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Introduction to the Play Big Queen Podcast...
Welcome to the Play Big Queen podcast.
This is for the woman ready to lead with power, move with confidence, and own your Play Big self.
For my newly minted or late blooming, neurospicy visionary babes who are waking up to your power and unmasking your brilliance.
For the sovereign leader building success on your own terms.
I am your host, Kate Bailey.
I am the Play Big Queen.
My name is my title and a command for all women, Play Big Queen.
I invite you to claim this title for yourself and coronate your Play Big Self too, so it can serve you.
This is a space for bold embodiment, radical reclamation, unapologetic leadership, and a business that works with your wiring, not against it.
Your voice is meant to be bold and heard and your brilliance is here to be claimed.
You are already powerful.
I am in service of everyone fucking tired of the people pleasing grind.
We go deep, we get real, and we play big.
It's a new era for women on the Play Big path.
Long may we reign.
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Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Play Big Queen podcast. My whole family got a nasty virus this week, myself included, and we are still recovering from it. But I've done enough health related podcasts as of lately, and maybe I'll do another one on chronic illness in the future and how to navigate business. But I want to start today with something that happened this week.
in one of my college classes because it surprised me and honestly, I immediately was inspired and I thought it needed to be a podcast episode. It reminded me that I have never done a podcast episode for brand new entrepreneurs, even though I've done so much for women who are already in the thick of it. Because usually women find me who are already on the path. They're already in their journey.
They're already dealing with reinvention, burnout, identity shifts, the heartbreak and resurrection of their business. They already understand the value of mentorship, embodiment, community and leadership. But this week, someone at the very beginning of their entrepreneurial life asked me for advice. And I want to share parts of that exact conversation with you because it was real, it was grounding and it was the kind of truth
that I honestly wish someone would have given me when I started out. So here's the story. I was in a group project meeting for one of my financial classes. We were going over numbers, nothing glamorous, and one of my classmates, who is all of 22 years old, literally half my age, looks at me and asks, you know, you have a lot of entrepreneurial qualities, so I wanted to ask you, what is your business?
And I'm going to Arizona State University, which is a college that is ranked for its entrepreneurial programs. Like it's got a great business program. So it's not totally out of left field for someone to try to connect and network with other people who are in the same area of study. But he said that I seemed entrepreneurial, that I organized everything for the group meeting very well, and that I had that leadership energy.
which I think is his nice way of saying I ran that meeting like cardio. So I told him I am actually a life leadership and business mentor for entrepreneurs, business owners, professionals, and leaders, and that I specialize in working with late diagnosed neurodivergent women. And then he told me that he thought that that was cool, that I was a mentor for women in business, and he asked me if he could pick my brain. And in that moment...
I kind of felt myself drop right back into the early days of like my own journey. I didn't have the same traditional track that he was going through where you graduate high school and then you go to college and you know you want to be an entrepreneur. didn't have parents that specifically identified as entrepreneurs but my dad worked in marketing, my mom was a small business owner. I was ADHD and went to an alternative school.
I spent a lot of time being a natural entrepreneur without actually being aware of and knowing I was an entrepreneur. would sell things to people on my street when I was little and it was like a little more involved than just your stereotypical lemonade stand. And I would look at catalogs where you could bulk buy things for inventory because I wanted to set up my own store. then I remembered
writing ad copy for my dad's marketing firm when I was 15. And then I thought of watching my mom run her bridal shop. then I remembered getting into the startup scene in New York City and then eventually mentoring women through my startups and High Heels Group, especially around building a brand and an identity. But I just had all the feelings come back to me about what it was like to be a first.
time entrepreneur and like what the early beginnings look like. And I remember building my own digital business piece by piece, the courses, the website, this very podcast that you're listening to now, right? This is the second iteration of my podcast that I relaunched years later and all the sales pages and the whole ecosystem that I created from scratch. And so when he asked me for advice, I didn't give him the soft version. I gave him the truth.
the real truth, the stuff that like nobody tells you when you're younger and dreaming about being your own boss and all the things that you think come with it. And that's what I really want to share with you today. Because there's nothing wrong if you want to go work for someone else and get a paycheck and have that steady income. But it's a certain type of person who literally cannot.
lived their life that way, right? And before I even got into sharing with him any strategy, told him, entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. The first thing I told him was having your own business and being your own boss sounds like freedom. And in many ways it can be, but
Having your boss or being a boss is for someone who wants to have a job. Like maybe that's not for you. Maybe you just want to learn how to invest in stocks and make a ton of money and just like be wealthy and not do any work in the world. Right. Like entrepreneurship is a place where especially in the beginning you will probably work 10 times harder for yourself than you will work for someone else. And it's not because you're doing something wrong. It's because you care.
