Katie Love describes a career shift from NBC News reporting to running a social media agency. In the episode, she connects that shift to storytelling, personal branding, and building systems that support both business growth and family life.
The conversation starts with how Katie approaches New Year planning. She says she uses a vision board with her team and reviews outcomes from the previous year: “I always do [a vision board] and I work with my team… at the end of last year we end up looking to see what came to fruition.”
She gives one example of the type of goal she put in front of herself: “I had a picture of her cover in Forbes and we got to work with her… it’s just like a power of putting it out into the world.”
She also ties planning to more than business goals: “When we’re thinking about our life, it’s not just work… our kids, our partner.” The host echoes this framing by positioning the episode around leadership, pivoting, and building a business around a personal voice.
The pivot: leaving a high-intensity reporting role
When asked about her pivot, Katie describes a specific work context that pushed her to reevaluate. She says she was covering a missing child and thinking about the life she wanted, while noticing the personal impact of the work: “I was covering a missing child… I had anxiety. I couldn’t sleep.”
She describes the cumulative effect of doing that work daily: “Living and breathing it every day… I needed to make a pivot.” She also highlights that the transition did not require certainty first: “I also did this scared.”
This part of the conversation stays focused on the cost of the environment and the decision to redirect her skills into something else, rather than trying to “push through” the role as it was.
What journalism contributed: storytelling and distribution
Katie does not describe her journalism experience as separate from her later work. She points to one skill in particular: storytelling. She also describes an operational insight she noticed in real time: the speed at which social media can distribute information.
She says: “I saw the power of when a child would go missing… how quickly the internet could find a child.” For her, the question became how to use the same tool in a different context: “How do I harness this incredible tool, but to do it in a way that lights up my cup?”
In her framing, the pivot was not a rejection of media. It was a move from reporting to applying storytelling and distribution to business and branding.
Building recognition through personal branding
Katie connects her business development to how she presented herself. She contrasts her earlier role—where she felt she had limited room for personality—with a choice to build a more distinct public identity.
She describes an early decision: “The first thing I did… I dyed the end of my hair… pink.” She links that kind of visible choice to how people remembered her and her work. She recalls a moment that signaled her branding was becoming recognizable: “A woman… was just like, ‘Oh my god, the pink girl.’… ‘My branding is working.’”
Katie explains that this recognition did not depend on people memorizing her company name: “It became sort of my identity… my superhero outfit.” She also situates this as part of how she started the agency: “I started with nothing, no funding, no help.”
In the episode, the “pink” and “sparkly” choices are not presented as aesthetic preferences only. She frames them as signals that helped her show up consistently and be identifiable in business contexts.
Hiring and responsibility: the operational weight of growth
The conversation shifts from personal branding to operations. The host points to the difficulty of early hiring, and Katie agrees. She summarizes the moment as a major step: “Starting a business was like hire one.”
Katie explains why the first hires felt high-stakes. She ties it to responsibility for other people’s stability: “You’re taking on their livelihood, their healthcare, their 401k…”
She also describes the meaning of that responsibility in her business today: “Knowing that I’m responsible for 20 women in their careers…” The discussion here is practical: hiring requires confidence in revenue, but also a willingness to carry obligations that extend beyond the founder.
Showing up online: routine, analysis, and less perfection
A recurring theme is visibility. Katie says many women come to her with hesitations about being seen on camera: “They’re afraid to get on camera.” She argues that showing up over time is what creates leverage later.
She describes how her visibility built a base of support that later affected hiring and client growth: “I created a community of people that had watched me have two children… scale… from nothing.”
Later, when the host asks for advice for women who fear judgment or failure online, Katie suggests starting with posting for oneself and delaying the focus on external reaction: “Post something for you… and then forget about the reaction for a little bit.”
She also addresses perfection as a blocker: “It does not need to be perfect.” Her recommendation is to commit to a schedule and learn through feedback: “Just showing up, getting into a routine, that’s where the real power is.”
In the same section, the host mentions a LinkedIn accountability group where members commit to posting multiple times per week. The point is not scale; it is structure and follow-through.
Authenticity and audience value (including a celebrity example)
Katie describes “authenticity” less as a slogan and more as a method: share lessons from lived experience, connect that to a defined audience, and build from there.
