We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kati & Alex Pauls. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kati & Alex below.

Alright, Kati & Alex thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

For many years KP Design consisted of only 1 person Kati. It was always our dream to work together and in 2019 we took the leap and Alex became a part of the team. From there we worked on ramping up our networking and taking on more monthly projects from local small businesses. In our first year working together we managed to double the amount of business we were doing just by being active members in our business network community.

In our second year of working together, we hired our business coach Erin Marcus from “Conquer Your Business” to help us become better business owners. Erin helped us expand our network across Canada and the USA, improve our messaging, ramp up our marketing of the business, we wrote and published 2 books, we became presenters on the subject of Branding, Graphic Design, Website Creation and Search Engine Optimization. Most importantly, we began raising our prices accordingly so they were more in line with our level of experience in our industries.

We added a book keeper to our team to help organize our books & taxes, this was HUGE for us! We are in the process of mentoring our oldest daughter who is very artistic, so that she can have the opportunity to work, earn money, and learn many skills including graphic design, website maintenance, organizing meetings/appointments ie virtual assistant role.

We have our business to the point where we work with a select limited amount of clients per year, everything is done in house and we have trusted partners we work with for marketing, social media, content creation that our clients can go to directly. We made the conscious decision to stay a 2 person partnership and not scale into a company with employees to manage.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Kati has a university degree in music and was a successful music teacher with a studio that she opened when she was only 15 years old, so she is no stranger to entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, Alex’s career as a power electrician had the couple moving every 6 months for a number of years and Kati was forced to close her music studio and focus on a career that could be done remotely (this was back when many rural areas still only had dial up internet).

Kati took many college and online courses for website design, coding, photography, graphic design and began working with a child care centre. Over the years Kati has built many websites using various tools such as hand coding html sites, Dreamweaver, and WordPress.

What makes KP Design different is how Kati perceives and transforms ideas into creative elements that interact in the real world. A creative problem-solver and visionary, she distinctly hears her clients messages and aligns her creative energy with theirs to allow the exact right design to come to life.

Kati & Alex are most proud of their relationship. Relationship is the foundation on which they have built the business together, and it is their guidepost for each new project. Their co-authored books “Partners in Everything” goes into detail the nuts and bolts that make their personal and professional relationship thrive and how other couples working together can do the same.

Kati & Alex have made it their mission to work with Change Makers who are doing great things for their community as well as the world.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson we had to unlearn was thinking that social media management was something we could take on for our clients. This experiment involved us hiring someone to do the posting and engagement while Kati designed each and every post while Alex researched keywords. Having a graphic designer design each piece for many clients was so time consuming that we quickly realized it wasn’t sustainable. We also realized that we don’t want to have team members to manage. It is really difficult to find other people who will care about your business as much as you do and who have the same level of commitment and dedication to clients. We did, however, learn a very valuable lesson: don’t wait too long to fire a team member that is not working out! Trust your instinct, you’ll know very quickly if someone is a fit for your business. In the end we stopped offering social media management and it’s been smooth sailing ever since! We are glad we tried and don’t regret the experience because now we know that we work better doing the things we’re really good at and that makes us happy.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

The first sale we made after we decided to listen to our business coach and bump up our pricing (quite a bit) was one of the toughest sales we’ve made. It was an epic mind battle to believe we were worth what we were pitching and the sale process felt like we were working very hard at proving the results. (Sidenote: because we were still charging what Kati had set up prior to Alex joining the team, bumping up our pricing had us on par with industry standards). The sale was to a “holistic” business consultant in Toronto and this very intelligent and strong woman asked us every imaginable question and tested our knowledge over and over again before finally deciding to invest in our services. We were exhausted, sweaty (thank goodness it was a zoom meeting) and elated that someone actually understood the value that we were bringing. This client became one of the most important clients as she pushed us to think outside of the box with her brand and website. Because we showed up in an arena that had us thinking bigger and better about ourselves, it was then that we started attracting clients who thought the same way. Since that first big sale, we have bumped up our pricing to reflect the quality of work we do, shedding the belief that we were tied to “industry standards.” Change-makers think differently than most and understand that what they bring to the world is unique which often has them pushing invisible boundaries.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kpdesign.ca/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kpdesign26/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KatiPaulsDesign
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katipauls/