It's because you are the one responsible for your vision and the quality and the movement and the client experience, the identity, the brand. You are responsible for all of it. And that level of ownership is not easy, but it is sacred and it is worth it, especially for people looking to self-actualize through their business.
like where their business gets to be a vehicle for their purpose in life. For some people, their business is not a vehicle for their purpose. It's just how they make money and then the money that they make goes to fund their business, right? But like for some people, this is their purpose. And then the second thing that I told him is that stability really matters. I literally asked him, what can you do to get a stable source of income while you build your entrepreneurial idea?
Not because you're playing small or because you're being cautious, but because entrepreneurship punishes desperation and it rewards patience. Your nervous system in entrepreneurship needs safety. Your creativity needs breathing room. You cannot build something that is super powerful from panic. You need space to think, space to refine.
and space to make long-term decisions. Stability gives you that. If you're not trying to do that, you're not playing the game of entrepreneurship and building a business that's going to last. You're playing the game of like a lottery mentality type of game where you're just looking for a quick win, where it's about the money only, And
You know, I told him something every entrepreneur has to keep in mind at all times. And this is like a major point here. Entrepreneurship is about solving a problem. I asked him, what problem do you want to solve that you can make money solving? Because whether it's a product or an idea, all of entrepreneurship solves a problem. Really knowing what problem you solve.
And then figuring out how to be the best at solving it for a very specific group of people is what this game is really about. And if you don't know the problem that you solve, then you don't have a business yet. You have a feeling, you have a vibe, you have a dream, and that's a beautiful thing, but it is not monetized. A business is a repeatable solution to a meaningful problem for a specific group of people. That's it.
For example, in my business, I help neurodivergent women regulate their nervous systems, reclaim their authentic identity, build brilliance, authentic embodied growing sustainable success in life and business. We make how neurodivergent people work differently work for them. That's the problem. Coaching through it is the solution.
And this is very much a part of my life's purpose. There are millions of other problems that I could solve that don't feel as meaningful for me, but might be much more profitable. And not to say that coaching isn't profitable because it's a wildly profitable industry, but it also depends on what you come into the industry with and how long you've been doing it for. Because something I told him that I learned again and again, especially over the past decade, is that
Time is your greatest asset, but only if you use time for the purpose of refinement. In my advice to him, I told him, the earlier you start solving a problem, the more likely you're going to be the best at solving that problem. Then you're eventually going to be the person that everyone goes to and pays to solve that problem.
And since we were having this conversation in the context of our college finance class, I put it in financial language and I said to him, you know, it's like money. The earlier you start investing, the more money you have at the end. Entrepreneurship is just compound interest in emotional and creative form. The longer you spend investing time in being the best at solving a problem,
Sharing with people how you solve that problem better than anyone else and what is unique about the way that you do it, then the more business you have. It also takes time for people to catch up and catch on to what you're doing, right? It's the same thing as collecting interest. You don't collect the interest the same day you deposit the money, right? It takes time. You have to get vested. Two years of solving the same problem.
will give you confidence. Five years of solving the same problem will give you mastery. And 10 years of solving the same problem will give you legacy. You cannot rush that. You can only start today. And that's a really challenging thing that a lot of ADHD entrepreneurs grapple with. There's so many things and that they have that are brilliant.
And that would probably make a shit ton of money and take off and serve a lot of people and solve a lot of problems. But if you don't solve for how to stick with it over time, it's going to be really challenging to see the fruits of that labor. So that consistency and dedication to being the best at solving the problem, to knowing exactly what the problem is and starting to solve it and letting your time in solving it.
back up and letting yourself become an expert is so key. But I also told him that, know, simplicity will save you on so many occasions. I told him that like, I am always doing things as lean as possible in my business. Like my business has a super lean outfit that I'm running. It's all online. I pretty much have one platform that manages so many different things. And yeah, there are benefits to like diversifying your tech and
having a setup with lots of specialized components. But you know, after seeing so many different ventures and businesses, everything from like seed funding for millions of dollars to watching my family's own brick and mortar shops, it made sense for me as someone who is changing as an entrepreneur with different interests early on to keep it simple.
to not get large overhead, to not invest in a bunch of inventory or product creation, or even marketing if I couldn't test the solution to the problem that I was giving and have a repeatable way to sell that. People tend to drown themselves in complexity before they ever figure out what it is they're even doing. And it's so important to keep it simple, to keep it clean, to keep it manageable.
