Kathryn Rose WINs by Asking Experts for Advice

In 2008, Kathryn Rose went from Wall Street power broker to being an unemployed new mother and a caregiver for a sick parent almost overnight.

Unable to take on a full time role, she reached out to her large network and asked what they needed help with.   Someone asked her if she could help them rank on the front page of Google.

Like a boss, Kathryn said of course - then set out to learn what SEO was.  She didn't have time to read books or take courses, she needed an answer faster than that.  She found an expert and paid them for their time.   Two weeks later she had a new marketing practice and a happy first client. 

In this episode of WIN, Kathryn shares how that idea fueled her latest business venture - a platform that connects business experts in different disciplines to business owners who need a bit of advice from an expert. 

One of the things fueling Kathryn's passion for her new business is the fact that over 80% of women business owners are solopreneurs with less than 100,000 in revenue.   With a lack of time and resources, there aren't many ways to get reliable advice at reasonable prices - enter getWise and channelWise - find an expert and "pick their brain" for an hour. 

Get ready to laugh and learn today on WIN!  Carrie Richardson, partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting, hosts.  Ignore the part where the Yeti microphone and extension arm falls on the floor.  

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

 Good afternoon. I am your host of WIN today.

My name is Carrie Richardson and I am one half of Richardson and Richardson Consulting. And with me today is Katherine or Kitty Rose. We don't actually call her Kitty Rose, and I think that's a shame, but back in the day, Her name was Kitty, but now it's Katherine because we're grownups.

It's sad. Welcome to WIN, Katherine, how are you doing?

today? Thanks. Great, and thanks so much for having me, Carrie.

Oh, it's a pleasure. I we were just saying before we were recording that we've been in the same industry for 10 years and we've never bumped into each other in an event, which is amazing considering that it's such a small community.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to finally be connected with you. Thanks. And I'm looking forward to learning a little bit more about your new venture. Kathyrn founded. Get Wise, which is a technology platform that connects small business owners with experts on a on demand or one-on-one per call appointment basis for a flat fee.

I got to take a little bit of a look at it while we were preparing to record the podcast today, but tell me a little bit about how that opportunity came to you. How did you, decide that was where you were gonna go? 

It it's been a journey like with a lot of folks starting their new businesses and things like that.

And so for me, my journey started back in 2007, the mortgage market was melting down and I was working on Wall Street at the time and I was also eight and a half months pregnant with my first child. And when everything fell apart they shut our division. And I was, as I said, I was expecting my first child, and then unfortunately, my mom had a brain aneurysm that left her paraplegic.

So in three months, I lost my job. I had a brand new baby, and I had to take care of my mom. And so I called all my brokers and friends. I've been in sales my whole career, and I said I can help you with sales training or marketing or whatever. And they said, you know what, we really, we want our websites to come up on the first page when someone searches Google.

And I told my top client no problem, I'll get back to you in two weeks. And so the problem was, I didn't even know it was called searching and optimization. I knew nothing. And so it was a problem, but I always deliver. So I was like, how am I gonna get back to this guy in two weeks? So I went and I, everybody wanted me to take their course or read their book, and I was like, if I could just find someone to show me I'm I'm pretty smart, I could figure this out.

And so just a random Craigslist search for like at the time and s e o tutoring or something I wrote and I found this guy. I paid for his time and in two weeks I got my first paying client. And then from then I just parlayed that into, I was a consultant, I wrote a bunch of books. I started speaking added social media to my, suite of services, and then, Started consulting with some telecom companies and some IT companies.

And then in 2012, my daughter was born. And right after that, I was presented with this opportunity to go run sales for a software company that was the very first through partner marketing automation company for the channel. And I had I've been tangentially tied into the channel, but.

Not fully immersed in it. And so that was like my first role. And so I, I loved it I did very well. We built the company up and we sold it. And at that point I was like, what am I gonna do with my life? I, don't know if I wanna go get another job or whatever. And my husband said making money's your superpower.

Go figure out how to do it for yourself. And through those years, one of the things that I, really embraced and I was so blessed with an incredible network of people when, like I said, when everything kind of the bottom fell out, all those people said, we'll hire you, Catherine, for whatever you can do.

You know what I mean? If you wanna, if you tell me you can do s e o, I believe you. And and so I just really I, built and I really embraced networking and building up a huge network. And so people were always asking me, oh, can you connect me with so and so and and I finally was like I, of course I would love to, but after a while like that, pick your brain.

