almost for 20 years now, and I've been in my business now for six years, and I literally started my business out of necessity. So I had experience in growing businesses and helping people achieve financial goals.

But I, you know, had a quarter-life crisis at 26 and realized I had the house, I had the dog, I had the shares, I had the career. I was number two in the country business specialist, and I was miserable. I felt so miserable.

And I was like, well, I'm living the same pattern, living the same day, each and every day, over and over again, I've reached the capacity of my life. So I was like, can't do this anymore, took a career break, moved to the other side of the world. And that's where I met my now fiance.

And it was with that, when I literally let go of everything, I sold my house, I sold my shares. So I had just a backpack on my back. That was the only thing I had in this world.

And then I grew up started a business to stay with Tom, my fiance. And through that, my love of helping people let go to grow and be able to simplify, to have fulfillment and joy. And, you know, the road isn't as hard as we tend to make it.

So six years in, that's what I'm doing. And it is so fun when you actually allow people to go, what is it you want? You give them the roadmap and you go, cool, just follow this. And like, it's so easy.

You're like, yes, it is. It is easy. You can do this.

You just have to get out of your own way. Wow. That's amazing.

Royce Hall

That's a, that's a great story. So maybe not quite as poignant, but I remember a little later, maybe it's still a quarter of my life, but it's my early 30. So I'll tell you when I reach a hundred, if I, you know, if there's a quarter life crisis, but I remember like being in a similar thing where I'm like, okay, like on paper, I've met success.

And, uh, I'm very miserable. And I remember like where I was in my career, like, okay, I have two young kids. I hardly ever see them.

And I'm like, that's not how I want to live. Like I want more than that. So tell me a little bit, like, how do you, how do you help people out of that? Like, you know, uh, you know, I think of entrepreneurs, business owners, like there's a lot of financial pressure there.

So like on that, on that one hand of like, okay, you've unlocked extreme financial success, you know, the number two in the nation, like, Hey, like I want some of that, but like, how do I, how do I do that with balance? Such a good question. And a lot of people probably don't want to hear this answer, but I'm going to say it anyway, Royce. It's actually about shifting how you feel about it on the inside.

Kaitlyn Cook

So what I found because in my own journey, I changed everything externally and it made me feel empty and miserable internally. So then when I shifted at all, I went, well, if I want to have financial freedom, financial abundance, and like, I have generated over seven figures in my business without social media or a website, because I wanted to make it as simple as humanly possible. But I did that through deciding how I wanted success to feel, not how I wanted success to look like.

So when people come to me and they tend to come to me when they're overwhelmed and they are just at their wits end, they're working as many hours as they possibly can. They tend to be parents and they're like, I cannot possibly do more, but I know I want to earn more because when I earn more, I'll feel better. And I always say to them, how did you feel before you got to this stage? They said that I needed to get to this stage to feel better.

And I said, what that is, is that's a pattern. That's a habit. So you're always trying to reach the next goal so you can feel better when you get there.

You're just prolonging, feeling happy and joyful now. So it's about actually pausing for just one moment and redefining what success feels like, not necessarily looks like. And with that, you become more intentional with your actions, which then yields greater and quicker success because you know what you're trying to feel instead of what you're trying to cultivate.

Royce Hall

I'd love to dig into that a little bit more. Are there maybe a couple or a handful of nuggets that are like, these are the things that we need to hear. This is the things that my CEOs, my entrepreneurs, my business leaders need to hear in your 18 year career.

Can you boil down a few salient points for me?

Kaitlyn Cook

Yeah. So something that not many people do, which is really important to do, is we live in a reactionary world. So we're just trying to keep running as fast as we possibly can to get to the next point, which means we're always looking forward to feel how we want to feel because we want that success and success to us is feeling something when it looks like something.

But instead of running, you want to stop and become proactive in your life instead of reactionary. And the way I find the most successful way to do that is to actually redefine what a day of success looks like and feels like to you. So everything I do is break down into a daily metric instead of, in one year, I want to make a million.

