Kate Erickson on intentionally building a business that creates freedom and staying focused to reach your goals

Today, I'm chatting with my friend and fellow podcaster business owner, Kate Erickson, who is the heartbeat at Entrepreneurs on Fire, and an award-winning podcast with her husband, John Lee Duma, who interviews inspiring entrepreneurs. 

They are part of the HubSpot podcast network and Kate is also the host of Kate's Take where she shares the behind-the-scenes look at running a seven-figure business. And co-hosts at Nicole and Kate Can Relate, which is a podcast about the power of conversations.

We're talking about how she juggles and stays focused when she's got so many different things on the go. So many different projects that she's focusing on. We're talking about what goes into running a podcast of the size of Entrepreneurs on Fire and running a seven-figure business. 

And then we're also diving deep into goal-setting, including her process for setting goals and how she stays focused on the goals when they seem like they're just way too far away, they seem like they're not really achievable just yet. 

So Kate. You run Entrepreneurs on Fire with your husband, John Lee Duma. You host Kate's Take, and you also co-host Nicole and Kate Can Relate with our mutual friend Nicole Bald. Why do you do what you do? Like there are a lot of different things going on, so what is it that motivates you, that inspires you to keep doing what you do?

What motivates Kate

This is kind of threefold and in no particular order. So much of what I do is driven by my desire to continuously better myself growing up and even into my older age, which is just basically post-college and like corporate America and everything. I struggled a lot with confidence. I struggled with understanding that I get to choose the path of my life, and so all of these things kind of rolled into entrepreneurship and smacked me in the face, and I thought, Oh my gosh. More people need to know this. 

So that leads me to number two, which is helping other people discover that you don't have to live a life that you don't like. You don't have to be in corporate America if you don't want to be. And I know that some people love their corporate jobs, and that's great. I'm all about it. I just love helping other people discover what I discovered, which is you get to choose. 

Number three is when John and I joined together to create our business having a shared vision and then seeing the ripple effect of that vision really inspired me to just want to do, just want to keep doing what we're doing.

There is more than one path to life. You don't have to just take that corporate role and climb your way up the ladder until one day you retire and then you have all of the freedom. 

The challenge of entering the world of the unknown.

I was working at a bank and I had held this same position for about three and a half years. Mind you, this position was at the bottom of the ladder. And so I thought, you know, there is so much room for growth and I totally am all about putting your time in and working hard.

I love working hard. So I'm three and a half years in, and I'm showing up. I'm doing everything I'm supposed to. I'm overachieving, I'm an incredible employee. Like I will toot my own horn all day about my efforts at this job and one day my boss came to me with a promotion opportunity.

Yeah, the position was in Northern California. I said you know what, no problem. I will love to relocate. I really want to further my career. I want to move up the ladder. I want a promotion. And she said, Okay, you've got it, but just as a formality, we're going to go through the interview process. You're going to chat with their hiring manager about all of this stuff.

So I'm thought, totally fine. I get it. I do the interview and I'm waiting for the call that's going to offer me the promotion.

I pick it the phone and it's the hiring manager and she says, you are perfect for this job. We're so grateful for your service to this company. We love everything that you have, all your skills, and everything that has built up to this position, but we've decided to hire outside of the company. Oh, yeah, I was crushed. I was really disappointed. I was sad, I was mad. I had a lot of emotions going on over the week.

I finally got to a point where I could see a little bit more clearly, and I thought there has to be something else. And that was really the moment that I thought, I don't know what that is. I didn't really know about entrepreneurship stuff. I didn't know that people just like created their own ideas and then pursued them and were able to create a lifestyle and love what they do every day.

I knew that there couldn't just be that one way after that happened. So I promised myself that in six months I would save up enough money to quit my job without having to worry about not having a place to live. And that was my first leap into entrepreneurship.

What it takes to run a multi-million dollar business whilst simultaneously staying true to your core values, scaling within your means and satisfying the needs of your audience.

What did those first few years look like versus what it looks like now? 

Very different. So when I quit that job and started my own entrepreneurial venture, I actually did it solo. So John was working in corporate America at the time, and I thought, I'm going to take all my passions and I'm going to have people hire me to do my passions.

