Kate Hendrickson Markets Through Conversations

🎧 Listen: Unscripted Small Business on Castos · More interviews: the full archive

Ask a marketing consultant to describe their marketing strategy and you usually get a channel list. Kate Hendrickson of The Strategy Lane answered host Jeremy Rivera with four words: “You’re looking at it right now.”

She meant the podcast. The conversation we were having was the strategy — and on Unscripted Small Business she made a coherent case for why, in a market where every competitor now has the same tools, the thing that does not scale is the thing that works.

AI Cannot Replace That People Connection

“Yeah, I completely agree. I think AI can’t replace that people connection. And like I shared with you at the very beginning of the podcast, this is how I connect and market and work with people because I love the people aspect. And I think that we can’t let AI replace that and making people feel important, you know.” — Kate Hendrickson

That came out of a specific story rather than a general worry. Jeremy described local businesses whose AI-written marketing was obvious to everyone who saw it — owners who were not in the marketing space at all, looking at a photo and a headline and saying, that was clearly ChatGPT. His question was why they thought nobody would notice.

Kate’s answer reframes it. The failure is not that the copy is bad. It is that the copy is doing a job copy cannot do. “Making people feel important” is not a content problem to be solved with a better prompt; it is a consequence of somebody actually paying attention to you.

Jeremy pushed the point further, and it is worth quoting because it names the trap precisely: small businesses keep “looking at tools as a solution versus leveraging people as a solution — of interviewing clients, of having conversations, getting your founder on a podcast, getting them interviewed. And they’re skipping over that process in favour of… this tool.”

Lunch, A Phone Call, Or A Stage

Honesty note on the heading: our plan for this piece framed it as lunch versus a thousand ads. Kate never mentions advertising anywhere in the interview, so we have not put that comparison in her mouth. What follows is what she actually described.

“You’re looking at it right now. So I love to talk to people. That is my marketing strategy is truly getting in there and having some face to face time with people. So whether it’s hopping on a podcast, sharing some tips and tricks and my expertise so that way other people can go, man, this would really help me — I’d love to partner or work with this person — or putting myself out there at conferences and doing speaking events locally in my own community.” — Kate Hendrickson

And then the specific version, which is the one people remember:

“I’d rather sit down and have a conversation with you. Let’s go have some lunch and let’s talk about how we could potentially partner together and how I can really help accelerate some of the work that you’re doing. Let’s hop on the phone and have a conversation about it. Let me jump on a podcast and talk to you, whatever that may be. I love getting up on a stage and sharing with groups of people, doing workshops. Those are super fun, because they’re interactive.” — Kate Hendrickson

The list has an internal logic that is easy to miss on a first read. Lunch, a phone call, a podcast, a stage, a workshop — every single one of them is a format where the other person can talk back. She is not describing a preference for offline over online. She is describing a preference for two-way over one-way, which is a different axis entirely, and it is why a podcast sits comfortably in the same list as lunch.

What A Conversation-Led Pipeline Actually Looks Like

This section is practitioner guidance from us, informed by what Kate described. She does not lay out a referral system or a follow-up cadence in the episode, and we are not attributing one to her.

What she does describe is the shape of the work once a conversation converts. Her engagements are, in her words, “pretty customized” — because “we’ll usually find out pretty quickly what’s working well and what’s not and where there’s some gaps.” The regular touchpoints deliberately cover both: celebrate the things that are working, because “it’s always really nice to celebrate those,” then home in on the issue or the gap.

She is also unusually honest about not being the expert in the room. She works with plumbers, an irrigation company, a behavioural health clinic: “I’m not a clinician, I’m not a plumber, but I can help ask the questions so that way we get to a solution or an answer or a next step.” She calls it a partnership where “we’re just digging in together to determine where the gaps are and what might need to be done differently.”

The practical translation, if you want to run this: the deliverable in a conversation-led model is not a report, it is a question set. That is the asset. It travels across industries you do not know, which is exactly why her client list can span irrigation and mental health without her being credentialed in either.

How To Run Conversation Marketing With No Budget

Also practitioner guidance rather than reported claims — Kate names the venues, not a playbook for working them.

The venues she names are all free or near-free to the person doing the work: local conferences, community speaking events, workshops, podcasts, and one-to-one meals. What makes that a strategy rather than networking is the qualifying step buried in her own description — she shares “tips and tricks and my expertise so that way other people can go, man, this would really help me.”

The demonstration is the qualifier. People who self-select after watching you solve something are pre-sold in a way that a lead form cannot replicate. Which means the useful metric for this kind of marketing is not reach; it is how many of those rooms contained someone with the problem you fix.

The failure mode is equally clear: showing up to the same rooms and describing what you do instead of doing a small version of it in public.

When To Bring In A Person Instead Of A Tool

Kate’s own answer to who should hire someone like her is the most quotable practical moment in the episode, and it is a diagnosis rather than a pitch:

“If small business owners are… you feel like you’re constantly living in that reactive state and you’re constantly putting out fires and you don’t know what next year is gonna look like, you don’t know what the end of this year is gonna look like, I think now is the time to find that accountability partner or coach or consultant, whatever you wanna call it, same thing.” — Kate Hendrickson

The signal is not revenue or headcount. It is the absence of a forecast — not knowing what the end of the current year looks like, never mind the next one. That is a genuinely useful line to hold yourself to, because it is checkable this afternoon.

And she is clear about the role she wants in that arrangement:

“I wanna be the person behind the curtain, right? That says, you go get all the accolades, you do the hard work, you go get grown, put your company out there, but I’m gonna be behind the curtain, nudging you along.” — Kate Hendrickson

Connect With Kate Hendrickson

Kate Hendrickson runs The Strategy Lane (thestrategielane.com) and is on LinkedIn. Her full episode is on Castos, and the written recap is here.

For the partnership-and-referral side of this argument, Brandon Barnum on raving referrals covers the mechanics Kate leaves implicit.