Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:11] Why Kathy Weidner lied about her age to get a job at McDonald’s
- [6:26] How problem-solving fueled Kathy’s entrepreneurial spirit
- [7:47] Transitioning from managing a single office to becoming a national speaker
- [9:56] Gaining expert knowledge in Medicare, coding, and compliance through national associations
- [12:43] Kathy’s early struggles and breakthroughs in building educational products
- [15:38] Balancing free knowledge sharing with paid educational services
- [18:56] How Kathy discovered the Entrepreneurs’ Organization for community and growth
- [22:11] Lessons Kathy applied from EO leadership to her business growth
- [25:28] The emotional importance of community and connection for entrepreneurs
In this episode…
Many entrepreneurs hit a wall when they realize their hard-earned expertise doesn’t automatically translate into a profitable business. How do you take what you know and turn it into scalable products or services that others will pay for? Kathy Weidner, a veteran of the chiropractic industry, faced these exact challenges and found success by turning her deep knowledge of chiropractic billing and compliance into a scalable, online education business. She shares how she built KMC University by first solving urgent pain points for practitioners and then transforming that expertise into structured training and consulting services. Kathy emphasizes the importance of being solution-oriented, creating systems that work beyond herself, and leaning into opportunities like public speaking and community involvement to grow her influence and impact. Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Kathy Weidner, Founder and CEO of KMC University, about building a business from niche expertise. Kathy talks about her entrepreneurial journey, the evolution of her online education platform, and the power of community through EO. She shares lessons on leadership, client retention, and creating scalable business models.Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Kathy Weidner on LinkedIn
- KMC University
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Quotable Moments:
- “You can never give yourself poor — sharing knowledge only leads to more opportunities.”
- “Sometimes, the best way to learn is to jump in and figure it out by doing.”
- “Entrepreneurs are wired to solve problems; that’s where we get our charge.”
- “The key to long-term growth isn’t just acquiring new customers — it’s stopping the churn.”
- “Community fills the gap that even success can’t; you’re never truly alone when you have the right network.”
Action Steps:
- Map your expertise: Write down the specific knowledge and skills you have that others value. This helps clarify which areas can be packaged into products, services, or educational content. Understanding your strengths gives you a foundation for scalable offerings.
- Balance free and paid content: Develop a strategy for what you give away publicly versus what you reserve for paying customers. This ensures you build trust and authority without giving away your core value proposition.
- Invest in systems early: Don’t wait to adopt tools like learning management systems or automation. They allow you to serve more customers efficiently and create repeatable, scalable processes.
- Find a community of peers: Join organizations like EO or local entrepreneur groups to reduce loneliness and accelerate learning. Being surrounded by like-minded business owners provides both emotional support and practical advice.
- Prioritize customer retention: Focus on reducing churn, not just acquiring new customers. Loyal, long-term clients provide more stable growth and can often become your best advocates and referrers.
Sponsor: Rise25
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At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 200 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution. We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work. What do you need to start a podcast? When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk. The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate. We make distribution easy. We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media. Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more. The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast. Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships. Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win? Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.#2 Our Comprehensive Corporate Gifting Program
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John Corcoran: 00:00 All right. Today we’re talking about how to go from being a worker in an industry to monetizing the expertise that you develop and building a business around it. My guest today is Kathy Weidner. I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned. Intro: 00:15 Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show. John Corcoran: 00:32 All right. Welcome, John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show. And you know, if you’ve listened before, every week we get smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And we’ve had Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, lots of great episodes. Check out the archives if you want to check those out. And before we get into this interview, this episode is brought to you by Rise25 and at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing. We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do strategy, accountability, and full execution and even gifting on the back end as well. And if you want to learn more about it, you can learn more at Rise25.com. And it’s been the pleasure of my life to be able to take people like you, Kathy, and share your story with my listeners. And so I’m really excited about diving into that. You can also email us at [email protected]. All right. Let’s get into our guest here. Kathy Weidner better. She’s also known professionally as Kathy Finnegan Mills Chang Weidner. She began her career in the chiropractic field back in 1980. The early 1980s started as a chiropractic assistant, quickly worked up into management, and has monetized that expertise in a platform that she runs today. So you’re going to hear all about how she did that. But, Kathy, I’m really excited to hear your story, and I love to start with what people are like as a kid, and I love this. I’ve interviewed people before that have worked at McDonald’s, but I think you’re the first one that had to lie about their age because you weren’t 16 yet. And you wanted to work at McDonald’s so desperately. So tell us about that. Kathy Weidner: 02:11 Well that’s true. My birthday is in August, and I was dead set to get contact lenses before school started at the beginning of my junior year. And so I had to fib about how old I was, because maybe back in those days you really had to be 16 to get a job. So I did, and I got the job. McDonald’s was just what was easy because it was near my house. But I probably today can point back to, gosh, so many lessons I learned there that are still applicable in business today. When I worked in a corporation owned by McDonald’s versus a franchise. So just the way I was trained, what I was taught about customer service, it just never gets old. John Corcoran: 02:56 Yeah. So it was a good experience because sometimes people kind of, you know, refer pejoratively to working at McDonald’s. Kathy Weidner: 03:03 Well, I will tell you that my negative was that I did start young. And the problem with that was that I advanced to a team