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

Hi Kate, thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

This is a complicated one, because it’s really more about what they didn’t do and what they got wrong that made me who I am today. I grew up in a very Mayberry type small town that has now become a big city in the Bay Area of California – Pleasanton. My parents were very social and sometimes the talk of the town (for good and bad). My brother was 7 years older than me and busy with sports. I was a soccer kid from the time I was 6 years old. We walked to school and were on our own when we came home as our parents both worked. I was very independent, made my own meals, did my homework, played with the neighborhood friends and stayed out of trouble. After my parents divorced when I was 7, sadness came over me and I had so much disappointment with a dad who was absent and often forgot that he was supposed to take me for the weekend. My little pink suitcase was waiting by the door as darkness would fall and my mom would have to tell me that he wasn’t coming.

When we moved to the Palm Springs area when I was 12, my mom developed a deep dependency on alcohol and I didn’t admit she was an alcoholic until I was out of high school. There were times she was a complete embarrassment publicly and I just wanted to crawl under a rock. Life changed for me when I lashed out in anger, and loving parents of my best friend helped me realize that I needed help understanding and dealing with being the child of an alcoholic. The lessons I learned in those meetings shaped me more than I knew at the time.

From the age of 13 I held jobs, mostly office-type positions doing busy work, but when I was 18 I decided I wanted to have enough money to live on my own. I had 3 part-time jobs and a full load of college classes at the local community college. My days were so structured and I had to be organized in order to maintain everything. As soon as I could move in with a friend and leave my mom, I did.

I became an overachiever at work. I needed the praise, and it felt good to get it. My schedule was daunting with school 4 days a week from 8-noon, then an office job from 1-5 and hostess job 2 nights a week plus a retail job on the weekends. I was learning that the more focused and pleasant I could be, the better sales (and more tips) I had, and that led to more responsibilities earned in my jobs.

I learned accountability. When I made a mistake, I owned it, apologized and explained how it may have happened and how I could make a change so that it wouldn’t happen again. I also learned what burnout looks like. I had absolutely zero balance in life, so I had to make some changes. I took more responsibilities at my office job, let go of the hostess and retail jobs, and scaled back on classes (it ended up taking me 11 years to graduate from college – but that’s an entirely different story). Then I landed a position at the brand new Marriott resort and loved it. Within a few years I was full-time and saw a career path in front of me in hospitality. I felt like a superstar.

As for my parents, my mother lost her battle with alcoholism when I was 32 and never met my kids. My dad ended up seriously coming through for me for all the big things. He bought me 3 crappy orange cars at auctions for $200, but they gave me independence. He took me clothes shopping. When I was 28 and started my own digital marketing company, he was so proud and was always just a phone call away for advice. He was there when my girls were born prematurely with a grim diagnosis, and present as they grew into toddlers. He died in the hospital after a routine procedure went wrong. I felt so alone when he was gone, but I am so thankful to have wonderful pictures and videos of him interacting with my kids.

Sometimes we learn to be good by observing what’s bad, and choosing to be different.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

When I was at my first real office job at age 18, I had incredible mentors who helped me discover my “inner computer geek.” I grew up in the 70s & 80s so I didn’t have a home computer or a smart phone until the late 90s, but at work I was the one who could fix the computer and figure out software because I learned very quickly.

When I started my own digital marketing company at age 28, I had no idea what I was doing, but taught myself because I had the luxury of time and the opportunity to grow in my skills. It wasn’t long before I was doing all of the sales, design and coding of websites. I scaled my business by hiring mostly women – many of them new moms. I gave them freedom in their schedules and in turn, they gave me loyalty and would do anything for me. We had a great time at work with a friendly environment, and that trickled down to our clients who loved us – which grew our business dramatically by referrals.

I sold that business after 15 years and worked for the man who bought it. My team changed because the environment changed. It wasn’t the fun, invigorating place my team had built any longer. After my two-year contract ended, I took three years off, got a divorce, focused on getting my kids through high school and fell in love again. When my guy retired from his high-stress career and took a few years off, we traveled, ate our way through Europe and then decided to start working again.

He opened a restaurant and I did his marketing. It was fun again, and I started getting more and more clients, but I also learned how to set boundaries and say no to projects. I really don’t want to hire employees again, but I have developed amazing collaborative relationships to either make referrals or work together on projects.

Technology has changed so much since I started in this field. Now I find myself doing so much more design and trying to find the best marketing solutions for my clients utilizing the tools they are already using and integrating new resources so that they are in control of all of their marketing assets.

“Sometimes, good things fall apart so better things could fall together.” — Marilyn Monroe

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

It was 2002, and my web development business was really taking off. Three years prior, I serendipitously met someone who had a similar hotel background but was looking to pivot into something more creative. We became fast friends and went everywhere together. Every mixer, every breakfast, we were networking and killing it. We closed about 95% of all our prospects and became known as the ‘web girls’ in what I called “mixerville” around town. Our client list was becoming a who’s who in our small Coachella Valley community, and I couldn’t have been more proud Yet, something was missing. I was 34 and still hadn’t started my family. My husband and I had been married for ten years and it was time to take drastic measures. His sister was pregnant, my brother and his wife were pregnant and I was feeling desperate. We decided to try in vitro fertilization and within 2 months, I was pregnant.

