Ambitious Podcast

Hosted by Kate Perkovic

Business Entrepreneurship

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141

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Welcome to The Ambitious Podcast with Kate Perkovic, a former server turned 7-figure business owner. Join Kate in exploring how unwavering ambition fuels success. Discover insights from a seasoned business coach, delve into pivotal entrepreneurial roles, and embrace ambitious living for holistic growth. Set audacious goals, thrive with experts' breakthroughs, and remember—stay ambitious!

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August 20, 2026Episode 14042 min

EP.140: You Don't Have to Be an Influencer to Build a Personal Brand

You didn't sign up to post your morning coffee. You didn't sign up to document every corner of your house or have strangers know your dog's name. And if building a personal brand means becoming an influencer, you want no part of it. The problem is that's not what a personal brand actually is, and this episode is here to clear that up once and for all. Kate has been in this industry for eight years, and she's watched personal brand go through three completely distinct chapters: the pre-COVID era of authority signalling and low-frequency formality, the COVID era of personality-first documentation culture, and now the AI era, which has changed everything again. Because when AI made information free and infinite overnight, it also made one thing infinitely more valuable: your perspective. That is the entire game right now. Not your lifestyle. Not your hot takes. Not how many platforms you're on. Your point of view. In this episode she draws the clearest line she's ever drawn between what an influencer is and what a personal brand is, and why conflating the two has been keeping a lot of brilliant business owners from showing up online at all. She walks through why depth beats width every time, why you can run a seven-figure business with 5,000 followers, and why someone with 400,000 followers can have nothing to sell. She also gets into the two-platform rule, why consistency will always outperform volume, how to pull perspective out of even the most personal content so it actually builds your business, and what the non-negotiable components of a personal brand actually are. She then walks through some of the best personal brands in the online business space right now including Donald Miller, Mel Robbins, Alex Hormozi, Cody Sanchez, and Gary V, and breaks down exactly what each of them is doing right and why it works. If you've been avoiding personal brand because you think it requires something it doesn't, this is the episode that gives you your own back Timestamps: 01:56 Personal brand vs influencer 02:59 Common misconceptions 05:53 Three eras of branding 12:11 AI makes POV king 16:37 Influence vs trust 20:50 Privacy and BTS content 23:22 Consistency over volume 25:37 Followers and platforms 29:54 Personal brand role models 38:53 Core principles recap To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

August 13, 2026Episode 13939 min

EP.139: Why Your Sales Funnel Stopped Working

Something has shifted, and you've felt it. Getting leads, warming them, converting them - it all feels harder than it did a few years ago. This episode is the explanation you've been waiting for, and more importantly, the update your business model probably needs. The funnel you built in 2021 is not the funnel that works in 2026. The market is more saturated, buyers are more skeptical, and the trust recession is real. People are not clicking your ad and becoming clients. They're clicking your ad, verifying your social, binging your podcast, checking your website, and then maybe applying. The customer journey is no longer a straight line. It's a ball of yarn, and if your ecosystem isn't designed for that, you're losing people at every point they don't find what they're looking for. In this episode Kate breaks down exactly what has changed, from how people find you to how they decide to buy. We cover why social is now the search engine, why information is no longer your leverage point now that AI exists, and why the value-value-value-pitch model your audience can see coming from three posts away is quietly killing your conversions. She gets into the four stages of the new customer ecosystem, why long-form content is doing the job webinars used to do, why giving your best content away freely is now a competitive advantage, and why the thing actually causing people to buy right now is problem urgency, not fake countdown timers. If you have people watching, consuming, and circling but not converting, this episode shows you exactly where your ecosystem is broken and what to fix first. DM Kate on Instagram with "funnel audit" if you want her eyes on your ecosystem. Timestamps: 01:51 Post Covid Saturation 07:42 Trust Recession Verification 09:49 Discovery via Social SEO 12:40 Perspective Beats Information 17:50 Nurture with Long Form 23:06 Sell Without the Pitch 27:39 Slower Sales Two Paths 32:12 Audit Your Ecosystem 36:15 Convert with Problem Urgency To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

August 6, 2026Episode 13843 min

EP.138: Stuck at the Same Revenue Every Month?