It's like, well, how do you want to show up today? Because you have 365 days a year that you can show up how you want to, which will create a habit over 21 days. And so what is the ideal day for you? What does that success metric look like and feel like? What time do you wake up? What do you do? What do your clothes look like? What do you eat? What kind of workout do you do? Who are you speaking with? And when you can bring it down into that granular of a detail on a day-to-day basis, you can literally change one thing now in your day to align more to that. And then you do the same the next day and that creates a compounding effect.

So stop running, stop chasing the next thing and just plant your feet and go, cool, what is my ideal day? Feel like and look like, and then move towards that. And something else with the CEO leaders, this is a huge one that I find all of them have, especially when they're running a massive team, is they're like, I'm responsible for their happiness and they're not. As a leader of a team, you're not responsible for your team's happiness.

You're responsible for their safety at work and you're responsible for paying them on time. But you are not responsible for making them happy because if you give that to them, they're not able to cultivate it within themselves, which means they're always looking to you to be happy and fulfilled. So you'll always have to move the goalpost.

So remember that and ask them what would bring them fulfillment in their own lives and help them start to cultivate it. And then that creates a leadership team within the team where you don't have to lead everyone because they're leading themselves. If you're an employer and you're speaking with your team and you're going, cool, what will bring you fulfillment? How do you see your growth in this role? What is it you'd like to try out? And you actually have an open, honest conversation about their trajectory, your expectation of their trajectory, and you merge in on that instead of them going, you're meant to make me happy.

If you pay me more money, I'll feel happy. But then what happens is you're creating a pattern of you need to pay them continuously more and more money for them to feel happy and fulfilled. And that will just constantly, not that you shouldn't pay people a good amount of money, but they can still get paid well and create their own happiness because it's their responsibility.

And when I say happiness, I mean that brings in creativity into the role that improves team morale. This has such a ripple effect across the company when somebody is responsible for their own happiness. And the boss tends to lead that.

So it starts with the boss doing that and then everyone starts to do it as well. Yeah, that's great. So tell me a little bit more, you had mentioned that you've grown your business.

Royce Hall

This is interesting to me as a salesperson. You mentioned that you grew your business to over seven figures without social media or anything like that. So that's pretty amazing.

Obviously we're on a podcast now, so we have an angle here, but how'd you do that? I think that's going to be very interesting for a lot of sales and marketing folks. Yeah, so for me, I'll go back to when I started. So the reason I chose this direction was because my visa had run up in the UK.

Kaitlyn Cook

And so my English partner and I had to either pay seven and a half thousand dollars for each other's country, for a visa for each other's country, or we chose to travel Southeast Asia together to see if our relationship would work. And for us, money meant time. So I just knew we had to find money some way, somehow.

I just didn't know how that was going to look. And so I opened my laptop the first day we arrived in Thailand and I'm like, what the hell can I do to make money online? Like we had about three months under our belt of money and I was like, cool, what can I do? So I thought, so I had no social following or anything at all at the time. And I was like, I don't have six months to devote to this and I don't really want to.

It was just to try and make ends meet. So I went to the platforms where people are actively looking to purchase what I had to sell. So I went on a platform called Upwork.

And Upwork is one of the leading e-marketplaces for freelancers and agencies. And I'm very fortunate. I'm a top 1% expert on there across millions of freelancers.

So I have a very good profile. But at that time, when I first started, I didn't. So I want, and I'm always about simplicity because I was traveling and we wanted to go scooter ride down the beach and just have fun and, you know, hope and actually live as well as work.

So I was like, cool, what can I do? So I went on Upwork and I, and I did my KPIs and I was like, cool, if I connect with 10 people through a proposal every day, I'm going to get something back. And if I just do this each and every day, I'll be compounding effect. So in six weeks, I landed my first client who then got me a review, who then got me the next client and the next client and the next client.

So then my word of mouth grew, my platform grew, and I literally just spent all my time and energy on this platform. And then it just grew over six years, really, really well. And it's only been this year that I've gone, I'd like to show up in a different way.