“OK, look here is the heartbeat… oh, and what’s this? You have two heartbeats – twins!” the doctor exclaimed But then, a pensive follow-up comment. “Hmmm, we don’t like to see this… looks like they are in the same sack and could get tangled up, so you’re going to have to go on bed rest.” He explained it as if I’m not an A-type person who knows when to slow down. Luckily, I had this great employee who I treated like a partner to take over the business, so I tried my best to slow down and only go to three events a week instead of ten – but my body had a different plan.

“That’s not really bed rest, you know…” people would remark as they knew the diagnosis and instructions to slow down. I felt like I knew better. Until I didn’t. I was at 28 weeks of my pregnancy and had gained a whopping 80 pounds. I felt horrible, like I was getting sick, so I went to my primary doctor’s office because it was closer. They took one look at me and sent me to my OB, who called in the high-risk doctor that had seen me every few weeks. They admitted me on a Thursday, and by Saturday they were telling me to settle in for the next six weeks on complete bed rest. So I didn’t know it all, after all.

That night something felt really wrong. The nurse was reclining the bed to better adjust the heart rate monitor on my swollen belly and I passed out. She shook me and I opened my eyes as the bed was coming back up. I didn’t know what happened, but it wasn’t good. She took my pulse and then ran to fetch the blood pressure cuff. She gave a funny face as it read something that I couldn’t see. She scurried out and brought in a different kind of cuff. Same result. She started to look concerned and went over to my urine bag and held it up. It looked like Guinness beer – very dark and not normal. That’s when I asked if everything was OK, knowing it wasn’t.

She came back in with the doctor and they put something in my IV, and the next thing I knew, it was the next day. My husband and both my doctors were at the foot of my bed and they said “Good morning, sunshine! We’re going to meet your babies today!” I’m sure I looked stunned… was I supposed to be excited? This was way too early – it couldn’t be good.

The high risk doctor asked if I trusted him, and I said, “explicitly” – so I was whisked away, to be prepped for an emergency C section. It all happened so fast and I was completely out of it, so I barely remember it. Within an hour I was telling the doctor to make my incision small, please. What an imbecile. I had no clue what was happening and what my future entailed. That was the last thing I remembered. I woke up 24 hours later and felt my empty, sore belly and saw my husband asleep in a chair beside my bed. I said, “Hey, what happened?” He proceeded to tell me that when the girls were born, they couldn’t get them to breathe so they had to intubate them and my babies were now on life support in the NICU. Life support… I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

We went down the hall to visit them. They looked like tiny little frogs – their bodies transparent in the open bed incubators. I held their little hands and we prayed. Everything changed that day. I didn’t care about work, about mixers – about anything other than my little fragile family. I had to pivot my entire life and become more resilient.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Many times in my life I have looked back and thought, “gosh, how did I get through that?” On their third day of life, we learned after an MRI that my premature twins would both suffer with cerebral palsy and their quality of life was uncertain. My least favorite NICU doctor, a woman, actually referred to my girls as “this one and that one” when delivering the devastating prognosis. She said we should “consider end of life procedures” for Abby as her intraventricular brain hemorrhage was a grade 4, the worst. My eyes narrowed and my hand flew up to shut her down and I said “that’ll be all, thank you.” She had more to say, but I said “not today, we’re done here.” and walked away. I just knew she was wrong. I never gave up hope.

As the strange days passed with them living in the NICU, my husband and I were now parents without babies at home. After two long months, Abby was well enough to come home on oxygen and a heart monitor. Cassidy remained for another two months filled with setbacks and challenges to the extent we almost lost her one night, which brought me to my knees.

She was finally released on the condition that I had to learn how to suction mucus from her lungs down her throat and how to carefully insert a feeding tube through her nose into her stomach – thank God she started drinking from a bottle after a few weeks and was strong enough to cough shortly thereafter. Managing their daily meds, therapy appointments, ambulatory aids and learning how to interact and challenge my girls became my full-time job for those first five years of their life, yet I still ran a growing company.

With early intervention therapy and a positive attitude, combined with some great accomplishments along the way, we remained steadfast that we could provide them with the best opportunities for a great life. We did alternative, holistic, weird, odd, intensive and immersive therapy sometimes achieving big results like the day Cassidy walked out of her walker in preschool and never used it again.

After hitting some big early milestones, they were accepted into mainstream education and I was able to return to leading my company, only to find that my employee who I considered a partner was undermining me and tried to steal the company, but that’s another story of resilience. I did my best to balance work life & home life along with never missing a therapy or specialist appointment. It was a challenge, but we made it work.

Now my girls are 21 and in college, I look back at all of their achievements so far and how their life is so much better than some of the doctors predicted. They are complete opposites of each other, but the best of friends. They went to a public elementary school, private middle school and then graduated with honors from Palm Desert High School. I’m incredibly proud of the work we put in, the sacrifices we made to give them the best chance to be their best self, I see their resilience and I’m inspired. I have hope they will find love, find purpose and enjoy their life.

For me, I think my resilience comes from the ability to remain hopeful in the face of difficult situations. We had to mourn the loss of our expectations for what our life with kids would be like. I regularly give myself space to reflect on the past, honor what has happened, talk about it, cry a little and move on. I’m lucky to be surrounded by a great group of friends, a wonderful guy who gives me all the love and attention I need and an ex-husband that cares deeply for the girls we created together.

“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”
― Elizabeth Edwards

Contact Info:

• Website: https://collabwithkate.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/k8spates
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katespates
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katespates/

Image Credits

For image of me with the microphone, please credit: Maile Klein.
For image of me with hand by face, please credit: Kathleen Geiberger