Everything I do to run Catbird for a week

In the June 2025 edition:

• A behind the scenes look at everything I do to run Catbird Consulting in a typical week

• Why curation, discernment, and taste matter most in the age of social media and AI

• It’s becoming a tradition—a June playlist to start your summer off right 🎶

This month is Catbird Care Package’s 1 year anniversary! I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have this connection with all of you, and I appreciate all of your responses, emails, and messages so much. As business owners and community members, we have so many challenges to confront every day—professional, personal, and political. Thank you for your support, and I hope my work with this newsletter has been supportive for you and your business too.

SOMETHING USEFUL

A week in Catbird

This month’s newsletter is a little different. Instead of a deep dive article, I’m sharing a behind the scenes look at everything I do for Catbird during a normal week—the client meetings and projects, the internal ops, and even the personal stuff that makes its way into my workday.

A few notes for reference: Every weekday I get up at 6:30am, exercise, shower, and start work at about 8:30am. Shout-out to my husband for making sure our kiddo eats breakfast and gets on the school bus. I try (and sometimes fail) to protect 8:30-10am as a focused work block. 10am-3pm is for meetings, client work, and internal Catbird work. I stop working when my son gets home from school around 3:30pm. He usually watches TV for an hour, so sometimes I keep working but I prefer to just hang out with him. I almost never work in the evening—I need unstructured time to let my brain relax and bounce around a bit, and the evening is the only time I can get it.

OK! Here’s a week in Catbird for the first week of May 2025:

Monday

Coffee always comes first. Today is the first Monday of the month, so I do my finance tasks. I reconcile my accounts in Quickbooks and look at April’s profit & loss (P&L) report to see where my revenue came from—mostly General Consulting services—and my biggest expense category, which is transaction fees (ugh.) Nothing surprising here, which is good. Next, I respond to emails from the weekend and review some financial reports a client sent over, which we’ll discuss in our session tomorrow. I quickly post an Instagram story about what’s on my schedule for this week.

Some cereal for breakfast, then it’s client meeting time. First is a strategic planning monthly check-in with a long time client. We discuss her progress on last month’s goal checklist and look ahead to the coming month’s tasks. We also review her cash flow projection, and talk through some investment ideas and big decisions she’s been considering lately.

Next meeting is another cash flow-focused session. This client recently got a hefty tax bill, so we’re monitoring her profits and estimated taxes closely to make sure she’s not surprised like that again.

After a quick lunch, today’s final meeting is another monthly check-in with a strategic planning client. Aside from reviewing her plan progress, we also discuss an internal process she wants to train her staff on. I’m going to write the training manual for her while she’s on vacation for the next couple weeks.

My last task for today is to log into a client’s Etsy shop and pull all of her April Etsy Stats and Marketing data into a custom metrics dashboard I built for her. I look at everything that happened with her shop in April and identify important data points and anything to flag in our session tomorrow.

I finish up the day’s emails while watching Pokemon with my kiddo.

Tuesday

After coffee, my first priority is to send my consulting contract to a new strategic planning client (yay!) I also have a deadline today, so I work on that project before my meetings start. Cereal for breakfast, as always.

Today’s first meeting is with a client who wants to do a deep dive on her 2024 financials. We look at her P&L report and talk through several items, and I give her a list of questions to ask her bookkeeper. My next meeting is the Etsy-focused one, where my client and I discuss my client’s April sales and marketing data, plus I share my advice on a few other business things she raises during our session.

I’ve blocked off the rest of the day to finish a project for the Buffalo Spree, which is a sidebar article that will run in their Best of WNY section (more info on that here). It’s a love note to small businesses plus a reminder to Spree readers that those businesses need their support, especially in today’s economic conditions. I have to finish and submit it today, and I do—while I’m watching Pokemon with my son, of course.

Wednesday

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but every morning before starting work, I leave my phone in a little basket on the other side of the room so I don’t waste time on Instagram. I started doing this a few months ago and it has drastically increased my ability to focus and be productive.

Somewhat ironically, I ditch my phone so I can focus on this morning’s task, which is writing an Instagram post about how to make your business healthier. I’d like to publish it on Monday.

