In this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Kate Hendrickson — consultant, author, and founder of The Strategy Lane — for a wide-ranging conversation about what small business owners actually need to grow. From escaping the reactive fire-fighting trap, to building community-driven culture, to understanding your cash flow ebbs and flows, Kate brings clarity and practical frameworks from years of working inside small businesses. Listen, subscribe, and share.
Face-to-Face Still Wins: Kate’s Marketing Strategy
Kate’s approach to marketing is counterintuitively old-school: she shows up in person. Conferences, workshops, podcast appearances, one-on-one lunches. She acknowledged social media isn’t her strength and leans on others for that piece — a candid admission that resonated with the audience.
“I love getting up on a stage and sharing with groups of people, doing workshops. Those are super fun, because they’re interactive and I get to work with people.”
The Over-Tooled Problem and AI’s Double Edge
Jeremy raised a pattern he sees constantly: small businesses chasing SaaS subscriptions as solutions before they’ve done the foundational people work. Kate agreed that we’re “definitely over-tooled,” and offered a nuanced take on AI: useful as a starting point and efficiency tool, dangerous as a replacement for genuine human communication.
Her Waymo analogy was pitch-perfect — you can’t let AI just drive itself. You have to remain the driver of your own content, strategy, and brand voice.
Finding the Creative Spark in Any Industry
One of the most practical sections of the conversation covered how Kate approaches clients in unsexy niches — plumbers, irrigation companies, behavioral health clinics. Her answer: values exercises and big-dream workshops. She helps them articulate who they are as a company, who their customer is, and what they believe — then that identity work fuels everything downstream.
“Yes, they’re selling irrigation. They’re also selling who they are as people and what they believe in and how you can trust them.”
The Two Gaps in Every Business Plan
Kate named the two most common holes she finds when she enters a new client engagement: too many competing priorities, and no data mechanism to measure progress. Her fix is elegant: pick two or three focus areas, build a tracking system, then hold yourself accountable to the numbers.
“If you can narrow your focus to two or three items and have some data to look at to say, yes, I’m moving in the right direction — that is where things get really good.”
Getting Out of Reactive Mode: Kate’s Soapbox
When Jeremy handed Kate the floor, she zeroed in on something every overwhelmed business owner knows: constantly putting out fires, never working on the business because you’re always working in it. Her prescription is finding an accountability partner — a consultant, a coach, a co-owner — who will hold you to the two or three things that actually matter.
“I want to be the person behind the curtain, nudging you along and holding you accountable to the things we’ve identified are most important in your business.”
Cash Flow Strategy: Know Your Ebbs and Flows
Kate shared a client example that stuck: a business spending wildly on Google and Facebook ads with no attribution model — no idea if the ads were driving a single client. When they pulled back on spend, client count stayed flat. The ads had been doing nothing. She also walked through seasonal cash flow management for service businesses as a model for planning around your own revenue rhythms.
Team Culture, Incentives & the Johnny Camacho Story
The final stretch of the episode covered team building, one-on-ones, incentive structures, and why pizza doesn’t replace wages. Jeremy shared the memorable story of Johnny Camacho — an invaluable employee who was cut to reduce “human resource costs,” sent churn through the roof, and had to be rehired at a raise. Kate’s response was simple: “He’s worth it — that’s why.”
Kate’s case for one-on-ones and bonus structures centers on ROI: retain your team and you stop constantly onboarding and retraining. That efficiency shows up on the bottom line even if you never directly measure the people value.
“If you don’t necessarily see the benefit in that people connection, you can see the benefit in the ROI.”
— Kate Hendrickson
🎙 Listen & Subscribe
Full episode at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com. Connect with Kate at kate-hendrickson.com | LinkedIn | Instagram @kwhendrickson.