Same numbers as last week. Same as the week before. You're doing everything right, and nothing is moving. That's a plateau. And the plateau itself isn't the real problem. The voice that shows up next to it, the one that says this is permanent, that you've peaked, that whatever you had is gone, that's the problem. This episode is the resource Kate comes back to herself, and the one she sends clients to every time growth goes flat. She breaks down the three mindset traps that make a plateau worse than it needs to be, and then the four actual root causes she audits when a client is stuck: an offer ceiling, a marketing ceiling, a systems ceiling, and an energetic one. Most people assume a plateau is a marketing and sales problem and throw more volume at it. Nine times out of ten, it's something else entirely. Growth is a staircase, not a straight line. This episode shows you what to do on the flat part. If you're in one right now, DM Kate the word "plateau" on Instagram. Timestamps: 03:51 Growth Is Staircase 07:39 Spiral And Identity 10:57 Hockey Stick Lesson 14:26 Comparison And Urgency 19:40 Four Plateau Audits 19:53 Offer Capacity Ceiling 23:49 Marketing Pond Problem 27:34 Systems Bottleneck Fix 30:23 Energy Leadership Lid 34:24 Regulate Then Diagnose 38:28 Small Tweaks Win To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

July 30, 2026Episode 13746 min

EP.137: How to Take Maternity Leave When YOU Are the Business

Nobody posts the messy middle of planning a business around a baby. You see the pregnancy announcement. You see her back at her desk a few months later. What happens in between, the finances, the team, the client conversations, the fear that the whole thing falls apart the moment you step back, that part nobody talks about. Until now. This episode is for the woman who wants to have a family and a business and isn't willing to blow up either one to get there. Kate doesn't have kids yet, but she's helped dozens of clients through this exact season, and what she's seen consistently is that the logistics are almost never the real problem. The real problem is the quiet belief that you are the business, and that without your constant presence, it stops working. This episode dismantles that belief and then gives you the actual plan. Kate walks through the three pressures that show up for almost every woman in this season: the fear of disappearing from your audience while you're out, the guilt of handing things off, and the trap of measuring your leave against what someone else did online. She then gets into the four things to build before you go, including how to document your processes so the business can run without you having to explain everything from a delivery room, why the test run matters and when to do it, what to actually say in a client announcement and when to send it, and the financial formula for building a runway that doesn't require you to sprint back to your desk at six weeks postpartum. She also shares a real client story of a woman who took nine months and kept 30 out of 32 clients because the system held. The business not needing you in every moment isn't a sign you don't matter. It's a sign you actually know how to run one. This episode shows you how to build that. Timestamps: 20:25 Strategy Starts With Offers 21:23 Delegate What You Do 22:49 Onboarding Without You 23:36 Standardize Reviews 28:45 Pressure Test Systems 30:05 Announce Maternity Leave 35:52 Financial Runway Planning 39:32 Design For Future You To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

July 23, 2026Episode 13642 min

EP.136: Stuck in Your Comfort Zone? How to Know If You're Justifying Fear or Making a Smart Choice

Comfort is not lazy. It's actually one of the most sophisticated opponents you're going to face in business. It comes to the table with logical arguments, reasonable timelines, and a really convincing case for why now is not the right time. And if you're not paying close attention, you'll lose to it every single round without ever realizing you were in a negotiation at all. Today's episode is about exactly that: the way comfort quietly disguises itself as strategy, preparation, and responsibility, and the four specific tactics it uses to keep you exactly where you are. If you've ever re-edited something that was already good enough, postponed a launch until things slow down, kept a client at a rate you stopped believing in six months ago, or filled an entire day with productive tasks that had nothing to do with the actual thing you needed to do, this one is going to land hard. Kate breaks down the four negotiation styles comfort uses against you: delay, dilution, justification, and substitution. She gets into how to tell the difference between a genuinely intuitive no and a fear-based one (your body actually knows the difference), why the most dangerous delays feel completely rational on the surface, and why the relief you feel when you push something off is almost always followed by something heavier. She also walks through her own real moments of negotiating with comfort, including a stage appearance she almost bailed on and a conversation she almost rescheduled, and shares the exact framework she uses to price a delay honestly so the cost of staying still becomes impossible to ignore. Because the discomfort of doing the hard thing is short. The cost of not doing it compounds every single day. This episode makes that math very hard to unsee. Timestamps: 07:24 Patterns of Avoidance 13:20 Body Signals and Relief 18:38 Four Comfort Tactics 18:49 Delay and Moving Goalposts 21:30 Dilution and Playing Small 24:43 Justifying Inaction 29:55 Substitution Procrastination 32:50 Pay Upfront To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