Not only is it gross if you think about it, but if I. Only spent all my time on pick your brain calls. Like I wouldn't make any money. And so I thought if I could match these people together and help small businesses and there are some stats where women own small businesses, particularly 88% of them are under a hundred thousand in revenue, and about 90% of them are solopreneurs, wearing a ton of hats. And I was like if I could just provide them with what I got. Where I had someone just, tell me what to do or show me what to do, like the next level, then I could help them like move through and maybe help them grow. So that's where we started in, in in, 2019, in November and 2019 we, launched get Wise and and yeah.

And from there it's just been a, it's been a journey. We have about 2000 experts in 26 countries on that side. And then a couple of years ago I, say that the channel's like Hotel California you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I still spoke at the channel events and I've had a lot of great relationships and my channel friends, like Janet Shines, and Frank Armandi and Eric Simpson, they said can you launch one of these for the channel?

And I was like, I don't know why I never thought of it. So, we did we went into beta in I think it was November of 2022. And we are now in our full, fully launched in March of 2023 and headed to channel partners and really excited about all, what's to come. So you're 

Having your debutante ball Yes.

Channel partners in May. Exactly. And that's, in Las Vegas from the 1st of May to the 4th of May if memory serves. Yes. And are you taking sales meetings while you're there? Are you gonna talk to experts? Can people book some time with you to learn more about how they might get listed on your platform or, how they could best take advantage of.

Think about a 50 minute time period, and that's how much you can book through the channel wise platform. How would you structure a call with an expert so that you could maximize this? Like you're, gonna spend some money to go talk to an expert. Yeah. How do you prepare for that call so that you can get the most from that 15 minute period?

I, yeah, that's great. So when, you do book a call with one of our experts, we do send you like a like a list of what you can do to prepare. And really it's coming into the, discussion with anytime you're doing like spot coaching or mentoring, it's usually to solve like a specific problem.

So I take calls all the time, cuz as I mentioned, I've been in sales for over 25 years in enterprise. And so typically it's, not so where are you from? There's no a rapport building. It's I have a sales meeting coming up at the end of the week and I want you to review my deck, or I want to do a mock sales call with you, or I, take a fair amount of like startups calls and oftentimes startups are started by like, usually a technical person who doesn't know anything about sales and so they're like, Hey, I have a meeting next week, and there are.

Four of four people gonna all top people, what do I do? How do I structure it? Where do I go with this meeting? And so those are the kinds of things. So usually it's like I'm trying to solve a specific challenge. Sometimes I uncover things though, like when they say to me, oh I'm I, wanna talk to this company, but I don't know how to get in there.

I took one a couple weeks ago where the. The founder was saying I'm just not getting any traction. And I said you're, selling to the wrong person. This isn't your market. And so those are some of the things that we uncover on these calls.

And just heard recently from her that it's, going much, better and she's growing much faster because she has abandoned this idea of this one customer segment that really wasn't her customer, right? So it's little things like that. 

Yeah, I'm trying to, I'm going through the list of the people.

I know a lot of the people on there. Some of them actually have been guests on WIN. And then I was thinking like, who are the people in the channel that I would want to book an hour outlet I would pay to book an hour with just to pick their brain. Jay McBain. Yeah. Jay McBain. A hundred percent. I would like good friend of mine.

An hour of Jay's 

time. Yep. Yep. He's coming on too. Yeah, he's a good friend. 

Who's not on there that you want to be on there? 

Who, who's on there that I want to be on there?

No who's, 

not on there yet that you want 

to be on there? Jay, obviously. Jay would be on there will, be coming on there. There I'm very, again, very blessed in the fact that I have a lot of really good connections. And we've we've, built the, network up.

To, to this level right now so people can can, take advantage of the ones that we have on there. And we have a lot more that are coming that are coming on as we as we go. But I use my expert network all the time. I just, I made a call last week with one of our copywriters because I had to like, redo my my Opening sequence my email marketing sequence.

And so I wrote all the copy, but it's always nice to be able to bounce it off of someone because we're we're a small bootstrap startup. I, have very large enterprise customers, so again blessed and work my work, work really hard to, do that. But I don't have a C M O and a a full marketing team.

I have a really great team. But it's not like I have anyone to sit next to me and bounce ideas off of. So for me, it works really well and I pay for my calls too. There's no free lunches. 

One of the things that I wanted to ask you about was partner enablement. So you've got this great platform featuring experts from the channel that obviously have been in the managed services space for some of 'em for.

Much longer than I have 30 plus years. Like Eric Simpson's been in the channel for, I dunno, since I was born. I think 

so. Don't, tell him you said that. We'll keep that between us. We'll edit that part out. 

