Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / How Credibility Becomes Financial Equity with Katherine Tuominen
Transcript
- Marci (00:15) Hello, I am MoneyMarci. Welcome. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, Katherine Tuominen. Katherine is a marketing strategist, publicist, and founder of Catalyst Brand Strategy, an award winning global PR agency that has supported more than 116 brands across health, wellness, technology, and regulated industries. With a background spanning luxury retail, and film with Fox and Warner Brothers, she specializes in governance-first communications that help founders build long-term credibility. Her clients have been featured in Marie Claire, Fast Company, and Women's Health, and her keynote, "Ethical Marketing Is Not An Oxymoron", challenges the idea that integrity and performance are at odds. Welcome Katherine. Katherine Tuominen (01:11) Thank you so much for such a wonderful introduction. I'm so glad to be here, Marci. Marci (01:15) Well, I am thrilled to have you. How did you get here? How did you end up as a marketing strategist and doing the things that you do? Katherine Tuominen (01:24) Well, the very short version is I did start off in film and television, and I recognized very early on in my career that the element I loved most was storytelling, but I really wanted to tell stories that actually mattered to me or topics that I was genuinely passionate about. And so that led me down a journey of recognizing how can we tell, you know, impact-driven stories that truly do create that ripple effect within communities, households, individuals, and encourage people to come together as a collective. And so that led me into learning more about nudge theory, which for those of you who don't know is a way to use marketing positively to encourage different behavioral change that can nudge people towards a certain outcome. For example, you know, not smoking or avoiding drinking and driving, things like this. And I think it's really a testament to the ways that marketing can be used as a positive tool when the intention is clear from the get go. Marci (02:26) That makes sense. So what do you see as a PR in branding, what do you see people get wrong about turning a good reputation into actual income or security? Katherine Tuominen (02:43) I would say more maybe for the next generation, there can be a tendency to share everything. So to build in public or to, you know, post whatever comes to mind immediately. And while some of it can be excellent when it comes to building it, you know, virality or an audience that sees the behind the scenes or almost like the messy moments, you do have to zoom out and consider what is your long-term strategy and is this supportive of that, or could it potentially hinder our reputation in the long run. So this is something that yeah I would just kind of want to weigh up early on. And the advice that I give to those who might be figuring out what exactly should I post or publicly share, I usually suggest for people to share things that come from a place of healed or reflection. So you're not necessarily sharing it instantly when the moment has happened, but you're sharing it retrospectively when you've had a moment to understand the insights and offer something of value. Yeah. Marci (03:44) Yeah, I you know, I'm a good bit older than you and people of my age appreciate the fact that cell phones and the cameras were not around when we were younger doing stupid things. You hear the stories of people who don't get into colleges because the college looks at their social media or they don't get jobs because their job looks at the things that they're posting on social media and I hadn't even thought about that being part of our conversation. But what you just said was like, yeah, yeah, that's something we really have to think about in this day and age of instant sharing. Katherine Tuominen (04:24) Absolutely. And I think it extends beyond just the company that you might be building now, but also potentially what you might want to explore in the future as well. There are so many instances of founders who make their brand based on their name and then they go on to wanting to build something else. And it becomes a legal issue where they almost need to buy back their name or buy back their rights or sell their rights for their name and then build a different version of their name, whether that be a middle name or an amalgamation of the names combined. So yeah, it's a very interesting space and another thing to consider when you're sharing your brand publicly. Marci (05:04) Right, 'cause that goes back to that credibility and people trust you or they know you based on your name and that's, that's hard. How do you treat your credibility as an asset and work on building that asset without going crazy on hype? Katherine Tuominen (05:23) That's a great question. I would say that you do need to get the reps in, so to speak, to some degree. So, you know, doing the things that are behind the scenes, learning the ropes, very much working and rolling up your sleeve and getting in to understand what is truly involved to be an expert in that field. And it takes time, it takes you know practice and all the things that we often hear about. And then from that place of truly understanding the subject matter, then you would be much more confident and better placed to start publicly sharing information on that or taking it to that next level of becoming a thought leader in the sector that you'd like to be known for. So, yeah, I would say for those who might be building up their career path or in that stage of figuring out what they would like to be known for, it's worth reflecting on your skill set and your expertise