And that's why I'm doing podcasts and my social media and everything like that, because now I'd like to, you know, we traveled five different countries in six years, we had a surprise pregnancy, we've got a four-year-old, we had COVID, now I'm feeling settled. Now I'm like, cool, let's do some podcasts and some social media. Yeah.

Royce Hall

Well, there's some interesting dating advice in there that to be sure, like, not sure if he's the one, so let's travel, backpack Southeast Asia together. Like, that's an interesting approach. And it worked.

Here we are six years later, you're engaged. Congratulations.

Kaitlyn Cook

Thank you.

Royce Hall

Well, Kaitlyn, tell me a little bit more, like, we've been talking about you, your background, tell me more about your business. So, you know, you're working with CEOs, you're working with founders, you know, you've been talking about that mindset, you've been talking about how do we unlock growth, which I think is going to be a big question right now, like, you know, kind of the time capsule element of this podcast is like, new tariffs are coming in, you know, global economies are seemingly crashing. You know, I think that's probably hyped a little bit, but, you know, there's going to be a lot of questions like, okay, how do I make more money? You know, how do I keep our business going in this new climate? Yeah.

Kaitlyn Cook

So I want to preface with, I'm a holistic coach and strategist, meaning I look at every angle of a business, as well as the person, because the person is the business. As a founder, as a CEO, you are the business, it does, you know, start and end with you. So I always remind people what you, what you focus on expands.

So if you're in the moment, you're wanting to earn more money and make more money, you need to be putting your time and energy into that in terms of what you're consuming. Because whenever there's an economic downturn, someone else is thriving, you will always have the pendulum swing in any environment, no matter what. So try to find what you're trying to replicate and look at that.

If you continuously look at how people are struggling, but you're trying to thrive, you will only struggle, because that is the filter in which you're looking at your world, you'll make decisions from that. And if you want to grow your income, one such important element that so many people don't do is they just go, I just want to grow and you're like, cool, how much do you want to grow by? You want to grow 15, 15%. You're like, what does that actually mean from a clarity standpoint? How much money exactly do you want to be making every month, every year, every day, you need to have clarity on your numbers, because when you have clarity on your numbers, you can make strategically clear decisions on what you need to continue to do and what you need to stop doing.

So for example, people come through and go, right, I want to get 50k months, and you're like, cool, where are you at the moment? So for example, they're at 20k, like, I want to grow, you know, 30%. So that's a that's a big leap. And it's very possible.

But what needs to change is what they're doing in their day, what they're consuming, who they're speaking with, what conversations they're having. And that will help them shift the trajectory. So you have to change your environment for everything to change.

And your environment in this day society is what you're consuming through your phone, what you're looking at, what you're listening to, what you're reading, what you're hearing, what you're talking about, to start by changing those things. And then everything else will change around that. Especially if you want a quantum leap like that, which is very possible, but you need to start by hanging out with people who have quantum leaps like that.

So the marketing and sales and especially for sole entrepreneurs, they they're the same person. But a marketer is the conversation you have before someone buys and sales is the conversation you have as someone buys. So that it's the exact same conversation, just different wordings.

So the power of that actually is in bringing your marketing and sales team to collaborate to create more innovation and more customer impact. Because when you can connect your marketing as well as your sales team together in the conversations they're having, your customer feels more heard or the audience feels more heard. And that transition will feel more streamlined and simplistic as opposed to respect to some person in marketing.

And they said this and this salesperson said this. It tends to be quite divided. You want to kind of connect it and makes it a lot nicer for everyone.

Royce Hall

Yeah. And you mentioned that in small companies, you know, that's typically the the same person or even in I think in growing companies, you see that a lot as well. It's like you have one person that's in charge of the sales and marketing together.

You know, do you have particular thoughts for somebody in that situation? Like I'm kind of in that situation myself. So I like tell me more because I'm wearing two hats. And, you know, I think most of us probably skew one way or another, right? Like I feel like I will wear the sales hat better than I wear the marketing hat. So tell me more.