But there are some fantastic people on this platform. And we talked before, we recorded today, and you said that one of the opportunities that you had identified was partner enablement, where vendors would be able to provide access to their to their best or most active partners where they would have access to these experts at a set per call price.

So tell me a little bit about how a vendor would engage with you in order to provide that service to their partners. 

One of the things when I ran sales for that through partner marketing automation platform it was a fantastic idea fi get, an easy way for your partners to get your marketing material to push it out to their customers.

And it's still a fantastic idea and it works really, well. Challenge you have is you provide all this incredible content and mar email marketing campaigns, but a lot of the ch. Channel folks out there still don't have like really good email lists or they don't they, just they're, still trying to figure out the business of doing the business.

And, there's nothing like wrong with that. It's just all of us are, just juggling things, right? Because a lot of the channel are small businesses under 10 employees, right? Under 20, under 10 employees. And What I say is that like it's great for you to PR to provide those, materials, but you still have to support their business because one of my philosophies is if you help people do more business, they'll do more business with you, because that's what I've always found when I was selling, I was never the lowest price.

I never felt that price pressure. I know you don't either, right? You, your business is very exclusive, right? Because you're like, Hey, look I'm, worth it, right? So I, I ne we were never the lowest price. We always delivered better. We always did all those things. And I feel the same way about this opportunity.

It's like we wanna make sure that partners get the help that they need. You provide them with partner portals. Less than 17% of partners even log into portals on a regular basis. So if you wanna change the level of engagement, you have to change the engagement model. So how can I get them to come and stay?

I can get them to come and stay by providing them time with an expert that can help them like, Figure out their email list or or help them get, more sales and now I'm in your portal. And they're gonna say why don't you use the, vendor's content? You know what I mean? The other side of the things we do is in terms of activation of partners, So a lot of vendors will contract with us, and we do, we'll provide one of our experts to do a a, specific like topic.

And ask me anything or a webinar or something. So there's a bunch of different things that we do that, that can really en enable, activate, and and really educate and, give them the tools that they need to go farther, faster. 

There's off the top of my head, there's so many more people I know that  should be on there, right?

Somebody that's can help you figure out a specific challenge in your psa, for example, right? Hey, how come I can't make ConnectWise do this? You can actually, you just need somebody else to do it for you. So there's gotta be so many opportunities like that, and I'm really excited to see where it goes and how, people start taking advantage of it.

Honestly, that's a big problem that I've identified in the channel, is that entrepreneurs aren't investing in their own. Education very often, right? Like they're, not working with coaches or consultants. They, might have a, platform or a program that they paid for and that they follow for marketing, for example, but they're really not learning how to think strategically about their business or they're not learning how to manage their books, or they're not learning tax strategy, or they're not figuring out how they're gonna retire, right?

There's so many things that we could be learning from experts. I was just saying this earlier today, if I had learned more about finance in 2016, an hour long call with a financial planner in 2016, and I'm retired right now, yes. But I didn't do that. Hundred percent, hundred. And if somebody had said Hey, would you pay $500 to sit down and talk to a financial planning expert in 2016?

And I'd be like, no. I can figure this out on my own. How hard can it be? Yeah. Turns out pretty hard. Yeah, 

exactly. That's the thing. It turns out that it's pretty hard. And sometimes what happens is people will come to me at the last, they're just, they're like, I'm done. I just wanna talk to someone.

And that's where we come in, and with particularly in the business space, it's One, what happens is once they make one call, then they're like, oh, now I have a problem with this. And I know they they, come back. They come back, which is really great. And it's, just, again, just that like little push that can get you, and sometimes it's building confidence.

A lot of the sales calls that I take, it's look, you can do this. You don't have to have some kind of special superpower to go sell something. You know what I mean? I'm like,

you don't have to have some special superpower to go sell something, 

no, and that's. That always surprised me, and maybe that's because cold calling came so easily to me, but I didn't be, I didn't start cold calling because I was dreaming about my amazing career in telemarketing.

Like I needed a job and you can always get a job telemarketing, and it's not hard to do. It's just very, I. Monotonous and like you have to have the tolerance to be able to do the same thing the same way over and over again all day. Yeah. And then the, almost like the, intuitiveness to know when you can tweak it and where do you tell the joke?

And you've only got a couple of minutes and I think I was selling like long distance, I sold all kinds of different stuff and it was one call closing and it was like old school telemarketing back in the day. And yeah, it just. Why I didn't stay in telemarketing was I couldn't understand that. If I could hit my number in three hours, why do I have to stay for eight?