in order to then decide: am I truly ready to share this in a more public way? Marci (06:24) I think everyone has a background story and one of the things you you listed in the form was about your different way of going through things than your sister. Katherine Tuominen (06:36) Yeah. Marci (06:36) And that doesn't mean that there's a right or wrong because there isn't and both of you can find success in doing things in different ways, but could you talk about that a little bit? Katherine Tuominen (06:46) Yes, so you know, money is still such a taboo subject, isn't it? And it's something that, you know, whether it be families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, even in the workplace, you often have to sign NDAs where you can't share how much you're earning even with your colleagues. So there's just so many layers of of gated information when it comes to transparency about finances and the way that's being shared or held. And the example I gave was the my sister and I are such different people, you know, she, I love her dearly and we're very close, but she stayed in a job for a decade, whereas by the time I was 25, I'd already had 35 jobs, and I was very much testing the waters and finding my way in the world. And similarly, you know, we kind of joked that she's like a master accumulator because it doesn't matter how much she earns, she still manages to save a very significant portion and she's very proud of this ability. Meanwhile, for me, my skills very early on were in sales and networking, and sort of creating something out of nothing. And so this meant that I was very comfortable working on a lean salary or a lower base because I knew I could always, on a commission, work my way up and earn more to some degree. And that kind of mindset is obviously very familiar to entrepreneurs. And it's useful, but it's also very, very different to someone who may treat finances in a more I guess like conservative approach. And there is no right or wrong, especially in today's world, and I think they're both an asset depending on how that's leveraged and used with balance. Marci (08:22) I think that is so true and it's important to recognize which you are and adapt your habits to your strengths. I am like your sister. I am that conservative financial person who feels much better with that steady check. I don't wanna have to adjust continually like people who work on commissions do. I have had clients who do sales, they may have fifty thousand dollars income in one year and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in income another year. And they need to be aware of their income flow to adjust their expenses so they don't find themselves waking up one day in significant debt because they didn't decrease their expenses or step up their work product that generates the income, you know, whatever their whatever their entrepreneurship or sales ship position was. But they can also be very successful by keeping aware and adjusting as they need to. You just have to be the right kind of person for each of those things. So it's important to be aware of your skills and your personality and your mindset. I love that story about you and your sister. Katherine Tuominen (09:32) Absolutely. And I think working with someone like yourself and balancing that and having a second pair of eyes on accounts obviously make a huge difference. Marci (09:41) Well, thank you. Everybody work with someone like me. Really, it's Katherine Tuominen (09:45) Ha ha Marci (09:46) for your best. So this is, you're my first guest of season five, and I'm trying to do something a little bit different this season than what I've done in the past. And one of the things is to ask the same question and kind of get information from different perspectives. And my question this year is what do you think wealth is and how do you define wealth? Katherine Tuominen (10:12) I love this question. So for me, this ties very closely with the idea of success and how that might be publicly shared. So, you know, a lot of us are taught that success is more material or the way we're perceived publicly. But I came to define success as fulfillment. And so when I was going through a sort of wealth journey or money journey, a big part that I unpacked was what does fulfillment mean for me? Translation, success than fulfillment. And in that sense, how would I want to spend my money? What is a worthwhile return for me beyond just the material, although that's obviously a factor as well. So one of the ways that we define wealth now as a communications and public relations firm is of course in the way that you're building relationships. So it's implied in the word public relations, but a big piece of what we do is establishing strong relationships. And I believe that that is a currency in and of itself. You never know when someone is able to refer you or recommend your work or pass on a resource that you would have struggled to find independently and the kind of ripple impact of how your work can then support others and likewise. So I really do think that relationships are extremely valuable in today's world and a true form of wealth in and of itself. Marci (12:25) Okay. Now you did mention earlier about the money taboo, about talking about money, and that's one of the reasons I have my podcast is to hopefully encourage people to talk more about money, with the appropriate people in their lives, whether it is their partner or their family or being willing to find a mentor or financial professional to help them make better choices. Katherine Tuominen (12:50) Mm. Marci (12:52) Growing up, Did you talk about money in general terms? Katherine Tuominen (12:58) I think, yes, like everyone, we've heard the expressions, you