Again, I don’t really know how to start a business or how to set it up or what was required, or any of that. So, I mean, a few months of that looked like me with my laptop in a cafe being like, this is so strange. People aren't telling me what to do, and I don't really know what to tell myself to do.

So I guess I'll Google a lot. Because when you're first starting out, there are so many unknowns, and before you've had the experience and kind of started taking the actions. What else are you supposed to do? Right? I mean, luckily, eventually, I realised that I could join masterminds and I could start going to meetups and mixers and surround myself with other entrepreneurs who were on the same path as me, which was so incredibly powerful. But that kind of led me to the next progression. 

Fast forward a couple of years, John had started Entrepreneurs on Fire while I was at a corporate job. And then once he picked up enough momentum, the audience was growing. He started monetising the show. Coaching was his first avenue of monetisation. 

And we were on the beach one day, I'll never forget it, in Maine. And he said, What do you think about quitting your job and joining me on the team? And I thought, Oh my goodness, this is all kinds of scary. Because we were somewhat new in our relationship as a couple. We had just moved in together. He had started this business. I was working in corporate America. 

So anyhow, that’s like that first year of being entrepreneurs together and running this business together, so much of it was around me trying to figure out and uncover what I was best at, what I love doing, and how those two things combined could provide an impact for our business and for our audience.

There was a lot of figuring things out. And I think for so many of us that figuring things out is such an essential part of the process, but a lot of the time we try to skip it. We think we need to have everything figured out before we take any action. We think we need to have everything figured out otherwise if we have to figure it out along the way, it's a failure. 

Or if we have to pivot, it's a failure. But actually no. The process of figuring out, figuring it out is going to have those twists and turns, and I think that's what makes it so exciting. 

What goes into running a huge business

So our business has been through so many kinds of valleys and peaks and that whole journey. It's about the experiences and the lessons learned and the relationships and the failures and the wins and all the highs and the lows. All of that makes up your journey. And that's the fulfilling part. That's the part where you get to see the impact that you're creating, where you get to see that ripple effect where you get to hear from your audience and mess up in one place, but then come back and do it better the next time.

And that, that is really like all that has kind of come together to create where we are today, even just four years ago. Our business looked very different than it does today. We were headed down this path of more courses and more employees and more contractors and more. Because you hear so much in the online space that you know the bigger the better and you need a big team and if you want to scale, you have to do X, Y, and Z.

And we were on this trajectory where like a lot of things were working really well, so we just kept adding more and more and more. And we got to a point where we thought, Oh my goodness, this is not the business that we want to run. We don't want to manage 10 employees and we don't want to have eight contractors on retainer and we don't want to manage four different communities.

And so, getting to where we are today has been a couple of years of hiring a team and figuring out what that looks like. What does it mean to manage a team, and then launch courses, launch masterminds, host live events, become an affiliate partner for different companies, and bring on sponsors to our show?

And I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned through all of these different iterations of business that we've had is one, none of it happens simultaneously. Like we've almost had to take these, you know, start a chapter and close it before we get to the next thing by choice. Like we've recognised that we can't just go and Launch like three different things and have them be successful.

That's not really how it works. And so a lot of running the business was about listening to our audience, finding out what their biggest pain points were, were what they were asking us for. Then sitting down and saying, How are we equipped right now to be able to deliver a solution to one of these problems?

Building out an outline for whatever that solution is, doing an MVP of it and getting proof of concept by asking people to pay us money for it, and then creating. And that's how our business has been built, one of those iterations after another, but never at the same time. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of people make is they try and do like four of those things at once, right?

Breaking down the goals into small bite-sized chunks

I'm curious how you came to that decision to not continue or to stop doing more and was it one of you, like, was it you first or John first, or was it something that you both realised at the same time that you wanted to actually stop doing more and be a little bit more intentional with how you were spending your time. 

It was kind of in line with a big kind of website revamp that we were doing, and we hired a contractor who came in and thankfully, was very blunt with us about the fact that when somebody went to our website, they didn't know what to do.

There were too many options and they laid it out very beautifully in a way that just really clicked with both of us, and that made us very quickly realise that we were confusing people. We were trying to get more people to our site, but more people to our site when there's not something for them to do or when they can't find what they want or when they don't have a clear next step, it doesn't matter.

