Build a Business You Can Sell So You Can Pivot, Not Quit It
Today, I’m looking back at the Zimmerman Podcast Episode when I chatted with Katie Selvidge, creator of the online and print publication Cottage Hill.
Katie loves real inspiration and wholehearted living, and used her experience as a magazine editor to shape the content of her program, Mastering Instagram for Creatives which is, by the way, the only Instagram course I believe in.
Katie has recently pivoted into the homestead life, and today we’re going to talk about how to build a business that you can sell (which, PS, should be every real-deal business!), how to know when it’s time to pivot, and how to navigate life as a multi-passionate entrepreneur.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Katie’s, and we had a blast when I was on her Podcast the Creative Well. I knew I had to have her on Zimmerman Podcast. I could talk to Katie all. day. long.
Check out the full episode here.
Becoming an entrepreneur
One of the many things that inspires me about Katie is the freedom she has given herself over the years to pivot her business. We talked about how, when she started out, there was a lot of pressure for creative entrepreneurs to 'do it all.' She started in the world of ballet and graduated with a journalism degree – she loves the beauty of the ballet and the art of storytelling. Although, it’s been a road with ups and downs for her to get where she is today, she is a true entrepreneur at heart…
She initially started her career working so hard it began affecting her health – she was working way too many hours, over-caffeinating and eventually needing to make a change.
After her husband noticed Katie would scribble on and edit magazines in her free time, he suggested she start her own magazine so she could build her own schedule and decrease her stress levels.
Instagram was becoming more popular, and she saw a shift towards a visual aesthetic. During this time, she visited her grandma and together they looked at silly photos of her great grandparents. The contrast between those photos and the overly stylized images everyone was sharing on social media was eye-opening. She wanted to capture the idea that there is a place for beauty, and it has value.
She wanted to create something beautiful that was also actionable – where people would put down their devices, open up a physical publication, and do something about what they just read. Not in the sense of people having to imitate the magazine, but rather realizing the beauty around them, “whether its’s holding onto my husband longer, calling my mom, going on a walk and actually seeing what’s already here with me, and not something I have to go get or become”.
That’s where Katie’s inspiration to “live a life worthy of an elegant and meaningful legacy” came from. Katie believes that you don’t have to prove that your life is meaningful or beautiful to anyone else. You get to treasure your own life. Legacy in the sense of what her great grandparents left her- they we’re not well known to the outside world, but they were pillars in her family, and that's what mattered.
Practically speaking, Cottage Hill became a bridge for a big dream and goal Katie and her husband had of living on land and pursing country living. It brought in a supplemental income and also helped her eventually have a healthier work life.
Grit and grace
As I said before, Katie is a true entrepreneur – she told me she loves hard work for hard work’s sake, enjoys the challenge and transformative growing pains that bring you from grit to grace.
Even now, on her homestead, she loves that there is dirt and sweat mixed in with the beauty. Right before our interview, she was shoveling manure for her sheep herd. Similar to ballet, while there would be a beautiful performance, there were also broken toes and bleeding feet that made that performance possible. Her outlook on life is that we need both grit and grace in our world, not either-or.
While talking to Katie, I was so impressed by her clarity at that age, (she was in her 20s when she started Cottage Hill), especially at a time when everyone was so caught up in posting perfect images. I asked her how she was able to maintain this clarity.
As she noticed the culture shift to more aesthetics and become less authentic – her idea of capturing beauty among real life really drove her passion for Cottage Hill and gave her clarity. Doing ballet, her childhood – coming from a military family that moved a lot and being homeschooled – and becoming a keen observer of the world around her all helped shape her and attracted her to her idea for Cottage Hill. She wanted it to remind people to feel it all – the good and the bad, the grit and the grace.
This also influenced her mindset when creating the magazine. She wanted the imagery in Cottage Hill to be beautiful, high-quality, and stunning AND she wanted the stories to remind people of real life and to inspire them to do the hard work to yield beauty in their own lives.
I shared with Katie that hers is the first magazine I’ve ever read cover to cover, and that the intentionality behind everything, the fonts, the details, made me stop and feel something during a time when I was overworking myself.
