In this episode of Unshakeable Talks, Katy sits down with Kyllie, a marketing strategist who built a six-figure marketing agency before she became a mum and kept it running through her son's open-heart surgery and a move from South Africa to the UK. Together they talk about working motherhood, guilt, ambition, and why so many women feel they have to pretend they don't love their careers. Kyllie also shares why she's built a new consultancy for product-based founders alongside her agency, and why understanding your own marketing matters more than ever in the age of AI.
Key Takeaways:
You don't need to learn marketing, but you do need to understand it.
Kyllie isn't there to turn founders into marketers. She wants them to understand enough that when someone emails promising 20 leads for nothing, they know whether it actually fits, or whether that budget is better spent on ads or a proper shoot.
AI can write you a marketing strategy in five minutes, but it can't tell you when it's wrong.
Kyllie will take an AI-built strategy to version 15 before she ever shows it to a client, because she can read it, challenge it, and catch what a beginner would just accept.
Being both a present mum and an ambitious woman is a choice, not a contradiction.
Kyllie refuses to pretend she doesn't love working. She likes the version of herself chatting to the mums at the school gates in her gym kit, and the version at her desk straight after, and she doesn't perform either one.
Most founders aren't missing tactics, they're missing someone tying it all together.
Kyllie's example is the candle business that gets a website from John down the road, then hires the cheapest social media person, then an ads person, and none of them are talking to each other. The founder assumes it's everyone else's job, but they're still the marketing manager, and without one plan connecting it all, they lose sales without ever knowing why.
The most acceptable time to quit is often the most important time to keep going.
When Kyllie's son had open-heart surgery at two weeks old, everyone in her corner would have understood if she'd closed her business. She kept it running anyway, answering emails outside the operating theatre, because she thinks forward and was protecting future her and her family, not just surviving the day.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can connect with Kyllie on Instagram @kyllie_knightconsulting and find out more about Kyllie's work on her website -kyllieknightconsulting.com. You can also grab Kyllie's free download, The Launch Edit, here, and as a listener you can get 15% off any of her programmes by quoting 'unshakeable'.
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