You can always grow, but you can't always undo the chaos that comes with building too fast. Getting in too deep too early is not sustainable and it's not the key to creating lasting success. And then this next piece of advice that I shared with him, I think a light bulb really went off when I shared this. think it's something that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially young American entrepreneurs need to hear because they forget.
or because our culture is so individualistic, just, they don't understand this as a baseline in business. But entrepreneurship is reciprocal. I told them, said, entrepreneurship is just like any other relationship. It's reciprocal. If people don't actually want it, then it will never go anywhere. Right? I mean, think about getting a gift from someone that you don't really want.
You're not going to wear it out. You're not going to tell people about it. It's like literally going to sit in the closet and not go anywhere. Really listening to people and their problems and what they want and what they're dealing with is so important in entrepreneurship because you're not just creating something for the world and hoping that they want it. That's not entrepreneurship. That's a hobby. Right. Like if you are creating a business.
You have to talk to people. You have to really listen. Most businesses wind up failing because the founder built something alone in their head instead of in conversation with their community. You cannot skip the relationship part of this. And then I started to kind of warn him about the fantasy of instant success, of lottery mentality, right? I literally said like,
People think that they're going to hit it big and that's not how it actually works. It can work for a very small percentage of people, but for the majority of people in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works. You can tap into the spiritual side of it and say, well, I'm 100 % decided. I'm not available for any other outcome. And that's great. And what comes with that is you don't have to force anything, but you do have to be available for the work and the conversations.
that are yours to do and have. You do have to get in flow with your community and the people that you serve and really understand and refine the solution that you're going to deliver to whatever problem that you're looking to solve for them. And then finally, you know, I told him the truth about support. Your network is another thing that is so important in entrepreneurship because nobody does it alone.
We need to work with people and we need people to recommend us and advocate for us and we need to hear what they need in order to fully serve them. And it's true, nobody does this alone. The people you meet now will become the collaborators, the clients, the supporters, referrals, co-creators and mentors that you will need later in this journey. Yes, talent matters.
Depending on the industry that you're in, aesthetics can matter. But relationships build empires, staying connected, staying in the conversation, staying human. And to be honest, that's a big part too of what I help neurodivergent clients with because relationships with neurotypical people can be challenging. This is something that I've gone through myself, right? Like autistic people aren't always interpreted in the same way.
that neurotypical people are interpreted as. So even if you solve a problem for a community and you're a neurodivergent person and you have a community of people who are neurotypicals, they might be cautious of it. They might not trust it, right? So how do you deal with that? Staying human and real and connecting with people so they know you and you have like true belonging in the community that you serve is important.
especially to keep that trust factor going so people feel like they can trust being in business with you. And then, know, after all of that, there was one thing that I didn't say in the moment to this guy who asked for my advice, but I do want to say now because I feel like it really completes the picture. If you are starting a business, this might be easy and hard to hear at the same time. You need a simple business model.
early on and I mean really simple. Just clarity around how your money comes in, how your money goes out and what it costs you to deliver what you sell. That's it. You actually don't need a huge business plan, although a lot of business mentors, myself included, will recommend that many people do get a business plan, but it depends on like what problem you're solving and what your business is.
But in the beginning, you don't need a business plan. You don't need a pitch deck. You don't need a five year forecast that looks like a fantasy novel. You just need to understand your revenue, your pricing, your costs and how a customer moves through your world. You need evidence that they want this problem solved. And so the simplest guidance is this. Pick one clear offer, price it intentionally and learn to sell it.
before you scale it. You will save yourself so much time, money and energy. You will save yourself years of spiraling by doing that one thing. And listen, I totally understand a lot of entrepreneurs concerns about like building authority and needing to have like a professional presence, right? As somebody who worked in graphic design for many years and builds websites and things like that, you don't need a website, especially if you're a
coach that's listening, Or even you're a service based provider, like maybe you do hair or something like that. If people are willing to pay you to solve their problem without a website, you know you've got a good concept in the making. So it's kind of like showing up on a first date with somebody without your makeup on.
You know it's got the potential for true love and like a match made in heaven, something that's like sustainable, something that's got longevity. If they want to be with you anyway. So don't invest like 20, 30, 40K in a website, all this other stuff. You could just tell people that you have this thing, you're selling this product or service that is a solution to their problem. And if they want to get in on it, you can send them like a PDF explaining what you do.
The hardest part for a lot of early entrepreneurs is they feel so insecure about not having that professional presence or that professional status or time or skin in the game that they let that fact make them shrink. They try to be someplace else than they actually are. And that's where they really start getting deep in the weeds because that's literally putting the cart before the horse. Like you have to have a driving force.
to be able to pull everything forward in your business journey, or it's not going to be sustainable. that driving force has to be demand. So you have to make sure that there is demand for your product or service before you go investing in all these other things that make you look like you have a professional product or service. And if you're really worried about what people are going to say early on,
about the fact that you don't have a website or you don't have this, then the harshest thing, but most true thing I would say is that maybe entrepreneurship is not for you. Because you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and be seen where you're at and overcome your insecurities and own where you're at in your game and have that much faith and conviction in the solution that you deliver through your product or service.
