Today we’d like to introduce you to Kali Kepple.
Hi Kali, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My story starts at fifteen, living in Denton, Texas, when my mom started a plumbing company from inside our house.
She had been the office manager at a plumbing company that ended up needing to be dissolved. The owner knew she already managed all of the operations, so he handed her the company. It was exciting but terrifying for my mom. She carried a lot in her childhood, making it so she was unable to finish high school. Having never taken something like this on before, she had faith in herself and her team, and she said yes.
She needed a second set of hands, and I was the teenager in the house. So I helped however a teenager could. Answering phones. Keeping things organized. Dispatch, invoicing, helping with audits. I went to Fred Pryor seminars to learn how to do taxes. I did everything alongside her, because what I was watching was one person attempting to carry an entire business on her back. A business she took from one place, moved to another, and started back up. With real lives and real families at stake.
I didn’t have language for what I was seeing yet. I just knew that everything ran through her. Every problem, every decision, every fire. I saw the weight.
My first job of my own was cashier and baker at Great American Cookie. From there I found my way into middle management young, and I stayed in the middle for a long time. Retail, merchandising, food, logistics, operations, print, even government. Small shops, large corporate, franchises, independents. Every industry you can think of, I was somewhere in the middle of it.
And no matter where I was, the same thing happened. My job was to support the people below me, and the resources I needed to do that were held by the people above me. So I would go have the conversation. And every time, I realized I wasn’t having a conversation. I was selling. Pitching my own leadership on the tools my team needed to do the jobs they were already hired to do. It took time. It took energy. And often, the person across the table didn’t even have the ability to listen.
It took me years to understand why. The people at the top of the org chart are actually at the bottom of a funnel. Every problem, every fear, every misstep, every growth decision in the company drains down to that one person. That is impossible for one human to carry. They lose visibility of their own business faster than they would ever admit. And we hardly ever admit it to ourselves. We just juggle.
I had been watching it since I was fifteen. The owner was never the problem. The funnel was.
I would say I fell into this work, but that’s not true. I couldn’t stop myself. I started going into businesses to help grow sales and kept fixing structural problems nobody had hired me to fix. Eventually a mentor pointed out that I was doing full scale operations work for free, and that it was time to develop it into something real. That’s when Cardinal Community Strategies was born.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not even close. And my hardest struggle was a funnel of my own making.
For years, my entire method lived in my head. I could walk into any business and see what was broken and know how to fix it, but I couldn’t hand that to anyone. Which meant I had quietly built the exact thing I help owners escape. A company where everything drained down to one person. Me.
Learning to pull the method out of my head and into manuals, systems, and structure another person could pick up and run has been the hardest build of my life. It’s humbling to realize the thing you diagnose in others is living in your own house. But it changed how I work forever, because now when an owner tells me the whole business is in their head, I’m never speaking down to them. I’ve stood exactly where they’re standing. I watched my mom stand there too.
There’s a question I ask that stops most owners cold. If you disappeared for two weeks, what would break? For most of them, the honest answer is everything. For a long time, my honest answer was everything too.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I founded Cardinal, a business architecture and production company, together with Jason Dominguez. We’re two halves of one model. I handle the inside of a business, he handles the outside. “Structure builds your foundation. Relationships build your business.” That line is literally the two of us.
What makes us different is that we don’t coach from across the table. We embed. I sit inside a business, on the floor, in the trenches, talking to the people actually doing the work, before I ever prescribe anything. We have our own frameworks and our own methodology, built from years of watching businesses from a seat most advisors have never sat in. The middle.
The work itself is about taking that weight off one person’s back. We build structure that holds it, so the business stops draining onto the owner. Here’s the strange part. Our goal on every engagement is to become unnecessary. Before we leave, everything we build has to run without us. If the business still needs us, we’re not done.
Why do I care this much? I grew up in Denton and watched what happens to local businesses when everything grows around them faster than they can. Businesses like my mom’s, run by people like my mom. Small business owners are some of the most scrappy, passionate, heartfelt people you’ll ever meet, and they’re forced to be extra creative because the resources aren’t as easy to get their hands on. When you have money, it’s easy to make money. When you don’t, you have to become creative to generate it. In this climate, it’s harder than ever for them to succeed. I wanna fix that.
My goals in my personal lofe are simple. Modeling the life instead of describing it.
I’m a mom. My daughter is watching how I live, the same way I watched mine. I want her to see a builder, in plain view. Someone who sees a problem, solves it, places the right person to carry it, and moves to the next. I’m working toward land, acreage where my family can be rooted, a home that outlasts me. Nurturing what matters. The people, the land, the work.
Cardinal is the same conviction at a different scale. The kid working the counter at a cookie shop. The woman running a plumbing company out of her living room. The owner juggling with their hair on fire. I want the structure around them to finally match how hard they’re already working. That’s what I’m building.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Go meet people. Talk to a stranger. Spread kindness. Be weird. Its inspiring.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://CardinalCommunity.com
- Instagram: @cardinalcommunitystrategies
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1D4UrgJhtc/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cardinal-community-strategies/
Image Credits
Cynthia Pantaleon @odethphoto