July 16, 2026Episode 13340 min

EP.135: First-Gen Entrepreneur Isolation: How to Build Your Own Safety Net

Nobody hands you a manual for this. There's no parent to call when a client ghosts an invoice, no older sibling who's been through a slow month in their own business, no family member who can tell you what it actually feels like to be the one holding the contract. When you're the first entrepreneur in your family, and especially the first woman, you are the roadmap. You're not following one. This episode is for the woman who knows that feeling. The one who loves her family completely and still can't fully explain what she's navigating. The one who shrinks her wins in certain rooms, who carries the weight of being watched, who's quietly become the financial anchor for people who don't entirely understand the business she's running. This is the episode Kate comes back to on the hard days, and she's making it for you to do the same. We get into what it actually means to sit inside this kind of isolation, not just the surface version of "nobody gets me," but the specific layers that stack when you're the first entrepreneur and the first woman and possibly the first breadwinner all at once. Kate names four distinct pressures that show up for first-gen entrepreneurs, including the guilt that comes with outpacing people you love, the way slow months hit differently when someone said it would happen, and the silent shrinking that happens when success starts to feel like something you need to hide. Then she gets into the three things that actually move the needle: building your own financial net before you need it, building an advisory circle instead of expecting your existing one to fill that role, and the permission slip nobody is ever going to hand you that you've been waiting on anyway. Being first is heavy. It's also a specific kind of power most people never get to hold. This episode is about learning to carry both. Timestamps: 01:52 Naming The Isolation 08:28 Rewriting The Story 10:00 Watched Pressure 14:04 No Safety Net 19:04 Legacy Weight 23:46 Build Your Triage Team 27:24 Guilt Of Outpacing 30:59 Three Ways Forward 37:57 Turn Pressure Into Power 39:14 Final Permission Slip To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

July 9, 2026Episode 1341 hr 1 min

EP.134: How to Find Your Personal Style When Nothing in Your Closet Feels Right w/Jamie Lewis

Getting dressed every morning shouldn't feel like a problem to solve. But for a lot of women, it does. The same ten pieces on rotation, the Pinterest boards full of outfits that never translate, the pile on the floor before a night out. Today's guest is personal stylist Jamie Lewis, and this episode is everything you didn't know you needed to hear about style. What makes this conversation different is that Jamie isn't talking about trends or hauls or must-haves. She's talking about why style feels so hard for so many accomplished women, and what's actually behind it. We get into why loving fashion and understanding style are two completely different things, why most women's wardrobes are full of the same item in ten colours, and why the oversized everything approach most of us default to when we want to hide something is usually doing the exact opposite of what we hope. Jamie also gets into the connection between style and confidence in a way that is genuinely hard to shake, including how she's watched clients land job interviews, attract better relationships, and walk into rooms differently, not because they spent more money, but because they stopped dressing to disappear. Practically, we cover how to actually start building your style identity using Pinterest the right way, what style archetypes are and how to figure out yours, the one rule Jamie gives every client no matter their size or shape, how to shop for your body in a way that actually works, and why proper undergarments are the most underrated style tool you own. We close out with a rapid-fire hot or not segment covering everything from bodysuits to capped sleeves to the pre-scrunched blazer, and Jamie does not hold back. Her style archetype quiz is linked below, and if this conversation hits for you, her DMs are open. Timestamps: 08:58 Style Archetypes Explained 09:44 Common Style Mistakes 20:30 Shopping List and Capsule Myth 22:59 In Store Versus Online 25:24 Body Shape Without Rules 28:41 Undergarments and Camouflage 32:08 Outfit Formulas That Work 39:31 Budget Friendly Style Strategy 43:12 Hot Or Not 57:51 Universal Style Rules Resources Mentioned: Ext-linkStyle Archetype Quiz Connect with Jamie: jbl.styles (Instagram) Website To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

July 2, 2026Episode 13350 min

EP.133: The 4-Part Social Proof Framework That Turns Client Wins Into Consistent Sales

You have results. Real ones. Clients hitting milestones, sending voice notes, sharing wins you genuinely didn't expect. And yet somehow, when it comes to marketing that proof, it either feels like you've already used it, like you're repeating yourself, or like every post looks exactly the same as everyone else's before and after. Today's episode is the masterclass on fixing that. Social proof is one of the most powerful conversion tools you have, and most people are leaving almost all of it on the table. Not because they don't have it, but because they're only collecting it one way, only telling it one way, and only sharing it when it feels "fresh enough" to post. This episode changes all of that. We cover how to build a system that captures proof continuously so you genuinely never run out, including the wins channel framework, three specific moments to ask for testimonials (most people only use one), why your team should be gathering proof on your behalf and exactly how to structure that, and how to use AI to pull client wins from call transcripts you've already recorded. Then we get into the part most people skip entirely: the four distinct lenses for telling social proof in a way that actually moves people. Objection-based, emotional, analytical, and identity-driven proof are four completely different stories, and each one speaks to a different type of buyer sitting on the fence right now. I walk through a real example of each so you can see exactly what this looks like in practice. Because the clients and results you already have are only working as hard as the way you're marketing them. This is how you make them work harder. Timestamps: 04:37 Three Capture Moments 08:10 Build a Wins Vault 10:55 Team Incentives and Context 19:02 Before and After Details 24:27 Proof Formats to Share 25:58 Four Social Proof Lenses 26:42 Objection Storytelling 30:21 Emotional Proof That Sells 32:51 Logistical Before After Breakdown 33:39 Identity Based Transformation 38:12 Post Structure Examples To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

