As a certified StoryBrand guide with Murphy Marketing, Katie helps people know what to say on their websites.
She recognizes that it can be hard to stop running your business long enough to create effective messaging. But she believes your words matter.
For the past 10 years, she’s been helping organizations such as Pilot Flying J, Seen&Heard, and Help The Persecuted find the right words to express their cause and to invite others to join in.
The Challenge
“It was honestly just chaos.”
That’s how Katie described life before her BELAY VA Ari Adler. More on him later …
She was handling everything on her own: her actual deliverables, sending invoices, scheduling – only to discover that her Calendly wasn’t working half the time. Everything was on her shoulders and in order to get everything done, she had to stay up late.
We’re talking working until 3 a.m. most days.
Her other super demanding job?
Being a mother to two small children.
“We were burning the candle at both ends, like to the clinical definition,” Katie shares. “And I was just at my wit’s end.
“I needed help – and I needed help now,” she continues. “And I didn’t want to go through the interview process; I just didn’t want to do any of that. I knew about [BELAY] and it just seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel for me. I could get somebody that knew what they were doing that they could start within a month.”
A tall order, but BELAY delivered.
The Solution
So start Ari did – and Katie decided to jump in with both feet, choosing to fill gaps with trust while meeting once a week.
Her thought process?
“If BELAY trusts this person, then I’m going to trust this person,” she says. “And right out of the gate, I had him in my inbox, in my calendar, and sent every login that he would need. And it was overnight.”
And her trust paid off – quickly.
First order of business? Bringing order to her chaotic inbox.
“[He] color-coded everything,” Katie says. “So when I get into my email, I know to take care of the red things first, and then the yellow things. It’s so helpful.”
But beyond the usual suspects for a VA – email, scheduling and more – Ari proactively stepped in to bring even more order to Katie’s business.
“[Ari] had a lot of initiative,” she shares. “And so he’s always thinking of ways that we can improve our systems and make things better.”
So they started with Trello.
“He was able to see the big picture and see what the problem was and how to actually solve it – [and] not just doing tasks that I asked him to do,” Katie says.
And implementing new systems and leveraging project management platforms has worked wonders for Katie.
“I can list out the tasks that she needs to focus on [and] the projects that I’m working on that week,” Ari adds. “And it’s just a great reference point [that] you can keep going back to throughout the week as you need.”
“I finally felt like I didn’t have to think of everything,” Katie shares. “I had somebody that was helping me think of everything.”
The Results
When paired with Ari, Katie’s short-term goal was to not work at night – which she no longer does.
Check!
Long-term, she wanted to be more present in meetings, grow her business, and spend more quality time with her family.
“Having Ari [gives] me the headspace and the bandwidth to even think through things because before, it was just like, ‘I’ll have to focus on what’s coming in,” Katies shares. “‘I have to put out the fires.’ Now it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, well now we have some space to breathe and think and actually dream about what might be possible.”
Double check!