Kaitlyn Cook

So with that, do your personalities test. So you'll go to 16personalities.com. It's Maya Briggs 16 personalities.

From that, it will then define who you are and how you should be showing up in your business. That's how I started in my business because for me, I'm a connector. So I've I've grouped 16 personalities into four quadrants.

There's a connector. So they're great at marketing and sales. They're actually really good at that.

And when you give people the permission to just show up as a connector, because all you're doing in marketing and sales is you're connecting somebody to somebody else or a solution to a problem. But then with the other four quadrants, there's the implementer. So they're your to do people.

They love ticking off, ticking the boxes, getting stuff done. There's also the visionary who tends to be the founder, the CEO. The visionary has a billion and one ideas and no execution.

Then you've also got the strategist. They create those steps from the visionary to the connector and the implementer. So you fundamentally want all of them.

That will create a very whole rounded team. Women, because of our menstrual cycles, we actually go through all those personality types because of the cognitive shift and our hormonal balance. So it's a really big superpower for a woman to be able to understand those.

As a male, you just need to know what your personality type is. And if you're a connector or a visionary, which I'm thinking you're probably a connector because you're a podcaster and people tend to like to do that. For you, if you have things to do on your to do list that you struggled to do because you're not an actual implementer, start by connecting at the start of the day and give yourself 15 minutes to do that task you don't want to do.

Then go back to connecting. And that could be in terms of connecting on a podcast like this, speaking to a friend, speaking to somebody in the office. That gives you energy when you're a connector.

You need to speak to other people. If you start your day by doing to do lists without talking to people, you'll feel drained already and you'll have no momentum to keep going. So when you know your personality types, you know how you need to plan your day for your own success, for what needs to get done.

Especially when you're starting in the business, you need to kind of do everything in the business. So just work out your own system of what works and don't block out four hours to do a task because you won't get it done and you'll feel overwhelmed and behind. Literally give yourself smaller bite-sized chunks to do.

And when you put in your calendar, write exactly what you need to do with all the required. So it's very easy. You won't get shiny object syndrome.

You just look at your calendar. Cool. Now I'll do this instead of time of 15 minutes and then you're done.

Royce Hall

Yeah. I love that. And you're definitely right.

Like, yeah, you're talking about me personally. I'm not the type of person that keeps the checklist. My wife actually does that quite well.

She makes a checklist every day. I'm like, my checklist is here, which means things don't get done. Right.

Kaitlyn Cook

So you already do that. And I say this from a place of, I've worked with over 10,000 entrepreneurs and I myself is an entrepreneur and I get it. Like we want to be great at certain things and we're just not like, we all have weaknesses and strengths and it's okay that you're not great at certain things because you're so good at the other things.

So for my coaching, for example, I'm not good at follow-up. I'm not great at that. So when I do client calls, I've got Fireflies.

They're my note taker. They email the client afterwards. They tell them the debrief, what we spoke about.

So I don't have to do the meeting notes anymore. I can just hone into what I'm really good at and they have more transformations because of it. But I used to be like, I have to do these meeting notes.

I have to do all this. It's like, wait a minute. I don't, it's my business.

I get to decide what I want to do with it. Yeah. Well, and you're talking about you know, uses of AI.

That's one of my favorite ones. Like you know, the, the AI note taking, and then I don't know if you've seen, I don't know if Fireflies, I haven't used that tool, but I don't know if Fireflies does it, but they actually make their own little checklist these days where you're like, it's like, here's the to-do's that are called that. I'm like, I love that.

Thank you so much. I know. And the thing is I've found as well, people these days, we are, our, we, our, what we use, what we consume now in a day used to take us 10 years to consume.

So we're really overwhelmed. Like a lot of us cognitively are capped beyond capacity. So when you're adding more to-do lists on, you're just like, holy moly.

And I think what we forget is as you add more, you should be removing something, but we tend to not, we tend to hold onto everything and then just try and add more on it. And it just doesn't work. There's burnout with it.