leader, and then they wanted to make me a manager, but I wasn’t 18, so I wasn’t even I was barely 16, so I couldn’t progress there because I wasn’t able, you know, I wasn’t of the of the right age. So I kind of shot myself in the foot there. John Corcoran: 03:27 I guess. Is it for the manager position then? Then you have to turn over your birth certificate and provide proof or something like that. Kathy Weidner: 03:33 I guess, I guess. Well, we had quite a tight knit group there because there was a group of us that opened and a group of us that closed. And back in those days, what were super exciting ways to go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. And then if we opened, we just stayed out and we would teepee somebody’s house or something. You know, that was the days when we had so much teepee you threw it away, or eggs, given the current state of eggs and it was all in good fun. But then we would just go open up the McDonald’s early and off to work we went. So it was a good group, a really a really tight group there, which I really enjoyed. Still friends with many of them. John Corcoran: 04:09 How did you get interested in chiropractic care? Because I know early in your career you were a chiropractic assistant and a chiropractic office. Was it something that drew you to that field or did you just happenstance and you ended up getting a job in one? Kathy Weidner: 04:23 Very much happenstance. After college, I worked in business with an optometrist, and did a lot of things. My claim to fame is I taught John McCain how to put in his contact lenses. So that was wow, that’s a notch on my wall, right? John Corcoran: 04:37 Well, let’s see if this was maybe it was the early 80s. So he was a war hero with a national profile. So he wasn’t a senator yet, but he was famous. Kathy Weidner: 04:47 He was running for Congress. And the doctor that I worked for was very active in the Republican Party in Arizona. In fact, his wife later became president of the Arizona Senate. And so he brought him in. They put the, you know, contacts. I was trying to. That was my job. It is one of my jobs. I taught you that. And my brother owned an x-ray company and in so doing had a bet about something. I don’t know what it was. And whoever lost had to take the other out to dinner. And in that dinner they found out that the woman that was going to be doing their insurance billing was pregnant and leaving, and they needed to hire somebody else. So he recommended me. I made all kinds of promises. I took the job and I was supposed to have like three months of training, and she left after two weeks. So I learned the job literally by doing it. And I think that’s been a real learning lesson for me over my career has been when you just do it, you find out more sometimes than anything else. And so I did. We grew over the five years I worked there into several offices, and I was off to the races and kind of became an expert at the whole process of insurance billing and collections. John Corcoran: 05:58 And what was it now? I remember you told me before we started recording a story about when you were a kid. You. You set up a trunk in your childhood bedroom as an office. So it seemed like maybe you were inclined already towards being an organized person, since you’ve already built yourself a desk at age seven or whatever. Kathy Weidner: 06:19 Exactly. John Corcoran: 06:20 But what was it about billing? Like what? What drew it to you? Why do you think you had a knack for it? Kathy Weidner: 06:26 It’s a challenge, I think, that all of us entrepreneurs are wired to solve problems ultimately, and I think that’s probably what it was for me because I became very, very good at getting it right out the door. But when they didn’t pay properly, when they should have, I knew how to fight for what needed to happen. So I think that I get like, I think many of us entrepreneurs do get a little bit of a charge for the win, and that was definitely something for me. A side note on that is that my father was a professional baseball umpire. So during those years, you know, they kind of come up the same way the players do where they come up through a ball double A, triple A into the majors. And so we traveled around a lot to see my dad. And believe it or not, I had a briefcase that was carried around with me that was an extension of my childhood desk. So yeah, I was, I was doomed from the beginning. John Corcoran: 07:24 So you figured out you develop a knack for this, and you eventually start managing these offices. And then at some point, you kind of became a thought leader in the space, taking your, your systems, your processes, your expertise that you built. And then I guess there was more of a demand amongst other chiropractors for you to speak. Talk a little bit about how that came about. Kathy Weidner: 07:47 So when I was through this particular first office that I worked at around that time, we were seeking to adopt our son or any person at that point turned out to be our son. And all of a sudden, I was working these long days because many doctors would work like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 8 to 8 or something like that. And so now all of a sudden, I’m a mother and I really can’t do that. And so I knew a chiropractor from church who happened to be president of the state association in that state where I lived in Arizona. And he said, look, I really need help. Things are not going right. If you come over, you can work whatever hours you want. Just let’s get the job done. You can work from home. Whatever you need to do. I need you just for this job. And so that started a different angle for me in my life, because then all of a sudden they needed a speaker on something at a convention, and they invited me. And then people saw me there, invited me, and it went on and on. And then around 1994, I was speaking nationally for an organization that put on seminars every weekend. So crazy a person that I was. I was speaking, you know, working all week and then leaving and speaking on the weekends and coming back and working all week. It was a little bit frenetic. But during that time, my husband at the time took a position at West Point and we moved to New York, worked for the largest chiropractic group practice in the state, and I was sort of a practice administrator for all those offices. But where things really shifted for me was when he was asked to take a position in Washington, DC, and we moved. The government moved us there, and I sought out a job at the American Chiropractic Association, which is the National association, the largest one representing doctors in the United States. And they knew of all my history, and they hired me. And then through that job, I actually started speaking nationally for them. And that sort of helped me learn more and more and people knew me, etc.. John Corcoran: 09:52 And so you’re taking your knowledge kind of to the next level at that point. Kathy Weidner: 09:56 Yeah. And at that point as my job there was really to get into the nitty gritty, like I was the representative, the staff representative to CMS and Medicare and, you know, getting details in, you know, making opinions about changes that they’re looking to do. Same with the AMA for coding and all of these things. So I sort of worked with the volunteers and became truly an expert in Medicare and expert in billing and coding and documentation and compliance. And so that’s when, you know, it just sort of elevated, I don’t know, by accident, but I just sort of was elevated into this position because I, I just knew what I was doing.Pages: 1 2