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Foreign. Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 291 of the Cage Show. Today is a whole bunch of things. It's. It's not just one topic. I've got personal updates, I've got business updates. So get ready for a charcuterie board of stuff. First of all, you probably noticed by the title of this episode that, that I am going to High Point. Not just going, but I am going to be speaking on a panel with Andrea Libros. She has been on the podcast before. I've been on her podcast. I ended up hiring her as my business coach for a year. She is amazing and she put together a panel and she asked Lynn Nagara to moderate it. So if you would like to come see all of us, we will be at the Point. The certain area of High Point, I guess it's kind of like the hub of all things high point at 2pm on October 25, which is Saturday. So I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible in person. There will be time to chat afterward. The panel will just be from 2 to 3pm and then there's really nothing else going on at the Point, so I believe we will be able to just hang out. So I would love to meet you, I would love to get connected with as many of you as possible because for the last 11 years, I have been interacting with all of you virtually. I haven't met many of you at all. You know, literally just a handful in person. So I'm excited for this to change everything. Now you might be wondering, well, what's this panel about? It is about getting out of your own way and growing your business. So obviously my business coach will be talking about the business side of things. I'll talk about the marketing side of things. And we have Whitney from Nested Spaces, who is an interior designer and home stanger, and she's going to be sharing a lot of helpful insights. So I'm pretty darn excited about it and I hope to see you there. Okay, so a few other updates. Well, this one's not an update. This is more of a. Just a heaviness on my heart. It'll be almost a week as of the recording of this episode that Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And it's. It's heartbreaking. It makes me sick in so many ways. Some of you might have gotten my email about it, but this is so much more than a right wing, left wing issue. This is a free speech issue. And I just have to say, if we lose the ability to have cordial conversations with people who disagree. What do we have left? We certainly don't have freedom of speech. And, you know, it requires emotional maturity to agree to disagree. It requires emotional maturity to say, hey, I still value you as a human being, even though I think what you believe is absolutely nuts. And it's okay, like, we don't all have to believe the same thing. But there's so much name calling, there's so much hatred, especially on social media. The algorithm likes to make people upset, so it will show more things to make us upset. Even if the clips from, say, Charlie Kirk are being misrepresented, making it look like he said things that he didn't. I've seen some of that going around, and sadly, some people are celebrating what happened. That's disgusting. Like, how is. How is that redeemable? I. I don't know. That's unfortunately, the lowest of the low as far as humanity is concerned. When you celebrate the death of someone simply because they believed something that you didn't, that's terrible. Now, I'd be saying that even if Charlie Kirk were on the left, because death is wrong. Like, murder is wrong 100% of the time. Now, you might be like, okay, but this is a marketing podcast. I didn't sign up for this political analysis, so why are you talking about it? Well, here's the thing. The moment he was assassinated, he dropped the mic, as you might have noticed. I have a mic, and I'm. I'm not going to become the next Charlie Kirk. That's not my calling. But God has given me a platform. And you guys know, you've heard me talk about my faith before. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where it becomes more than just, oh, I go to church on Sunday. I wear a cross around my neck. It's actually bearing that cross on your shoulders and marching out in public with it, because this is not the time to be a coward. Now, ironically, the strongest thing we can do right now is say no to violence. The strongest thing we can do right now is be kind to those who clearly don't want to be kind to us. The most mature thing we can do is look at someone and say, I see you. I hear you, and I'm willing to listen to your point of view. Not for the purpose of talking over you or for persuading you into what I believe, but to just listen to you because you're entitled to your own opinion. And if I think your opinion's wrong, that's fine. And if you think my opinion's wrong, totally fine. So I did send out an email newsletter about this, and I ended it with, you know, if you disagree, step to the front of the line. That's something that Charlie always said. So this one's for Charlie. If you disagree, email me Kate the socialite.com because my goal is to hear you out, not to argue with you. All right, so those two things out of the way. I actually realized that since doing this podcast all the way back in 2018, I've never actually shared how I got here. Now you might be like, okay, well, where's here? You're sitting in your home office. Did you really go that far? I mean, I kind of did, and it was all of God, because there's no way I could have done this without him. But I want to share this because I was interviewed by two other podcasts recently, and they were asking me about my origin story, and it. It helped impacted some people. So I guess I just want to share it here too. When I started my business in 2014, I. I didn't know what I was doing. I thought, well, I guess I'll be a writer, because I'm naturally gifted in writing. I got a book published when I was 17. No, I'm not going to tell you the title of it, Cringe. But still, it did get published. Not self published, by the way. And in 2014, I just knew there was a need for good writers, but I didn't know anything about marketing, that type of business, and I actually really hated marketing. Now, you guys have definitely heard that part before. What you might not have heard is that I worked for a serial entrepreneur during this time. He was kind of like a real life Daddy Warbucks. I mean, he had the bald head, tall stature, he was a very wealthy man. He had homes in Boston and la, and actually