Time for a quick bowl of cereal, then client meetings begin. My first session is to review a website audit report I created for a client who asked me how to make her website more targeted to her ideal clients, while boosting her credibility as a service provider. I walk her through a checklist of my specific recommendations to reach those goals.

After that, I eat lunch and go for a walk around my neighborhood, which is something I try to do 2-3 times each week. When I get back, I do some prep work for my afternoon meeting, which is a planning session for a workshop series I’m creating with a partner in the small business services space. We’re applying for a Springboard grant to develop and deliver it, and we’ll find out if we got the grant in July. Fingers crossed! We finish that meeting, the school bus arrives, and my work day is done.

Thursday

Today is unusual (in a good way!) because I have an on-site working session with one of my strategic planning clients. We’re going to overhaul her Quickbooks data infrastructure, which will make her financial reports clearer and more useful. I make my coffee and prepare for that session, then head over to meet with her. We make a lot of progress and I get to hang out with her cat, so that’s a win for everyone. Our second working session is scheduled for next week.

On my way home, I stop by the library to pick up a Pokemon graphic novel that I put on hold for my son. I have a quick lunch, head out for my walk, then spend the rest of the afternoon answering emails, planning my tasks for next week, and working on that Instagram post for Monday.

Friday

On Fridays I go for a 10 mile run, so my workday starts a bit later. Usually this is my catch-up day, whether that’s work tasks or personal stuff. I don’t have any meetings today—I try not to schedule anything on Fridays because I get anxious when I have meetings every day of the week.

My Friday morning ritual is reading Austin Kleon’s Substack while I eat breakfast. I’ve gotten some fantastic recommendations from his newsletter recently, like the album Flora from Japanese ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura and this unbelievable article about The Old Leatherman from the New York Times Magazine.

Today my main task is related to a new service I’m launching called the Business Resilience Jumpstart. One of my clients has agreed to be a pre-launch beta tester and we’re kicking off next week. I need to send an email advising him how to prepare for our first resilience strategy session. I’m pretty meticulous about emails so this takes a little while, but once it’s done I save it to my email template repository so I can reuse it for future Resilience Jumpstart clients. I also do some work on the Resilience Jumpstart sales page.

After lunch, I wrap up all my other outstanding items, respond to emails, and look at my calendar for next week to make note of my to-dos and deadlines. I create Google Calendar Tasks for any time-sensitive to-dos. Then I sign off for the week and do some cleaning around my house before my son gets home from school. Time for the weekend!

(Note: This article was inspired by Claire Zulkey’s Evil Witches Substack “Week in Evil Witches” article from March 2024.)

SOMETHING NEAT

I loved this article from Stepfanie Tyler’s Substack about what human intelligence really means in the age of Artificial Intelligence. She suggests that the difficult process of developing your own taste and honing your sense of what’s truly good, is a uniquely human trait that will set us apart from the cheap dopamine hits of Instagram or the formulaic outputs of AI.

Lots of lessons and food for thought here for creatives and business owners.

A LITTLE TREAT

This month’s edition marks one year of Catbird Care Package! 🎉

When I launched CCP last June, I included a playlist as the little treat—so I’m continuing the tradition a year later. Enjoy!

Catbird Care Package - June 2025 playlist [Spotify]

WORK WITH ME

This newsletter is for everyone, but a one-on-one consulting engagement is tailored to you and your business. Here’s how I can support you:

• Strategic Action Planning—For solo business owners with a lot to do, and never enough time. We’ll refine, prioritize, and organize your goals, and I’ll create a road map for you to get them done. (My most popular service.)

• Resilience Jumpstart—Turn analysis paralysis into decisive action with affordable 1:1 support to get you moving in the right direction fast.

• Operations Analysis—Is your business built on a strong, long-lasting foundation? An operational deep dive will reveal opportunities for improvement, and tell you exactly what to do to make your business more resilient.

• General Consulting—Get expert support with business challenges like workload sustainability, financial fundamentals, pricing, client communication, and more.

When you’re ready, schedule a free 30 minute intro call with me.

Thanks for reading—see you next month. If you have a business owner friend who would find this newsletter useful, please share it with them!