We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kate Hufnagel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kate below.

Hi Kate, thanks for joining us today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?

I love this question because I regularly encourage my clients to reflect on a version of this question themselves.

I’m building a community that encourages conversations about the traditionally taboo topic of what happens after we pass away. Nothing lights me up more than educating people on how the digital age has the potential to make an already difficult time of dealing with a loss of a loved one more complicated than we can imagine.

All I can hope is that I inspire someone, whether they hear me speak, work with me as a client or watch a clip of me on social media, to ensure someone in their life will be able to access their phone, knows the combo to the lockbox under their bed or understand their end-of-life wishes.

Ultimately, if I can help normalize discussions around being prepared for the inevitable and inspire someone to take action to organize their important life details, then the work I’ve done to educate and support my clients will build upon my own legacy.

Kate, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Truth be told, establishing The Digital Wrangler™ has not been easy primarily because my line of work is one-of-a-kind. Yet, what I’ve learned during my (almost) 50-year life is that anything worth doing requires work.

I moved to the Los Angeles area in the late 1990’s for my first full-time job as an engineer. Because I was suffering from imposter syndrome (though I didn’t have a name for it at the time), one of the first books I read related to managing my finances was Suze Orman’s “You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It.”

In it, she talked about the importance of estate planning, including how to pass on financial assets to loved ones in a way that minimizes their tax burden. I followed her guidance and, before I was 30, I had created my first will and was working with a financial advisor. I still have Suze’s book today.

Combining my interest in my own financial legacy with a 25-year career in highly technical fields (mostly IT and software-related work) uniquely positioned me to start The Digital Wrangler™. I understand how to protect my identity online and I’m passionate about educating and helping others plan for their own legacy.

Most of my clients have come to me after struggling with settling the estate of a loved one. Unfortunately, they learned some difficult lessons and they’ve promised themselves to put in the work necessary so they don’t leave a complicated web for their own loved ones to sort through.

My fundamental mission is to make things easier for loved ones — whether it’s by saving them time, money or both.

And because my clients also cover a 20-30 year age range, I always look to my clients to let me know how much — or how little — they want to utilize technology when organizing their important life details.

For me, my entire family lives in multiple states; none of us can get to each other without driving several hours or hopping on an airplane.

We live in a digital world. And I want to leverage technology, whenever possible, to access the majority of their important life’s details (when the time comes) regardless of my location, whether I’m home in Colorado, on vacation in another country or giving a presentation at a national convention in another state.

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

When it comes to legacy and estate organizing, my business has five revenue streams: – An on-demand course: individuals can organize their important life details by following along bite-size videos on their own pace and on their own schedule.
– An intimate group setting: I coach no more than five people over the course of a 12-week program to help them organize their important life details; it’s a lot of fun working with a small group over zoom as the participants love to ask questions and tell jokes
– One-on-one work: some clients prefer to work with me privately
– Speaking: I travel around the country and speak to various audiences on the importance of organizing important details and how technology makes things more complicated for loved ones left behind
– Workshop facilitation: I deliver half-day workshops to educate and inspire individuals, who are also small business owners, on why it’s important to organize important life details — both for their personal lives and businesses. I typically incorporate a variety of hands-on activities and collaboration exercises to keep the workshop participants engaged.

I also help people manage, organize and secure their passwords. In our digital age, assuming we’re practicing good digital hygiene, we have hundreds of unique and complex passwords to keep track of. When it comes to password organizing, my business has three revenue streams:
– Consultation call. This is a perfect opportunity to explain the benefits and features of password managers and sometimes I’ll even do a live demo so the individual can see first-hand how they work.
– Transferring passwords. People are starting to learn that some password managers are more secure than others, which is prompting some to break up with a password manager they’ve used for years. These individuals don’t feel confident migrating their passwords to their new password manager so I do this for them — and yes, I can easily do this remotely.
– Wrangling passwords. With the countless passwords we all have, people are storing them in multiple locations — some may be in a keychain, others may be in a browser, some may be on a post-it note or a notebook — and realizing they have no idea where the correct one is stored. I help individuals get to “ground truth” on their passwords.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

As a little bit of a nerd, I absolutely love John Doerr’s “Measure What Matters”. How do you know if your business is successful? Mr Doerr uses case studies from a variety of people — like Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Bono (One Campaign) — to illustrate what happens to organizations when specific objectives and key results are defined ahead of time.

Simon Sinek’s “Together is Better” is another favorite. A mentee of mine gave me a copy of this book several years ago, with a touching inscription explaining how inspiring they found my collaborative approach to leadership.

And lately, I’ve been all about podcasts. I listen to so many good ones so I’ll share my favorite three: Hello Seven, Super Soul and For The Love.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thedigitalwrangler.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedigitalwrangler/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedigitalwrangler
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-hufnagel
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@thedigitalwrangler