June 25, 2026Episode 1321 hr 5 min

EP.132: From Goat Milk to $150M w/ Brent Ridge of Beekman 1802

What does it actually look like to build a nine-figure brand from a moment of total financial collapse, a herd of borrowed goats, and the decision to never walk away? Today's guest is Brent Ridge, co-founder of Beekman 1802, and this conversation is one of those episodes that will genuinely stay with you. Brent's story starts in 2008. He and his partner Josh had just lost their careers in New York City, were sitting on a million-dollar mortgage they could barely afford, and had nothing to work with except some life experience, a creative background, and an overflow of goat milk. What came next was 60 million bars of soap, a partnership with Anthropologie, a Schitt's Creek popup that drew 20,000 visitors to a 547-person town, a 24-hour Christmas livestream that Martha Stewart and the Pioneer Woman eventually called into, and a brand that is now the number one beauty brand across QVC and HSN. And through all of it, the same principles that carried them through desperation in year one are the exact same ones running the company today. In this conversation, Brent walks us through the philosophy behind his and Josh's new book, Goat Wisdom, including why information is not the same as wisdom, the "chop your own wood" principle and why you should never delegate what you don't yet understand, the zero dollar budget exercise they still run with their team to this day, and the ripple effect of kindness as a literal business strategy. We also get into how to spot opportunity before most people even notice it, what contentment actually means as a goalpost, and why moving that goalpost after you've hit it might be the most underrated threat to both your happiness and your success. A copy of Goat Wisdom is being given away inside the Ambitious Network. Head there to enter, or grab your own on Amazon now. Timestamps: 03:48 From Medicine to Farm 06:49 Recession Sparks Soap 10:29 Luxury Retail Breakthrough 17:36 Chop Your Own Wood 20:43 Anthropologie Order Crunch 28:32 The Zero Dollar Budget 32:03 Glitterville Christmas Hack 36:44 Schitt's Creek Boost 40:23 Spotting Opportunity 48:07 Bootstrapping to Funding 01:01:54 Book Takeaways Connect with Brent Ridge: Instagram: @beekman1802 TikTok: @beekman1802 Website: www.beekman1802.com To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .

June 18, 2026Episode 13150 min

EP.131: The Truth About Passive Income That Nobody in Online Business Will Tell You

You want sales coming in while you sleep. You want to stop feeling like the second you step away, the revenue stops too. That desire makes complete sense, but there's a reason so many entrepreneurs spend a year chasing passive income only to end up more exhausted, more confused, and no closer to the freedom they were after. Today's episode is the conversation the passive income space isn't having. Because while everyone's showing you the sales notifications rolling in from the beach, nobody's showing you what's actually behind them. The content output, the ad spend, the funnels, the testing, the team, the customer support tickets, and everything else that runs quietly in the background so that the "passive" part can exist at all. We're getting into why passive income is a stage three strategy that gets sold to people in stage one, the real day-in-the-life of someone with a passive income business (I literally ran an AI audit on a creator's account and the results will reframe the whole thing), and why the desire to go passive often isn't actually a business model problem at all. It's a capacity, pricing, or boundary problem in disguise. I'm also walking you through the three things that actually create freedom in your business, what leverage looks like at every stage versus what passive income requires, why undercharging and lack of structure are quietly driving people toward the wrong solution, and the five questions to ask yourself before you build a single funnel or record a single course module. Because the goal isn't passive income. The goal is a business that doesn't run on your nervous system. And those are two very different builds. Timestamps: 02:21 Leverage vs Passive Sales 05:03 What Passive Income Really Is 06:10 Behind the Curtain Workload 14:02 Why You Want Passive Income 18:47 Burnout or Business Fixes 29:23 Attract Convert Scale Framework 34:15 Pricing and High Ticket Math 39:18 Scaling With Systems and Team 44:20 When Passive Income Makes Sense To join the Ambitious Network for free, click HERE . To connect with Kate on Instagram, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To apply for ITI, click ⁠HERE⁠ . To submit a question to be answered on the podcast, click HERE .