Betting on yourself
I wondered if from the beginning, she thought she’d do Cottage Hill forever, or if she thought about selling it some day. While she had many bumps in the road at the beginning, she had faith and passion for it and she knew deep down, it would last. During a particularly low moment during the first issue she had to ask herself some hard questions about failure and boundaries and what was worth doing and what was not worth doing.
This time of reflection and curiosity became a path toward her becoming an educator down the road.
I related to this so much, because I used to wonder how I ended up in the floral industry – where most people are passionate about the flowers themselves and I didn’t care to learn all the names to the flowers. I just needed a reason to own a business. But in hindsight, I can see how all those moments, I knew in my gut that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and they later lined my path to the next thing.
I’ve always bet on myself and followed my gut even if no one understand my vision. Katie related to this, saying that is the definition of an entrepreneur. We have to trust in ourselves to take risks and create something that doesn’t yet exist.
Learning to grow and let go
Katie knew Cottage Hill mattered, and it was becoming bigger than her. After the challenges of her first issue and her ‘come to Jesus moment’ with failure and boundaries, she put her business hat on tighter by educating herself, involving her husband in decisions, taking wise council and realizing she didn’t have to be an expert in everything. They were able to overcome every predicament that arose in that first issue. At this point, things started to go really well.
She also started documenting her mistakes and used this to create curriculum for her Editor’s Course, and began her work as an educator.
Then, in 2016, she became pregnant with their first daughter, and their dream property-ownership was becoming a reality. She was immensely grateful for both things, but the timing was difficult. She knew Cottage Hill and her education would continue, but not with her. She didn’t know what type of mom and entrepreneur she would be until she met her daughter. She wanted whatever she did to make her daughter proud and also to be a good tradeoff for the time it would take away from being home all the time… she came to realize the time needed for Cottage Hill wasn’t an equal tradeoff for what mattered most to her. She had to let go.
Her perspective continued to shift when she had three people close to her have health scares and it really hit home that our days are numbered. Her husband helped her realize that “life is too short to live in indecision and ambiguity”. She put pen to paper and did an evaluation on her business. She was surprised when she learned that it was more valuable than she imagined. In her business decisions, she always tried to do the right thing, and rather than treating her competitors as an enemy, she built relationships with them as colleagues. She was just being authentic to who she was, and in the long run when she did decide to sell she had a larger pool of potential buyers and was able to sell with a clear conscious and clear heart.
Selling your business
We talked about how it’s easy for people to get attached to their businesses and how, especially creative entrepreneurs, often to make emotion-lead decisions, when we should be making passion-lead decisions. Her business was not her baby, it “had grown legs and gone to college”.
We both agreed anyone with a business should know what the value of their business is even they're not planing on selling it, because, as Katie says so well “if you build a business and can’t sell it, then you don’t really have a business.”
New adventures
Katie is not quite ready to share what she is planning next, but she did talk about life on her homestead. She has given herself a challenge to not monetize anything just yet. Her and her husband want to be mindful and take what they’ve learned from Cottage Hill and apply it to what they do next. She’s very excited and has more confidence going into this because of what she learned from the magazine, even if there still are question-marks and unknowns. And as we talked about previously, she knows she can bet on herself – “not just because in my head I think so and in my heart, I feel so, but because on paper and in reality, I know so. I know I can do this, and I know I’ll figure it out.”
I cannot say enough how much I enjoyed my conversation with Katie. There were so many things I wish we had more time to chat about. I hope you’ll listen to this episode to learn more details about her journey as an entrepreneur, her life on the homestead, what questions she would ask herself to gain clarity about changes in business and much much more.
YOU CAN FIND KATIE ON INSTAGRAM @KATIEOSELVIDGE OR ON HER WEBSITE WWW.KATIEOSELVIDGE.COM.
SHOW NOTES & LINKS
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Creatives and entrepreneurs spend hours trying to crack the new algorithm changes, posting at exactly the right times, and attempting to build businesses and followings on the back of a free app.
If you want to love Instagram again (and maybe even grow your following) you have to check out Katie’s Mastering Instagram for Creatives! Head here: zimmermanpodcast.com/instagram
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