100% Woman Owned Business, founded in 1988
From a humble yet hopeful beginning in a second floor bedroom of her home, known as Suite 200, Kathleen Cabot-Smith launched her business to be of service to clients in the private and public sectors. Working within the constraints of a non-compete contract with her previous employer, she was starting from scratch. “During those early days, I arose at the same 5AM hour to ready myself for work and my daughter for school. I dressed for the job each day and maintained an unwavering focus on productivity, reaching out to prospects, hours of cold calling that turned into warm leads, then clients. After my daughter was in bed each night, I worked for another few hours on strategy, development and fine tuned planning for the next day, week and month. As a single parent, I had to make each minute count so that I was able to be fully present for her as well.”
Kathleen’s focus was on the client – what was happening in their world, what was happening in their organizations, what were the pains, the unrealized opportunities and what successes were not fully leveraged? She became a student of each organization, studying its history, studying its competition, studying the business environment and regulations that might impact it. She wanted to understand what made that business tick and what would make its leadership team and people successful.
She became a student of each contact, learning what they did, how their performance contributed to the organization and what barriers they faced to being fully successful. She became a student of the processes to get things done – what was working, what was necessary and what wasn’t.
She became a student of the relationships within the organization, focusing on how productive and effective these relationships were. Were they communicating about the right things, enabling access to information people needed to do their jobs, was their communication clear and efficient, were people working together cohesively, were they handling conflict effectively, were they able to challenge assumptions both within their organization and their industry without bias, were they developing change readiness, remaining agile and adaptable?
Many clients credit Kathleen’s ability to build trust quickly and to bringing new awareness about what is going on in their organizations as a key to why they have maintained relationships over decades. They also cite her extraordinary network of talented advisors, coaches, consultants, trainers and development staff as highly experienced practitioners with exemplary credentials and a world of experience, most having walked in their shoes as executives themselves.
Over nearly 25 years in business LeadersCore has employed hundreds of subcontractors to fulfill client needs with exceptional results. Kathleen finds great satisfaction in being one of America’s job creators and one of the public and private sectors’ success instigators. She values her long-term relationships with clients and treasures the many friendships that have grown from these relationships that have spanned over two decades.