Behind the Scenes: What We're Working on at Kate Waldo + Co.

Welcome to Episode 39: BTS What We're Working on at Kate Waldo + Co. 

On this episode of the podcast, we're diving into ways we are working behind the scenes at Kate Waldo + Co. to streamline our work and cut back on tech to work smarter. We'll discuss ways to hone your energy and condense tasks to maximize productivity. And if you're someone who loves diving into the numbers, we've got some tips for you too. Join us as we explore the benefits of simplifying your work and finding ways to work smarter, not harder.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• Descript, Video & Podcast Editor
• Kajabi, Hosting Platform for Online Courses
• SmarterQueue, Social Media Scheduling with Recycling Content
• Tailwind, Social Media Scheduling with Pinterest Integrations

Connect with Kate Waldo here:

• Instagram
• YouTube
• katewaldoandco.com
• Take the free Business Health Check Quiz!

Kate Waldo + Co Programs:

• Smarter Not Harder: 3-Day Workweeks for Millennial Entrepreneurs©
• Airbnb on Autopilot
• Pro Organizer Success Kit

Thanks for joining the launch of The 3-Day Workweeks Podcast! 

Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a 5-star review!

Always cheering you on,

Kate

Creator of the Smarter Not Harder: 3-Day Workweeks for Millennial Entrepreneurs©  Program

Owner + Founder, Kate Waldo + Co. 

P.S. Curious how you can grow your 6-figure business while slashing your workweek in half? Click here to learn about the Smarter Not Harder© program!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

 Hey, and welcome back to another episode of the Three Day Work Weeks for Millennial Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Waldo Jones systems and efficiency expert lover of streamlining things so that we can work smarter, not harder. And today I am going to give you a little bit of behind the scenes of what we've been working on because I love these kind of episodes when other people do it on their podcast.

Interviews and topics, stuff is great. . I love hearing the dirt, the behind the scenes, what you're working on stuff. So that's what we're gonna get into today. And if you are curious about anything that we are talking about, check out the show notes for all of the links. You can go to kate waldo and co.com.

That's where you'll find pretty much everything and you can connect with me there or on Instagram at Kate Waldo and co. What are we working on? What's going on in the business? Just to recap, because I don't know how long you've been here. I have several different businesses. . My very first business was is Orchid Organizing, which is my professional organizing business.

We started in Savannah, Georgia, and now we have five locations across the us. We just actually won best of Savannah for another year, which is crazy. We've either got one or gotten runner up best of Savannah every single year that we have been in business, which is such an honor. And I'm so grateful to my teams because that wouldn't happen if not for them.

That's really cool and very exciting. So that is my first business. And then because of that business, I started Kate while doing CO because I felt like other professional organizers, other entrepreneurs, needed to know how to be able to. Make more money by working less and actually be present in life and.

I'll come back to that point in a second. And then I have a personal blog and lifestyle brand, which is called Simplified LuxLife. I have a podcast for that too. We are paused on that for the moment. And then I have a Airbnb business. , short term rental business. We are on a lot of different platforms, including Airbnb and that property is called Lux on Lakeview.

That is really cool. I love that one. It's probably my favorite right now of all the businesses. And then I also am partnered with my partner on a cpr, a e d and first aid, as well as lifeguard certification and training business. That's really cool to see all the systems that I've used be able to translate into a field that I really don't know a whole lot about.

I'm learning as we go. John is very well versed in this subject. He was a beach lifeguard and has been in this field. pretty much his whole life. So he is really fantastic at it and it's really cool to be able to see putting these systems into another service-based business that is something that I have zero experience in.

That's part of what I love to do with my one-on-one clients as well, is be able to put these systems into businesses that I personally haven't necessarily had experience with. , it works really beautifully. We just tailor things a little bit differently for the needs of the business, and it works out well.

got a lot of businesses, got my hands in a lot of things. I also have two sweet pups and one of 'em is 13 years old. We just found out that he has cancer, which is really, sad. He right now is comfortable and happy, so we are doing our best to keep him that way for as long as possible. And yeah, that one's a little tough.

I won't get into much more of that, but, there is, I watched this video recently on TikTok. I won't lie, I'm not gonna say I read an article, and was talking about this billionaire in Dubai who he's saying that the goal is to work. 18 hours a week and that you wanna work three days a week because it gives you the free time and the head space to be creative, to say yes to experiences, to have the flexibility to go and do things whether for fun, whether to further your business, et cetera.

Makes a huge difference. So that's something that we are working on right now is to continue to hone processes in order to stay in that three day work week. window. It's always a refining process, especially if you are a professional organizer. I know a lot of you are, you know that you don't just clean your closet once and then it's like always clean forever,

It's always a refining process. You're always going back through and. culling things that are no longer relevant, they no longer suit you. They you've outgrown them, whatever that is. So that's a big theme of, I'm always doing that in business, but especially right now with Kate while doing co over the last six months, I've been looking at the technology we're using, the systems, we're using the.

Providers we're invested in all of those tools, systems, softwares that we have, and seeing what is the best fit. Things are moving so quickly right now especially with technology and ai, really cool things are happening. So some, things are redundant, some things are no longer relevant. That's my main focus is figuring out.

we're trying to be smart about where our output is going and is, are these tools actually helping us move the needle on a daily basis in a productive way so that we can continue to be in, emulate that three day work week. Schedule and that lifestyle while also maintaining really good profit margins.

So that's what's really important to me, is that we don't get so overloaded with tech and technology and all those things that that the profit margin's not there. It's fun for me. I , part of my job is to test the tech is to see, does the step still make sense?