So, that was really kind of a big aha for us. I mean, it sounds simple, right? But it was at that moment that we realised, okay, we're doing this exercise to try and identify the one thing that we want people to do when they come to our website. We looked at what are the five most impactful things in our entire business and how can we double down on those five things to really like immensely embrace the 80-20 rule and it was in that moment and over the next year that we ruthlessly cut anything that did not have to do with those five core things in our business.

And that really allowed us to set our business up for the success that we're seeing today because we were able to focus on the things that we're actually moving the needle. This impact on our audience that we love doing and that we're generating revenue and that felt amazing. 

Five core things in business

So for us, it was the podcast first and foremost that's always been the foundation of our business. It was our email list because that's our direct connection with the audience that we own.

It was our affiliate relationships, our sponsorship relationships, and our physical products, which include a suite of four journals and a physical book that John published. So those were the big five for us, and they still remain the big five for us today.

How to stay focused on things and still manage different tasks

It's tough. That's an excellent point that you bring up because when you talk about them in such a broad sense like that, that could mean a million different things, right? Over the past 10 years, we've built a team very intentionally that helps us with very specific things in our business. 

So when I say the podcast and sponsorships are like one of our main focuses, what is that really results in is John recording the episodes, his personal assistant helping him upload and schedule those, having the content on our site to back up each of those episodes with show notes.

Locking in sponsored relationships with it, which is my focus, and making sure that we're delivering on those. And then follow up with our guests to see if they will show and share the show with their audience as well. So, I say podcast, but like, that's really the podcast for us. 

So I am such a huge fan of time blocking and batching and so I have like themes for my days where, you know, I know a day of the week of a certain time of the month is like my sponsorship. Fully focused on sponsorships, communicating with them for talking points, making sure that the right sponsors are in the right episodes, doing any contracts, invoicing, that kind of stuff.

And so I don't ever allow my schedule to include a lot of random different things on the same day. I have a content day, I have a podcast day, I have a sponsor day, I have a course day, and so they don't, I don't allow them to mix and mingle because I know that that is a recipe for a lack of focus, distractions, context switching, wasting time and so on. 

Process for setting goals and how does that differ between personal goals and business goals?

So whenever I'm approaching a goal, I always look at it from like how overwhelming it feels to me. And if it feels really overwhelming, then the time I give myself to accomplish that goal becomes shorter.

So the more overwhelming and complex, the shorter my timeframe becomes. And really the reason for that is it forces me to get more specific about what I'm trying to accomplish. 

How do you stay focused when they feel really far away? 

So, In 2016, John and I launched a journal called the Freedom Journal. It's literally a framework of how to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days. So, the framework of this journal is literally you doing the same things every single day to help you get closer to your goal. 

And so even my biggest goals will never extend out more than a hundred days, and I've found the most powerful thing in-kind of adopting a daily routine around your goals is not only the accountability that it gives you but also your ability to consistently check in with yourself to gauge your progress towards your goal.

What is a time when you've taken imperfect action to achieve a goal and what’s the result of it?

I'm going to give you an example of something that I'm actually living in right now. So mid-September, I went online and I Googled how many days till the end of the year, and I thought, Oh, okay. I have an opportunity if I act fast to do a 100-day goal challenge along with our 100-day flow and invite people to join me completely free. 

So, I didn't have a whole lot of time to think about it because the hundred days till the end of the year were coming up really fast. So I basically put together an outline for my intro episode, introducing this idea. 

My goal is to actually publish an episode a day for a hundred days and be in that Facebook group every single day to do a post about the topic for that day.

And whoever wants to be held accountable and be surrounded by like-minded people and you know, have access to me to chat about their goal every day can join. And it's been a really incredible journey. Like I'm learning so much. And you know, in the beginning, I'm like, a hundred days is going to be so great.

I've been podcasting for like nine years. I can do this. And. I'm realising that a hundred days in a row is a lot of podcast episodes. It's creating a lot of content and a lot of editing and a lot of post-production but I'm also learning by being in our Facebook group how impactful it is if even just one person is able to accomplish their goal from this, it will be way more than worth it. 

And I think that when we, again, kind of going back to the beginning of our chat today, that ripple effect when you realise that what you're putting out there is making such a deep impact for other people, I mean, that's why I do what I do. 

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