When the host asks how she balances brand presence with authenticity, Katie references working with Naomi Watts. She describes Watts using personal experiences to communicate about perimenopause: “Naomi Watts… took her… storytelling around going into perimenopause… in her 30s.”
Katie says her team worked on the launch: “We had the pleasure of working with her on the launch of her Stripes menopause brand…” In her telling, the core mechanism was openness about a real experience and the audience response that followed.
She summarizes the broader takeaway: “All of us have something… that we can share… lessons you have learned.” Her framing suggests that content ideas do not need to be invented from scratch; they can start from experience and translation into something useful for others.
Misconceptions: “passive income,” influencer work, and what it takes to sustain it
The host raises the idea that entrepreneurs are sometimes treated as a new type of influencer. Katie responds by pushing back on the assumption that influencing is easy or passive.
She describes creator work as labor-intensive: “They are putting work in… the filming, the editing, the building, the concept.” She argues that sustainable visibility requires clarity of message and ongoing execution, not just the decision to participate.
She also describes entrepreneurship as requiring both execution modes—creative and operational: “You need to look at your numbers, but you also need to be creative…” In her case, she hired support to cover weaknesses: “I went out and hired someone… better at… spreadsheets and the organizing…”
Support systems, comparison, and choosing “the room”
A practical thread in the episode is support. When asked how she runs a company while being a mom and wife, Katie says the baseline requirement is help: “You can’t do everything without support… your village, your community.”
She describes a household structure where her husband is the stay-at-home parent: “My husband… is a stay-at-home parent…” She also describes his approach as enabling her decisions rather than limiting them.
She adds a second support layer: her team. She credits them with contributing ideas and execution that made growth possible.
At the same time, she talks about a risk that increases with visibility: comparison. She says she is trying to narrow focus and reduce that loop: “I’m trying to… keep my blinders on… not look so much at what everyone else is doing…”
The conversation also addresses gender dynamics in professional spaces. Katie describes repeatedly being the only woman in certain rooms and deciding to change that: “I kept finding myself as being the only woman in the room… I need to change what room I’m in.” She explains the goal as being in environments where she does not need to prove value repeatedly: “I want to be in a room where women get it.”
For her, part of that change was choosing to build a team of women and focusing her work on women founders.
Work-from-home boundaries: time blocks as a shared system
Katie shares one practical system that helped her manage working from home with a child. She describes the challenge of being physically present but unavailable during work hours, and the need to make availability predictable.
She outlines a schedule she used with her daughter: “From 9:00 a.m. to 12:00, mommy was an entrepreneur… From 12:00 to 12:30, mommy was going to be mommy.” She says the structure helped because her daughter could anticipate when she would get attention and when she would not.
She notes that boundary-building took time: “Creating those boundaries was helpful, but it wasn’t easy at the beginning.”
Outsourcing and “zone of genius”
In a later section, Katie frames outsourcing as a way to reduce bottlenecks and anxiety. She suggests that if social media execution creates stress, founders can delegate parts of it so they stay focused on the work they do best.
She puts it directly: “Deciding what to outsource can be such a liberation.” And she ties it to focus: “You want to be in your zone of genius.” She uses accounting as an example of what she decided not to keep doing herself.
The host adds a related point: once revenue supports it, outsourcing work you do not want to do can free time for higher-value activities.
Style as a conversation tool: the “sparkly sneaker” segment
The episode ends with a conversation about shoes as identity and social signal. Katie shows sparkly Betsy Johnson sneakers and describes how they became a way of showing up in rooms.
She frames the shift from trying to match traditional expectations to embracing what fits her: “Katie, you are a sparkly sneaker… let’s show up this way.” She also notes that the shoes often start conversations: “It has become a conversation piece when I walk into a room…”
The host ties this to her own history in tech, describing shoes as a prompt for conversations that led to opportunities, including introductions connected to her first business acquisition.
Closing: what the episode emphasizes
Across the conversation, Katie’s points repeatedly return to a small set of mechanisms:
- Transferable skill: storytelling applied outside journalism
- Visibility strategy: routine and analysis rather than perfection
- Growth structure: support systems at work and home
- Environment design: choose rooms where the dynamics match how you want to operate
- Execution relief: outsource work that pulls focus away from core strengths
The episode closes with a New Year tone, but the operational focus stays consistent: systems, repetition, and clarity about audience and message.
Leave a Reply