know, money doesn't grow on trees and you know the kitchen tabletop bills and a lot of these sort of expressions that are ingrained in us so early on. And but I would say the part that was missing, at least in our household, was, you know, what is a P&L? How do you organize your finances on a month to month basis? you know, how do you do your tax returns? A lot of the things that I wish were taught in schools weren't necessarily available to us, at least back then. So yeah, hopefully this next wave of schooling considers it to be an important part of adulthood, but most of us probably had to learn it by ourselves and figure it out and Google or ask a friend and yeah, slowly find our way through. Marci (13:47) Let me start with a definition for my listeners. A P&L is a profit and loss statement that tells you how you're doing, whether you're making money or losing money at any point in time in your business. And you know, as the internet certainly there are resources out there that are available. You don't even have to go to the library, whether it's listening to podcasts or downloading an ebook or you know, anonymously being a part of a group where you can ask questions. I I think it's much more accessible now. I know more and more school districts are requiring it to be part of education in one way or another. Katherine Tuominen (14:29) Mm. Marci (14:30) So it'll be interesting to see where things go in the future and what the next generation coming up looks like. Now, do you have kids? Katherine Tuominen (14:40) No. Marci (14:42) Okay. So I guess I can't ask what you're teaching them, but do you have an idea of how you'd want to talk to them about money in the future that would be maybe different than what you did? Katherine Tuominen (14:52) I've never thought about this. I guess I would want much more transparency from an early age in the sense that, you know, more of an understanding of the idea of currency. So, you know, if you if you spend here, yeah, what would you choose to save on or invest in? And and almost rethinking the way it kind of moves and then encouraging yeah, I guess more conscious circulation. And yeah, that would be a good start. But I really haven't thought about this from a kid's perspective. Marci (15:29) Well, and you know, I threw that from left field Katherine Tuominen (15:33) That's fair and Marci (15:34) so it's one of those things that you start to think about, okay, now that I'm an adult, now that I'm doing these things and looking back and seeing and seeing what I didn't learn, what are the things I would want to, you know, encourage them to learn. Well, you're not necessarily gonna come home to your kids and say, Hey, here's mom's paycheck but Katherine Tuominen (15:55) Yeah. Marci (15:56) but you can have general topics and kind of figure out where you want to go. And I wonder where people might be starting to think about that. Katherine Tuominen (16:06) Maybe on that as well, I remember reading in in one of the kind of books around building wealth that they gave the example for the men or boys, they were saying like, which house would you invest in? And for women they were saying which apple would you like cut in half or it was something like that. And I think that's another example of when we're thinking about metaphors or educating the next generation, we need to be really careful about the words we're sharing and obviously mindful of any kind of built-in gender bias. Marci (16:37) That's true. I hadn't even considered that. Yeah, we've got to, there are so many things you have to consider when you're doing all of this. And this is why you're, you know, PR and whatever else, you see these big pictures and all these small things of you've got to market this, you've got to kind of put that out there and make it so people are aware of what they're choosing and all of that. Do you have any financial challenges or victories that you had in your past coming up that impacted how you think and deal with money now? Katherine Tuominen (17:17) Absolutely, so many. I feel like every entrepreneur has many stories on this. One challenge that I learned very early on. So, for some context, I never went to business school. I didn't really get any formal education in terms of you know what makes a good business structure. So a lot of it was learned on the job, and our agency started very organically in the sense that I capped out as a copywriter, and so I reached out to - capped out means I was full of hours and I couldn't take on more clients - so I reached out to an art director to say would you like to collaborate on this project you can do the designs I'll do the copy and we can kind of branch out from there and that worked so well that we ended up working on more and more projects together and she was like we can connect with this friend and we can all do it together and so I had a little team of basically women helping women all creating this creative agency and the way I did it in my mind was I'll just split it so everyone gets a fraction but what I didn't realize is the business is also a fraction in and of itself. And for anyone who studied business, this would be so obvious. So, what would happen is like everyone would get their fraction, but then there would be you know business costs like subscriptions and random bills that popped up, and I was like, who gets this fraction of the bill? And of course, it was myself, so my fraction was getting smaller and smaller. and I was like, I see the business needs to have its own fraction, so to speak, in order to make sure that it's continuing to be self-sustaining. So that's a very simplified version of what I learned, but I'm sure for those who are just beginning their journey, they may appreciate