You have to be able to chuckle and be like, yeah, I don't have a website, but I don't really need one yet. Right now I'm just like delivering the solution and it's like the best solution. And here's why do you want it? And those early years are not going to be easy years. And if you're going to make it, you have to have that entrepreneurial spirit where you go head on into your responsibilities and challenges, because it's going to be a challenge and your responsibility to get
your community to even want to try your product, Or your solution or your service. That's your burden. That's your problem to solve on top of getting the privilege of solving this other problem for your community, So you have to keep your relationships going. They have to feel good. They have to feel clean. They can't feel like scummy salesy.
They have to feel like a genuine relationship in your community of potential buyers where you invite them into the solution, where you invite them to experience your product or service and you're doing it from a place where you genuinely want to serve them. You've genuinely developed your product and you know what makes it better than other potential solutions that they could buy. And even if it's a great fit for them,
and they don't want to try it, that's just another part of a problem that you as an entrepreneur have to solve. You have to rise to that challenge and be willing to solve that problem of getting people engaged and interested in wanting to experience it. Now, if you are listening and you are at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, I want you to hear this part. So listen carefully.
You are not behind. You are not late. You are not missing anything. You are building skill, vision, emotional capacity, discernment, confidence, self-trust and identity. Those things take years. They do not take weeks. And I've said it so many times, but you have to be willing to get out of that lottery mentality and be willing to play the long game for lasting success. Stop sprinting a marathon.
and walk it. You have to build the legs and the lungs and the capacity for it. You will become exceptional by accident if you stay consistent on purpose. And if you want support, structure, strategy and a more embodied and sustainable way to build a business that actually works for your brain and body, then come join me.
I've started a new community called Walk and Talk Wednesdays. It's a beautiful group of women in there where you can get coaching, community support, or feedback on whatever you are going through in your entrepreneurial journey and a group of like-minded women who are taking the overwhelm out of everything from starting your own business to navigating divorce to even celebrating massive wins with people who really care about your success.
You can join us at the link in the show notes. This is what we do here. This is who we become here and community is a major part of success. All right, my loves, thank you so much for joining me in this episode. I will see you next week.
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Outro 1
That's it for today, Queen.
Take what lit you up, leave what didn't.
You know what serves.
If you want to stay in this Play Big Queen orbit, get the rituals, resources, and real talk that fuels your Play Big self, go to xxxkatebailey.com, scroll to the bottom, and join this community.
This is where bold women gather. Neurodivergent visionaries, disability warriors, sacred disruptors.
If this episode spoke to you, leave a review on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
Leave comments, give me all the stars, share it.
That's how we create change that ripples, and how this podcast gets out to more people who need it.
If you're ready to work together to make your play big self not just a vision, but a reality that you embody, then head to xxxkatebailey.com, go to the work with Kate section, and join in on a program
that feels right for you.
Or tag me on socials and tell me a moment that truly served you from this episode.
Until next time, remember to honor your own timing, value your own unique way.
And most of all, when you come face to face with your boldest desires, trust your brilliance and Play Big Queen.
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Outro 2
Hey, queen, are you still here?
Good.
That means you're not just curious.
You are being called and want more.
I am here for the ones who want more than party trick mindset hacks.
The ones who need nervous system rooted, neurodiverse affirming space held by someone who is trauma trained, so they can rise on their terms.
My work is designed to center folks navigating ADHD, autism, disability, trauma, or mental health challenges and their brilliance all at once.
You do not need to be someone who identifies as neurodivergent or someone who has a disability to benefit from this work.
If you're feeling called, you belong here.
I believe in and support queer and trans rights, Black Lives Matter, sex worker rights, Palestinian, Ukrainian, and global self-liberation, religious autonomy, and dismantling abusive systems.
If that's too much for you, then babe, this isn't your podcast and you know where the unfollow is.
But if that lights a fire within you and you are inspired to learn more, then my Play Big Queen, you are home.
You can also head over to xxxkatebailey.com/about to learn more about me, my company,
qualifications, methodology, values, worldviews, philosophies, and my mission.
My mission is to activate 10,000 women with invisible disabilities to lead, create, speak up, and claim the spaces that they were told to shrink inside.
Because their leadership, your leadership, will change the world.
If you know that's you, declare it.
Put your energetic line in the sand and tell me.
Email me at [email protected] and tell me why this work is so important for you and we can explore opportunities to work together and make your Play Big dreams a reality.