I don't disagree with you. Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. I'll just start my own. Like it was years, later that I started my own thing, but it was like, I don't wanna do this for eight hours. If my numbers are good enough at hour three, why don't you just let me go home? Yeah. It's no, cause we want you to work more.

And I'm like, yeah I, understand that, but I don't wanna do that. 

Yeah no, you're right. I think a lot of people start businesses either by design or by circumstance. And for me it was by circumstance. I, just was, I was thrown in the deep end of the pool and I was like, I better learn how to swim.

And the same thing like, I didn't have my service back in in 20 20 2007, 2008, nine, when I first started. I made a ton of mistakes and I think that if I had something like this where I could, because you could, you mentioned like courses and stuff. I can't tell you how many courses I've purchased over the years that are still sitting there.

I. Because it's, it feels like a slog. Like you look and you're like five hours of content oh my God, my brain and if I just was able to talk to somebody, then I'd be like, I can do this. Sometimes you just need that confidence that you're on the right track. Or someone who's been there, done that says, listen, I fell right into that same hole and I'm gonna help you get out.

And so that's really more of what we do. We don't sell expert advice. We sell. We sell help and hope. And and really we're, in service like PE people. We people say to me all the time, like, Why don't you why don't you charge more? Why don't you take more percentage?

And I'm like, look we're, fine. We're gonna make the money and we're gonna provide the service and we're gonna help people do better business, more business, and we're gonna be fine. You know what I mean? And, that's where we, really, I think it's, our philosophy is different. It's look if, people get value out of what we're doing then you know that's what we're here for. 

There's so many so many. We talked about this a little earlier, about like people picking your brain. Yeah. And if all you do are take, pick your brain calls, you're never going to make any money. So this is actually a very nice way for people to say Hey, do you wanna pick my brain?

You're welcome to, and you can click that button right there. And hey, me for my time. Yeah, I don't mind giving away time but I've also I sold my business a couple of years ago. I have time to give away now when I was trying to build my business, like with my hair on fire all the time.

And people wanted to ask me just a quick question about telemarketing. Yeah. It's this is my job, right? This is you could hire us, like we can coach you, we can train you, we can build your program for you. No, I just wanna ask you a question. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I wanna ask you a question about my IT network.

Yeah. You answered that question, and then I'll answer your total marketing 

question. No, agreed. And it's all, especially when you're in that space, it's all you have is what's in your head. And if I give it away for free, but with our platform some experts do give their time away for.

The other thing is our experts can decide to take their portion of the fee or donate it to our charity fund, and we, support underrepresented founders and and career climbers that might just need maybe an extra comp tea certification or an extra, and they can and we've we've given over a hundred thousand dollars away on the getaway side, and we're hoping to do the same thing on the channel wise side. And I think for the experts that are on there, again, some of them like really Karl Palachuk. For example, like he, he's look I'm, coming on, but I don't wanna charge for my time.

Fine, good. Like he wants to good people. He's really, it's amazing. He's amazing guy. And and then there are other folks who are like, listen, I if I'm gonna be here and give like, you said, like 50 minutes of my time schedule 50 minutes of my time, I wanna make sure that person could afford my services later.

So it really just runs the gamut. And there's nothing wrong with either. Personally, I don't believe free is a strategy, but Carl's doing it more out of like an altruistic side of things, rather than thinking that someone's gonna hire him for his a hundred thousand dollars retainer. You know what I mean?

At the end of that, At the end of that call. Which they could. But it's really it really the, experts run the gamut, but what we try to find is you you can't apply to be an expert. You can't pay to be an expert. You have to be invited. And because I, we want the best of the best, we want people that I.

If I were to call someone for advice, like I would call Jennifer Bleam, honestly, for like sales advice or or Kris Blackmon, we were talking about Kris Blackmon for advice on content and community and there's all these different folks on there that I would call personally if I needed.

If I needed help. That's what we're trying to do is we're, trying to give people the access and what I used to say was like, democratize access. Because if, I came to somebody through LinkedIn and said, Hey, will you, can I pick your brain or can I ask you a quick question?

Once in a while that's fine, but after a while it gets a little bit daunting for that, person to have to say no. So now they're saying, Hey, like you said I, don't, this is how I book my time, and this is why, because a portion of my fee goes to charity, whatever it is.

And so that's how they it makes it more comfortable to say no, because here's an alternative. No, 

I love the idea. I think it's great. I'm glad we got to talk about it today. I'm glad I got to go on a little tour through it. And I'm gonna be interested in seeing where it goes, not just for the channel, but your expert series.

