“This is going down as one of the best decisions of the year!”
See how a VIP Brand Messaging Intensive continues to fuel this design business’ growth a year later…
Like many small business owners, Katie Kath had reached a plateau when it came to her marketing.
Business was good. Their Instagram following was solid, they’d been featured in key publications, and they had some exciting business plans on the horizon.
And yet…something felt…off.
With a new website in the works, Katie found herself getting seriously bogged down trying to hone their messaging and capture their story.
And like most business owners, she felt like she was spinning her wheels. Never quite capturing the right words to do their family business justice.
Luckily, a bit of serendipity connected the two of us — and we partnered on a Brand Messaging Intensive to clarify Jkath’s marketing language and realign their messaging.
A year later? I checked in to see how things were going. And even I was blown away by the results.
Take a peek at my conversation with Katie Kath below:
Hey Katie! So excited to reconnect and hear more about your experience.
Let’s start with “the before”. Can you look back to the state of your branding and messaging before you started working with me?
It was very scrappy. Very DIY. And not very intentional in terms of who we are. I think it was more aspirational in terms of who we want to be. There was a disconnect there, and it didn’t always feel authentic.
It just felt like really pretty language, but it didn’t feel like ours.
It was me doing it all. We’re a small business. And I knew we needed an outside perspective. It was hard for me to put words around, ‘What are we really good at?’ It felt like bragging instead of being just really clear about who we are and what we’re great at as a company. As a team, we just weren’t nailing it.
Was there a particular moment of frustration where you knew you had to say ‘enough.’ Where you knew you had to fix this?
We had just made a huge investment into our cabinet shop, and we knew we needed to elevate our marketing language to do it justice.
We needed our website to hold up to that space. And the language just wasn’t doing that.
So you’d outsourced your website design — what was holding you back from outsourcing your copy?
Honestly, it never occurred to me that I could hire a copywriter. In my mind, I needed to figure this out on my own. It felt like, ‘How is someone else going to write this for me? They don’t know anything about our company.’
[Author aside: I (Katie Boyce) happened to be on Jkath’s email list. One Sunday, I hit "reply” on a weekly newsletter featuring a really lovely blog post. I had no idea who was actually writing these, but wanted to say, “Well done, internet stranger!”. And the rest, as they say, is history. Ok, back to Katie Kath’s story below…]
But I got your email - just a compliment, out of the blue - and I saw your email signature. And I thought, ‘Ok, this person actually knows, she’s paying attention to my brand.’ And that was enough for me to reach out. And I said, ‘I’m drowning over here. I need help. I don’t even know if you can help. Or if this is a fit. Or if it’s in my budget…’
It was so serendipitous!
Talk to me about those initial conversations. How did you go from “ok, this might be a possibility” to “Yes, this is what I need.”
Oh, I saw the value right away. I realized this is going to take me beyond just our website. I’m going to get some key messaging that we can plug-and-play in different company bios, maybe social media posts.
And you were super transparent about the process, about the pricing, from the onset. And that’s huge. That’s how we do business, too. That’s really important.
Another thing that was appealing to me about this offer, since I have been solely in control of all of [our marketing and content], it still allowed me to take what you provided and use what worked for me. I still had a hand in it, and that felt approachable. I felt like, ‘if nothing else, I’ll at least get some critical language and some creative juice to get me unstuck.’”
You’ve mentioned feeling ‘stuck’ a few times now. What had you stuck? What did that feel like?
I just couldn’t seem to sell our creative ability. To articulate who we are and what we do. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to stand on a stage and say, ‘This is what we do. This is what we’re good at.’
As we develop our brand, it comes with a higher price tag.
“[Before], we were still in a place where we were getting inquiries from people who wanted to price shop — who wanted to get three bids and compare them. And we’re never going to win that game. That’s not who we are. It’s Folgers vs. Starbucks.
So I was really struggling with, ‘This is where we want to go. How do I change who our audience is? How do we speak to the right people earlier on?’”
We’d hired someone earlier on to help with a few pieces, and it kind of worked, but nobody had really been able to solve this for me.
Tell me a bit about the end result — how have you been able to use your Brand Messaging Manual in your business?
“Oh, I got SO much more than I anticipated. And we’ve used it in so many ways.”
I mean, I was able to hand it all over to our web developer and just say, ‘Look, take what you need from this and plug it into the website where you think it fits.’ So it became much more turnkey than I expected.
We’ve since written some internal documents — including our roadmap for our team — about who we are, where we’re going, our goals, etc. We’ve used it in job descriptions as we’ve grown our team.
And we just did a 4-page sell sheet to outside clients that are looking to hire us for cabinetry only. It gave us some great language to use for that service, too.
I love hearing that! How does your business feel as a whole, now that you’ve more clearly defined who you are and what you do?
It just took a huge weight off my shoulders. Before, I sometimes felt like we were just mass producing renovations, and I woke up often battling with that stigma a little bit. And now that feeling is gone.
“Since we’ve launched our site with this new language, the VAST majority of inquiries are people I’m excited about, people I want to follow up with, and homes I want to be in.”
There’s a difference between ‘interiors’ and ‘custom interiors’. That kind of customization requires a specific set of talent — a keen eye for detail, craftsmanship, patience, and budget. We’re definitely not the most expensive company in town, and we don’t want to be that either. But we want to connect with the right people, and the right projects. And we are now.”
Amazing. You mentioned your Brand Messaging Manual was instrumental for your new website — has it benefited you in other ways?
“Oh, I’m accessing that information probably weekly — and it’s been almost a year.”
I was impressed by the variety, some of the messaging is saying the same thing, but in a very different way. And it’s given me a lot of different places that I can use it. That’s probably the biggest surprise. I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to use this beyond my website. But the copy is so versatile and so well-written, we use it all the time.
What do you think has been your biggest takeaway from this partnership?
I do a lot of facilitation in a local women's business group, and when I hear that creatives are struggling for content, I just say, “You should think about hiring a copywriter.”
It was that impactful.