We were lucky to catch up with Katie Helms recently and have shared our conversation below.
Katie, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?
What I’ve seen after being in the back ends of dozens of businesses across the globe, is that most small businesses waste $10-140k each year on bad hiring decisions. It was just me at the beginning, me and the accountant. Then I had a board and co-teachers for a while, which is like having a team except they were paying me! My first few hires inside my own business were messy, personal hires for barter that ended in disappointment (and no results). As business owners, we want to wait to hire until we have more stable income, but what’s true is that we need to hire BEFORE we feel ready, most of the time. We know we’re doing too much, and after a few bad experiences, we hire someone to take some things off our plate for project A, but then we either don’t know how to manage other people, don’t give enough information for the hire to give good results, or we get bored waiting and are on to projects B & C before we get receivables for the first idea. Often, we learn and hone skills and professional expertise and then lack the management or interviewing skills to get or keep the team we need.
What we need is need to find our flow and set ourselves up for success and we need to practice knowing how to recognize what that is! For example, every good gig I’ve ever gotten has come from one single referral source-for the last decade (plus). She knows my skill set and she meets a lot of people. She’s clear on what I can bring to the table no matter who else is at the table. She’s helped me get zoomed in on what it takes to stay in the flow as a business owner and now it’s much easier to recognize who will be a good fit for what I want to get accomplished.
As a grad student, I learned about flow in the creativity and art making context, it’s a concept explained by happiness researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as being moments when you’re totally absorbed in a challenging but achievable task. He found that for humans, happiness is an internal state of being not an external one, and can be shifted by introducing FLOW. I used this as the basis for many of my classes and presentations throughout my career.
As a business owner, I teach about it as a way to help neurodivergent entrepreneurs stay focused, creative, productive and healthy! I break it down like this, to stay in the flow as a business owner, we need: commitment, willingness, prioritization, communication and reassessment. If I were to start my business over today, what I’d do differently is create a framework around these five concepts/questions so that whether I was in a forest school with homeschooling mamas, online teaching drawing to school-agers, or supporting multi-millionaires as they teach women how to build wealth, I’d keep my clients focused on these five principles.
Now, as a service provider, I’m likely to be asking these questions to discern whether or not I want to work with someone (rather than being in the position of applying for and waiting for recruitment), they’re directly related to the five ways I teach people to stay in the flow as a CEO.
Commitment: For the sake of whom do you do your work in the world? (and are we in alignment there?)
Willingness: How are you being in the world? (and are we in alignment there?)
Prioritization: Do you need to decide what requires your attention and focus now? (and am I able to provide that?)
Communication: What needs saying? (and are you open to learning to use words as medicine?)
Reassessment: How do you discern what success looks like? (and do you want accountability and community with me?)
If i’m in an interview (or a sales call), it’s a two way street! I’m deciding if I want to work with you just as much as you are deciding whether or not I’m going to suit your needs. If I’m hiring someone, they’re interviewing me simultaneously, what am I showing them about me, my company culture, and my brand? What I would do differently were I to start my process now is, I would be adamant about the fact that long after I’ve moved on from your company, or you’ve moved on from mine, creating community and systems that support. frequent reflection and realignment are key to your ultimate success.
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?
I help service-providers in transition GET CLEAR, GET OUT of their own way, and GET INTO momentum.
TLDR; I’m a business consultant who will see and hear you in a way that will leave you changed for the better. I can help you get clear on your offers, organize client-facing assets, and gain momentum without misery!
Through over 20 years of building and managing teams, training leaders, and supporting entrepreneurs, I have been thoughtfully cultivating my expertise. I started my business in 2013 and have powered through multiple pivots, which makes me an expert in change management!
I have supported business owners as they navigated running brick & mortar arts studios, asset creation agencies, burgeoning coaching practices, and all sorts of service-providing in the wide, wild world of online entrepreneurship. I have also worked with national publications, world-renowned acupuncturists and healers, artists of all kinds, best-selling authors, as well as leading birthpreneurs and wealth advocacy experts.