one north of where I am in Wisconsin. And one of his friends walked past me when I was working at Menards, which is kind of like a Home Depot or a Lowe's. And I was still in college, and this guy was like, you looking for a job? You should work for my friend. And I was like, I'm not necessarily looking for a job. I'm just trying to graduate and then figure out my life. But yeah, so I applied, I got the job. And when this man Robert hired me, he was like, okay, well, tell me what you want to do. And I was like, well, aren't you the boss? You're supposed to tell me what to do. And he said, yeah, well, I, you know, have like 80 different companies and you can kind of do whatever you want to do. And that was really weird to me. I'd never had that kind of freedom before, and basically it ruined me for working for anybody else. I did have some other jobs after that. As I was continuing to grow my business. I had side jobs, but that one really put the entrepreneurial spirit in me. And I was like, yes, I want to run my own business. I have no idea what I'm doing. So when he offered me a promotion and wanted me to move out to Boston, I said, no, I'm. I'm staying in Wisconsin. I'm getting married, starting a business. And, you know, he was happy for me, but he was like, oh, but, like, it would just be so good to have you. And I was like, yes, I know, but I think I can do this. And then I started my business, and I was like, I can't do this. It's so hard. But from then to now, and, Lord willing, in the future, the before and after story is nothing short of amazing. Because you can run a business even if you don't know what you're doing. You have to do a lot of hard work to figure it out. And it wasn't without its challenges. I wanted to give up many times. I was not born into wealth. I was not born into tech. I was born. I didn't have a smartphone until I was about 20. I grew up just outside of an Amish community. I was homeschooled preschool through 12th grade. I come from a domestic abuse situation. So it was. You know, I wanted to leave home, but I couldn't. I was afraid for the safety of my family. There was so much that I had to work through internally in order to run a successful business, because it became quickly apparent that the complex ptsd, the huge blow it did to my confidence, all of that came through in how I ran my business and how I presented myself and how I positioned my services. And all it did was make me a target for people who knew they could push me around or for people who knew that I just really didn't believe in what I had to offer. And I was told again and again, you've got to believe in yourself. You've got to believe in yourself. But I was like, I. I'm so broken right now. There's nothing left to believe in. And. And the truth is, I didn't get anywhere by believing in myself. I had nothing left. I had to understand that God put me in that position. He called me to it, and he was going to equip me to do it. And I think that is the biggest lie that people have to overcome in business. They have to overcome the lie that they have all the answers. They have to overcome the lie that they just have to believe in themselves enough. There is no amount of belief in yourself that will help you. They're all temporary fixes. And, you know, I had to. I had to learn that the hard way. Even though I grew up knowing. Knowing about God and knowing that, okay, he has a plan for me, I was still like, no, I can bootstrap this. I can figure it out. And of course, there was a lot of figuring it out. But then there's also the blessing, which is something I had no control over. And a lot of it had to do with me cleaning up my mindset, letting go of my pride. And that's something that I had to learn over and over again. Because that pride and that control freak nature that a lot of us business owners tend to have was. Was crippling. It was crippling because I was like, all of this could be gone in an instant. Everything that I air quotes have worked so hard for could be gone in an instant if I make one wrong move. And, oh, my goodness, that's a lot of pressure to live under. Especially when, you know, I got married, my husband joined the business, started having babies. I was like, okay, there is a lot riding on this. And. And that's when God told me, hey, I gave you this business so that you could steward it. That's all. I didn't give it to you so you could worry about it. And that kind of put me in my place. Who am I to worry about it? So I say to you, if you're worried about your business, whether you're worried about its future success or you're experiencing a lull in your business, it does nothing but negative things to worry. Someone recently told me that worry is a prayer for something bad to happen. And it's so true. And the Bible says again and again, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. But we have to be constantly reminded of that because it's our tendency to worry. But the thing is, paranoia is just control wrapped in good intentions. So my business journey had to involve every part of me. My mind, my soul, my body, Lots of late nights. That was okay. But the journey to getting here hasn't been easy. And I'm grateful for it because people who launch a business and then never have to work hard to get clients a day in their life or, you know, all the projects come easily. And the partnerships come easily. Uh, they do eventually have to learn these lessons, but it's when things start to fall apart after they've been coasting for a decade or more. And for some people, that is their journey. But my, my word of warning to any of you is, first of all, if business is slow or you just started, don't try to do it on your own strength. You'll never be enough. You won't. That said, you could be called to this and you could have an extremely successful business. And to those of you who have ex that you've seen success right away in business, I would recommend that you not get too full of yourself and that you realize that the marketing has to happen at some point. The financial management has to happen if you want this to continue. I do often think of the people who win the lottery. They win millions upon millions of dollars taking them from rags to riches. But if you look at those same people, a few years later, they are back to the regs because they squandered their money. They didn't know how to handle it. And that means the problem wasn't it wasn't the money, it was them. I've had