My first thought around that was like, Ooh, how do you apply that to the startup founder community? All these software and tech founders that are trying to learn how to fundraise, for example. Like there's gotta be, like, if you could ask a. Venture capitalist questions on how to like, to look at your pitch.

Yeah. And donate money to charity. That would 

be phenomenal. We have some of those. So we have a few, we have a couple m and a people on there, PE people and we, are bringing on some VCs and angels and stuff and just, like we're, what we're waiting to see with the channel is like what where are there pain points that maybe we haven't hit?

And we mentioned the Channel Partners Conference. So we're standing up the very first live coaching cafe at Channel Partners Expo, and we have over 36 coaches. So Jennifer and Eric and Karl and Amy Babinchuk and like the whole like who's, who of the channel kind of thing are going to be in there giving advice one-on-one at the conference.

And we we stood it up and everyone showed up and we've, already have almost 30% of all the slots booked already. And, it's it's. We're still out a bit from the conference. We're gonna see how that goes, but that's, and then we've been contacted by a couple of other conferences to say, can you bring this here?

Because we've really we, really focused on the promotion and and, really giving people that access that they want. We're excited to see and and like I said, out of that, people will, tell us we're gonna hear from the people, from even vendors cuz we have a fair amount of coaches in the cafe that are, that they work on channel programs and MDF management and stuff.

And so we'll be able to hear from both sides of wait, I need an expert in, like you said, vc, so I'll go find those. We really wanna solve the problems that need to be solved. 

No, that's wonderful and I hope it does further your mission of supporting small business owners, women specifically.

Yeah. The one thing I wanted to ask you before we end today was you've been in sales your whole career. 

Yeah, actually I started out in marketing because my, dad ran his own financial services agency and he was always saying to me, oh you'll be good in sales, but of course you know it, you always have that, you evoke that image of the used ca car salesman, the slick back hair stuff.

And I was like, I don't wanna be in sales. And then I graduated college and I was in marketing and. I was like I saw the sales people after a while it was like, you realize to be revenue generating is where you need to be. And I always liked people and I always had a really good relationship with people.

And I was like if you don't look at sales is is coercing someone or getting someone to buy something. It's buyers buy from people, buyers you're solving someone's problems. Once you reframe it, you're like, Hey, I can do this.

And, I have, and I've I, don't know, sold hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street. I was global accounts for WorldCom. Yes. That's how old I am. And but I've always been a top performer and not because it's some like big gold star I wanted. It was more of I like doing it and I might as well sell more people if I like doing it.

So 

you mentioned that you had a, set of books that you would give as clients. Oh, yeah. Gifts as opposed to taking them out to dinner. You would help them get better at selling. And do you wanna tell us what those books are so people could go and read them? 

Yeah, so I mean they're oldies but goodies with Jeff Gitomer books.

So it's a little red book of selling, I think it's a little yellow book of Yes. And then there's a little black book of questions. And for me it was always like, again, that same philosophy that if I helped my brokers do more business, then they would want me in their office. And, selling to them and working with them versus I take 'em out to dinner cuz I've got stuff to do.

Like I I've got kids at home and so do they. I don't, you probably found this too, in your sales career, that after a while it's like you're, the clients that you attract, mirror your own life. And so these people were top, performers, again, hundreds of millions of dollars a year and, all that.

And they wanted to go home to their kids. They didn't wanna go out to dinner with me, which I was fine with they would've if I asked them, but I was like How can I help you do more business? And so I would drop them off a 4, 4, 4 set of Jeff' Little books.

They, he, everything's a little book of something a four set of these books. And they just raved about them because it was hopefully helping them get another client, 

oh, that's awesome. So that'll be in the show notes. So if you're listening to the podcast on your platform of choice today, in the show notes, if you wanna go check out the transcript, there will be links to the books that Catherine's referenced and the websites that Catherine has built for access to those experts.

So if you wanna book some time with a channel expert, you can go to channel wise.com. All right. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks for joining us today. It was really great having you on here. It was good to finally meet you and I can't wait to hear the feedback from the cafe setup from Channel 

Partners.

I am, I'm really excited about it and people seem to be really excited about it. And, I'm and I'm, hoping you'll be able to join us on the platform. Carrie would love to have you. And No pressure No pressure. I'm gonna put. But but seriously, I think that we're, I think we're all in that same you, do the podcast, you do the two seats, like you're in service too.

So I think that I'm just so glad that I was able to finally meet you too and and, be able to help in whatever way I can. Your audience too. 

Wonderful. Everybody have a great weekend and Catherine, have fun in Las Vegas. 

Thank you.