IF BIG ACADEMIA / COURSE DEVELOPMENT IS YOUR SCENE, I AM A:
**Master of Transformative Leadership and Social Change
**Master of Art Education
**Bachelor of Humanities
**Former associate editor of the Journal of the National Art Education Association
**Creator of five elements, Reggio-Emilia inspired art program for families in Baltimore
IF YOU LEAN TOWARD THE ”WOO” SIDE OF THINGS, I:
**am attuned to Reiki Level II
**am certified as a Sufi healer
**have been studying Whole Heart Connection for over a dozen years
**have a very intentionally crafted healing presence
IF BOOTS ON THE GROUND EXPERIENCE IS YOUR JAM, I HAVE:
**managed teams of up to 40 people as an admin at an early childhood school blocks from the White House
**directed programs full of international business powerhouses bringing in hundreds of thousands in revenue
**taught thousands of students in my career, ranging in age from six months to eighty-six
**worked behind the scenes in multiple seven-figure businesses to strategize and optimize
And I’m not finished yet. Right now, I provide two kinds of support for service-providers. For those in a pivot: a group program for people (mostly neurodivergent, perimenopausal humans within the first five years of business)…so they can solidify offers, bank assets and build momentum without misery. And I provide 1:1 done-with-you support for thought leaders and visionaries looking to scale and simplify.
I’m your girl for brand strategy and optimization, especially for those “weirdos” or “nerds” who need healing and support for themselves AND their businesses.
As I have evolved as an entrepreneur, a teacher, an artist, and a human, my service offers have shifted too. I not only understand, but also embody the need to embrace change to meet goals! We may resist change even though we know it’s necessary…and it helps to have an expert to guide us along the way. I’m here to provide the insight and tools you need to level up!
The basic skills I teach remain unchanged, whether in a forest, board room, atelier, or conference call. And the quality of my presence remains palpable, tender, and nourishing. Sure, you’ll make more $$$, and you may even ENJOY the work along the way. 🙂
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Word of mouth is the best way I find reliable clients. I’ve spent money hiring team to make social content, I’ve invested hours learning new apps and tools and studying ways to write compelling content and in the final analysis, personal recommendations are always the source of the perfect fit clients. In contemporary times, those usually come in the form of a forwarded email or recommendation from a college friend, maybe a three way direct message intro from a previous client and their colleague. Email subject lines are the new way my audience keeps track of what I’m up to. Those I pay someone clever (and slightly distanced from the urgency) to write. Sometimes the introductions come out of networking groups with peers. The short answer to your question is: honest conversation and willingness to be seen.
Have you ever had to pivot?
After seventeen years together, seven of them married, I began disentangling my life from that of my best friend’s. We had become adults together, grew as academics and professionals together, had so much common vocabulary and shared experience. And it was time for us to separate, we were doing so much harm to one another.
A few months after we separated, I fell at work and broke my left foot and sprained my right ankle. It was bad, I was working at that point as a teacher inside a co-operative program that I had co-designed with a handful of others. I was the teacher, there was no program without me. And I couldn’t walk. There were twenty-seven steps from the street to my front door and seventeen more steps up or down to a bathroom once inside the door. Daily life was difficult, I couldn’t possibly run my business, AKA teach over a dozen kids aged one to nine years old outside in the forest and in and out of people’s homes.
A major pivot was required in how I thought about my business, how I made money, and what I was doing in the world (and for whom). I began to reassess what success looked like for myself and how I was going to step up (once I could take steps alone again)!
Then my father died. We weren’t that close, it was a strange time. That first week after sixteen weeks in the giant space boot cast, I drove sixteen hours alone to my father’s funeral. When I returned it was like I was in a fog. Grief is a bizarre and distorting filter through which to view our lives. I was grieving the loss of my spouse, my mobility, my dad, and from that place I was needing to decide what direction my business was going to pivot toward.
Perhaps I made the wrong choice, but it is what it is. I made the pivot I thought was the best choice available to me and it resulted, in the short term, in total destruction of my life as I knew it, my business as it was structured and my self-concept as it had been gathered till that point. It was violent and confusing, totally unfamiliar and honesly, scary. But in the long run, that series of choices made in that pivot led me to the current iteration of my business and the beautiful and content life I’m living. The space between the old and the new, the pivot space, it’s messy like caterpillar soup. It can feel terrifying not to know what will be the end result of the complete breaking down of what you’ve built around you. The caterpillar business you made can only grow and transform if you let it make it’s cocoon and sway in the winds, vulnerable, way out there on the branch of the unknown! And yet, what emerges (if we let it) is the stunning moth full of the colors and patterns that shaped our outlooks and ideas so we can flap away into the starry night.
This is why I focus my work on business owners in a pivot or transition time, because I know first hand just how helpful it can be to have someone to remind you that you already know what grounded feels like, you’re clear on what success looks like, and you’ve got a vision big enough to live into.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.katiehelms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiehelms_consulting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/helmskr/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynrenohelms/
Image Credits
Emet Lipson