to learn this. Many of you have to learn this. And it's not easy. And that's why mindset is so important. We have to get out of our own way. And going back to what I mentioned earlier, the High Point panel that I'll be on, we're going to talk about mindset issues and how they can really make your marketing easy or they can slow down your business growth. And it's the thing that a lot of people don't want to work on. I want to work on my mindset. I just want to go make money. Well, there are a lot of things that happen before you get to the money part. So I hope that you will join us for, for that panel at High Point. Okay, so I do have another announcement to make. As you guys know, we have Socialite Vault, which is a place where you can log in and grab email newsletters that are tailored for the high end luxury home industry as well as blog posts. And up until recently, we've had to have us or you manually modify each one to make it sound like you send it out. And it worked well. It has worked very well since we started doing it in 2016. But now we've kicked it up a notch. Our content will always, always be written by humans. And in addition to that, we have incorporated AI so that you can pick any blog post, any Newsletter and automatically have it refined to match your unique brand voice as well as any other changes you might want made to it. This happens in seconds, but it always comes from content that was human written or human generated. And the reason we are so committed to not having AI write the marketing content is because as cool as AI is, it's not the same as having people with experience marketing in the home industry actually create the content. The AI can only work with the information that it curates. It really does not think for itself. And I've played around with it. I'm like, okay, write a newsletter or chatgpt and it will write fluff content. It will repeat the same thing over and over, but word it differently. It's really good at rewording things, which is why it's helpful for applying brand voice, for example. But when it comes to original ideas, it's just not doing it. With Google's recent core updates in March and July of this year, 2025, Google is prioritizing content that shows authority, genuine authorship, and true helpfulness. And merely telling ChatGPT to go write a blog post about the remodeling process doesn't cut it anymore. You might have noticed that your website traffic dropped off this summer, and it doesn't mean you were doing anything wrong, but it does mean those core updates are affecting you. They're affecting everyone. And people have to start blogging differently in order to make it in the SEO world. Now, they made those changes because there was such an influx of cheap AI created blog content. And then of course, there are plenty of spam filters out there that will catch AI generated newsletter or email content. So it's very important that we remain genuine. And because we are committed to that, we wanted to just make it faster and easier. So we are incorporating AI into the vault and it will be available in October. So I believe, yeah, you're, you're watching this in October, so it's likely available now. If you don't see it on my website, then just contact me and you could get to be part of the beta program, which may or may not involve a month free. We'll see. But I encourage you to go to Kate the socialite.com look under services. You'll see our ongoing marketing plans and then the AI that will instantly refine any blog or newsletter in your brand voice. We plan to do the same with our lead magnet templates as well, just to make the process so much faster and easier. Okay, so that's another update. Now switching gears to the more personal side. Of things. I know I'm kind of all over the place here. This is my first podcast recording this since I went on maternity leave. So I had my third baby, a little boy named Silas, on June 13, and he is such a dream. He is the easiest baby I've ever had. He is so charming and so chubby and cute. His delivery was not easy, and it has pretty much solidified. Like, no more babies. I'm done. My body really can't do this anymore. It was my third home birthday. And, you know, on one hand, I. I do mean it when I say I have had beautiful births. I have had three wonderful home births. I was never transferred to a hospital. But with this third one, there were more complications than I would have liked, and it. It was traumatizing, I hate to say, and I don't. I don't like to say that, because I. I want every woman to feel empowered to have a home birth if that's what she wants, but, man, it was not easy. It was not easy. So I'll spare you the details, but just know that my son is healthy and well. I am healthy and well. My recovery was much better than I expected it would be, considering how everything went. And we are just so blessed to have this little guy. He happens to look exactly like his brother, who's 3 years old. They. Their birthdays are 24 hours apart. So my son, Salem turned 3, and the very next day, Silas was born. So my kids are. Are adapting nicely to having a new little brother. And my daughter Sadie is six years old, and she's in first grade, and she's. She's doing well. She's growing up way too fast for my liking. She's already talking about things that I'm pretty sure I wasn't worried about until I was a teenager. She just processes things at a whole other level. That girl could have her own podcast. Like, it's crazy. So. So that's the personal update side of things. And I think that was everything. There's just a lot. I just. I just wanted to have a chattier, more casual episode to catch you guys up on everything, because even though you probably didn't notice I was gone, I've been gone from podcasting for three months. So this is also my warmup episode. I've got to get. I've got to get sharp again. I have been working pretty much the whole supposed maternity leave I was planning to take. I took two weeks off completely after he was born, and then I just kind of went back to work, but I haven't been podcasting for a few months, so. So, yeah, here I am. I'm back, and I am looking forward to seeing you at High Point. So, without further ado, I will see you in the next episode with regular programming all about SEO and AIO and the changes that you'll need to make to meet those new standards. All right, guys, until next time, keep your marketing simple, your message clear, and I will talk to you soon.