Does it really work for us? There's some really interesting features that are coming out with different softwares that we use. So I'll be interested. There's some that I don't feel like I can make a call on yet if we're gonna keep them or if we're not, for example. And in love head over heels with our video editing software called Descript.

I'll I have a discount affiliate link. I'll, link that in the show notes, but it is has been such a game changer because you just drop your video in, transcribes everything really well, their transcription's getting better and better every day. It can also separate the tracks if you have two people talking.

and then you can highlight the transcript and edit or delete and it edits or deletes the actual video. You can also copy and paste to move things around. It's so cool. But Cajabi, which is where I host my website and my online courses. Some of my other offerings are hosted in Kajabi. They just came out with.

I don't think I'm supposed to say the name, . I'm not gonna say the name. I just realized. not really supposed to talk about it, cuz I'm in a beta program for it. But they came out with a testing software to do similar things that Descript does, which could be really cool because it's a whole process.

We also host the podcast on Kajabi it could be really cool to be able to put your video in one place, edit and upload a lot more seamlessly instead of going from. one place to another. If you're a podcaster or you do a lot of video content it's it's a whole workflow . So that's something that, that I'm looking into.

It's still, cuz that program's in beta, it's still not where it needs to be yet. But looking into those kind of things continuing to refine processes and cut out things that don't necessarily make sense. We. we're using, what was it later I think, for scheduling social media content. And what I found was that it was a bit redundant with having Tailwind.

Now Tailwind doesn't necessarily have the same Instagram or Facebook functionalities for scheduling that later does, but we have been, but I found. if we're already using it. If we're already using Tailwind for Pinterest, it does have some great features where you can just upload one piece of content and then distribute it across your other channels in a pretty easy way.

It's not the best. We'll report back on that. If you guys have any like process that works really well for you, let me know. That goes across all those platforms. We're using Smarter Q, which I do still use Smarter Q as a scheduling tool for orchid organizing because we have content that is evergreen content can be recycled, it's static posts, there's no video.

So that is really easy for that to just recycle and keep going. But when you're talking about other social media, Like as a professional organizer, we don't rely on social media for our leads. It is a really, I can't remember if I've talked about this in another episode, but social media is not a absolute.

it's a must. It needs to exist. , it's your proof of life, but it's not where we spend our time, effort, and energy to get our leads. We get them through other, ways, mainly Google ads and through word of mouth referrals. In-person things. So yeah that's, why that stayed on Smarter Queue.

But I found that re continuing to recycle content on Evergreen for Kate Waldo and Co because it is largely a online based, it is an online based business. That was not what we needed anymore. The content needed to be fresh. Sure. Things, I definitely recycle things our team recycles.

Content, but reposting the exact same thing doesn't really work for that. . So those are some things that we're working on. We're also working on refining the process for our finances. Really, tracking. This is something we've been doing over the last year, is tracking. where the income is coming from each month from each income stream.

Cuz I have too many to count , which is, I'm a blessing. I'm very grateful for it. But tracking where that comes from. And then something that I added recently was I do all this in Airtable and I might be adding this to our Smarter Not Harder program which is on a wait list right now. But but I recently added a, column in there for.

Basically what my percentage take home is from. It's not after expenses, profit margin, it's whatever the income of whichever in like income stream it is. For example, affiliate marketing. And then how much of that do I take home? So affiliate marketing I take home 100% of my cut of the.

Affiliate payout with our courses. It just varies because if someone buys directly from me, then I get 100% of that. If someone buys through one of our Kate Waldo and co affiliates, then I get a percentage of that and they get a percentage of that sale. So that has been really interesting to track that and see.

Those numbers have been very interesting. I'm, watching to see what story they tell and where. Time, effort, and energy is best spent because when you start to itemize all the income streams and then you think about how much time you spend on them, and then how much of that profit do you actually take home, it can really adjust how you spend your time, effort, energy, all of those things, which is something that we go a lot into in the Smarter, not Harder program.

I'm continually trying to. , figure out other ways to make this whole process easier for me. I'm such a visual person, so I've been working a lot in Airtable. It helps me to see things, map things out, look at the numbers be able to play with the numbers and adjust things. So those are some things that we've been working on.

We're starting to have more guests on the podcast. We just had Alex Shin, which was fantastic. I loved having her on. We've got a few other people queued up and I think. Y'all really enjoy those episodes, so let me know if there's anyone that you wanna hear from or any topics that you wanna hear about.

But yeah, so on a personal note, really working to get back into a flow of self-care and all those practices, meditation fallen off. Not that I haven't done it, but just working to kind. refine what? What my, like journaling, meditation, salt baths, all those things. If you wanna hear more about self-care I have a whole episode called Weird Self-Care that actually works cuz it does.

Yeah. Refining those things. Also like finding myself as my parents are aging, our pups are aging. Feeling like I want to bring everybody close and have everybody nearby. So that's been an interesting like feeling after being such a. Independent person and living like far away from everybody so that they can't come visit me as often.

and feeling the opposite of that, and like wanting to have people close and around and all of that. That's what's up over here. I, if you guys like these episodes, let me know. Cuz you could also be like, I don't care at all, but I find them interesting. So send me a DM on Instagram at kate walden co.

Let me know if you wanna hear more episodes like this. Also, if there's some guests or topics that you want me to have on the podcast. I would love to hear it. Everything that we talked about is linked in the show notes of this episode, and you can find me at Kate Waldo and co on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook I don't really use.

And then over on our website, kate waldo and co.com. So we'll see you on the next episode.