We are very proud to feature our Wonderful Web Radio Rising Star interview. In this segment, we speak with Cate Richards.

Cate Richards – founder of True Entrepreneur.  Cate is a Strategist for Entrepreneurs.  She works with “Know How” entrepreneurs to find clarity, develop their brands and signature systems, choose a business model and create products. Cate has been an entrepreneur for 10 years following a 20 year corporate career as a strategic marketer working with billion dollar brands.  Cate started True Entrepreneur as a “side project” because she discovered how much she loved helping her entrepreneur friends with brand and marketing strategy. You can find Cate at www.trueentrepreneur.com.  Her current giveaway is “”The One Page Brand”” mini course.

Transcript of the Interview

Announcement: Welcome to Rising Stars Radio, where we share the stories of ordinary people taking action to create extraordinary changes in their businesses. They are the true rising stars to watch. Get ready to take notes around no fluff, cutting to the chase, 20 minute interview.

Janet: Hello, and welcome everybody to Rising Stars Radio. This is Janet Beckers here; and I’m very excited to bring to you today a lovely friend of mine who’s been part of the wonderful web community for quite a few years, Cate Richards.

Hi Cate! It’s wonderful to welcome you here.

Cate: It’s wonderful to be here, Janet. I’m very excited about our conversation today and hoping that my story will resonate with some other people who are somewhere along this wonderful path of entrepreneurship.

Janet: The thing that I’m really excited about sharing with Cate’s story is this beautiful journey of Cate has one business, called Team Bonding, which is an exciting business. The business that she’s built and it’s grown strongly. We’ll talk about that; but she also has another business which is around the True Entrepreneur, which is what we’re going to be a lot about, how has she has those two businesses and how does it fit in with her progress as an entrepreneur?

To make this really easy. Our plan today is to try to give you the maximum value that we can in 20 minutes. We’ll be cutting straight the chase. It’s also our intention to give you some really clear points that you can implement this week. Some action steps from Cate’s journey, things that she has found that’s worked really well for her that you will be able to use straight away. We’ll be sharing that with you today well on the course.

Let’s get stuck straight in. Instead of me reading out Cate’s bio, let’s hear it straight from her. Cate can you please share with us who it is that you helped and how do you do that?

Cate: With True Entrepreneur, which is my new business, I helped what I call know-how entrepreneurs. Those are people that I guess they know something, they’ve experienced something and they have something to share or teach or guide and pass on to others; but there’s a gap between having that knowledge and I guess packaging it and selling it to the market. I helped them with all of their strategy and their branding and everything in the way to package their product, everything they need to do before they really have an offer that they can take to the market. It’s kind of my tradition for that business.

Janet: Right.

Cate: I also have another business which is nine years old, which is called Team Bonding, as you mentioned it just then. That is a business that creates events for the corporate market. In that business, I no longer am involved in day to day. I’m kind of the creative target now in that business. I just work on … I just square projects squaring the business and creating new products and things like that. I’ve kind of finally worked my way into quite an ideal well. Just been quite a journey.

Janet: Yeah, absolutely; and I’ll let you what. Even that the holy grail when it comes to building a business is you want to be able to … Theoretically, that you had a couple of ways that you can run a business. You can have it so that, you know, it’s a business that runs on its own; so you get to have a lovely well all machine that you get to be the director of. That’s one way. Then the other way is doing something that you love so much that you don’t want to be hands off. You’re kind of immersed in that and working very closely. You seem to have got the best of both worlds here Cate.

Cate: Well, I do Janet. I also got to move out of Sydney. I’ve got to move down the coasted way. I know you live up the coasted way. I live about an equivalent distance down the coasted way. I live on a beach now and a park and I get to stay out of all the traffic and all the general mayhem and I live in a place where people don’t know me very well and I can be calm and content. It sounds so ideal but I will not lie. It’s taken a great many years and a great deal of work to get here. I was going to tell a story Janet. The first time we ever met, I’m not sure, we probably exchanged many words. It was in Las Vegas in 2009 at Ali Brown’s conference and I was sitting with Valerie, our mutual friend. Right at the start, we did a sort of an exercise on the values, and putting the values into business and I started to cry. I was sitting at the back and I started to cry.

I realized that Team Bonding, the business I had, was not the business that was going to deliver to me, the kind of life that I wanted and particularly the kind of service that I wanted to be in the world. It really all started from there. The whole path to having I guess the two businesses and you know having one that’s kind of supporting me and supporting investment in the new business and a new one which I consider probably will be in my future from this point. That it’s been wonderful because I’ve been able to take a lot of time with it. I’ve been able to grow it the way I wanted and now I don’t have a huge amount of pressure on that business to make money straight away. I can really put some great long term relationships in place and kind of learn things as I need to without being rushed. It all taken quite a lot of time, but yes, it is quite ideal and I’m, basing like this, really quite proud of myself, Janet, if truth be told.

Janet: You should be. You should be, Cate. We might explore that a little bit further about … I know that there are people who will be listening to this recording that are in that point where they’re going you know what I’m transitioning. It might be that they’ve got one business and they’re transitioning to another. It might be that they’re employed and they’re looking at it going in their own business. They might have what’s happening in their life has changed, whether it’s going to be that they’ve just had children or they’ve got children flying the coop or they’ve just gone through a divorce and they find themselves in a very different social and financial situation. This idea of a transition from one thing that you’re doing over into building a business that you’re very passionate about. I’d really like to explore that a little bit further, how you’ve done that; because the nice part about you being part of the wonderful web community for a while is kind of being able to observe what you’ve been doing.

Cate: You have witnessed it all happened.

Janet: I have witnessed it all happened. I just love how you’re very, very open because you come on our inner circle call and you go to our private Facebook group and you asked really, really good questions and you’re very open about, “I’ve got the challenge at the moment of, I’ve got to do this while I’m now building this other thing”, and you’ve been very, very opened about that transition which has been really, really rewarding to watch from the outside and to have, you know, parts of those discussions with you to say it’s not as if you’ve been sort of hiding something and then all of a sudden, “Boom! Here’s Cate with a whole new business.” That transition has been very transparent.

Cate: It has. Thank you Janet. I appreciate you saying that. I guess that some of sort of a personal and emotional facet is that’s been … The hardest thing for me is just I felt such urgency to be doing my new work and I used to feel so much resentment I think when I was constantly being pulled back. I found that really difficult to manage from an emotional perspective but I think, partly, it’s part of the journey. You kind of traffic the timing and stuff of things.

I think sometimes you haven’t made quite managed your lessons but have to come back for a second time; but yeah, I worked my way into a good … I mean it almost started, as I said, it started in Las Vegas there. I think if you set that vision out, realize and really come to groups with the fact that, you know, if you look your life as a set of trai