this metaphor or reference. Marci (18:55) That is true. And when you let your, I guess, would we call them partners? Katherine Tuominen (19:01) Well they weren't partners strictly like on paper, but collaborators. Marci (19:07) Okay. So when you told your partners, yeah, your collaborators, yeah, we're we've been looking at it as this comes in and we split, but now we've got to look at it as it's this four way split, or the business gets before we allocate that money. So I'm not giving you the money as soon as it comes in because we've got to take care of these business costs. Were they surprised to realize there was that part of it? Katherine Tuominen (19:32) Yes, exactly. I think especially when you're a creative person, you know, you're always thinking of it more in terms of other skill sets or you're just wanting to get involved in the project and it can take a moment to recognize you know, these systems are in place for a reason to protect everyone. ~ And that just means doing things a little bit differently. So it just, it was a transparent conversation, but once everyone understood why, we were able to proceed. Marci (19:58) That's good. Do you have any other stories you'd like to share of things you've learned along the way or specific things that new entrepreneurs should consider as they begin their businesses? Katherine Tuominen (20:10) Ooh~ gosh, there's so many. I would say maybe going back to the public relations or communication side, I do think that we're in a very fortunate time in the sense that it is accessible to grow an audience or grow media coverage, and that can be very lean. Yes, it takes your time, yes, it takes some, you know, learning and maybe some subscriptions, but it's a very lean cost in order to reach and get your message out to many, many people. And so, you know, when you're thinking about weighing up, I guess, is this worth the time and energy? That could be one of the areas to weigh in on in the sense that sometimes it makes more sense to grow an organic audience before starting to look at paid avenues or you know running ads for the sake of it or anything like that. So that's another element that we often encourage founders to think about. Where can you leverage your existing communities, your existing networks, following relationships to grow your business in a meaningful way before taking that next step and kind of blowing the budget on financing or funding ad spend without the data or I guess examples being there to nurture it. Marci (21:26) Can you talk a little bit about how brand equity can become financial equity and how that reflects in valuation, pricing power and deal flow? Katherine Tuominen (21:37) Absolutely. So there's a lot of stats on this specifically, but to give you some examples, when you look at the business magazines of the world, Forbes, Foss Company, a whole element of what they do is report on upcoming businesses, you know, entrepreneurs that are building something unique and have a specific stance that on an area that is currently trending or receiving coverage. And so with that said, the people who read these magazines or publications are often investors or are often family offices or people who are actively looking for what is coming up, who would be the next person that would be great to back. And they're keeping an eye on the way that these sectors are changing. And so if you're part of that conversation early on, if you're getting featured in these publications, it can make a huge or a significant difference when it comes to getting in the right rooms and starting those conversations. And you can leverage this in all kinds of ways. It can be the logo on your website for sales pages, which support basically borrowing credibility, but it could also be in terms of when you're sharing pitch decks or negotiations, you're able to reference specific trusted sources. Marci (22:49) Okay. Well Katherine, do you have anything else you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Katherine Tuominen (22:57) I think maybe as a last note, what would be helpful is the speaker side of things. So when we're talking about building wealth or reducing the taboo around these topics, I think many people may see an opportunity to publicly speak on the subjects they're passionate about. And what is often missed is you can treat your assets as leveraging or compounding each other. So for example, if your more mature audience has a published book and they want to be a speaker, they can actually bundle this together and ask for higher speaker rates because they are a published author. And then when they're attending that speaking event or speaking at a panel, they can also request to have a booth where they share their book. And so instead of seeing all these marketing elements as different fragments, a huge way to kind of compound your wealth or the assets that you created is to let them work together in a way that it continues to feed each other and reach the right audience and nurture them and convert from there. Marci (24:03) Yeah, it is so important to treat you, you know, all the little bits of what you offer as one total package because it is much more powerful to see everything that you are as opposed to a little bit of this over there and a little bit of that over somewhere else. Katherine Tuominen (24:20) Absolutely. Marci (24:22) Katherine, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Katherine Tuominen (24:28) Thank you so much for your time, Marci. It's been an absolute pleasure. Marci (24:32) And to my listeners, I will be sharing a link to Katherine's information in the show notes. Please check her out. She has a lot of interesting information. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.