So anytime there's a to-do list, you should have something that you're removing, whether it's files in your computer, you don't need, it's apps you don't need to use, it's reducing subscriptions. All of this creates space to get the work done. You need to get done.

Royce Hall

Yeah. That, that goes back to one of my favorite sayings. I had this, I heard a long, long time ago, but it was automate, delegate, eliminate.

Yeah. And you know, I've, I know that there's been points in my career where I've been very overwhelmed and it's like, okay, can we automate? Like, that's kind of my role right now. Like, you know, the CRM, like that takes a lot of work off your, your desk as you are doing, you know, as you are digitally enabled, as you are using automations to do things so it can automate it.

Can we delegate it? You know, that goes, that can go back to tech these days as well. Like you can build agents that do things for you. It doesn't have to necessarily be a different person and then, you know, eliminate, which I think my, my favorite way of thinking about that is like delegating it to the floor.

Like it doesn't need to happen, just delegate it to the floor. You know, we can make do without it because it's not really adding any value. And I think I, I, I, I definitely am part of like, I love the connector, but I also love like doing and, and operations focused.

And for me, I'm like, I just, I can do everything. I want to do everything. And like, you know, coming to the end of myself and realizing I can't do everything.

And you know, there's things that don't need to be done. I'm like, that's been the eye opening for me of like, I, you know what, like what I need to do is get some rest and that just doesn't need to happen ever. Yes.

Kaitlyn Cook

And it's interesting because as a connector, you're actually able to like, because you're so good naturally at people and understanding people and how they're feeling and the, the, the meaning behind the words, you can automatically adopt one of those four quadrants of personality times. And so what I have, what I find is really helpful for that is if you have to get stuff done, don't do it in where you tend to connect with people. So if you need to get stuff done, don't sit there because you're used to connecting and not actually doing the to-do lists.

So if you need to do a to-do list, like sit in the kitchen or sit in a different place, because it's a different energy, it's a focus and it will help your brain to focus more instead of it being like, we're always here in this environment and we never do, don't do the to-do lists. So why would we do it now? And that's what I mean, change your environment to change what you want to get done in a day. Wow.

Royce Hall

Well, I'm going to tell my wife I need another office now. Yeah. So if somebody wants to, to work with you, like what, what does that look like? Yeah.

Kaitlyn Cook

So I offer private one-on-one coaching. So it's over six months because six months is enough time to help somebody change their habits, see the progress. And it's actually interesting because within the first three months, people will grow their revenue when working with me, but then there's the internal shifts, like the anxiety of having more money.

What do I do with this more money? And then it's me, that next three months has been helping them through that. So I do that. And I also just about to launch a group coaching actually, and my second cohort of a mastermind.

And it's so fun, especially when you want to change your environment, I've realized you need to change your community who you're speaking with. And so that's why I've, I've started a group coaching as well as a mastermind so people can speak with her. So I take people through six pillars.

So the pillars are, you know, what's your marketing? What's your systems? How do we automate what you don't need? And we talk on mindset. We talk on what does success feel like? Who's that successful person to you, as well as how many hours you want to work in a day, let's create the roadmap to get you there. And then we talk obviously about the tech, how do you integrate AI into your business in a way that works with people? Because I've got clients who love AI and others who are so scared of it.

So how do we find it that it matches where you are? And how do you set up your marketing so it's sustainable, both short and long term. So I know for me, for example, I'll do podcast, or I'll do a YouTube video, and I'll get a year's worth of content off one video because I'll cut it into short snippets. And that to me is more efficient.

And that fulfills me because then I can spend more time with my son, which brings me joy. So it's those things, how do you want to show up? Let's replicate that. Yeah.

Royce Hall

Kaitlyn, thank you for joining me today. Thank you for sharing your experience, your life with me. And thank you for sharing these tips. A lot to think about. I really appreciate it.

Kaitlyn Cook

You are so welcome, Royce.

And thank you for you and all you do for Salesforce and the podcast. That's really cool. Yeah, thank you very much.