Engineering the Shift Your Industry Needs w/ Katie Brinkley of Next Step Social

Summary

Katie Brinkley began her career with a dream job in sports radio, covering locker rooms for the Denver Broncos and Colorado Rockies. But when industry disruption and a surprise layoff coincided with the news of her second pregnancy, she took a bold leap into entrepreneurship. Without any co-founders, Katie launched her business, Next Step Social, from her couch—with just a laptop and a severance check. Today, she leads a 13-person team helping CEOs amplify their thought leadership through social media and podcasting.

In this episode, Katie shares how she pivoted from corporate media to building a growing agency without outside funding. She gets candid about early missteps, how she finally discovered her business’s niche, and why intention, trust, and a commitment to data have shaped the culture and trajectory of her company. Her story offers a refreshing mix of strategy and heart, ideal for founders navigating early growth or building media-driven brands.

Whether you’re a founder with a podcast, thinking about your first hire, or wondering how to stand out in a noisy market, Katie delivers tactical insights rooted in her own journey of bootstrapping, scaling, and differentiating in a crowded space.

Takeaways

1. Start with what you’re good at and what you love. Katie built a business around the two things she’s always been passionate about: radio/audio and social media.
2. Hiring starts with time tracking. Before hiring her first team member, Katie used Toggle to track how she spent her time, helping her identify what tasks to delegate.
3. Use Loom for scalable training. Early Loom videos explaining her process became part of her team’s long-term training documentation.
4. The most powerful differentiator is intention. Katie narrowed her niche to CEOs who want to be thought leaders—and built her strategy, team, and service delivery around that focus.
5. Bigger teams don’t always mean more success. At one point, she scaled back her 13-person team to nine for better alignment and efficiency.
6. Trust is foundational. She emphasizes empowering team members to make executive decisions to avoid becoming the bottleneck.
7. Stick to your onboarding systems. A client onboarding gone wrong taught Katie the value of saying no—even when the client is eager.
8. Audience feedback is a signal. She resisted launching a podcast division until she realized her audience was consistently asking for help in that area.
9. Bootstrap mindset breeds discipline. Katie never raised money—instead, she grew based on revenue, reinvested wisely, and scaled slowly.
10. Intentional time blocks are non-negotiable. Every Friday is a “Next Step Social Day” to work on the business, not just in it—a key driver of vision and long-term thinking.

Chapters

• [00:01] Sports radio origins
  • Katie begins her career in locker rooms for the Colorado Rockies and Denver Broncos, chasing a dream job in radio.
• [03:30] Laid off, pregnant, and launching a business
  • Two weeks after being laid off, she learns she’s pregnant—and decides to freelance social media from her couch.
• [05:48] Saying no to the wrong work
  • Katie shares how doing “everything” early on diluted her value and drained her energy.
• [09:04] Pricing and scope clarity
  • She explains how she learned to define her services, value her time, and set better client boundaries.
• [11:47] Defining her ideal client
  • After working with everyone, Katie narrows her niche to CEOs who want to be visible industry leaders.
• [13:10] Her first hire and early systems
  • She talks through how Toggle and Loom helped her identify which tasks to delegate and how to train her first VA.
• [20:58] Scaling through documentation
  • Katie reveals how her SOPs and training videos helped her scale to a 13-person team.
• [24:00] Standing out in a crowded space
  • Why her strategy is built around intention—and how not liking social media made her better at it.
• [28:48] Launching a new business division
  • Despite two years of resistance, she listens to her audience and launches a podcast division.
• [32:22] Bootstrapping without funding
  • Katie explains why she never raised money and how she managed cash flow through smart hiring and pricing.
• [36:26] Protecting time for vision
  • Fridays are off-limits for client work—Katie uses them to think, plan, and check alignment across her business.
• [43:45] A failure that still stings
  • She tells the story of ignoring her onboarding process for a big client—and how it backfired.
• [46:58] Most common founder questions
  • She’s constantly asked when to hire—but says the more important question is how to use team time wisely.
• [51:24] Starting over with $1,000 and a laptop
  • Katie would use ChatGPT, build a landing page, and validate her idea through market feedback before building anything.
• [53:52] Tool and book recommendations
  • She recommends Traction for scaling insights and her own book The Social Shift for intentional social media growth.