When you reduced staff a few years back and went back to solo-business-ing for a season - how did you take the shock to the system of “oh shit I have to do ALL of this by myself now!” I assume it forced you to just figure things out & simplify your business and then you just figured out how to get all the things done with the limited hours / bandwidth you had as ONE person?
Kate's answer
Kate's take, in a sentence or two
Kate explained that her team shrunk gradually through 2023–2024—via a mix of letting people go for culture/budget reasons and people leaving voluntarily—until she became a true one-woman show from December 2024 to May 2025. She said each time she lost a team member she initially panicked, but was repeatedly reminded that "I can handle this, I can do hard things, and I can figure stuff out," especially since her business was already heavily systematized with SOPs that made it easier to step back in. She described that solo period as a gift that forced her to simplify, drop the "rubber balls" (like social media and launching), and clarify what she truly needed to delegate versus keep, which now informs how she runs her team of three contractors today.