56. Space Robotics to Strategic Advisor with Katie Bedford

Katie Bedford spent seven years as an aerospace engineer building space robotics before pivoting through digital agencies, project management, and five years as a fractional COO to land where she is today: a strategic advisor and thinking partner for agency leaders. She's the founder of K Bedford Consulting in Vancouver, and her whole approach is built on giving business owners the honest, unbiased conversation they can't get from anyone else on their team. In this episode, Katie and Jack dig into how an engineering brain wired for risk and rigorous logic became the perfect training ground for advisory work, why so many small businesses mistitle their staff, the real difference between AI-as-pattern-finder and AI-as-judgment-maker, and the emotional weight of helping leaders make the calls they already know they need to make. Katie also shares two tools she built herself using AI (a custom CRM and a cash flow forecaster) and makes a genuinely useful case for why chasing AI tools without a centralized dataset is putting the cart before the horse. Chapters: 0:00 Scrappy or sophisticated: Katie's answer 1:29 Cinder blocks, jewelry, and Katie's non-entrepreneurial roots 4:13 What a thinking partner actually does 7:33 How the advisory relationship gets structured 9:41 Why small companies over-title their people 13:40 From grade one space obsession to aerospace engineer 14:41 NASA, the Canada Arm, and getting the "get out of jail free" layoff 16:43 The pivot into agency life and finding the thinking partner niche 20:36 Where AI actually helps (and where it can't) 24:04 Building her own CRM and cash flow tool with AI 27:23 The overbuilt website and the box of unused business cards 29:20 Her one scrappy money story: fighting for a business credit card 34:02 The Steve Martin mindset and Katie's rotating hobbies 36:08 Broadening her niche beyond digital agencies 43:09 The Thinking Partner ROI calculator Katie Bedford: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-bedford/ Jack Tompkins: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-tompkins/ Consulting: https://www.pineapplecf.com AI Analyst Product: https://www.pineappleanalyst.ai/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCalnj5yLU0ZH9y_tVl1J4ng